The Man Who Sold the World

by Peter Doggett

  With three decades’ hindsight, Bowie dismissed Diamond Dogs as “my usual basket of apocalyptic visions, isolation, being terribly miserable.” Participants in the 1974 sessions at Olympic Studios, where Bowie shared his time with Brian Eno, who was mixing Here Come the Warm Jets down the corridor, remember an altogether more positive artist—energized, restlessly creative, bouncing back and forth between his white Perspex guitar, his Mellotron, and his synthesizer. Rolling Stone magazine may have complained that the finished record was “simplistic and murky . . . muddy and tuneless,” but that was the way Bowie wanted it. To that extent, Diamond Dogs anticipated the sonic audacity of Low and “Heroes,” at the same time as it capsized the vessel of classic rock.

  None of this was apparent at the time, and in Britain, at least, the album was widely regarded as a severe disappointment, ameliorated only by the rowdy genius of the “Rebel Rebel” [101] single. There was much talk, too, about Guy Peellaert’s cover design, on which Bowie metamorphosed into a mutant canine, just as the inner gatefold of Aladdin Sane had seen his body morph into a creature without sexual organs. Peellaert, however, had painted the Bowie dog with a penis and balls, which had to be airbrushed into decency before the record was released. Censored or otherwise, the Diamond Dogs sleeve marked the end of a year of semi-affectionate sparring with Mick Jagger, who had made the mistake of boasting to Bowie that the next Rolling Stones album would feature a Peellaert design. “Mick was silly,” Bowie conceded. “I mean, he should never have shown me anything new.” And with a swagger in his step, he set off for America, his three-year experiment with the rock template fashioned by the Stones and the Beatles at an end.

  [108] CAN YOU HEAR ME

  (Bowie)

  Recorded August, November–December 1974; Young Americans LP

  * * *

  Bowie’s journey from rock to soul began with this sensuous and elegant ballad, written to prove his conviction that his friend Lulu was “a real soul singer.” In April 1974, he boarded the SS France for New York, to begin preparations for an extravagant American tour. When he checked into the Sherry-Netherland hotel, Lulu was already in residence, and the following day he produced her still unreleased version of the song, commissioning a string arrangement from Mick Ronson (their last musical collaboration of the decade). “Lulu’s got this terrific voice,” he said excitedly after the session, “and it’s been misdirected all these years. People laugh now, but they won’t in two years’ time, you see!” The session, which also allowed him to revamp “Rebel Rebel” [101] for its US single release, marked his first encounter with guitarist Carlos Alomar, who would soon join Bowie’s band and remain a vital collaborator for the rest of the decade.

  “Can You Hear Me” reemerged during Bowie’s Philadelphia sessions in August, its intense “take it in right” vocal interplay inspiring the creation of another song [119]. Ostensibly a romantic ballad, for someone whom Bowie refused to name, it also awoke some internalized demons. As on “It’s Gonna Be Me” [116], he expressed his boredom with the parade of sexual partners available on tour. More urgently, the song’s title expressed a more existential fear: Could his perception of reality be trusted? Did he really exist at all? “I set out on a very successful crusade to re-establish my own identity,” he said later of this period. “I stripped myself down, and took myself down, and took myself apart, layer by layer. I used to sit in bed and pick on one thing a week that I either didn’t like or couldn’t understand. And during the course of the week, I’d try to kill it off.” All of which may explain the apparent—with Bowie, reality and artifice were always difficult to separate—emotional openness of his performance.

  Like “It’s Gonna Be Me,” “Can You Hear Me” captured the mood of southern rather than Philly soul, as if it had been cut during Elvis Presley’s 1969 sessions at American Studios in Memphis. Indeed, Bowie had envisaged producing an entire album for Lulu in exactly that location. The signifiers of “southern” identity were the gospel-tinged piano, the tight and terse guitar figures, and the sense of space in the arrangement. Where Philadelphia reasserted itself was in the strings (added by Tony Visconti in London, ironically enough) and in the intimacy of the relationship between Bowie and his background singers, especially during the play-out, as the band vamped modestly over a C major chord. His lead vocal, slightly compressed and rigidly controlled in the opening verse, slowly began to betray the depth of his commitment, the edges almost cracking with emotion as he stretched out all the possible implications of the gorgeous melody.

