The Man Who Sold the World

by Peter Doggett

  The music business had a glorious tradition of gay managers, lyricists, and, no doubt, performers, but no celebrity had chosen to “out” himself as flamboyantly as Bowie, others preferring to let their audiences assume (the painter David Hockney, with his delicious canvases of young male swimmers) or vehemently deny the slightest vile implication (Liberace). Homosexuality had been legal for consenting adults in England and Wales for less than four years, and in America gay liberation was the last and slowest of the sixties counterculture movements to be accepted by the so-called New Left.* The British censors had balked at the publication of Jean Genet’s novels, while Hubert Selby’s Last Exit to Brooklyn in 1966* aroused outrage not merely for its savage rape scene, but for the impunity with which its author described his male characters as “she.”

  Bowie’s openness to the idea of bisexuality was presumably what had encouraged Kenneth Pitt to arrange his client an interview with the newly launched magazine Jeremy (promising “out of this world gay fashion, humour and fiction”) in 1969. But Bowie was not yet ready to launch a crusade. It was more than two years later—after the formation of the Gay Liberation Front, from which Bowie made sure to distance himself; after the editor of another gay magazine, Spartacus, was arrested for sending indecent literature through the mail; after the release of films centering around bisexual relationships, such as Pasolini’s Teorema and Schlesinger’s Sunday Bloody Sunday (for which Pitt had secured Bowie an audition)—that Bowie was finally prepared to admit to his diversity of sexual choices, and more important to use bisexuality as a fashionable PR tool. Pitt was given no credit; this was a Bowie/Defries production. Within a few months, Bowie was placing his arm casually around Mick Ronson’s shoulders on Top of the Pops and miming fellatio to Ronson’s guitar onstage, producing an image that was immediately milked by Defries’s organization for its full shock value.

  In 1969, Bowie would have been breaking genuinely new—and potentially threatening—ground. By 1972, the US garage rock band Alice Cooper was already ensconced as rock’s cartoon transvestites, with Alice himself noting, “Everyone is part man and part woman, and the people who are threatened by us haven’t dealt with their own sexuality. People are really surprised when they meet us and find out that we’re all straight.” He would soon be reinforcing that point with a tongue-in-cheek boast about the fourteen-to-sixteen-year-old girls who dominated their audience: “We get so much action from them, it’s untrue.” If gay stars were still shocking, seventies society chose not to be concerned about rock’s infatuation with what was lasciviously known as “jailbait.” Yet Bowie’s “I’m gay” statement still won him more publicity than his recent Hunky Dory album, preparing a reputation that would serve him well when he donned the disguise—the week after that interview appeared—of the gender-ambiguous, alien-origin Ziggy Stardust. If Ziggy was a cartoon like Alice, at least he existed in three dimensions.

  Together, these two reprobates certainly left their mark. One American rock writer noted that 1972 had become “the year of the transvestite.” Bowie’s buddy Mick Ronson was persuaded to board the wagon: “I’m gay,” he explained helpfully, “inasmuch as I wear girls’ shoes and have bangles on my wrist. I get offers, too—but I don’t accept them.” Established British star Cliff Richard, for whom the very existence of sexuality seemed troubling, was certainly shocked: “Bowie is physically a man no matter what he does, and I think it must be pretty confusing for his audiences. I mean, it doesn’t help young people when they see him like that.” It took Lou Reed—the man who would pose with a boyfriend named Rachel on an album cover, and then deny every imaginable rumor about himself a decade later—to separate artifice from action: “Just because you’re gay doesn’t mean you have to camp around in make-up. You just can’t fake being gay. If they claim they’re gay, they’re going to have to make love in a gay style, and most of these people aren’t capable of making that commitment. And that line—‘everybody’s bisexual’—that’s a very popular thing to say right now. I think it’s meaningless.”

  Bowie continued to milk the image of bisexuality throughout Ziggy’s lifetime, aided by a growing entourage replete with gays, transvestites, and every variant between. In later years, he was altogether more ambiguous on the subject. For example, in 1976 he was able to tell one interviewer, “It’s true, I am a bisexual,” adding that he admired the looks of Japanese boys aged eighteen to nineteen; while telling another, “Positively not. That was just a lie. . . . They gave me that image. . . . I never adopted that stance. It was given [to] me.” He completed his denials by pretending in the latter interview that he had never heard of Lou Reed until he was compared to him in 1971 (see [A42]).

