Bowie

by Marc Spitz

  “The Inchworm” has been covered by everyone from John Coltrane to John Lithgow. Tony Bennett does a version that will give you stomach flutters, but Kaye’s rendition, with or without Muppets (he reprised it on The Muppet Show in the late seventies), is the standard, and the recorded version became five-year-old David Jones’s favorite. Simply, it made him feel safe and hopeful when his increasingly discomfiting family life and shyness filled him with guilt and wariness. The record was never far from his gramophone.

  “‘Inchworm’ is my childhood,” Bowie said in 1993 (curiously, in an interview with fashion model Kate Moss). “It wasn’t a happy one. Not that it was brutal but mine were a certain type of British parent: quite cold emotionally and not many hugs. I always craved affection cause of that. ‘Inchworm’ gave me comfort and the person singing it sounded like he’d been hurt too and I’m into that, the artist singing away his pain.”

  When David first began learning guitar and saxophone in his adolescence, the chords for “The Inchworm” would be the first he would seek out. If you listen to the structure and melody, you can hear the template for many of David Bowie’s best and saddest songs. It’s there in “Life on Mars?” and “Aladdin Sane.” Even his cover of Dimitri Tiomkin and Ned Washington’s “Wild Is the Wind” (first recorded by Johnny Mathis for the 1957 film of the same name, but made famous by Nina Simone in ’64, Bowie in ’76, and much later, in 2000, Chan Marshall on Cat Power’s The Covers Record) has a little “Inchworm” in its arrangement and delivery.

  “You wouldn’t believe the amount of my songs that have sort of spun off that one song,” he has said. “There’s a child’s nursery rhyme element in it. It kept bringing me back to the feelings of those pure thoughts of sadness that you have as a child, and how they’re so identified even when you’re an adult. There’s a connection that can be made between being a somewhat lost five-year-old and feeling a little abandoned and having the same feeling when you’re in your twenties and it was that song that did it for me.”

  David, by age six, had an even more powerful way to forget his immediate circumstances and dial into a life outside of his parents’ house, beyond his discomfort over Terry’s treatment, beyond Great Britain and even the realms of planet Earth. In keeping with their upwardly mobile determination, the Joneses were among the first families in Bromley to purchase a television set. The black and white tube, with its small screen and a massive cabinet, seemed more than anything else like a reward and a unifier for an uncertain post-wartime nation. TVs sold like mad in the years after the war as the British took to the invention with a verve that even the most ardent American nuclear family would be hard-pressed to match. The British Broadcasting Corporation, a public network founded in 1922, had been testing TV since World War II but suspended advancement until after the war. By 1946, the first London residents began enjoying rudimentary television programming and an unreliable signal. In 1949, the erection of more transmitters made signals outside of London stronger and allowed television to be enjoyed by the rapidly sprawling suburbanites.

  On June 2, 1953, the Joneses gathered around the primitive set to view the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. This was one of the first highly produced affairs, with multiple cameras and much pageantry. Millions watched as the orb and scepter and the rod, ring and crown are bestowed on Elizabeth. The New York Times called it “the first international television event.”

  David and other British schoolchildren were granted a full week off. “It was like Christmas and sort of New Year all rolled into one,” Greg Tesser, a future music publicity officer and habitué of the Marquee Club, would later recount to me. It may have also been the first time that David Jones realized the scope of the world, as proud English subjects who watched the coronation on TV and heard it on the radio bragged about the massive scope of the listening and viewing audience, some twenty-seven million people in total.

  Whereas Terry was a war baby, his father torn away by a world in tumult, David Jones was a TV baby, where the world was literally brought to you and the figures inside the glass tube seemed like family after a while. While H. G. Wells had his borrowed library on the summer estate, early English TV is likely responsible for introducing young David Jones to the concept of outer space, a theme he would later use to such great effect throughout his songwriting and acting careers.

