Bowie

by Marc Spitz

  The A side, a traditional blues song despite Conn’s songwriting credit, sounds as though it was recorded in an airplane lavatory post-flush. It sucks and hisses and churns but has real charm even as the instruments bleed, the background vocals croak and David’s voice, still tentative and thinner than it would soon become, strains and strains to sound big, black and experienced. “Liza Jane” nonetheless possesses a crucial rock ’n’ roll ingredient: swagger. One begins to sing along with the “Hey … Liza” chorus within seconds. The press release issued with the single heralds it as a “beaty, action packed disc.” Not far off, but, as history would soon bear out, not yet enough.

  Possibly much more interesting to Bowie-ists is the B side, “Louie Louie Go Home,” recorded during the same seven-hour session at Decca’s West Hampstead studios in the spring of 1964. Although it is technically a cover of an homage to a cover (the King Bees doing Paul Revere and the Raiders name-checking the Kingsmen’s totemic version of “Louie, Louie”), it’s valuable, as you can actually listen to David playing with his voice, experimenting as he goes, hitting weird high notes that will show up a decade later on “Young Americans” and “Golden Years.”

  For some odd reason all of David’s would-be hit singles up until the very late sixties have superior B sides. It’s almost as if they were chosen by people who had absolutely no idea what he was truly capable of creating … and they probably were. Still, the press releases are priceless. One informs: “He dislikes Adams apples, and lists as his interests Baseball, American Football and collecting Boots. Davie Jones has all it takes to get to the show business heights, including … talent.”

  He wouldn’t get there right away. “Liza Jane” was reviewed on the popular Juke Box Jury reviews show the day after its release and given a lukewarm reception. The British sex symbol Diana Dors (who would later be immortalized on the cover sleeve of a Smiths singles collection) didn’t dig it at all. The single failed. Hearing it played on television for the first time was certainly thrilling and increased the attendance at their club shows, but it ultimately provided the King Bees with a teasing glimpse of what was out there. David was not going to stay with the King Bees for long. He had too much to lose. Bromley and the quiet life his family was living out was the only other option. College or being content behind an office desk was not for him.

  “It’s all right for you lot; you’re at college,” David said to Underwood at the time. “I’ve left the [advertising] agency and I’m in this up to my neck.”

  5.

  DAVID JONES WASN’T the only seventies British rock superstar to fail to channel the sixties Beat boom into glory. Marc Feld would wait out the decade with nothing but whimsical image experimentation and titanic ambition to go on. Inside of a half decade Jones would be Bowie and Feld would be Marc Bolan, engine of the Bolan boogie and focal point of “T. Rexstasy.” They would battle for the singular loyalty of pop music fans and serious consideration from the rock press. “In my school you had to pick a side. One of the reasons I got into Bowie late, some time after the Ziggy Stardust album, was due to my allegiance to Marc Bolan,” Gary Numan says. “To even buy a Bowie a record felt like a betrayal of T. Rex.” And yet, this sense of “one or the other” began the better part of a full decade earlier, when neither of them were even semi -famous beyond the fading mod scene. When eighteen-year-olds David Jones and Marc Bolan first encountered each other in the offices of Les Conn (who managed both pop aspirants in 1965) a lasting sense of genuinely valuable competition was created, one that helped both survive their initial commercial disappointments. They were British pop’s Shelley and Byron, or at least the notion that they could or should be was powerful. Marc Bolan, it is seldom noted nowadays, remains every inch the icon that Bowie is. He is worshipped just as intensely but ultimately not by as many people. His is a perfect pop death cult, which sometimes overshadows all those excellent T. Rex albums and singles. Bowie’s career is fluid, Bolan’s frozen. He never had a chance to be a futurist, and among those who knew him there are those who insist that he was content to offer up retro pleasures (Chuck Berry riffs, double-tracked crooning about girls and cars) for all time.

