The Man Who Sold the World

by Peter Doggett

  Though Bowie wrote the song, and co-produced it (and its subsequent album) with Mick Ronson, it was Mott The Hoople who owned it. They invented two of the record’s chief attractions: the opening guitar motif by Mick Ralphs, and the quite terrifying valedictory monologue from Ian Hunter. Bowie never came close to matching it, when he either laid down a guide vocal in 1972, recut the song insipidly during the Aladdin Sane sessions in 1973 (though it was left unreleased), or included it on David Live in 1974. The last of those three efforts was the most beguiling, as Bowie held back the tempo and returned the song to Mott’s key (D), though that (and certain chemical strains on his voice) left him unable to hit, or ultimately even attempt, any of the high notes.

  But Bowie did write the song, which was greeted as the teen anthem of the era (alongside Alice Cooper’s “School’s Out”) and, ironically, outsold his own “Starman” in Britain and America. It was a melodic return to the territory of Hunky Dory, with its diatonic major descent, and the slow glide of his left hand down the bass keys of his piano.* Verse and chorus followed essentially the same path, though the verse offered a variation that used an unscheduled E major chord in the same way as “Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide” (announcing the delinquent), and the chorus detoured from C into Bb for two bars, requiring an interlude of three chords in 3/4 time to regain the predominant key.

  If the music revisited the familiar moves of “Changes” [48] and “Oh! You Pretty Things” [30], the lyrics updated the lives that Bowie had chronicled in “The London Boys” [A21]. Life was over at twenty-five, he had one of his characters suggest, having just celebrated his own twenty-fifth birthday. The song doubled as an incisive piece of rock criticism: it was an elder brother, not a dude, who was still fixated on the Beatles and the Stones. A new generation required new idols, and Bowie was prepared to provide them.

  GLAM, GLITTER, AND FAG ROCK

  ONE OF THE GREAT STRENGTHS OF THE EARLY 70S WAS ITS SENSE OF IRONY. . . . THERE WAS A VERY STRONG SENSE OF HUMOUR THAT RAN THROUGH THE EARLY BRITISH BANDS: MYSELF, ROXY MUSIC, MARC. . . . WHATEVER CAME OUT OF EARLY 70S MUSIC THAT HAD ANY LONGEVITY TO IT GENERALLY HAD A SENSE OF HUMOUR UNDERLYING IT.

  —David Bowie, 1991

  In Britain, it was glitter rock; in America, fag rock or drag rock. “I don’t know anything about fag rock at all,” Bowie insisted in September 1972. “I think glam rock is a lovely way to categorise me, and it’s even nicer to be one of the leaders of it.” Given his unwillingness to fit into anyone else’s straitjackets, his polite acquiescence to this US interviewer was presumably an early example of that sense of irony he boasted about twenty years later.

  Three months earlier, Sounds journalist Steve Peacock had been able to survey what he dubbed “glitterbiz” without mentioning Bowie’s name. Then “Starman” became a hit single, and the perceived pioneers of “glitter rock,” Alice Cooper and Marc Bolan, had a serious rival. But not that serious: looking back almost forty years later, what’s most striking about Bowie’s career-establishing appearance on Top of the Pops in July 1972 is not the casual way in which he draped his arm around Mick Ronson’s shoulder as they leaned in together for the chorus of “Starman,” but the beaming smile that rarely leaves Bowie’s lips. It’s the hallmark of confidence, no doubt, and the knowledge that he is about to stun British reserve out of its lethargy. But it’s also the brand of a man who is not taking any of this remotely seriously: who knows, in fact, that there are few things more ridiculous than posing as a red-haired spaceman on prime-time BBC television, apart from the fact that it is about to make him irreversibly famous.

  In the brief period between the coining of “glam rock” and Bowie’s realizing that it was important not to be typecast, he claimed that he had actually invented the genre by posing in a dress on the cover of The Man Who Sold the World. That was a blatant attempt to steal the limelight from his rival Marc Bolan, who had sprinkled his face with glitter before his own Top of the Pops debut with T. Rex a few weeks before Bowie’s album was released. He would have had more credibility had he staked his “glam” reputation on his February 1970 appearance at the Roundhouse, where he had masqueraded as a glittery “Rainbowman.” That aside, he knew that it was Bolan who had introduced British teenagers to the possibilities of gentle reinvention with a packet of glitter; and Alice Cooper who had taken on the responsibility, like Mick Jagger a decade earlier, of outraging parents and press with his shocking antics onstage.

