The Man Who Sold the World

by Peter Doggett

  SIXTIES NOSTALGIA AND MYTH: Pin Ups LP

  Pin Ups was an exercise in Pop Art: a reproduction and interpretation of work by other artists, intended for a mass audience. The British pioneer and theorist of Pop Art Richard Hamilton had re-created Marcel Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even; Andy Warhol used newspaper photographs and consumer graphics as the canvases for his art. “I don’t know whether I want to be a commercial artist again,” Bowie had pondered during the sessions for an album that epitomized the brand.

  The singer became a brand himself—a Pop Art pop artist, indeed—with the release of Pin Ups: for the next two years he would no longer be “David Bowie” but merely “Bowie,” paving the way, perhaps, for future incarnations as Pedigree Bowie, New Improved Bowie, and of course Original Bowie.

  This album of defiantly unoriginal material was also a sure way of not giving any new Bowie songs to his music publishers, both of whom were in dispute (with each other and with MainMan as Bowie’s representatives) during the period that the album was recorded. And this may ultimately have been the primary reason for the project—a way of continuing Bowie’s career beyond the retirement of Ziggy Stardust, without having to reveal a fresh direction or surrender any valuable copyrights.

  Yet the primary impact of Pin Ups was as a fashionable utilization of nostalgia, which was already—alongside the craze for androgyny—emerging as one of the dominant themes of the early seventies. (“It sometimes looked as if the originality of 70s designers lay in their flair for deciding what period style to use next,” journalist Norman Shrapnel reflected in 1980.) In pop rather than Pop terms, Bowie’s album was a cheeky way of copying and overshadowing These Foolish Things, an album of rock and pre-rock standards by Roxy Music singer Bryan Ferry, which had been much longer in the making than Pin Ups. The two albums ultimately emerged on the same day, Bowie gaining more sales, Ferry better reviews. Yet while Ferry ranged across the decades in search of suitably arch material, Bowie chose to concentrate on his own past: not his adolescence, as John Lennon was then attempting with Phil Spector on the album belatedly released in 1975 as Rock & Roll, but the years in which he had battled in vain to establish himself alongside the likes of the Who and the Kinks. It seemed as if everyone in British pop was remembering the fifties and early sixties, from Elton John’s “Crocodile Rock” to 10cc’s “Donna” and Wizzard’s “Ball Park Incident,” taking a self-conscious look back at an era they had originally experienced without a hint of irony. Bowie, by contrast, was tackling a more immediate version of the past, as if to prove that he could have been a contender after all.

  Once he had reimagined the mid-sixties, Bowie’s passion for nostalgia knew no bounds. His next target was his own recent past. First he used pop star Lulu to reinvent “The Man Who Sold the World” and “Watch That Man.” “[Bowie’s] in show business, and knows where it’s at,” declared Lulu, who had bonded with Bowie in a hotel bar over their shared passion for Anthony Newley’s show tunes. And then he reincarnated Ziggy Stardust for American eyes only, for a TV project known as The 1980 Floor Show. It allowed him to reprise the highlights of Pin Ups and two of his earlier hits, preview his scheme for a musical based around a George Orwell novel, and revisit one of the more enduring singles of the sixties, Sonny & Cher’s “I Got You Babe,” in the erratic company of one of that decade’s most emblematic figures, Marianne Faithfull. One minute Ziggy was a prophet of the new; the next he was selling the past to an audience desperate to believe that it could return again: tomorrow’s nostalgia today.

  [88] GROWIN’ UP

  (Springsteen)

  Recorded July 1973; Pin Ups extended CD

  * * *

  The commercial impact of Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J., the debut album by the American singer-songwriter Bruce Springsteen, was minimal in 1973. Its influence on David Bowie was brief, but intense. Springsteen represented a fabulous collage of classic American symbols: Chuck Berry’s command of teenage iconography; James Dean’s almost delinquent sullenness; Bob Dylan’s lyrical extravagance; the ephemeral glory of pop, mixed with the gutsy authenticity of soul. Rock critics initially greeted him as “the new Bob Dylan,” and within a year journalist Jon Landau could proclaim, “I have seen Rock’n’Roll Future, and its name is Bruce Springsteen.” (Landau was rewarded with a multi-decade career as Springsteen’s producer-turned-manager, as if to spite every journalist who had ever crafted a cruel review.) Bowie bought into the hype early, but unlike the press he was not impressed by Springsteen’s manic live shows, which belonged to a very different theatrical tradition from his own.