  “Marc Bolan was a much bigger deal [in the early seventies],” veteran British rock writer Charles Shaar Murray says. “Bowie seemed to be offering everything T. Rex were offering, but there was a lot going on for grown-ups. Bolan was writing a lot of lyrics that were catchphrases and cute rhymes. They didn’t actually make any sense. They were fun to listen to. Ear-candy. Whereas Bowie’s songwriting was a lot more coherent. When you scratched the surface of Bolan’s lyrics, you know, you were through to fresh air. You scratched the surface of Bowie’s lyrics and there seemed to be a lot going on.” Shaar Murray compares Bolan to “a little jeweled snake,” adding, “He talked a very good game in terms of substance but he didn’t deliver in terms of the work. I think an awful lot of bravado. We have a saying in Britain, ‘More front than Harrods.’ Marc was pretty much all facade. It was a great facade. As facades go I would give it very high marks but it was a Potemkin village. With Bowie you walked through the front door and you were in this huge cathedral of mirrors. This mirrored maze.”

  Although small with kinky hair (adjectives he would use to describe himself in the T. Rex tracks “Spaceball Richochet” and “Telegram Sam,” respectively), Bolan certainly appeared as darkly romantic as Lord Byron. His face seemed unique, cherubic in the cheeks but with a chiseled jaw. His speaking voice had a slight lisp but was raspy, wry and given to hipster parlance (each observation punctuated by a winking “man”). Marc Feld was born in the borough of Hackney in East London on September 30, 1947. His mother and father, Simon and Phyllis Feld, were working-class Jews. Simon drove a transport van. Like David Jones, Marc spent his childhood in front of the movie screen or the TV set. By his tenth birthday, he was mad for American rock ’n’ roll and had also decided that he wanted to be a star.

  As with David, Marc’s parents also supported his interest in music, outfitting him with a guitar and a drum kit, which he taught himself to play. According to Bolan legend, this process was expedited when Marc touched American rock star Eddie Cochran’s guitar after a gig in Hackney. The magic rubbed off, and possibly the curse too, as both Marc Bolan and Cochran, also small in stature, would die young in London car crashes (Cochran died in the spring of 1960 at age twenty-two). Cochran appears in The Girl Can’t Help It as well, performing the great “Twenty Flight Rock.”

  By thirteen Marc too had his first group: Susie and the Hula Hoops, with lead singer Helen Shapiro on vocals. Shapiro would go on to have several huge pop hits and enjoys cult status today as another beloved British (and Jewish) singing star. Like David Jones, Marc was a teenage rebel and a smart but underperforming and tempestuous student. There are stories of him kicking classmates and others who crossed him. For a brief time he was even purportedly a member of a West Side Story—worthy street gang actually known as the Sharks.

  “He could see no point in what he was being taught,” biographer Tony Stringfellow writes in his study The Wizard’s Gown—Rewoven, “it held no purpose for him.” A school friend is quoted as saying, “He was only ever interested in music and clothes.”

  In his very early teens, Marc was discovered by a London modeling agent and began to earn his boutique money by posing for catalog ads. Unlike David, who has confessed to doing so, Marc was too proud to go crawling through any garbage cans to pick up discarded wardrobe items (a common mod boy practice). This may be a key difference between the two. There was a strong element of David’s personality that was and is constantly searching, but Marc Bolan it seems preferred to stay put and have people and things simply come his way, doting and gushing. And they did, including modeling agents, the gay proprietors of the mod boutiques opening up in London’s Carnaby Street, and later, of course, obsessed fans. David Jones, and later David Bowie, pursued such things doggedly. Marc puffed out his chest and simply accepted them as tribute to his magical charisma. Th
is isn’t to suggest that Marc the musician remained completely sedentary. He was gifted and intuitive in both his writing and guitar playing (both of which remain quite underrated). Like David, he was highly adept at picking and choosing from other artists and arranging a sort of magpie’s nest full of style. There are photos of him clutching a guitar and wearing the same type of snap-brim cap that Bob Dylan wore during his Woody Guthrie–influenced phase. Marc called himself “Toby Tyler” then and for a brief time played the city’s folk venues. An early outfit, John’s Children, combined Who-style proto-punk with the startling, tremulous baritone borrowed from soul man Billy Eckstine (an effect Bolan would refine throughout his career, developing a tone that would be much imitated in itself). His restrained playing on the pastoral Tyrannosaurus Rex albums (“The Throat of Winter” on 1969’s Unicorn out–Nick Drakes Nick Drake for foliage-hued folk splendor) is as gentle as the tough, salivating and hypersexual fifties-style riffs on Electric Warrior and The Slider by T. Rex. Bolan defenders point out that this indeed amounts to a complex and varied body of early work. Still, even if he hadn’t gone spangly and a bit static with the bubblegum once he hit on a working formula, Bolan’s versatility and musicianship were certain to be upstaged by his Napoleonic ego and penchant for boasting to the eager rock press. He claimed in 1971, for example, “I definitely believe in reincarnation. I believe that all my lyrical ability was learned in a past life as a bard.” Whether taken seriously or not, Bolan remains a major figure in both David Jones’s and later David Bowie’s life and career, and in rock ’n’ roll.