  THE HEART OF PLASTIC SOUL

  White rock has lost its contact with the dance by straying too far from black beginnings; black music is struggling to define its own integrity in the throes of new developments in the popular idiom comparable to the be-bop pioneers’ impact on 40s jazz. Whatever next? I suggest black’n’white music.” That was New Musical Express rock critic Ian MacDonald in 1975. For another voice, try Ron Ross from the US magazine Circus: “Any artist who will mean as much to as many in the 70s as the Beatles did in the 60s is going to have to involve black listeners in the same way Stevie Wonder or Jimi Hendrix involved whites.”

  For the generation of white musicians who emerged in the mid-sixties, particularly in Britain, black American music represented a touchstone of authenticity—a jewel that they could reproduce in paste, but never hope to match. As American producer Tony Visconti noted in 1974, “Every British musician has a hidden desire to be black. They all talk about ‘funky rhythm sections,’ and their idols are all black blues guitarists.” Talking of Bowie, he added: “He’s been working on putting together an R&B sound for years.” Like the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Who, and many more besides, Bowie had set out in 1964 with the intention of sounding as if he had been born in Harlem, rather than pre-immigration Brixton. A decade later, he boasted: “It’s only now that I’ve got the necessary confidence to sing like that. That’s the kind of music I’ve always wanted to sing.”

  Not that one could have deduced that from the music that he—or, for that matter, the Beatles, the Stones, or the Who—had recorded between 1967 and 1970. All of those acts felt as if they had progressed beyond the need to imitate their black American idols. They were under more direct influences: psychedelic drugs, literature, radical politics, street protests, the decline of a traditional national identity. None of them lost their passion for R&B or soul, but they now inhabited what felt like a more complex universe, which the simple verities of the blues were inadequate to reflect.

  Instead, American soul music came to meet them: alongside the rise of black nationalism and black power, the Black Liberation Army and the Black Panthers, performers such as Curtis Mayfield, James Brown, Marvin Gaye, and Sly Stone began to sketch vivid portraits of a black nation in revolt, under threat and forced to confront the starkest economic realities of the age. Only when the black liberation movement was destroyed by covert government interference (the Nixon administration’s infamous COINTELPRO initiative), the ghettos of America’s cities were flooded with cheap heroin and cocaine, and the revolution of 1970 was repackaged as “blaxploitation” chic in movies such as Shaft and Superfly, did the culture of US soul slide back into escapism and hedonism, the righteous blast of funk giving way to the dance-floor metronome of disco.

  That’s a very simplistic overview, of course, which glosses over complex social transformations and political initiatives, and underplays the richness of America’s black music during the early to mid-seventies. It was the latter that attracted David Bowie when he moved to New York in 1974. He hung out at the Pierre Hotel, ordering steaks that he never ate and hundred-dollar bottles of vintage champagne, before heading uptown to the Apollo and downtown to Max’s Kansas City—sampling the best of the era’s sweet soul in Harlem, and an altogether more chaotic brew in the East Village. He wasn’t alone in his obsessions: Mick Jagger, John Lennon, and Elton John were all about to welcome contemporary black American influences back into their music, to disguise the ho
llowness of their closeted rock culture. But Bowie, ever the stylist at heart, was entranced as much by moves and fashions as by music. He fell for the clichéd swagger of what Tom Wolfe, in an essay titled “Funky Chic,” called “the Pimpmobile Pyramid-Heel Platform Soul Prince Albert Coat Got-to-get-over look of [New Haven’s] Dixwell Avenue,” in which “all of them, every ace, every dude, [were] out there just getting over in the baddest possible way, come to play and dressed to slay.” As Bowie recalled nearly thirty years later, “it was an attempt to turn the visual around as well as the music”—an escape route from his image as a space invader, his obsessions with political apocalypse, his hard rock clichés, his emotional repression; a reconnection with the body that he was already subjecting to torture by starvation and drug addiction; an expression of (there was no other word for it) soul.