  In the aftermath of his celebration of British pop on Pin Ups, Bowie began to assemble material for an American equivalent, including the Velvet Underground’s “White Light/White Heat” (the exhilarating backing track for which was bequeathed to Mick Ronson) and the Beach Boys’ “God Only Knows.” Both of those songs were acknowledged as classics; by approaching Springsteen’s catalogue, Bowie would be conferring some sort of princely tribute on a performer who was two years younger than himself. On the evidence of his cover of “Growin’ Up,” and his subsequent rendition of “It’s Hard to Be a Saint in the City” [122], an entire album of Bowie Sings Springsteen might have been a worthier project than Pin Ups.

  Guitarist Ronnie Wood augmented Ronson for this session, treating Springsteen’s song with a disregard for the niceties of rhythm that was well suited to his own band, the Faces, but less appropriate here. That problem faded in the heat of Bowie’s vocal performance: taking the song in a higher key than Springsteen, he pushed himself to his physical limit, rasping into falsetto and leaving a raw throatiness in his wake. This imperfection was strangely affecting, betraying his absolute engagement with the song. These early forays into the highest reaches of his vocal range proved to be a rehearsal for his later experiments with soul music.

  By the end of 1973, Springsteen’s launch would appear understated alongside the publicity campaign focused on another new American singer-songwriter: Jobriath. Billed as “the First Gay Rock Star,” he was flamboyantly hyped by his manager, Jerry Brandt, as “a composer, arranger, singer, dancer, painter, mime artist, ballerina, woman, man” who would soon be “the biggest artist in the world.” When Brandt was asked about his client’s similarity to Bowie, he dismissed the comparison contemptuously: “David Bowie has taken his best shot. He’s tacky and he can’t pirouette and he can’t move and he’s rigid and he’s scared to death. . . . It’s just like the difference between a Model A Ford and a Lamborghini.”

  Billboards on Sunset Strip and promises of a live show that would be extravagant beyond Bowie’s imagination failed to translate into a career strategy, especially when Jobriath’s concert debut proved to be spectacularly short on pizzazz. By early 1975, Jobriath—like Ziggy Stardust—had announced his retirement, the only difference being that Ziggy had become a star, while Jobriath was a laughingstock. Little attention was paid to the perfectly respectable blend of Bowie, Stones, and cabaret influences that comprised his two albums, and Jobriath died from AIDS in 1983 without any public recognition. The utter failure of Brandt’s PR strategy emphasized the skill of Tony Defries’s handling of David Bowie, as well as the subtle difference between launching a “Gay Rock Star” and a rock star who said “I’m gay” with a smile on his face and a twinkle in his eye.

  [89] MUSIC IS LETHAL

  (Battisti; trans. Bowie)

  Written for Mick Ronson

  * * *

  The end of Ziggy Stardust, and the consequent demise of the Spiders from Mars, need not have signaled the end of Bowie’s working relationship with Mick Ronson. That was a matter of choice, from a man who, less than two years later, would tell an interviewer: “I honestly can’t remember Mick that well these days. He’s just like any other band member that I had.” During the final Ziggy tour, Bowie had already begun to downplay Ronson’s contribution, preferring to regard him as someone who could translate Bowie’s creative impulses ra
ther than, as most objective observers remember him, an artistic contributor in his own right.

  The two men had very different temperaments: in an otherwise warm tribute after Ronson’s death in 1993, Bowie said that his onetime musical collaborator lacked ambition, and would have been content to sound like Jeff Beck or Free’s Paul Kossoff. “I just gave up trying to get him to come out and see other bands or listen to interesting musics,” Bowie recalled. “You’d mention anything new, and his pet phrase was, ‘Don’t need to.’ ” But it’s hard not to conclude that ego—Bowie’s need to be seen as master of his own destiny—played an equally large part in the severing of their partnership.