  Shortly before meeting David, Marc Feld had experienced a life-altering encounter with “the Wizard.” The Wizard was likely just that, a fantasy creature, sprung from Marc’s imagination, but he insisted on more than one occasion that shortly before changing his name permanently to Bolan (after a very brief period as Bowland), Marc was whisked off to see the Wizard at his forty-room château near the Bois de Boulogne. He’d encountered the robe-clad mysterio in a London street. There, with only his cosmic tutor and a barn owl for company, he was tutored in the ways of magic, forming a new, heightened persona and writing verses such as “Golden eagles at his door / Cats and bats played on the floor.”

  “He was a magician actually, very powerful man, very learned man,” Bolan told a reporter years later. “I learnt a lot of very important things off him, just sort of mythology, good things. I read a lot of books. He had amazing books there, books by Aleister Crowley and handwritten books and things like that. Then I came back home again.”

  The first thing Bolan did upon returning to London was (perhaps inevitably) suffer a nervous breakdown (suggesting his time with the Wizard may have been a drug-fueled hallucination). One of the next things he did was record an ode to his magic pal as an audition for Decca records, which released it in 1965. It was not a hit but stands as a harbinger of the cosmic dippy-and-horny-poet mysticism that would make Tyrannosaurus Rex (a duo with Steve Peregrine Took on bongos and Bolan on acoustic guitar) so dense and fascinating, and later the electrified (and nominally abbreviated) T. Rex so commercially massive.

  By the time he met David Jones, Feld was formally and professionally “Bolan” and strongly convinced that he was going to be a huge pop star. It’s now hard to believe but the meeting of these two rock icons was as humble as it could have possibly been. Les Conn, managing Bolan and Jones, had promised both future icons some much-needed spending money to whitewash his office.

  “Both Marc and I were out of work,” Bowie would later recall, “and we met when we poured into the manager’s office to whitewash the walls. So there’s me and this mod whitewashing the office and he goes, ‘Where’d you get those shoes, man?’ And I asked, ‘Where’d you get your shirt?’ We immediately started talking about clothes and sewing machines. ‘Oh, I’m gonna be a singer and I’m gonna be so big you’re not gonna believe it, man.’ ‘Oh right. Well I’ll probably write a musical for you one day then ’cause I’m gonna be the greatest writer ever. No no, man, you gotta hear my stuff ’cause I write great things and I knew a wizard in Paris!’ It was all this. Just whitewashing walls in our manager’s office.”

  Marc Bolan was slightly younger but much less introverted than David, giving him the influence of an older sibling. Until David blazed past him forever, circa 1973, Marc, it can be argued, held the upper hand in the relationship. He would suggest the use of the signature Stylophone on David Bowie’s first hit single, “Space Oddity,” in ’69. It would be Bolan who would first flirt with electric volume, glitter and gender-bending while David was still a folkie.

  “David idolized Marc for a while,” Bowie’s future manager Ken Pitt, who for a time considered but ultimately passed on managing Bolan, observed. “He was going around to his flat night after night, playing songs, listening to songs, talking about music, and then he’d come back here and we’d talk about our own projects and David would say, ‘Well, Marc says this,’ or, ‘Marc says that …’ Bolan had a tremendous influence on him at that time, and David considered him an authority.”

  In the history of rock ’n’ roll, few ascended so high and fell so far in so small a period of time as Bolan did. Like JFK’s, Bolan’s glory period would last about a thousand days. He appeared on another chat show, Pop Quest, in 1975, bloated and uncomfortably shifting in his chair. He looks like Liz Taylor at fifty. He is only twenty-eight. Two years later, he would be dead. A string of failed releases had left him vulnerable. The British music press was referring to him routinely as “the Porky Pixie.”