  A more sensible Bowie came clean to Paul Du Noyer in 2002: “I found I was able to get a lot of tension off my shoulders by almost ‘outing’ myself in the press in that way. . . . I wasn’t going to get people crawling out the woodwork saying, ‘I’ll tell you something about David Bowie that you don’t know.’ It perfectly mirrored my lifestyle at the time. There was nothing that I wasn’t willing to try.” That was the spirit of Ziggy, recalled in a more accepting age by a man who no longer needed to care about his image. In any case, hyped or otherwise, his pronouncement in January 1972 genuinely cheered those who knew precisely which way they were leaning. As Boy George recalled in his autobiography, “Even if Bowie’s claim that he was bisexual was a fashionable hoax, he marginalized himself for a sizeable chunk of his career. He took a risk that nobody else dared and in the process changed many lives.” Tom Robinson, whose “Glad to Be Gay” in 1977 became the uncompromising anthem that Bowie was unwilling to provide, noted: “When Bowie came up with Hunky Dory, I knew what he was talking about, and it affected my life in an enormous way. Had that message been stronger, and not broadcast on the radio, I’d never have heard it.” Bowie’s hype became a generation’s lifeline.

  [54] VELVET GOLDMINE

  (Bowie)

  Recorded November 1971; single B-side

  * * *

  “Probably the lyrics are a little too provocative,” Bowie warned in 1972 about this teen sex fantasy oozing with references to oral sex. Though he sold himself as a King Volcano, by the second verse he was already exhausted. Like “Sweet Head” [55], “Velvet Goldmine” was recorded for Ziggy Stardust, but sensibly exiled: even after John Lennon had posed naked on an album cover,* the pop world was not ready for a star who suggested bathing his lover’s face in semen.

  The song was a tribute to the creative possibilities aroused by the Velvet Underground, rather than a pastiche of their sound(s); musically, it owed more to a fusion of Gene Vincent’s fifties rock’n’roll and the electric thrust of Marc Bolan. It burst into action without even a minimal fanfare, as if the narrator were ready to explode, the combined electric/acoustic guitar assault grinding back and forth relentlessly across the tonic-subdominant chord change. But the guitars disappeared in the chorus, an altogether more sinister exercise in minor chords—more apt for the Berlin cabaret than New York’s Lower East Side. By the close, it sounded like a parade of Nazi troops humming their way to the front line (compare “Ching-A-Ling,” [A55]), accompanied by operatic guffaws—a heady cocktail for Ziggy’s admirers to swallow.

  [55] SWEET HEAD

  (Bowie)

  Recorded November 1971; Ziggy Stardust extended CD

  * * *

  The effect of introducing “Sweet Head” and “Velvet Goldmine” [54] to the sketchy scenario of Ziggy Stardust would have been profound. Was Ziggy, one wonders, specifically designed to be the first outwardly gay rock’n’roll star?* He would certainly have been the first to sing about “spics” and “blacks,” language that located the opening verse in the heart of the borderline racist, white supremacist teddy boy culture that was the British guardroom of rock’n’roll in the mid-fifties.

  That language littered the opening chapters of Nik Cohn’s novel I Am Still the Greatest Says Johnny Angelo (see “The Making of a Star #2,” page 164) and “Sweet Hea
d” suggested that regardless of the sexual inclinations of “Brother Ziggy,” he and Johnny Angelo were very much cut from the same egomaniacal cloth. (Note the way in which Bowie issued instructions to whichever groupie, of whatever gender, happened to be servicing his mighty organ.) That made them blood brothers to the genuine fifties rockers, men like Jerry Lee Lewis, who could easily have sung, like Bowie, about their desire for the young* and the loud. For the first and, arguably, only time in his career, Bowie set out to re-create the sound of the fifties, as filtered through the young American sensibility of bands such as the Flamin’ Groovies and the MC5. His vocal was stuffed with bravado, fleet-footed, sneeringly confident, rolling his “rrrs” and turning “wall” into a feline howl.

  After a power chord introduction (A major to A6), Bowie built the bulk of “Sweet Head” around the simple E-A progression that was, insisted his friend Lou Reed, the heart of rock’n’roll. Only the middle section dipped briefly into the vulnerability of a minor chord, before reverting to the swagger of the majors. Bowie delivered the most convincing rock vocal of his entire career, only to sideline this stunning performance in favor of more subtle, and cerebral, material.