  As recompense for his loyalty, Bowie and Tony Defries agreed to support Ronson’s launch as a solo artist, and the MainMan hype machine was set in motion on the guitarist’s behalf. To publicize his first solo album, Slaughter on Tenth Avenue (named after a movie theme that Bowie had suggested Ronson should record), the Rainbow Theatre in London was booked for a prestigious debut performance. It proved to be little more than a disaster, not just because Ronson was never a strong vocalist in isolation, but because he presented himself like someone who didn’t believe he deserved to be in the spotlight. Bowie went backstage during the intermission to offer encouragement, and briefly considered joining Ronson onstage, before realizing that this would only highlight the gulf in charisma between the two artists. Neither man could have been delighted that the only song in Ronson’s repertoire that roused the crowd was Bowie’s “Moonage Daydream,” as if fans had half-closed their eyes and imagined that Ziggy himself were there.

  Ronson’s solo career ran aground after two albums—the second more cohesive than its predecessor, though it lacked the attraction of any material from Bowie (except for the abandoned backing track for “White Light/White Heat” from the Pin Ups sessions). Bowie had a hand in three songs on Ronson’s debut, however—among them this rather embarrassing adaptation of an intimate ballad by the Italian singer Lucio Battisti. Bowie certainly seemed to have learned little about the art of translation since his ill-fated attempt to secure the English-language rights to Claude François’s “Comme d’Habitude” in 1968 [A50]. The song required an intensely personal lyric, open to the dramatic potential of tiny incidents within a relationship; Bowie delivered an almost hysterical parody of Jacques Brel’s most lubricious work, cramming in words as if he were being paid by the syllable.

  [90] HEY MA HEY PA

  (Ronson/Bowie)

  Written for Mick Ronson

  * * *

  Working around a framework erected by Mick Ronson was hardly a new experience for Bowie: unlike the songs for The Man Who Sold the World, this melody was supplied by Ronson, reducing Bowie’s role to lyricist. Both men’s recent influences were on brazen display. While Ronson’s music betrayed his enthusiasm for Todd Rundgren’s dazzling exhibition of pop and electronics on A Wizard a True Star (“Zen Archer” was the closest equivalent here), Bowie continued to pay homage to the streetwise sensibility of Bruce Springsteen—albeit via parody. His tale of J. J. Dean and Pigsty Paul was a blend of comic-book Western and a schoolboy’s version of a James Dean scenario.

  [91] GROWING UP AND I’M FINE

  (Bowie)

  Written for Mick Ronson

  * * *

  It was surely no coincidence that having recorded Springsteen’s “Growin’ Up” [88], Bowie borrowed that title for another gift to Mick Ronson. Stylistically, though, it was a throwback to the days of Hunky Dory, diatonic descent in the chorus and all. If that automatically sparked thoughts of the Beatles, that resemblance was reinforced by the melodic similarity between the finale to the chorus and Paul McCartney’s “Mother Nature’s Son,” while Mike Garson’s piano introduction had the same quality of music-in-motion as George Harrison’s circular guitar opening to “I Want to Tell You.”

  The lyrics might have been written by the narrator of “Can’t Help Thinking About Me” [A14] to explain why he was abandoning his teenage friends in favor of a woman. Like the most existential of Mods, he mapped out his previous life in epic terms. Then love intervened, bringing with it a strident middle section that seemed to have stepped from the score of West Side Story—itself an influence on Bruce Springsteen, completing this circle of adolescent melodrama.

  [92] I AM DIVINE

  (Bowie)

  Recorded by the Astronettes, November 1973

  * * *

  In November 1973, Bowie interrupted the sessions for his next album to pursue a musical fusion that his own previous work had barely dared to touch. He revived the name of the Astronettes—used for his backing vocalists at the Rainbow in 1972, and mentioned as an aside in “Drive-in Saturday”—for a loose vocal group based around his school friend Geoff MacCormack and his newly appointed lover, Ava Cherry. With session singer Jason Guest, they formed a black/white, male/female combination that allowed Bowie to explore what he could achieve with contemporary forms of soul music, without the pressing necessity to be making a conceptual statement at the same time.