  “He lost it,” Charles Shaar Murray says. “He had his shining hour from [1970’s] ‘Ride a White Swan’ up to ‘Children of the Revolution’ [in 1974]. After a while, it became apparent that he wasn’t doing very much more than recycling the riffs of his childhood with hippie nursery rhymes and a lot of echo. Got lazy and got complacent. He got fat literally and metaphorically. He basically believed that he could sing the phone book and kids would adore him and buy it. Then he did start singing the fucking phone book and they didn’t buy it. He turned into this sulky rock ’n’ roll Norma Desmond figure.”

  In the early morning hours of September 16, 1977, just as he was enjoying a comeback of sorts, hosting a show for the Granada TV network and touring with respectable punk acts like the Damned, he and his companion Gloria Jones (the Northern Soul star who released the original version of the Soft Cell electro-pop classic “Tainted Love”) were driving to their home in the Maida Vale section of London when the car hit a tree. Bolan died, according to the report, of “shock and hemmorhage.” Jones was hospitalized but survived. The death was ruled accidental.

  The crash site is commemorated with a black marble marker: IN RESPECTFUL MEMORY OF MARC BOLAN, MUSICIAN, WRITER, POET. There’s a message board by the tree and a bronze bust that makes him look a little too much like Jim Morrison. Bolan was, if nothing else, a hero all his own.

  By the time David and Marc were assaulting each other with braggadoccio, David’s backing band the King Bees had packed it in, a response to the indifference of the failed “Liza Jane” single. Conn stayed on as David’s manager and quickly recommended another act he had begun working with called the Manish Boys, named after the title of a Bo Diddley song (which spelled it with two n’s). After his tenure as a bona fide London-based front man, David was not thrilled to learn that they were based in Maidstone, over thirty miles away. Conn convinced him that the Manish Boys (guitarist Jon Edward, bassist John Watson, drummer John Whitehead and keyboardist Bob Solly) were a hot combo, worth the commute. Likewise, the Manish Boys were not thrilled at the prospect of taking on David. They felt like they’d gotten their act down and were not even auditioning for new members. They already had two sax players playing in the outfit (Wolf Byrne on baritone and Paul Rodriquez on tenor) but Conn hustled them, implying that American concert promoters were interested in a tour, but only if they welcomed Davie Jones as a member.

  “Without that I don’t think we’d have taken him. We wer
e happy enough as we were,” band member Paul Rodriquez said, adding that David’s pallor was also bit disconcerting. Still, both parties needed a break and decided to make the best of it. After some hours rehearsing, they acknowledged that they could at least make a good, loud racket together. David’s voice impressed them, as did his horn playing.

  It was with the Manish Boys that David Jones first started to get “out there.” The London mod scene was changing. The speedy tempos were slowing down as marijuana and the heady poetry of American singer-songwriters like Simon & Garfunkel, Roger McGuinn of the Byrds, Scott Walker of former teen idols the Walker Brothers, and, of course, Bob Dylan influenced the scene—Dylan toured England in ’65, as captured in future Bowie documentarian D. A. Pennebaker’s film Don’t Look Back, and briefly plunged the then impressionable David into a black-clad “Dylan” phase. The Beatles released Rubber Soul late in the year, marking a sea change in their own sound. Even the formerly clean-cut Beach Boys, as big if not bigger in England than they were in America, became gleefully expansive with the lush, symphonic Pet Sounds album and the staggeringly inventive, Theremin-tinged “Good Vibrations” single the following year.

  Young London professionals now embraced a louche, jaded pose, exemplified by actor/filmmaker David Hemmings (another future Bowie tour documentarian) in Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 film Blow Up. In that film Hemmings, a photographer based on premier London fashion lensman David Bailey, receives a giant, polished wooden propeller for his loft space, simply, one assumes, because it is something unusual to look at. Anything to remain interested. Sensing this zeitgeist, David knew instinctively that the Manish Boys, who were quite happy playing the blues, gulping speed and cheap wine and chasing girls, were not going to make it as is. David encouraged the band to grow their hair even longer than the by then socially acceptable mop tops of the Beatles and Rolling Stones.