The Man Who Sold the World

by Peter Doggett

  The US tour took an enormous mental toll on Bowie: each successive week saw him ingesting more cocaine and less food. Yet there were compensations: Bowie recruited a key musical collaborator, jazz pianist Mike Garson; was introduced to the New York Dolls; and struck up a lasting friendship with Iggy Pop, who invited him to mix the amateurishly recorded tapes for the third Stooges album, Raw Power.

  Meanwhile, Bowie channeled his bus-window impressions of America into the songs that would fill his next album. A simple process of addition produced one of his most enduring singles: he took the guitar riff* from the Yardbirds’ arrangement of Muddy Waters’s “I’m a Man”; combined it with the climactic build on a repeated chord that the Yardbirds used on another R&B standard, “Smokestack Lightning”; created an imaginary character out of his observations of Iggy Pop; and found a title by playing with the name of Lindsay Kemp’s literary hero, Jean Genet. He honed his ideas at the RCA Studios in Nashville, and “The Jean Genie” was recorded in New York a few days later. It was rush-released in Britain, coinciding with another RCA release, “Blockbuster” by the Sweet, that was built around the same Muddy Waters riff (and in the same key). To Bowie’s chagrin, “Blockbuster” narrowly outsold “The Jean Genie”; the British rock press loyally assumed that Sweet had “copied” Bowie, but neither act had heard the other’s record in advance.

  The “classic” roots of Bowie’s record—its slightly wheezy blues harp and snake-rattle percussion—ensured its longevity: if “Starman” was the sound of 1972, “The Jean Genie” might have been recorded in 1966, or indeed 2006. Its lyrics created instant rock’n’roll mythology, touching on fashion, drugs, and rampant sexuality, with a nod to the Max’s Kansas City scene in New York, where everyone had been familiar with the powder known as Snow White. His vocal had a playfulness that undercut the menace of the band, which was deliberate; his rhythm guitar occasionally missed its entrance into the chorus, which was not. But “The Jean Genie” was never intended to be about antiseptic perfection: its selling point was exuberance, not exactitude.

  [66] WATCH THAT MAN

  (Bowie)

  Recorded January 1973; Aladdin Sane LP

  * * *

  In September 1972, David Bowie witnessed two consecutive shows in the Oscar Wilde Room of Max’s Kansas City by the New York Dolls, whose transparent assemblage of classic rock images proved more enduring than the brittle collision of influences that comprised their music. Though their commercial impact was negligible (neither of their albums reached the US Top 100 chart), they represented America’s most committed response to the British glam-rock movement—not least because they owed their fashion sense to the same West London stores and stalls that were frequented by Bowie and Bolan. The Dolls’ guitarist Johnny Thunders also preempted the early punk bands by sporting a swastika armband for confrontational effect.

  In New York, the band attracted the attention of homosexuals, transvestites, and those few members of the Warhol entourage who didn’t fit comfortably into either category. So it was inevitable that Bowie would seek them out. “He’s a collector,” said his producer Ken Scott, “of anything and everything, experiences, influences, the lot.” Bowie was reported to have told the Dolls at their first encounter that they had “the energy of six English bands.” It was that spirit that he attempted to capture on “Watch That Man,” a decadent collage of impressions from Max’s (notably his meetings with Wayne County and Cyrinda Foxe), the Sombrero in Kensington, and the pages of Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies (whose characters would not yet have become bored with the jazz standard “The Tiger Rag,” which became little more than a cliché after Benny Goodman’s hit version in 1936). As for the focal point of the action, he was a chancer, a hipster, a voyeur, and a star;* the verses were his, but the perspective (and the key) changed for the chorus, where he was now the one being watched.

  Maybe the basis of life as a chancer (and a star) was taking inspiration wherever it could be found. The structure of the chorus—punch the first syllable, then pause for effect—was reminiscent of a track Bowie had recently produced for Mott The Hoople, “Momma’s Little Jewel.” The vocal blend—lead buried deep in the mix, female backing almost more prominent—was identical to the sound of the Rolling Stones’ newly released Exile on Main St. album. The rest was pure hard rock theatricality, from the viscous layers of guitar to the boogie-woogie lines of the bass, and the guttural grunt of Bowie’s saxophone holding up the bottom end.

