Bowie

by Marc Spitz

  Bowie was able to place a little bit of distance between himself and the raw, painful goings-on on Plaistow Grove as Terry’s illness built to a head. Terry returned to Cane Hill, where he was formally diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic. John Jones, who had warmed up to Terry in light of his illness, would lead family trips to the hospital. They’d bring fresh clothes and fruit and show him kindness and concern. It was all they could do.

  Shortly after Terry’s institutionalization, Bowie began to seriously consider leaving London and traveling north to a Buddhist monastery in Edinburgh, Scotland, where Zen master Dhardo Rinpoche lived and taught. He spoke frequently of giving up his pop career, shaving his beloved long hair and turning his life over to the abbot. Unlike his peers in the consciousness-expanding summer of ‘67, to Bowie meditation was not a pop fad but rather a serious means of dealing with a cataclysmic world, his underperforming career and a series of private family traumas, which would build to a climax by year’s end. With stardom eluding him, Buddhism served to remind him that there were other goals than fame and material gain, and with its implicit dictums that nobody knows anything—each dizzying, new career strategy offered by London’s smug scene makers and record-industry power brokers seemed neutralized by chanting and meditation.

  “As far as I’m concerned the whole idea of Western life—that’s the life we live now—is wrong,” he’d complained to Melody Maker the previous year, adding, “I want to go to Tibet. It’s a fascinating place, y’know. I’d like to take a holiday and have a look inside the monasteries. The Tibetan monks, Lamas, bury themselves inside mountains for weeks and only eat every three days. They’re ridiculous—and it’s said they live for centuries.”

  “It was the lord Buddha that he turned to, temporarily, for guidance and inspiration,” Pitt writes. “My view is that he heretofore abjured all false finery and pride in his appearance and it was in this dressed-down state that he came to the office to meet a Buddhist dignitary who was to honor us with a visit. Our receptionist ushered in the notable, who to our astonishment was flamboyantly arrayed in voluminous saffron robes, flip-flops held to his bare feet by jewels between his toes and over all the strong perfume of sandalwood.”

  In 1967 Tony Visconti, then a twenty-three-year-old Brooklyn, New York–born musician and producer, also wrestling with his attraction to Eastern spirituality and his love of Western rock ’n’ roll, was brought to London to work with the flamboyant Irish music impresario and producer Denny Cordell (who’d just had massive hits with the Moody Blues and Procol Harum and would, a decade later, discover Tom Petty and the Heart-breakers). One day Cordell brought Visconti into the offices of Essex Music, the firm where David was signed to his publishing deal. He had, like most people on the planet, not heard Bowie’s debut record. Many at Essex believed that Bowie was talented. They just didn’t know what to do with him and were hoping that somebody with Visconti’s instincts, an outsider with a fresh perspective but also a gifted pro, could help them figure it out. According to Visconti’s autobiography, he was told, “You seem to have a talent for working with weird acts. I’d like to play something for you to consider. This is an album made by a writer I’ve been working with for some time. We were hoping he’d be right for the musical theater but he’s become something quite different since he made this record.”

  Listening to the tracks, Visconti was impressed by the maturity of the teenager’s voice and the humor in his lyrics. In addition to the collected singles, “Rubber Band” and “Love You Till Tuesday,” the album contained lushly romantic ballads like “When I Live My Dream” (the Bee Gees meet Broadway), “She’s Got Medals” (which is more or less Love’s “Seven and Seven Is” in tempo and melody and indicated that Bowie could rock credibly), the Hammer Films–worthy “Please Mr. Gravedigger,” and the Peter Sellers–influenced “We Are Hungry Men.”

  Visconti did not know that Bowie was there that day, waiting in the office by a piano, eager to give anything that might catch fire a shot. Bowie didn’t know much about Visconti, only that he was from New York City, from whence his new heroes the Velvet Underground hailed.

  “I realized this casual encounter was a setup,” Visconti recalled. Bowie nervously shook hands with the American. By the end of the day they had warmed up a lot and realized they had a real musical affinity for one another. Visconti was impressed that Bowie was so well versed in rock ’n’ roll, R & B and soul, as well as music hall show tunes, West Coast “cool” jazz and Beat-generation novelty recordings like Ken Nordine’s loony Colors series of jazz poetry. It may be not be irrelevant to point out the timing of the Bowie/Visconti union in relation to David’s reaction to his older brother’s misfortune. Visconti was a tough, confident American, three years Bowie’s senior. While unable to replace Terry or heal the wounds that Bowie’s half brother’s illness was then inflicting, Tony Visconti would certainly take on an older-brother role in his life, and to fail to note the significant timing of their partnership and friendship would be silly.