  Almost exactly one month after the televised coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, the BBC broadcast a serialized science fiction drama en titled The Quatermass Experiment. The ratings were massive and this somewhat pulpy production captivated an entire nation. Watching The Quatermass Experiment today (I’ve located a grainy dubbed videocassette copy), it quite obviously belongs, along with that other wildly popular BBC production The Day of the Triffids, to the subgenre of alien-possession-as–Cold War–metaphor films (best exemplified in America by the original 1956 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers). Quatermass begins with two young lovers wooing each other in a field when they hear a noise and spot an object in the sky. “That’s not a jet!” the man shouts. A rocket crash-lands in the countryside, part of a top-secret British space program mission headed up by the gruff but upright Professor Quatermass, a sort of proto–Dr. Who figure in British pop culture. Inside the ruined fuselage, only one of the original three astronauts remains, and there’s something funky about him. He will eventually turn into a creature resembling an elephant seal covered with Berber carpeting. What’s important about The Quatermass Experiment is not the plot and the special effects, of course, but rather the ideas it placed in the mind of young viewers.

  Quatermass debuted just four weeks past the international, globe-shrinking hubbub that was the coronation, and one can imagine a six-year-old David Jones’s head swelling with possibility and excitement, out there, “on the other side of the air,” as Quatermass promises. “There’s a whole new world out there.” Young boys made heroes of astronauts in part because of the brewing desire to conquer. But at the risk of putting too fine a point on it, a somewhat emotionally repressed young boy, with occasionally wounding energy in the family living room, could certainly imagine space exploration, and by extension the hard facts of science itself, as a clean antidote to messy human emotion he could not fully understand or protect himself from.

  Around this time, Terry decided that he would go off and see the world beyond Bromley for real. In the early fifties, thanks to increasing tensions with the Soviet Union and a last-ditch, doomed effort to preserve what was left of the “empire,” Britain still had mandatory military service, unless one was ill or otherwise disqualified. Terry’s joining up was required but it was most likely reactionary as well. As was John Jones’s response to this development. Terry and David shared a room in Plaistow Grove when Terry stayed over, but after he announced that he had enlisted in the Royal Air Force, John began making plans to convert the room into a larger bedroom for his son.

  The RAF service certainly took Terry Burns far away from suburban England. It has been suggested that some of the things he saw, while stationed near Yemen, as the British fought one of their final colonial wars against largely uncontrollable tribal insurgents, deeply disturbed him. The Aden conflict, which carried on into 1963, has real parallels with America’s twenty-first-century occupations in the Middle East in that it consisted of well-trained soldiers who often found themselves defenseless against guerillas in a sweltering desert theater.

  Aden had been crucial to Britain since the early 1800s as a passage to India and a port for the importing of spices and oil. In July of 1956 Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser attempted to block this passage and nationalize the European-financed Suez Canal. He also tried to unite Arab nations as a republic but only succeeded in fomenting a fierce anticolonial sentiment. In essence, the British troops found themselves the object of an unexpectedly virulent hatred and violence as they attempted to take back the canal. As with World War II and his mother’s generation, once again, the reverberation of armed conflict would take its toll on a fragile Bur
ns psyche.

  “Something had happened to Terry while he was serving in the Royal Air Force in Aden,” Angie writes in Backstage Passes, “and whatever it was, it had disturbed him profoundly.” Upon his return, he became disheveled, often irrationally angry or upset. This was, as with any bit of effusive emotion, frequently ignored with the kind of cold English denial that the Joneses seem to have perfected as a matter of course. The profoundly skaken had no place in Bromley where conformity was quietly but rigidly enforced.

  I was born on October 2, 1969—the same day David Bowie performed “Space Oddity” on England’s weekly Top of the Pops count down show. A spot on Top of the Pops guaranteed sales and exposure. It was a career milestone for any artist; it meant you had arrived. That night, both of us arrived. “Space Oddity” was the first David Bowie song that I ever heard and, along with “Stairway to Heaven” by Led Zeppelin and “Saturday in the Park” by Chicago, one of the first rock ’n’ roll songs I remember from very early childhood. A few years after the song was reissued as part of ChangesOneBowie, his 1976 best-of, and enjoyed a new popularity, its lyrics became some of the first to really haunt me. It was around ’78, and the older brother of a grade school friend had learned it on guitar. He was sixteen and a high school student. I was nine and still wet the bed. My friend’s brother strummed a six-string acoustic guitar with butterfly appliqués along the body like Peter Frampton’s had. It was a Saturday afternoon and he was attempting an English accent, poorly: “a-round cant-rowl to Moy-ja Tum …”