  Steve Peacock’s account of the visual hedonism in British pop circa June 1972 concluded: “If you look at what’s happened in ten years, we’ll see that it’s the music that’s lasted, and the glittering gimmicks have come and gone.” That was both true and wildly mistaken. So potent was the appeal of glam, with its triumphantly banal anthems, outrageous sense of camp, and deliberately amateurish presentation, that after the initial enthusiasm had ebbed away, to be followed by a suitably embarrassed pause from all involved, it was reborn as the definitive sound of the seventies. Even today, the caricatured sexuality* of Gary Glitter and the flagrant bandwagon-jumping of Sweet offer instantaneous memories of the era of power cuts and strikes, all the more potent for the fact that neither act (then) demanded to be taken remotely seriously.

  Anyone who watched Top of the Pops could reproduce Bolan’s glitter or Sweet’s mock-Cherokee makeup after a visit to Woolworth’s. (Bowie once described the Ziggy Stardust look as being “Nijinsky meets Woolworth’s,” as effective a summary of glam’s clumsy genius as any.) Glam’s essence was entertainment, and that was both its appeal and, for many of its protagonists, its curse. By June 1973, Marc Bolan was declaring: “I don’t want to go on the road now for fear of being involved in the dying embers of glam rock. I don’t feel involved in it, even if I started it. It’s not my department any more, and personally I find it very embarrassing.” But he was too closely tied in to the glam aesthetic to be accepted outside it, and he died without registering another Top 10 single or album. Around the same time, Bowie expressed his concern that “The Jean Genie” had (on some charts) reached No. 1, in case it meant that he had become a pop star, rather than an enigmatic icon. But the pretensions he carried—and the sense of mystery that was his trademark—ensured that he was never in danger of becoming trapped by a single image, as Bolan was. He alone was able to complain that he actually wasn’t very interested in rock, while maintaining all the trappings of a rock superstar.

  Bowie’s skill was being able to live out the dictum of rock critic Simon Frith: “Rock is entertainment that suggests—by its energy, self-consciousness, cultural references—something more.” He achieved this almost instinctively, whereas Roxy Music, his most cogent rivals as intelligent seventies pop stars, deliberately used their art-school background as a resource. They were a conscious evocation of classic Pop Art principles, deftly using the clichés of fifties and sixties rock to satirize pop’s superficiality, while employing irony and camp as a way of distancing themselves from the purely ephemeral pap around them. Roxy’s frontman, Bryan Ferry, was Bowie’s only serious rival as the self-constructed symbol of seventies Pop Art, though it was his short-term colleague Brian Eno who proved to be more influential than Ferry on the decades to come (and indeed on Bowie himself).

  Although Bowie gave every sign of wishing that he could have enjoyed Ferry’s past—with its apparently seamless journey from miner’s son to art school aesthete—he had stumbled upon a less certain but more enduring way of translating constant artistic innovation into a credible career. It would be his destiny to extend the genre of glam rock, and then transcend it, while his peers struggled to escape its curse.

  [63] JOHN I’M ONLY DANCING

  (Bowie) (see also [117])

  Recorded June 1972 and January 1973; both single A-side

  * * *

  The setting: the Sombrero Club in London’s Kensington Church Street. The clientele: all of the city’s hippest queens and most available boys. The visitors: David and Angie Bowie, plus whichever of their straight
friends they could tease into accompanying them. The scenario: boy arrives with boy, but dares to dance with another he/she. Cue the chorus . . . and remember that Bowie claimed in 1972, “I don’t know anything about fag-rock at all.”

  Some antecedents: the opening riff used the most familiar chord change in rock’n’roll, but at a speed that harked back to the version of “Pontiac Blues” that R&B veteran Sonny Boy Williamson recorded with the Yardbirds in 1963. Mick Ronson’s stuttering final G chord stemmed from a later Yardbirds incarnation, responsible for the 1966 single “Shapes of Things.” Bowie’s “oh lawdy” interjection, meanwhile, predated the British blues boom by conjuring up visions of Al Jolson in blackface, waving his jazz hands at the camera as the talkies began.