  According to Visconti, after leaving Essex, the pair went to a revival screening of Knife in the Water, the 1962 art-house hit by Polish director Roman Polanski. Though stark and disquieting, Polanski’s film features a jazz score at turns sultry or bebop influenced and manic, composed by the cult Polish jazz artist Krzysztof Komeda, and the two fast friends set about deconstructing the film and especially its soundtrack as the theater let out.

  Their first recorded collaborations included the Bowie original “Karma Man,” recorded on the afternoon of September 1, 1967. The guitar and strings are strange and thrumming. The verses are verbose and Dylanesque, reflecting the songwriter and the producer’s shared affinity for Eastern spiritual guidance: enlightened souls, “clothed in saffron robes.” The song’s chorus, “Slow down, slow down,” among Bowie’s catchiest, was more or less directly ripped off by Suede for one of their Britpop-igniting singles “The Drowners” in 1992.

  “Let Me Sleep Beside You” is fairly self-explanatory, with a nifty chorus come-on and a fuzz guitar riff that nearly achieved what Woody Allen’s Alvy Singer would have called “heaviosity.” Visconti was a Beatles obsessive and you can already hear him connecting with his inner George Martin. On the records Bowie sounds stronger, clearer and more alive than he ever did on the Shel Talmy–produced garage rock or the horn-driven Tony Hatch–produced pop kitsch. In the cooling weeks following the summer of love, as everything around him with regard to his family seemed to be violently dislodged, Bowie seemed to finally be settling into his own sound. He still borrowed. He sometimes even stole. But Visconti was now there to help make David Bowie records finally sound like their own statements somehow.

  Also in 1967, David Bowie would meet another powerful collaborator, one who would help him connect with his physical vision. “I taught David to free his body,” Lindsay Kemp boasted to Crawdaddy! magazine in 1974, and he was telling the truth. Kemp was a controversial dancer, choreographer and movement instructor. By 1968, he was already getting a reputation as a master provocateur, having set classical dance techniques on their ear with his touring company.

  His father was a British naval officer who was killed in action. Kemp, openly gay like Pitt, was a misfit driven toward the performing arts at a young age. “Of course, I’ve always been very fond of the service, but actually joining it was out of the question. I wanted to dance and sing and swing through circus hoops even more than I wanted to sail the seven seas. Now, by being a mime, I can be a sailor whenever I choose to be—and I can be the sea too.”

  Kemp didn’t fare well at school and had to rely on his wicked wit to get by. “It was a very rough school and I wasn’t a very rough person, so I found that the only way I could survive was to make the other boys laugh. I was like Scheherazade, telling them the most amazing stories night after night to ensure my survival. I amazed and dazzled them—like a bright light trained in wild dogs’ eyes.”

  After attending the Bradford School of Arts and Media (then already
over a century old, it also produced David Hockney), Kemp tried his luck as an actor in the West End but found difficulty standing out. He was balding and pixie-ish, and his features without makeup, feathers and wigs seemed small. Kemp really found his voice when it came to mime. In his twenties, he moved to Edinburgh, Scotland, and studied with the famous French mime Marcel Marceau. Marceau bolstered his confidence and showed him how to use his body effectively. When he returned to London, Kemp founded his own performance troupe. He saw staid and joyless productions and decided that they were ready for a little camping up. He’d see the dancers chain-smoking and cussing offstage, but when they were onstage, they’d pretend to be sculpted and angelic and sincere.

  “Camp sees everything in quotation marks,” Susan Sontag wrote in “Notes on Camp” in 1964. “It’s not a lamp but a ‘lamp,’ not a woman but a ‘woman.’ To perceive camp in objects and persons is to understand Being as Playing—a role. It is the farthest extension in sensibility of the metaphor of life as theater.” Using this sensibility and combining it with real diligence as far as the body and utter commitment to the performance, Kemp and his collaborator Birkett torpedoed the highbrow dance recitals with bawdy humor and pieces based on edgy literature like Jean Genet’s homoerotic Parisian novel Our Lady of the Flowers. By the time he encountered Bowie, he was already equally reviled and renowned for his work and his accelerated and archly bohemian approach to life and art.

