by Marc Spitz
“Bloody philistines!” Bowie reportedly shouted when he first heard news of the label’s reaction to his original cover choice. More likely, however, both Bowie and Angie knew that word of a banned or controversial sleeve would get them lots of ink. It was a throwback to the Manish Boys’ Society for the Preservation of Animal Filament gimmick of 1965. This isn’t to suggest that the couple didn’t find the dress a genuinely pleasing frock. Bowie, according to Stevenson, would even wear it in his downtime. “I went ’round his place and he was wearing it,” he recalls. “It was the type of thing a flamboyant Arab would probably wear in the street.”
Bowie’s androgynous style was not uncommon at the time. Any photo of Mick Jagger circa 1970 would suggest a growing comfort with blurring gender lines. There is also a long tradition of drag among British performers from Shakespearean productions up to the Rolling Stones gussying themselves up for the cover of their “Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing in the Shadow” single sleeve. Monty Python’s Flying Circus, launched the previous year, featured drag performances in nearly every episode via Terry Jones or Graham Chapman.
“Lots of English comedians dressed up as women,” Hanif Kureishi says. “It’s part of English culture to dress up as a girl. It’s all performance and putting on voices. Messing about. It’s not the same as being gay. All Englishmen dressed as women.”
Bowie debuted the songs from the upcoming record in front of a crowd of just 1,500 that summer during the very first Glastonbury Fayre, which is now the massive and prestigious annual summer gathering the Glastonbury Festival of Contemporary Performing Arts. The event was held on a farm in the southwestern countryside by Glastonbury Tor, a hill where, according to Arthurian legend, the Holy Grail was supposedly buried. Bowie performed with Traffic, the Grateful Dead, Hawkwind and headliners T. Rex, among others. Glastonbury was the latest in a series of concert events (beginning with Monterey Pop in 1968) that seemed to confirm rock ’n’ roll’s power to unite and its key role not just in culture, but in the political world as well. Shortly before traveling to the event, Bowie completed a new song that reflected both this shift as well as his personal journey. “I was already a Beatnik, I had to be a Hippie …,” he wrote in a letter to his songwriting publisher that fall. “Now I am 24 and I am married and I am not at all heavy. And I’m still writing and my wife is pregnant …”
These developments are as scary to young people today as they were in 1970. Before “Changes,” however, they had no anthem to assuage them. “Turn and face the strange,” he sang, most likely to himself. The bridge, however, is directed to his parents’ generation: “And these children that you spit on / As they try to change their world / They’re immune to your consultations / They’re quite aware of what they’re going through.” A sentiment as old as the Grail itself but so eloquent (even when he swaps “spit” for “shit” on 1974’s David Live album) in delivery and conviction that John Hughes would use them to open 1985’s The Breakfast Club, all alone on a black title card. It would not be David’s last anthem. He has many (“All the Young Dudes,” “Heroes”), but “Changes” (which would open his 1971 album Hunky Dory) is his most durable. It’s a young person’s song that manages to follow David through his career with grace and not nostalgia (even when he brought it out during his 2000 headlining set at the now massive Glastonbury festival).
Haddon Hall’s gothic splendor was demolished in the mid-seventies and converted into a block of ugly flats that must have felt very modern at the time. Thirty years or so onward, it’s now a real eyesore. It resembles a Travelodge off the interstate, with thick, frosted glass windows and drab brown bricks. There’s a row of garages, and the great driveway where Bowie’s Jaguar was parked has been converted into a parking lot. Haddon Hall’s current landscape exudes none of the energy of its legendary days, and the titanic music that was dreamed up inside can no longer be heard. Many of its current residents probably have no idea that they live in the haunted house of the modern age.
11.
WHEN THE IRISH LITERARY AESTHETE Oscar Wilde disembarked from the USS Arizona on January 3, 1882, in his green coat, seal-trimmed collar, blue necktie, silken turban and patent leather shoes, he was famously asked by customs officers, “Have you anything to declare?” and answered, cigarette in hand, “I have nothing to declare except my genius.” The press from every major newspaper, including the Saturday Evening Post, the Herald and the World, was there to cover his first trip to America. When Bowie—at this point intent on being part of the continuum of aesthetes both decadent and profound, and determined to represent a modern-day version of Wilde’s fin de siècle philosophy and pose—went through customs at Washington’s Dulles International Airport on January 27, 1971, only Mercury publicist Ron Oberman was waiting … with his parents.