  When he was finished with “Space Oddity,” he began “Werewolves of London” by Warren Zevon, also sung in an English accent. I later found out that Warren Zevon was born in Chicago and was widely associated with the Los Angeles singer-songwriter movement of the early to mid-seventies, but by then, I was already a rock journalist. “Werewolves of London” was sick humor, like the Mad, Cracked and National Lampoon magazines I read with great excitement every few weeks. The lines “You better stay away from him / He’ll rip your lungs out, Jim / I’d like to meet his tailor” fit my rapidly blackening sense of humor. “Space Oddity” was not as witty (“And the papers want to know whose shirts you wear” is actually a nod to British football team loyalty and not a sly critique of sartorial trends à la the Kinks’ “Dedicated Follower of Fashion”) but it stuck with me longer. At night, I would look up at the sky and wonder what it would be like to be Major Tom, trapped way up there in outer space, floating in a tin can forever. Was it technically living? Do you age? Do you have money and hair? Do you see pictures of Jap girls in synthesis? Bowie made me consider existentialism before I even knew what it meant to be alive (and before I ever really thought about my death). It was much easier to reckon with the Grease soundtrack and put off the inevitable, but I already knew even then that Bowie’s music had permanently changed me.

  3.

  DAVID SEEMED TO EVOLVE quickly during the advent of rock ’n’ roll, as if his very form was slowly adapting itself for the cultural upheavals ahead. Class photos from the late fifties and very early sixties show David slowly beginning to appear different than his schoolmates do. He was skinnier and paler and blonder than the other boys, but he was not yet equipped, or even inclined, of course, to use these delicate and unique qualities. However, by the end of the 1950s, as he entered his teens, David would amass a series of key influences, many handed down to him by his older brother upon his return from RAF service, which would help ease him into a powerful other-ness.

  In 1955, when David was eight, the film East of Eden was released in England and was, along with Disney’s Lady and the Tramp, one of the big hits, both critically and commercially, of the year. Adapted from John Steinbeck’s 1952 novel, it begins with a swelling overture and the crashing of the Pacific waves on the Salinas, California, shores. East of Eden is epic Americana, full of biblical allegory, violence, poverty and desire. In it, James Byron Dean, named for the romantic poet, played Steinbeck’s character Cal Trask, the tortured half brother skulking around a small town, seeking love and affection but unable to express his need to fill the void in his guts. Like Marlon Brando, James Dean made psychic pain and social disenfranchisement seem romantic, even desirable. He “said it all so clean,” as the Eagles noted in their 1974 ode to him. An icon in America, Dean articulated the same sentiments for millions of British youths encouraged to be voiceless, rewarded for a politesse that clashed with every roiling impulse they were feeling. If possible, he was bigger in England than in America because of such institutionalized repression.

  “Dean’s impact among British youth was huge,” writer William Bast says. Now in his late seventies, Bast was Dean’s friend and roommate in the early 1950s. After the actor’s death in 1955, his Dean-inspired play The Myth Makers would be broadcast on the UK’s Granada TV network, and he would observe the intense English James Dean cult firsthand. “He was a huge movie star there,” he continues. “There were large fan clubs. People could relate to his farm boy origins. They have farms, first of all. But with regard to American culture and teenage culture, the feeling of being displaced is not just an American thing.”

  Dean’s father was a Quaker with a lineage that could be traced to the Pilgrims. He had Native American blood on his mother’s side. She died when he was eight, and he never really recovered from the loss. Fast, sexed-up, palpably sad and searching, Dean was American rock ’n’ roll before there was such a thing as rock ’n’ roll. What is irresistible about rock, the stylish, slippery, hot freakiness, is irresistible about him. David could not have looked at Dean’s androgynous features, prettier than most girls’, and not see a kindred soul. Subsequently, Dean remained not just a hero but also a model for the rest of David’s life, as great a template for Bowie as any rock or jazz pioneer would become. To be a Bowie-ist, by extension, is to be a student of James Dean. Bowie’s celebrated self-conception and/or self-invention (or reinvention) really begins here upon David Jones’s discovery of the Hollywood rebel. Dean transformed himself after moving from rural Indiana to California and later, in ’51, to New York City.

  “The mystery of James Dean lies not in his abrupt end, but in his origins,” David Dalton writes in the classic Dean biography James Dean: The Mutant King, which Bowie is busy reading while spending time with journalist Cameron Crowe during their classic ’76 Playboy interview. “Dean was probably very much like me,” Bowie tells Crowe in the interview. “Elizabeth Taylor told me that once. Dean was calculating. He wasn’t careless. He was not the rebel he portrayed so successfully. He didn’t want to die. But he did believe in the premise of taking yourself to extremes, just to add a deeper cut to one’s personality.”