  In the remainder of 1974, therefore, he channeled his soul obsessions into one tour that was meant to promote Diamond Dogs, and one that clearly wasn’t; and into a series of recording sessions whereby the strategies of contemporary black music enabled him to explore psychological terrain left untouched by his rock stardom.

  [109] KNOCK ON WOOD

  (Floyd/Cropper)

  [110] HERE TODAY AND GONE TOMORROW

  (Bonner/Harris/Jones/Middlebrooks/Robinson/Satchell/Webster)

  Performed live 1974; David Live LP [109] and extended CD [110]

  * * *

  Bowie promised “some silly ones” during the July 1974 Diamond Dogs concerts taped for David Live, no doubt leading some in the audience to expect a live debut of “The Laughing Gnome.” Instead he worked his way gently toward a contemporary soul sound via two vintage offerings. In “Knock on Wood” he was tackling a song so well known that it was virtually a cliché, having entered the repertoire of every British R&B band in the late sixties. While Eddie Floyd’s 1966 original was tightly controlled, relying on its brass section to help it swing, Bowie increased the tempo and let Earl Slick’s guitar dominate the arrangement, with an inevitable reduction in subtlety.

  Few, if any, of Bowie’s following in 1974 would have been familiar with “Here Today and Gone Tomorrow,” a 1968 single by the Ohio Players. Even in 1968 it must have sounded like a throwback, to the era when Smokey Robinson was crafting a succession of hits for the Temptations. Aside from lowering the key, Bowie did little to amend the Ohio Players’ arrangement, delivering a faithful but ultimately pointless reproduction of the original.

  THE UNMAKING OF A STAR #2: David Live LP

  The mid-seventies was the last era of rock history in which concert tours by major artists were not routinely documented for posterity. David Bowie undertook two lengthy excursions across the United States and Canada in 1974: the first, designed to promote Diamond Dogs, was recorded for the album David Live, but only a few fragments of concert footage have survived; the second, for which he abandoned the scenery and iconography of Diamond Dogs and set out to prove himself a soul singer, was glimpsed briefly in the 1975 BBC-TV documentary Cracked Actor, but otherwise exists only in memory and on illicit tapes made by audience members. For fans in Britain, famine replaced glut: after two years of almost frantic touring activity, Bowie was not seen onstage for almost three years.

  David Live was roundly criticized on its release in October 1974: one of Bowie’s staunchest supporters, journalist Charles Shaar Murray, wrote: “He seems to be kicking and screaming in a vain attempt to break out of the boundaries imposed on him by the songs, as if he needs them to say more than they are capable of saying; as if they had lost so much of their original meaning to him that he must infuse the lyrics with a desperate theatricality simply in order to convince himself that the songs have not yet become totally impotent.” The staging of the tour was certainly theatrical. Bowie had become obsessed with German expressionist cinema of the silent age, and the treacherous, angled surfaces of the most enduring example of the genre, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, were a major influence on the Diamond Dogs scenery. Everything in Caligari was off-balance, as befitted a film about madness and the uncertainty of identity. For the Diamond Dogs tour Bowie combined the tilting floors of Caligari with the inhuman cityscape of Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis, which he had seen for the first time in January 1974.

  Lang had arrived in New York a few months before he began shooting Metropolis in 1926. He saw the city as “the crossroads of multiple and confused human forces,” though implicit in his film was the belief that love could overcome the confusion and break through the overpowering modernity of a technocratic society. In Bowie’s hands, this theme became more vague: instead of Metropolis, his designers built Hunger City, with skyscrapers that seemed to be decaying before the audience’s eyes. Yet the singer, his band (positioned modestly stage right, as if observing proceedings), and his two “dogs” (singing dancers) never fully interacted with this vision. Songs were staged in a series of tableaux: Bowie was carried over the audience on a boom, miming a boxing bout, running with a street gang, but never capturing the focused intensity of the silent movies that ran through his imagination.