  Having slowed his output since the torrent of 1971, Bowie could write nothing except hit singles. That such an uncompromisingly gay song should reach the UK charts (and receive BBC airplay) testified to its naked panache, from the explosive drumbeats across the opening riff to the guitar noise echoing eerily between the speakers at the climax. Bowie’s voice was harsh and brittle, but still soared to a crazily high falsetto D as he expressed his needs. Rarely were the Spiders’ rhythm section of Trevor Bolder and Woody Woodmansey so central to the impact of a Bowie recording, with Bolder’s bass walking up and down the E minor scale during the first half of the chorus, before dealing out notes an octave apart with consummate ease. Besides the resonant acoustic guitar, Ronson laid down a grumbling electric figure beneath the verse, as if trying to emulate a saxophone, before adding a police siren wail to the chorus. The collective effect was propulsive and hypnotic, but still Bowie wasn’t satisfied.

  The Spiders duly returned to the song during the Aladdin Sane sessions, and without any fanfare their second attempt was substituted for the first, though by then sales of the single had dried up. The retread was faster, more unhinged, and added a saxophone to replace Ronson’s imitation, but it sacrificed two of the most thrilling aspects of the original: the percussive arrival and the marching bass. In one respect, though, it was arguably more satisfying: if the guitar crescendo of the first recording hinted at orgasm, the second took it all the way.

  TRANSFORMER: Bowie and Lou Reed

  Four years after being introduced to the music of Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground by Kenneth Pitt [A42/A44], David Bowie was elated to witness a performance by the band during his first visit to America in January 1971. He went backstage to congratulate Reed, and was embarrassed to discover that the man he was calling “Lou” was actually Doug Yule, who had assumed leadership of the Velvets after Reed’s departure a few months earlier. When he returned to the States in September, Bowie endured an uncomfortable meeting with Reed’s onetime “producer,” Andy Warhol, before finally connecting with the composer of the Velvets’ most enduring material at Max’s Kansas City that evening.

  The pair struck up a slightly awkward friendship, blighted by Reed’s fragile emotional state and legendarily spiky personality. They met again when Reed traveled to London to record his first solo record, a self-parodic, self-titled disappointment. Reed proclaimed that Bowie was “the only interesting person around. Rock’n’roll has been tedious, except for what David has been doing.” Bowie responded by offering to produce an album for Reed. “The people I was around at the time thought Bowie would be the perfect producer for me to make a record that would sell,” Reed said cynically a decade later. First, Bowie set out to introduce the American to his own burgeoning audience, and Reed made his British concert debut as a guest at Bowie’s acclaimed* performance at London’s Royal Festival Hall on July 8, 1972. Tony Defries made strident attempts to shepherd Reed into his MainMan empire: “He was always running around telling people he was my manager, which he wasn’t, although he tried,” Reed complained. In tribute to Bowie’s influence, Reed even sported glitter and eye shadow for his early UK gigs, before reverting to the leather-clad image that he found more comfortable. During a brief pause in Bowie’s schedule, he and Ronson acted as co-producers (with the trusted Ken Scott in the supporting role of engineer) for the best-selling album of Reed’s entire career: Transformer.

  Although it was Bowie’s involvement that sold the project, Ronson was the principal creative force on the record, as an arranger and multi-instrumentalist. Bowie’s chief role was to keep his troubled artist awake and interested, while encouraging Reed to exploit some of the more outré themes that he had explored with the Velvet Underground—erotic obsession, transvestism, drugs, bisexuality. “There’s a lot of sexual ambiguity in the album,” Reed conceded, “and two outright gay songs.” He and Bowie duetted on the deliciously camp trifle “New York Telephone Conversation,” while Reed also explored the full perversity of the Warhol milieu—most famously on “Walk on the Wild Side,” a triumph of Ronson’s arranging skills and Herbie Flowers’s bass playing, and arguably the most explicit song ever given airplay by naïve British radio producers. The album also provided another showcase for Bowie and Ronson’s increasingly inventive use of backing vocals, which had begun to assume a Beatlesesque variety and confidence.