  Several other songs were apparently recorded by the Spiders during this period, but permanently shelved, including “The Black Hole Kids,” “It’s Gonna Rain Again,” and “Only One Paper Left.”

  [56] FIVE YEARS

  (Bowie)

  Recorded November 1971; Ziggy Stardust LP

  * * *

  Bob Dylan once claimed* that he wrote “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” in response to the Cuban Missile Crisis, filling each line with the ingredients for an entire song because he was afraid the world would end before he could finish them all. “Five Years,” the first act of Ziggy Stardust, was Bowie’s equivalent: snapshots of the end times, which were survived only—like cockroaches after a nuclear holocaust—by the ominous drumbeats that had introduced the song. His jump cuts through urban decay moved from a market square that might be in England to a fantasy America of symbols and stereotypes—the Cadillac, the “black,” the “queer,” and a girl carelessly fixated on her milk shake, mocked by Bowie in a sarcastic recitative. His narrator watched dispassionately at first, before his humanity took hold, and he was seized by the urgency of imminent apocalypse. But crisis seemed surreal, and once again Bowie identified himself as an actor. (In an amusing echo of a Monty Python catchphrase, he also complained that his brain hurt.)

  Bowie’s vocal was certainly delivered with an actor’s certainty. As he moved almost imperceptibly from calm to hysteria, his voice nearly shredded under the strain, culminating in a primal scream reminiscent of John Lennon’s anguish on his 1970 song “Mother.” That was not a coincidence: “Five Years,” which used the I-vi-IV-V structure of a thousand doo-wop songs, was set to a stark, minimal piano accompaniment in the “Mother” style, gradually becoming more ornate until it sounded like another song from the same Lennon album, “God.” But whereas Lennon stripped down his accompaniment to a basic trio, Bowie’s song added an autoharp to emphasize key chords, and then acoustic guitar and strings for the second verse. By the finale, the orchestral players were fighting for air against amplified guitar static, scraping despairingly at their own instruments while the last of the human race screamed around them.

  There were just five years* left, Bowie insisted till the last, but the apocalypse was unfolding right now, regardless of what he had promised. Had he telescoped time, replaying his warning to prove that he had been right? Or was he demonstrating the powerlessness of the prophet? That ambiguity reverberated through the album that followed, undermining trust in soothsayers, heroes, and even starmen from beyond our world.

  [57] SOUL LOVE

  (Bowie)

  Recorded November 1971; Ziggy Stardust LP

  * * *

  “Soul Love” followed “Five Years” [56] on Ziggy, and mimicked its portentous drum rhythm (and the priest among its cast of characters). After the panoramic vision of the apocalypse, it apparently offered a more optimistic landscape, with bongos and acoustic guitar signaling mellow fruitfulness. Then Bowie’s voice appeared: dull, jaded, depressed, sapped of vitality, as if he’d stumbled briefly into a warning of Low spirits five years ahead.

  The word soul rarely entered Bowie’s vocabulary (“Lady Grinning Soul” [74] being another rare exception): his occult studies had taught him that the soul was vulnerable to unwelcome claimants, while he may have mistrusted the facile boast of soulfulness that had become a rock cliché. There was little in “Soul Love” to inspire braggadocio: this was a song of stifled creativity and cynicism. Its brief libretto destroyed all illusions—religion, politics, romance, idealism—while retaining the outer vestiges of a musical form that was usually devoted to the banalities of teenage infatuation, the three-minute pop song.

  This appeared a tame example of the genre, its melody rising in wary steps over conventional chord changes. But two minor excursions in the chorus told a darker story. As Bowie subverted the romantic theme in the chorus, he introduced an E major chord (“sweeping”) in place of the expected minor, to strengthen the image of love’s carelessness. Then he used a vulnerable Eb to interrupt the G major theme, highlighting the weakness of “all I have” and the hollow nature of fantasy.

  Even on this (apparently) slightest of Ziggy songs, the attention to musical detail was stunning. Mick Ronson added sparkles of guitar harmonics to the verse, and Bowie’s saxophone kept relaxed company. Meanwhile, the backing voices wailed like harpies, as if fifties doo-wop had become the devil’s music. Bowie’s lead vocal, defeated at first, bit back with the spirit of Ziggy himself in the chorus, before dropping apparently random cockney vowel sounds in the final verse, to add a cynical veneer to an already enervated vision of humanity and its follies. On this album, it seemed, no love could stand unchallenged.