It was determined that Washington soil, rather than that of Chicago or New York, would be the first that Bowie would step on, and not for any real strategic reason. Oberman was more or less his only companion in and liaison to this new world, and he happened to be staying there with his parents.
Bowie, who would later develop a notorious fear of flying, flew eagerly, having almost no experience to base any rational fear on. While he had no work visa and could not legally perform, Oberman was determined to introduce him to the right people (hip journalists, ambivalent but charmable Mercury employees) at coordinated exhibitions in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco. The Man Who Sold the World album, which was released in November of 1970, was not a hit. Mercury had managed to break Rod Stewart on a global scale. His single “Maggie May” was number one on both sides of the Atlantic. Also in 1971, Marc Bolan and T. Rex had an American hit with “Bang a Gong” (curiously only after altering the song’s original UK title “Get It On”). Elton John, another figure from the Marquee Club rhythm and blues scene, was quickly becoming one of the biggest stars in pop. Even Bowie’s old Deram Records labelmate Cat Stevens was becoming a big star in America. His melancholy “Wild World” was ubiquitous on AM radio. The thinking was that if only Americans could meet Bowie, via the press, and see how charismatic and unique he was, he would surely be next in line. It would not be so easy, of course. Bowie was more authentically arty and different than any of these peers, certainly more so than Tony Orlando and Dawn, the Osmonds, Bread and other American hit makers of the time. Even getting through customs was a challenge: “We were waiting outside the plane, fifteen minutes, half an hour, forty-five minutes; there was no sign of him,” Ron Oberman says. When Bowie emerged through the gate an hour and a half later, Oberman was relieved. “I said, ‘What happened?’ And he answered, ‘Oh, they held me on the plane. Maybe because I look so strange.’”
Once in America, Oscar Wilde was taken to a fete in New York City where he met the great American poet Walt Whitman. David Bowie was taken to Hofberg’s kosher deli in Silver Springs, Maryland, for a corned beef on rye. Oberman asked Bowie what he would like to do after dropping off the luggage at the hotel in downtown Washington, DC, he’d booked him into. “He said, ‘Oh, I’d really like to meet some American people,’” says Oberman. “Hofberg’s delicatessen had the best corned beef that I’ve ever had in my life. So we went to the restaurant and had a great dinner there.” His first taste of kosher cuisine was accompanied by a lot of curiosity on the part of the locals. “He got a lot of stares,” Oberman says. That night, Bowie attended a suburban kegger. Oberman and his brother drove the star to a house party in nearby Garrett Park. “We walk in and the place is just filled with pot smoke. There are huge bongs being passed around all over this party.”
Bowie had, of course, been fantasizing about America since his pre-teens. It did not disappoint. For someone as shy as he was, it seemed an ideal place socially. People came right up to you. There were no painful silences, no repression. Americans were aggressive and inquisitive and Bowie’s slim, elegantly androgynous appearance fascinated them. They approached and even touched him without hesitation, as if he were some exotic z
oo animal.
“He was wide eyed,” Oberman says. “He could not believe he was here. I would say he had the mentality of a tourist. He wanted to see things and meet people.” That the nation itself was essentially broke, with a severely devalued dollar and the unpopular Vietnam War drawing hundreds of thousands to protest in Washington and San Francisco, did not seem to matter. This was the land of Evel Knievel and Muhammad Ali. This was the land of Mickey Mouse (Disney World had recently opened in Orlando). Even our boogey men, like Charlie Manson (then on trial for the Tate-LaBianca murders), had outsized style.
(Of the abovementioned people, only Knievel would not be mentioned in a David Bowie song within three years [although Ali is referred to by his pre-Muslim name Cassius Clay in ’74’s Diamond Dogs track “Candidate”]. And this may be due to his rhyming options [discounting “Evel” itself, or “evil,” what do you have left besides “boll weevil”?])