  “He was an actor,” Bast told me. “An actor prepares by watching. Seeing. Trying to live the part. Studying other people. [Russian acting innovator Constantin] Stanislavski wrote that. [Dean] was very much aware of all that and took the opportunity to avail himself of things like that. The end result … to become an actor. You can live other roles. He’s not going to go around talking like an Indiana farm boy unless there was a certain charm. Then he’d turn it on.”

  Dean’s death made him an even more perfect model. As he sat in the cinema, watching Dean, brooding about the Griffith Park Observatory in Rebel Without a Cause or covered in black gold in the following year’s Giant (his final film), David knew that this was someone who no longer existed in any terrestrial way. He was somewhere else, “beyond the air,” as Quatermass would say.

  Equally out-there, and next in the crucial succession of formative Bowie heroes, was Richard Wayne Penniman, a.k.a. “Little Richard.” In the autumn of 1956, several weeks short of his tenth birthday, John gave David a copy of Little Richard’s Specialty Records single “Tutti Frutti.”

  “My father brought home a plastic American record with no center,” Bowie recalled. “An American GI had sent a bunch of singles to Dr. Barnardo’s and he brought me half a dozen home to listen to. Our record player only played at seventy-eight so I used to put the nee
dle on it and try to turn it at the right speed using my finger. So I got this very weird perception of what rock ’n’ roll sounded like at a very early age. That could explain a lot.”

  This was no Danny Kaye.

  “A wop bop a loo bop a wop bam boom,” the gritty caterwaul declared—words that meant everything and nothing at once. The band fell in with the piano, sax, bass and drums and David Jones felt his entire body rise and shake. It was an electrifying moment. “My heart nearly burst with excitement,” he said. “It filled the room with energy and color and outrageous defiance.”

  Rooted in gospel and gruff like a blues singer, but also pliant, flexible and light like an opera singer, with the winking, naughty wit of a cabaret star, Richard’s voice is still unique in its twisted, somewhat insane timbre and phrasing. He sang like a man who could never sing any other way. It possesses urgency, confidence, bravado and deep, almost biblical need. “I tried to take voice lessons but I found I couldn’t because the way I sing, a voice teacher can’t deal with it,” Richard has said of his phrasing. “I’m out of control.”

  As epochal as it was, Richard’s “Tutti Frutti” was not a number one hit in America. A watered-down cover version by Pat Boone had topped the charts instead. Richard was an African American and androgynous. He was a double threat to many parents at the time.

  “I had heard God. Now I wanted to see him,” David recalled. And he finally did, in hit films like Don’t Knock the Rock and The Girl Can’t Help It, both from 1956. In Don’t Knock the Rock, featuring seminal and soon to be scandalized Cleveland disc jockey Alan Freed (who has a great face for radio), Richard is all cheekbones and sex, flipping a sharkskin leg up on the piano lid and thrusting it into the keys and rolling his eyeballs with extreme camp as his band runs through “Long Tall Sally.” “Rock and roll is for morons!,” one of the disapproving local officials declares later in the film, “It’s outrageous! Depraved.” In The Girl Can’t Help It, the better film of the two thanks to genuinely funny dialogue (“Rome wasn’t built in a day.” “She ain’t Rome and she’s already built!”) and a prescient plotline (Tom Ewell’s agent attempts to turn Jayne Mansfield’s sexpot into a star inside of six weeks at the behest of a gangster) that will reflect David’s own rise to super-stardom in the early seventies. In Girl, Richard performs the title track, “Reddy Teddy,” and “She’s Got It,” in a nightclub before an all-white crowd. The film begins in dull black and white as Ewell boasts about the “gorgeous lifelike color by Deluxe.” Suddenly (with further comic prompting by Ewell, a master of the deadpan delivery) the widescreen transforms into a vivid, burning color scape. A better metaphor for Richard’s impact on the young David Jones and by extension, polite, white popular culture, does not exist. To David, Richard was the pinnacle, a consummate weirdo but no outcast; rather an artist with killer power over all who gazed upon him. Even at ten the boy wanted to be … this, whatever this was.