  [58] SHADOW MAN

  (Bowie)

  Recorded November 1971; unreleased

  * * *

  The similarity of “Shadow Man” to the sound of the Rolling Stones in 1971—all elongated southern (US) vowels and swaggering power chords—suggests that, like “Looking for a Friend” [43], the song was intended for a band who would be Bowie-but-not-Bowie: not the Spiders from Mars in this instance, but Arnold Corns. The melody was clearly constructed around the framework of the chords, and the contrivance involved was perhaps too obvious: the song seemed to lead toward a dramatic chorus that wasn’t there. Bowie revisited the song early in the twenty-first century as a power ballad, perhaps indulging the entertainer he might have become if his 1968 cabaret act had ever reached the stage.

  THE MAKING OF A STAR #2: The Birth of Ziggy Stardust

  Nobody believed that Arnold Corns were the new Rolling Stones, or that Rudi Valentino could topple Mick Jagger. (The music wasn’t even momentarily convincing.) Bowie realized that sooner than anyone, and began to sketch out a more ambitious vision of stardom, and how it might be manufactured.

  That was a pejorative concept in 1971, and for many years afterward; late sixties rock was, by definition, authentic, the anti-pop, anti-hype, anti-commercial refuge for those fans who wanted their music to have a meaning as well as a backbeat. The true badge of authenticity was a connection—real or feigned, it didn’t matter—with rock’s roots in working-class American styles such as blues, soul, and country. Emotional openness was de rigueur, a link to the soil a distinct advantage, which is why it became a cliché, in the wake of the Band’s Music from Big Pink album, for British musicians to “get their heads together in the country.” The most authentic performers of all, such as Bob Dylan and the Band, were steeped in American folk traditions, grew ragged beards, abandoned the city, and spoke for a community that believed that it had escaped the vacuity of consumerism—despite the fact that its messages from the country arrived in shrink-wrap with a sales sticker on the front. Only much later would it become apparent to many observers that the most authentic personae of the era were also
the most elaborately constructed. As Bowie reflected three decades later, “Realism, honesty and all these things that came out of the late 60s had got really boring to many jaded people going into the early 70s.”

  As early as 1971, he was speaking for the jaded minority: “I think [rock] should be tarted up, made into a prostitute, a parody of itself.” Nothing could be more self-parodic than for him to live out John Lennon’s sarcastic line from his 1970 single “Instant Karma!,” daring his listeners to imagine themselves as superstars. Lennon wasn’t the only person confronting the emptiness of stardom: it was implicit in Delaney Bramlett and Leon Russell’s tawdry tale of a “Groupie” (aka “Superstar”; smoothed for commercial acceptance by the Carpenters); in the Kinks’ cynical Lola Versus Powerman and the Moneygoround, with its tales of music business chicanery and media manipulation; and even in the musical Jesus Christ Superstar, which repositioned the Gospel story in the world of first-century AD public relations.

  “I really wanted to write musicals more than anything else,” Bowie claimed in 2002. “Some kind of new approach to the rock musical, that was at the back of my mind. The initial framework in ’71, when I first starting thinking about Ziggy, was as a musical-theatrical piece. [But] I couldn’t afford to sit around for six months and write up a proper stage piece. I was too impatient.”

  The textbook for doomed rock’n’roll romanticism was I Am Still the Greatest Says Johnny Angelo, the novel published in 1970* by the young journalist and rock historian Nik Cohn. The author based his hero’s stage performances on the mid-sixties pop icon P. J. Proby, but in his closeted stardom, Johnny Angelo is also Elvis Presley, the Bob Dylan of 1966, Howard Hughes, and every other idol isolated from reality, and his audience, by fame. Johnny lives by tarot readings and omens, surrounded by a lickspittle entourage, and respects only “violence and glamour and speed, splendour and vulgarity, gesture and combustion.” More pertinently to Ziggy, and Bowie, “he was all things at once, masculine and feminine and neuter, active and passive, animal and vegetable, and he was satanic, messianic, kitsch and camp, and psychotic, and martyred, and just plain dirty.” Eventually he becomes locked into a bored ritual of stardom: “I mean to make an ending, a final explosion and, when it’s done, I shall cease.” Johnny stages a confrontation with the law, and his story ends in an orgy of murder and bullets.