From Washington, DC, Bowie traveled to New York City, where he was met by Paul Nelson. On the verge of becoming a very influential and respected music writer at Rolling Stone, Nelson was then doing freelance work for Mercury Records. “I hired him because he had great credibility. They got along really well, David and Paul,” Oberman says. “And Paul had set up a number of interviews with him in the city. The plan was to align Bowie with some of these insightful writers.”
Manhattan was freezing and Bowie amplified his androgynous flamboyance with a giant fuzzy winter coat and beret. Bowie stayed at the Holiday Inn in Times Square, then the world’s nucleus of sleaze and decrepitude. The fear and unease contributed to the adrenaline rush that he was already naturally feeling from all the attention. Bowie would spend the rest of the seventies seeking privacy in expensive hotels. This would be his first and only real time spent among the people, inviting them to approach him. As he visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art or browsed the jazz LPs in the Colony record shop, people would point and whisper. One brazen elderly woman asked him what sort of pelt was used to make his coat. “Teddy bear,” he quipped, and she furrowed her brow and crept off. That night, he caught folksinger Tim Hardin’s set in Greenwich Village. As he walked around, he thought of all of his heroes who’d trod over the same pavement: Jack Kerouac, Bob Dylan, Charles Mingus, Lou Reed.
Next Bowie visited Chicago, where he was feted by the Mercury office staff. The office workers, expecting a gender-bending rock ’n’ roll wild man, were shocked to discover the shy, polite Englishman eagerly offering his hand. Sensing, perhaps, that it might be best to temper any incendiary conduct while in the Midwest, Bowie remained on good, if restrained, behavior.
“In Chicago, New York, he didn’t wear any dresses,” Oberman says. “But he wore the dress in L.A.” Los Angeles was much more encouraging when it came to such things. They loved a good show. Bowie was met in Los Angeles by then Mercury Records publicity officer Rodney Bingenheimer. Bingenheimer, who would later open the legendary glitter nightclub Rodney’s English Disco and become one of our best and most influential disc jockeys (he is still on the air at KROQ in Los Angeles), was known for his flawless rock taste. He’d been an assistant to Sonny Bono and, ironically, a stand-in for Davy Jones, the Monkee who inspired Bowie to change his name. A tireless Hollywood gadfly, in ’71 Rodney was already a super-Anglophile, well turned on to Bowie when almost nobody in America knew who he was. Before being hired by Mercury, he was one of the few people in America who actually bought the Space Oddity record. Bingenheimer would routinely shop for imports at a record store, just up Hollywood Boulevard from the local Mercury office. “It was like the only store at that time that actually had import albums,” he tells me. “I bought the Space Oddity album there. By the time I went to Mercury of course I already knew all about him. I loved his music and his style. He seemed like one of a kind. Kind of different for a British artist. It wasn’t that jangly pop.”
Rodney was as much a music fan as David was, and they quickly bonded over pop records, movie gossip and girls. The diminutive scenester was excited to take Bowie to local clubs and introduce him to all the right people, including his friend and fellow skirt-chasing pop obsessive songwriter/producer Kim Fowley.
Bingenheimer’s enthusiasm for Bowie (“godhead” is the word he uses to describe such artists, as in “Brian Wilson is godhead. Oasis are godhead.”) was greater than his loyalty to his employer. He had contacts at every label in town and was happy to conflict with Mercury’s interests by parading Bowie before executives from other companies who might poach him for a bigger and better setup. With two failed Mercury records and his ears full of kibitzing about the kind of rock ’n’ roll largesse afforded Los Angeles–plundering acts like Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones, Bowie seemed eager to be poached at the time.