  While the Astronettes’ sessions enabled Bowie to ease himself out of the Ziggy Stardust straitjacket into a more liberated way of making music, they were probably more important for him as a way of consolidating his romantic partnership with Ava Cherry. Until now, Bowie and Angie had both enjoyed the freedom of their open relationship, neither of them making any attempt to hide their numerous affairs and dalliances. None of these flings had threatened the core of their marriage, which seemed to operate as a mutually beneficial system of emotional and career support. Bowie knew that Angie would always be there to advise him, regardless of where they had both spent the previous night. But in Ava Cherry, Bowie discovered a young woman who could excite him emotionally, physically, and professionally. While theirs was never quite a union of equals—their affair was carried out strictly on Bowie’s terms—it did mean that Angie’s central role in his life, and his career, was diminished. Although they continued to maintain the fiction that their marriage was functioning as before, Bowie increasingly kept his wife, and her influence, at a distance.

  Not that Bowie’s passion for Ava Cherry was enough to encourage him to complete the Astronettes’ album. Tony Defries retained the rights to the unfinished tapes when his business relationship with Bowie was severed in 1975, and eventually issued an Astronettes CD in 1994. The song selection betrayed several of Bowie’s private obsessions: Frank Zappa, Roy Harper, standard songs, even the Beach Boys’ “God Only Knows” (cut at these sessions in an arrangement he clearly copied for his 1984 album Tonight). As a commercial (rather than archival) release, the album subsequently titled (by Defries) People from Bad Homes would have damaged Bowie’s reputation if it had appeared at the time—which is presumably why he chose to leave it unfinished.

  Of the four songs that Bowie contributed to the project, “I Am Divine” gave the most accurate indication of what would happen when he visited Philadelphia the following year for the Young Americans sessions. Indeed, it would have been a worthy contender for that album, its rhythmic breakdowns and disco-funk arrangement providing a thrilling vehicle for the glorious voice of Geoff MacCormack. The combination of R&B trademarks—gospel voices, wah-wah guitar—with the daredevil piano of Mike Garson was positively inspired, Garson’s ability to send out jazz feelers across the standard funk changes making one wish that he had survived in Bowie’s band long enough to participate in Young Americans. Besides the ecstatic rush of the music, the track had its biographical intrigue: its portrait of a megalomaniac contained a sly reference to someone who considered himself the “MainMan”—which was exactly how Tony Defries used to sign his seventies correspondence.

  [93] I AM A LASER

  (Bowie)

  Recorded by the Astronettes, November 1973

  * * *

  Of interest solely because Bowie returned to the song briefly in 1974 [111], and then rewrote it as “Scream Like a Baby” [187] in 1980, “I Am a Laser” was a ghastly exercise in thea
trical soul that contained some of the most embarrassing lyric writing of his entire career—patronizing, clichéd, ultimately laughable. In other circumstances, a couplet about the excitement of a “golden shower” might have been amusing; given to Ava Cherry as a statement of power and pride, it was nothing less than insulting.

  [94] PEOPLE FROM BAD HOMES

  (Bowie)

  Recorded by the Astronettes, November 1973

  * * *

  Bowie’s mid-sixties songwriting demos [A8–A13] illustrated that writing to a pop formula did not come naturally. “I Am a Laser” [93] and “People from Bad Homes” confirmed that he found it no easier to come to terms with the demands of R&B. No reputable music publisher would have offered him a contract on the basis of those two songs—though the latter was marginally more effective, thanks to its vague similarity to the Drifters’ “On Broadway” (as quoted in the fade-out of “Aladdin Sane” [70]) and the brief spasm of excitement spurred by the opening to the chorus. As yet, Bowie had no reliable guide for constructing a soul melody, or indeed an appropriate lyric: “People from Bad Homes” had a tune that seemed to be running a bar or two behind the band, and a social comment lyric that was little more than inane. It left at least a subliminal mark on its creator, however, as the title reappeared in the lyrics to the altogether more successful “Fashion” [185] in 1980.