  [67] PANIC IN DETROIT

  (Bowie)

  Recorded January 1973; Aladdin Sane LP

  * * *

  Politics as passion or politics as posture: that choice shaped rock’s involvement with radical activism during the late sixties and early seventies. In the motor city of Detroit, blues fan, beat poet, and perpetual dissident John Sinclair responded to the defiance of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California, by forming the White Panther Party, whose manifesto demanded “rock ’n’ roll, dope and fucking in the streets!” Police brutality in the city provoked extensive riots among the African-American community in 1967, and Sinclair aligned his Panthers with those seeking to banish racism from the streets and end the war in Vietnam. In 1969 he was jailed for possession of a small amount of marijuana; a prolonged protest campaign, climaxed by a concert featuring John Lennon, brought about his release. Meanwhile, the rock band that Sinclair had managed, the MC5, carried the Panthers’ manifesto into thousands of homes via their debut album, Kick Out the Jams.

  Some of that history was available to Bowie as a gentle reader of the music press; the rest he learned from Iggy Pop when the pair met again in Detroit in October 1972. Not an instinctively political being, Bowie chose to satirize* the cult of John Sinclair, by comparing him to rebel martyr Che Guevara, who even by 1972 was being admired more for his rock’n’roll image (a mustachioed Jim Morrison) than for his example as a guerrilla fighter. The subsequent “panic” told us more about the narrator’s sense of irrelevance than about any political realities.

  That provided a thematic link with Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower,” which used a similar* three-chord riff to underpin its apocalypse. Like “The Jean Genie” [65], and indeed Iggy and the Stooges’ “1969,” Bowie’s recording harked back to the swampy R&B records that came out of Chicago in the fifties, all maracas and tom-toms, creating a tension that pulsed and grew until a single cymbal crash signaled the way out of the chorus/chaos. The entire track seemed on the verge of that electronic sound distortion known as phasing, which finally won sway in the instrumental break, mimicking the “train” drums of Jimi Hendrix’s “Gypsy Eyes.” All the sense of disturbance that Bowie’s lyrics couldn’t satisfy was provided by the turbulence of the final moments, as Ronson’s guitar filled the right-hand speaker with wave after wave of dive-bombing sirens, and female voices wailed demonically.

  All this was in keeping with what one journalist at the time, paraphrasing Bowie’s explanation, called “a vague feeling of impending catastrophe,” a conviction that “the Americans he had met were poised unknowingly on the lip of a cataclysm that would rock the world.” Partly that reflected the milieux in which he had chosen to mix; partly it represented a transference of his own unease onto a nation that was politically and economically troubled, but lacked the cripplingly defeatist mentality that afflicted Bowie’s homeland during this era.

  [68] DRIVE-IN SATURDAY

  (Bowie)

  Recorded January 1973; Aladdin Sane LP

  * * *

  Before the movie American Graffiti legitimized fifties teenage life as a subject for nostalgia,* not ridicule, the drive-in was a peculiarly American phenomenon, as alien to Europe as the science fiction landscape of Bowie’s song. The song’s location was the future, when sixties icons such as Mick Jagger and Twiggy (the Wonder Kid) were as archetypal as anything conceived by Jung, and—as in the 1967 movie Barbarella—lust was a thing of the past, only accessible from ancient videotapes. It’s one of the ironies of “Drive-in Satu
rday” that technology that sounded so advanced in 1973 is now laughably passé. But then Bowie was a much better alarmist than he was a futurologist. A few months before he wrote the song, Bowie warned British pop fans that they needed to “face up to a future which is going to be controlled by the Pill, and by sperm banks. . . . Man and woman will change. . . . I want to be very optimistic. But I have a hard time being optimistic about the future.” He conjured up his anachronistic desire by placing it in a mythical version of the 1950s, the tapes providing a “crash course” for the ravers of the future, even though “ravers” was decidedly sixties slang. Along the way, he tipped his hat to the T. Rex hit “Get It On” and to the New York Dolls’ guitarist Sylvain Sylvain, while preparing his public for the intended launch, the following year, of a group called the Astronettes.