“I’d take him over to Liberty Records. We would walk down Orange, walk right past Hollywood High, and the kids would be out there having lunch. And that’s how the rumor went out that we were trying to pick up girls at Hollywood High. Actually he wanted to pick up a new record contract. Liberty Records was across from Hollywood High.” Bingenheimer also arranged for Bowie to stay at the well-connected record producer Tom Ayres’s house in the Hollywood Hills. Anybody who was anybody stayed at Ayres’s place when visiting L.A. There he also met Gene Vincent, the fifties rock icon famous for his echo-drenched hits like “Be-Bop-a-Lula” and a somewhat jarring stage act in which he led his combo, the Blue Caps, through a rockabilly set while dragging his leg, which was permanently injured in a motorcycle crash, behind him. Vincent with his cavernous bone structure and towering physique, was ill and down on his luck, but like many of the first wave of rock ’n’ roll heroes, he remained a star abroad. Bowie was thrilled to meet him and the pair jammed on early versions of “Hang On to Yourself” and “Moonage Daydream” (both of which would end up on the Ziggy Stardust album two years later). Such specactles didn’t seem unusual inside the Ayres palace. Ayres, a former paratrooper, had been a nocturnal Hollywood character since the beatnik era, producing novelty hits like “Hot Pastrami” by the Dartells and connecting the right people to one another as a sort of self-deputized public service. Ayres’s place was just off Sunset Boulevard, high above the old Source health food store (made famous in the last L.A. scene in Annie Hall, where Diane Keaton tells Woody Allen she is not going to return to New York with him). It was a grand 1920s castle patrolled by a massive Great Dane named Blue.
Another taste of Hollywood opulence whetted his appetite for a greater success, the kind he did not achieve with Kenneth Pitt (as well as the kind that Oberman did not have the infrastructure to provide and the kind that Tony Defries, the legal adviser who was fast becoming his full-time manager, saw as well within his reach). In early February, Bingenheimer and Ayres threw a party to introduce Bowie to the in crowd of L.A. Although Los Angeles would five years later be the location for Bowie’s darkest period (and, some say, his best recorded work), at the time, he was smitten, and, according to Fowley, cannily sober. “It was his ‘I’m new in Hollywood, how does this place work?’ phase,” says Fowley. Bowie was studying the lay of the land and making notations. He would sit on the floor, clutching a leather briefcase, which probably contained lyrics and notebooks. He scribbled ideas to himself as people passed around him and Warhol superstar Ultra Violet, also in attendance, did her best to steal much of his attention. “She looked like a prune version of Paulette Goddard,” Fowley would recall. Bowie was getting hundreds of musical ideas as well. While at the party, Fowley offered Bowie a copy of a record by Wigwam, a new Finnish band that he was producing. Sure enough, Fowley would detect not only some of Wigwam’s melody style on Bowie’s next album but also the line “Look at those cavemen go,” in a song called “Life on Mars?” It’s a direct lyrical nod to the Hollywood Argyles’ 1960 number one hit “Alley Oop” (which Fowley produced when he was still in high school) and reveals just how adept Bowie was becoming at refining the sounds and snippets of overheard dialogue swirling around him and turning them into songs that
skirt pastiche and seem entirely original. One thinks again of the party chatter in the back room of the pub behind his childhood home in Bromley. He didn’t know how to process all the information back then. He was too young, but the notion of such things as raw materials surely got into his head very early on.
Also in attendance was journalist John Mendelsohn. Mendelsohn, another one of the hip writers Oberman had reached out to, was profiling Bowie for his first-ever Rolling Stone feature story. Published in April, under the headline “David Bowie: Pantomime Rock?,” it’s hard not to read the interview today without seeing it as a sketch for what Bowie was cooking up. Bowie frets about being dismissed as “mediocre.” He needn’t have worried. Mendelsohn describes Bowie as “ravishing, almost disconcertingly reminiscent of Lauren Bacall.”
“My performances have got to be theatrical experiences for me as well as for the audience,” Bowie told Mendelsohn. “I don’t want to climb out of my fantasies in order to go up on stage—I want to take them on stage with me.” In the most oft-quoted point in the interview, Bowie channels Lindsay Kemp, telling Mendelsohn, “I think [music] should be tarted up, made into a prostitute, a parody of itself.” He signs off with, “Tell your readers that they can make up their minds about me when I begin getting adverse publicity: when I’m found in bed with Raquel Welch’s husband.”
Everywhere Bowie went, people seemed to be pressing records into his hands. At a radio station in San Francisco, Mendelsohn played Bowie a record by an obscure garage band from Ann Arbor, Michigan, who called themselves the Stooges and were fronted by a man named Iggy.