  Critics lamented his vocal inadequacies (as David Live proved, his offstage habits had cut away at his range) and the band’s lack of engagement with the music. Meanwhile, the gadgets didn’t always work, the venues didn’t sell out (especially in the South, in cities such as Nashville, Tampa, Charlotte, and Greensboro, where the arena was only 20 percent full), and the running costs were enormous. Even the taping of David Live during a six-show run at the Tower Theatre in Philadelphia was problematic: the band mutinied over a pay dispute before they went onstage, and the intended producer, Tony Visconti, arrived only after the shows.

  When the first tour ended in New York, a chance discussion with a MainMan employee forced Bowie to face an uncomfortable truth: he had misunderstood the entire nature of his business relationship with Tony Defries. What he had signed, and what he had chosen to believe, were diametrically opposed. He had imagined that he must be the co-owner of MainMan alongside Defries; instead he was merely one of the company’s employees, albeit the single most profitable individual on the staff. Bowie felt betrayed, and his personal relationship with Defries effectively ended at that point. His first decision in his new state of awareness—like Adam and Eve after they’d tasted the apple—was to cover himself up, to lessen his liabilities: specifically, he ordered that the next leg of the tour, due to open in September on the West Coast, should proceed without the ruinously expensive scenery and special effects.

  He also revamped his live band, replacing several experienced musicians with young black hopefuls from New York. Shepherded by Mike Garson, and led vocally by the then-unknown Luther Vandross, they were allowed to open the subsequent shows, to the disgust of many fans who had come to see Ziggy Stardust, not an unknown band of R&B singers. Although much of the material and arrangements remained intact (including Bowie’s reduced range), publicity centered around the handful of new songs that Bowie had added to the repertoire, all of which revealed a strong soul influence. Reviewers were virtually unanimous: as a soul man, Bowie was “a non-singer of the Lou Reed school,” “lightweight,” “hoarse,” “undistinguished,” “raw, uneven and generally strained.”

  It was now impossible to describe Bowie without mentioning his emaciated appearance, his skull clearly visible beneath his skin, like one of Egon Schiele’s distorted portraits of sickness. Associates had been worrying about his attitude to food since the late sixties, when Ken Pitt’s secretary complained that he never seemed to eat. His bodyguard during the Ziggy tours, Stuey George, talked as if he were a willful, self-destructive child: “You’d give him something to eat and he’d say he’d have it in a minute, so that in the end you would have to take the work off him. Many times he would go for days without eating, then he couldn’t get any food down. We had to fix Complan [a nutritional food supplement] and make him eat.” By 1974, he would taste a little milk or cheese in the early hours, but otherwise ingest nothing but alcohol. Observers guessed that
he weighed no more than seven stone (eighty-four pounds). Journalists noted that he was “almost ravaged, beyond belief.”

  He was also trapped in a routine of epic drug use. It was, said guitarist Earl Slick, “self-destruct time.” That was a more accurate summary than Slick perhaps realized. On October 23, 1974, Bowie returned to his hotel after a show in Chicago to watch an In Concert TV special based on the final Ziggy show the previous year. He could hardly have been taken by surprise to see the broadcast: he had remixed the tapes of the performance a few days earlier, for this exact purpose. But as he saw himself at the height of his powers just fifteen months earlier, in a state of innocence about his financial situation, something inside of him cracked. “I nearly threw myself out of the window,” he revealed later, claiming that Defries had never told him about the film. “I saw everything for the first time. And I nearly threw myself out. I was trying, but they stopped me. I just couldn’t take it.” A week later, as if nothing had happened, he was back onstage in New York. “I saw everything for the first time”: where he had been, what he had become, what he had believed, how he had been manipulated, what lay ahead. It was too much reality to bear.

  During his run at the city’s famous Radio City Music Hall, he filmed an appearance on Dick Cavett’s TV chat show, sniffing uncontrollably, tapping a cane on the floor incessantly as he spoke, singing with passion but little voice, and resembling a famine victim. A few weeks later, he was spotted in a New York club with Bob Dylan, “moving very strangely, looking very thin, and also a bit crazed.” It was this man who recorded one of the most directly emotional albums of his career, and then resolved to overturn the business relationship that had guided him to fame and all its attendant curses.