  The fifties landscape also permeated the music, from the arpeggio plucking of the opening E chord to the re-creation of the era’s vocal group sound—lush but not quite perfect,* as you’d expect from denizens of the future. Like a Saturday morning movie serial, the song depended on maintaining anticipation: the opening V chord established a tension that was immediately resolved at the start of the verse, which itself ended in a cliff-hanging B7 chord, preparing the way for the small leap up (and down, from the key of A into G) of the chorus. There were other signals of the era, from the Duane Eddy–style lead guitar to the Phil Spector–inspired percussion. Bowie originally requested Spector’s services as producer for Aladdin Sane, but failed to make contact with him. The dense, luxurious sound of the chorus hinted at the effect that he had hoped Spector’s presence might bring. Within a few months, this epic re-creation of a lost era would itself become a cliché, in the skilled hands of Roy Wood’s Wizzard (“Angel Fingers” and “See My Baby Jive” being prime examples).

  [69] TIME

  (Bowie)

  Recorded January 1973; Aladdin Sane LP

  * * *

  Melodic and structural similarities between the chorus of this song and “Oh! You Pretty Things” [30] weren’t an accident, as both were composed during Bowie’s piano experimentation of 1971. Indeed, a prototype of “Time,” titled “We Should Be on by Now,” was given to his friend George Underwood that summer, complete with its playful, clock-watching lift from Chuck Berry’s fifties rock classic “Reelin’ & Rockin.”

  Extended and rewritten as “Time,” the song not only shifted its chronological focus from the fifties to the thirties, via the ambience of Mike Garson’s Berlin-cabaret-club piano, but also renewed one of the most unsettling concepts of the twentieth century: relativity. As cultural historian Peter Conrad noted, before 1900, “Time flowed always at the same reliable speed: space, by contrast, was immovable. Then, in the twentieth century, the universe suddenly ceased to obey these laws. Time adopted variable, unsynchronised tempi, and space too became mobile.” In Bowie’s fevered imagination, as in the temporal realm of modernism, time could shift and bend like a note on his blues harmonica: yesterday’s apocalypse might be previewed today. To add to his perturbation, he had recently become obsessed with the culture of a country he had yet to visit, Japan, where verb formations took no account of time existing in the past or the future: everything was in the present tense; everything was happening simultaneously. Time, then, could be both Life and Death; and, in its latter form, it claimed Bowie’s friends, such as Billy Dolls.*

  “Time” opened to the distant sound of Garson’s piano, offering vaudeville clichés with a distinctly European flavor. Bowie’s voice entered with a lingering echo delay, as if to demonstrate time in action. Once the initial verse was over, we were returned to familiar territory, another diatonic descent in the tradition of the “Changes” [48] chorus, with backing vocals marking out the root of each chord. But the decadent romanticism of the song abruptly gave way to horror: Bowie could voice that only with a scream, answered a few bars later by slowly declining howls from Mick Ronson’s guitar. The eeriest moment of the song, however, came when yet another of his wordless choruses—remember “Ching A Ling” [A55] and “Velvet Goldmine” [54]—turned into a cacophonous march, with massed Bowies accompanied by saxophone and flute. It was like a scene from Christopher Isherwood’s evocations of 1930s Berlin, which—in another reversal of time—had recently been revived in the movie Cabaret.

  [70] ALADDIN SANE (1913–1938–197?)

  (Bowie)

  Recorded January 1973; Aladdin Sane LP

  * * *

  While “Time” [69] could have been subtitled “1973–1933,” the title track of Aladdin Sane was both more and less specific. Bowie’s inspiration was Evelyn Waugh’s 1930* novel Vile Bodies: “The book dealt with London in the period just before a massive, imaginary war,” he explained. “People were frivolous, decadent and silly. Somehow it seemed to me that they were like people today.” The closest that Waugh came to anointing a hero in his novel was Adam Symes, who tells his lover: “Nina, do you ever feel that things simply can’t go on much longer?” While the characters frolic in cavalier ignorance, war is declared during a Christmas Eve carol service, and Symes finds himself “on a splintered tree stump in the biggest battlefield in the history of the world. . . . The scene all round him was one of unrelieved desolation.” It was a fine epigraph for a pop album at the height of the supposedly hedonistic genre of glam rock.