  “Most people think my life is very theatrical anyway because it’s played to the hilt,” he has said. “I like to do everything fully. I drink until I’m drunk. I eat until I’m full, frequently until I’m sick. I don’t fancy people; I fall in love with them. Leave out hate—it doesn’t come into my work at all. I’m terribly into intoxication—that’s the only thing that counts …”

  Kemp first heard Bowie’s music while at NEMS, the British booking agency that was finding him employment as an opening act for various rock ’n’ roll shows. “They were getting me occasional gigs during what was then my mime act, billed as Lindsay Kemp’s a Man Who Mimes His Own Business,” he says. Kemp is now in his seventies but his speech is still marked with dramatic rolling “R”s and fits of wicked laughter like John Lovitz as “Master Thespian,” on Saturday Night Live.

  “I’d be put in those kind of university gigs and things with rock ’n’ roll singers and skiffle players and so on. And it was one day that I was in the office just checking that there was any work and the girls in the office said, ‘Oh my God, Lindsay, you have to meet and listen to David Bowie,’ who they had just met. Bowie had been in the office also trying to get work through NEMS even though he was with Ken Pitt at the time.” Kemp says, “They gave me his record and I took it away and that was the Deram record [entitled David Bowie]. And I just fell for him, I mean the songs, the music, the whole thing.” Kemp saw himself in those songs, and he also saw himself moving and performing to them. They affected his body as well as his emotions. He focused on one track, the meandering love song “When I Live My Dream.”

  “It was so perfect for this little piece,” Kemp recalls. “I liked that kind of plaintive voice you see. So he, the voice and the songs he was singing about, appealed to me immensely. On that first occasion I wasn’t actually dancing to his music, I was just playing it as a kind of preset before the curtain went up, you see.”

  The song became the soundtrack to his next performance at a small West End theater. Bowie was invited to the show and excitedly attended. This was among the only attention he’d received with regard to his widely neglected debut. The only problem was, nobody seemed to want to give David Bowie a chance. Dropped by Deram after the failure of his self-titled debut, he was again label-less.

  In 1968, Pitt looked to find Bowie a new contract and was meeting with the Beatles’ new label Apple, Atlantic Records and Liberty among others. Bowie’s family was concerned. The singer was so broke that when it came time for him to pay his taxes, Pitt received a letter from John Jones saying, “It would be ironical if he was called upon to pay anything in view of the fact that his earnings from show business do not give him sufficient income to pay for his social security stamp.” He was about to gain something more important than immediate financial stability, however. Bowie was about to receive a philosophy. “He came backstage afterward and it was love at first sight,” Kemp says today. “Well, most attractions are physical to start with. A blond angel, he was like one of the Ganymedes standing there. I mean, oh.” Bowie was flattered that Kemp had chosen his song and they got to talking. Bowie came the following day to Kemp’s small Soho flat, where they had breakfast together. “We immediately began to put our heads together and create something,” Kemp says. Bowie talked about his fascination with Eastern art and thought, and Kemp told him all about the Japanese Kabuki theater tradition with its outsized costuming and willfully attention-seeking ethic. “It was a very joyous meeting and a very fruitful one,” Kemp says. “We began to work immediately on this little show which was called Pierrot in Turquoise. Bowie suggested the turquoise, it being the Buddhist symbol for everlastingness.”

  The plot of Pierrot in Turquoise was basically autobiographical. David played, appropriately, Cloud, a young muse of the titular character Pierrot (portrayed, of course, by Kemp). In a separate sequence, Jack Birkett plays the clown Harlequin. Birkett, a nearly blind dancer who performed under the stage name Orlando, was the star of Kemp’s company and another large personality to impress the young David Bowie. Kemp and Birkett seemed lifestyle models, like James Dean, Elvis and Little Richard were, only Bowie had never met Elvis or Little Richard and Dean was long dead. Here was someone who could influence Bowie directly and respond to his multiple queries in person.

  “I began to think about costuming music, creating an alternate version of reality onstage. I wasn’t quite sure what the balance would be but I was always open to other people’s ideas and always so influenced by something I found dramatic,” Bowie has said.

  “I really taught him to be audacious, because he was a bit timid,” Kemp recalls. “Through example. My own example. My example offstage of course, but I mean my example in the theater, on the stage and in the workshop as well.”