  Within months of the album’s completion, Reed’s trust in Bowie’s motives had begun to evaporate. “I don’t know what he was up to,” he complained of his fan-turned-producer, “I honestly don’t know.” But he was presumably assuaged by the belated success of “Walk on the Wild Side” and the sales of Transformer, which lived up to its title by turning a cult artist into a mainstream rock star, for the next decade and beyond. In that context, it hardly mattered that, as one longtime admirer noted, Transformer was merely “a collection of songs witty, songs trivial, songs dull, songs gay, songs sad, none of them really much cop.” (One of those songs, “Wagon Wheel,” is now often claimed to have been a Bowie composition, despite being credited to Reed. But that seems unlikely, given that Reed had recorded an acoustic demo of the song several months before he began working with Bowie.) If that judgment was harsh, it also reflected the extent to which Reed had allowed his own personality to become subsumed into Bowie’s. He did not respond to Bowie’s invitation to produce his next record, the magnificent Berlin, a song cycle fueled by paranoia and pain, which left its mark on Bowie’s Diamond Dogs. The two men briefly considered another joint venture in 1979, until their discussions ended in a fistfight. Only in the nineties would both men’s egos have subsided to the point that they could collaborate without fear of being scarred by the comparison.

  [64] MY DEATH

  (Brel; trans. Shuman)

  Performed live 1972–73; RarestOneBowie CD

  * * *

  The second of Bowie’s homages to Jacques Brel—after “Amsterdam” [17]—was mediated through the dual prisms of Scott Walker, who recorded “My Death” on his 1967 debut solo album, and lyricist Mort Shuman, whose English translation was included in the theatrical show Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris, and was made available to Walker several months before the show premiered off-Broadway. Both Walker and Elly Stone, who sang Shuman’s adaptation onstage, assumed that mortality demanded a portentous delivery, and Bowie followed suit when the song* joined his live repertoire in 1972. It allowed him to experiment with the mannered crooning that he would later adopt on the Station to Station album, while thematically it reinforced the imminent conclusion of Bowie’s adventures with Ziggy Stardust. “I can’t think of a time that I didn’t think about death,” he admitted in 1997. Sadly, Bowie seemed not to have heard Brel’s uproarious original recording from 1960, which treated death with cavalier contempt, marching in military fashion over its pretensions to importance.

  [65] THE JEAN GENIE

  (Bowie)

  Recorded October 1972; single A-side and Aladdin Sane LP

  * * *

  “In England, David Bowie may become—may already be—a real star, but in the American context he looks more like an aesthete using stardom as a metaphor. . . . I felt unsatisfied; more than that, I felt just the slightest bit conned. Something was being promised
that wasn’t being delivered.” That was the verdict of American critic Ellen Willis on Bowie’s third US appearance, at New York’s Carnegie Hall on September 28, 1972. “I had flu that night,” Bowie said a decade later. “I’ll never forget that.”

  Bowie had arrived amid a publicity campaign worthy of Hollywood’s most brazen mythmakers. At a time when other British acts (notably Marc Bolan’s T. Rex) were struggling to establish themselves in the United States, MainMan booked their artist into major arenas and halls on the back of two singles (“Changes” [48] and “Starman” [60]) that had failed to climb higher than the low 60s on the Hot 100 chart. It was effectively the Ziggy Stardust coup played out on an international stage: an imaginary star demanding instant reverence and respect.

  Even with a roving spotlight lighting up the sky outside, and an audience including Andy Warhol and his Factory entourage, plus celebrities such as Tony Perkins, Alan Bates, and Lee Radziwill, more than 500 of the 2,800 tickets for the Carnegie Hall show could not be sold, and had to be given away (with MainMan’s approval) to ensure a full house. Elsewhere, in Cleveland, Memphis, and Detroit, MainMan’s strategy worked. But across the South and the Midwest, the tour was a disaster. Only 500 seats were sold for the 5,700-capacity Kiel Auditorium in St. Louis, and just 250 for a show in Kansas City, during which Bowie got drunk and fell off the stage. Other concerts were canceled to avoid a similar fate. Most embarrassing for Bowie was his visit to San Francisco, for two nights at the Winterland Arena. Unfortunately for Bowie, the Cockettes—an ultracamp cabaret troupe, starring future film star Divine alongside Goldie Glitters and Paula Pucker—were staging a new revue that weekend at the Palace Theater. Much of his potential audience chose to sample the delights of their nude ballet and risqué song-and-dance routines, rather than his somewhat tamer form of flamboyance.