  The feeling of two worlds moving at different speeds—glamour and apocalypse, frivolity and war—was emphasized by the way the song was constructed. The verse repeated a virtually identical theme over and over, while the accompaniment constantly shifted its ground, using chords that only a pianist could have conceived. Then, by instinct rather than musical training, Bowie added to the sense of dislocation by launching his chorus melody on a high A (against a movement from G to F major chords), and then continuing to build his theme out of notes that didn’t appear in the chords beneath them.

  Though the song was unmistakably Bowie’s creation, its landscape belonged to jazz keyboardist Mike Garson. His flamboyant glissandi in the verse, the ultimate signs of romanticism, heightened the feeling of decadence—while his extended solo, a phenomenal improvisation around the simplest of changes, stabbed at the keys with reckless flamboyance, apparently unhinged but thrillingly controlled. There were other magisterial but more subtle touches throughout: the eighth-note caresses of the cymbal with a brush over the opening chords, the cameo appearances by a twisting acoustic guitar, the single delayed saxophone note repeated after Garson’s showcase, the voice vanishing into echo on the final call of “sane.” And one touch of amused guilt: Bowie briefly offered a line or two from the Drifters’ “On Broadway” to acknowledge the similarity between the roots, if not the ambience, of the two songs. Finally, there was a slow decaying of sounds, some tonal, some merely an interruption, a long-held bass note from the piano, one last defiant flourish—and then silence.

  FASHION: Turn to the Left

  Stanley Kubrick’s film of Anthony Burgess’s novel A Clockwork Orange premiered in the UK in January 1972, the same month in which David Bowie ventured into the outside world under the guise of Ziggy Stardust. The choreographed violence of Malcolm McDowell (as “Alex”) and his fellow “droogs” would, Burgess predicted, encourage imitations: “After seeing A Clockwork Orange, a lot of boys will take up rape and pillage and even murder,” he declared. “Therefore all art should be banned.” He was being both ironic and searingly truthful, and Kubrick would soon take him at his word, preventing the film from being screened in Britain until after his death.

  Such was the ease with which irony and outrage merged in the early seventies that David Bowie, who loved Burgess’s book and saw an early screening of the film, was able to translate the uniform in which the droogs dispensed their rape and murder into a distinctive brand for a pop group. “I got most of the look for Ziggy from that,” he recounted in 1993. “I liked the malicious, malevolent, vicious quality of those guys.” But he insisted that he had stripped the violence from their image, while being ab
le to retain “that terrorist, we’re-ready-for-action, kind of thing.” The film toyed with a series of troubling equations: art as voyeurism, voyeurism as violence, violence as Nietzschean ecstasy. Burgess insisted that he had looked back for inspiration, rather than forward: A Clockwork Orange was a report on the world of the fifties and early sixties, not a forecast of a dystopian future. In Bowie’s hands, however, everything became futuristic, and everything ironic.

  The missing, essential ingredient in that equation was “style,” a quality that had obsessed Bowie since his earliest adventures in Soho with his brother, Terry, at the dawn of the sixties. A decade later, he both reflected and invented the styles of the age, drawing on not only futurism and violence, but also several other vital facets of the seventies: androgyny, individuality, eclecticism. In fashion as in history, this was a decade that was defiantly not its predecessor, but which could not escape being influenced by the recent past. Hence Bowie’s importance as a catalyst, for the way in which he compressed symbols from the fifties and sixties—from sci-fi movie costumes to the stage garb of the classic rock’n’rollers—into a series of images that always appeared to be pointing the way ahead. Throughout the sixties, you could understand exactly where youth culture had arrived by looking at Bowie’s hair and clothes. In the seventies, people studied Bowie to find out the ways in which they would soon be selling themselves to the outside world.