  Kemp and Bowie enjoyed a brief physical affair as well, with Kemp expressing his desire and having his way with his starstruck new friend, although this act too seemed to be part of a larger curriculum. Bowie plunged into this tutelage with everything he had and there was no longer much talk about shaving his head and fleeing to Edinburgh to become a monk.

  “I taught to David the technique of the hypnotist and the lover. One has to hypnotize an audience to enchant them and of course make them love you. The Casanova technique. Not that that I needed to teach him much about the Casanova technique,” Kemp proclaimed.

  “Lindsay always gave him hell,” Pierrot’s costume designer Natasha Korniloff has said. “He said he was as stiff as a ramrod and would get nowhere, but he’s pretty hard on people anyway. But Lindsay is also a very great teacher.” Pierrot in Turquoise quickly became a touring road show, with Kemp, Bowie, Birkett and Korniloff, who was also the van driver, playing theaters throughout Britain. “We were like a terrible gypsy encampment,” Korniloff recalled.

  Reviews were encouraging but critical. “At the moment it is something of a pot-pourri,” the December 29, 1967, edition of the Oxford Mail observed. “Mr Kemp has devised a fetching pantomime through which Pierrot pursues his love of life, his Columbine, tricked by Harlequin and deceived by the ever-changing Cloud.” Bowie’s music, which provided the soundtrack, is singled out as “haunting,” his voice “superb” and “dreamlike.”

  Predictably, Pierrot in Turquoise was not a commercial success, and both Bowie and Kemp were forced to follow each creative vision with the most threadbare of budgets. This period, marked by Bowie briefly turning his back on his pop gambit, did much for his creative soul but little for his welfare or that of his mentor.

  “There were more and more debtors calling at Lindsay�
�s door,” Korniloff recalled. “All these bills and demands.”

  As he struggled, Bowie knew there was always a warm meal and a bed out in Bromley, but it often came at the expense of the great nourishment his creative side was enjoying. Wasn’t it much more romantic to starve with these artists? he’d reason. No longer a teenager, he was struggling to find a balance between the world of his childhood and some kind of valuable, productive adult world as an artist. Both realms held darkness and bursts of bright warmth. Meditation only helped balance the two so much. He spent his days and nights stuck in the middle, a bit of a psychic mess. It was certainly no time for first love.

  Mother: Are you going to wear that tie? You might want to dress down.

  Ren: I like the tie!

  Mother: In September, when you go to college, you can dress like David Bowie.

  —Frances Lee McCain and Kevin Bacon as Ethel and Ren McCormack (from Footloose, 1984)

  It was freshman orientation and my mother and stepfather had driven me up to Vermont from Long Island. We’d stayed overnight in a bed-and-breakfast and I remember falling asleep to the radio. It was playing a song by Bruce Cockburn entitled “If I Had a Rocket Launcher.” Next was “Little Miss S.” by Edie Brickell and the New Bohemians, an elegy for Edie Sedgwick, her namesake (still much better than the Cult’s histrionic “Edie (Ciao Baby).” This was, in Vermont anyway, “college rock.” I was wearing a black sweater that my grandmother had knitted for me. She complained because I would only wear them in black. Knitters like variety, stripes and checks or squiggles. Cosby sweaters. I was growing a little sick of black myself. I wanted some squiggles in my life and Bennington College offered plenty. The sophomore who led my tour had recently seen the independent film My Life as a Dog and terrified my mother by answering some of her earnest questions about cafeteria nutrition and curfews with barks and sometimes growls. I thought he was the coolest person I’d ever met. My high school had a dress code and a detention room. Up in the Green Mountains, I could wear whatever I wanted and do whatever I felt like, as long as it was reasonably legal and creative. Such freedom can be dangerous. You can wander too far off the path and just be a far-out individual, creating nothing but trouble for yourself. At night from “the End of the World,” at the ridge of the Commons Lawn, you could see every celestial body. I instinctively felt like I needed a North Star for the next four years, and I chose David Bowie, the Starman, waiting in the sky. Bowie got far out and reinvented himself, I reasoned, and yet never ceased to be creative. This was a discipline, and I would adopt it, both academically and behaviorally. I would major in Bowie-ism. I displayed his compact discs prominently on my bookshelf, returning often to Young Americans —for sex; Station to Station —for drugs; “Sorrow” off Pin Ups —when crushed out or sad; Ziggy —for when my school was insane and my work was down the drain; and Diamond Dogs —for sex and drugs and being crushed out and sad.