Bowie

“On the first radio tour he heard Iggy, also the Legendary Stardust Cowboy, Annette Peacock and in Los Angeles a lot of L.A.-based talent: Kim Fowley, Randy Newman and the poet who lived in motels! What’s his name? Tom Waits!” Angie told me during an interview we did in 2000. “He ransacked their ideas! Of course! That’s what artists do. Experience life through listening and interacting with people and other artists and then reinterpreting it in their peculiar way. That’s why they don’t have day jobs! Too much intellectual pillaging and looting!”

  The trip was successful in a creative way. Professionally, despite some of the important connections he made, the venture did little to sell records. The Man Who Sold the World was not a success, but Bowie was fast picking up what it took to write a hit. England had one official radio station, a few independent stations like Capital Radio and some pirate transmissions that broadcast from boats and barges anchored offshore and therefore unregulated. America had hundreds of stations. Traveling across the country, his brain was bombarded with popular music in a way it had not been before; hooks and more hooks seemed to radiate into his creative cortex, from Three Dog Night’s “Joy to the World” to Jean Knight’s “Mr. Big Stuff,” to Bill Withers’s “Ain’t No Sunshine,” to Sly and the Family Stones’ “Family Affair,” to the Carpenters’ “Rainy Days and Mondays,” to just about every track on Carole King’s megaselling Tapestry (the year’s biggest hit).

  Bowie returned to gray, freezing England from sunny California that winter determined to get his act together. The professional life he’d left behind was, when compared to the lives of his new friends in America, in shambles. Worse, Tony Visconti and Defries did not like each other, not least of all because Defries reportedly approached Visconti like an employee and not an artist. With Bolan’s career in gear in both England and America, it wasn’t long before Visconti decamped semipermanently (he would return in 1974). “Defries also wanted to manage me as a producer,” Visconti wrote. “I wasn’t so enamored with the idea and didn’t like his style so I was not easily seduced.”

  With no support for a tour or any further promotion on the part of Mercury, Bowie’s band subsisted on a small deal for a Bowie-free record by the Hype, with new drummer Woody Woodmansey permanently replacing original drummer John Cambridge. It didn’t result in any product and soon it became harder and harder for Bowie’s backup group to justify remaining in London while David dealt with a change in management and, eventually, a change in record labels. In Hull, Ronson could work and record and play when he felt like it. Down in the capital, he was left waiting for something to happen. He returned north, played occasional gigs under the name Ronno (Ronson’s nickname) and did some session work (including an unused guitar part during the recording sessions for Elton John’s “Madman Across the Water”).

  Meanwhile, Defries suggested to Bowie that he relax, concentrate on his family (Angie was about to deliver) and continue to write and record demos, something he could use to drum up interest in a new record deal. David had tons of inspiration. Upon returning to Haddon Hall, he realized he had enough material for literally dozens of songs. He simply had nobody interested in recording them. Despite the absence of Visconti and Ronson, this was a period of songwriting that was much more fruitful than that of the previous project.

  Personally, happier events were unfolding. On May 30, 1971, David became a father. Angie gave birth to a boy they named Duncan Zowie Haywood Jones (his second middle name a tribute to Bowie’s deceased father). A crib was set up in a small room in Haddon Hall with blue stars affixed to the ceiling above it. Much has been made of the couple calling the boy by his second name, Zowie. It rhymes with “Bowie” but is really just an altered spelling of the Greek Zoe, which means “life.” (Visconti joked about naming his son Monty Visconti, and Marc Bolan would later actually name his son Rolan Bolan.)

  “If when he gets old enough to care about his name he doesn’t like it, he can always change it, or give himself a nickname, it’s okay by me,” Bowie told a fan club journalist in 1973 (he did just that, going simply by Duncan Jones once he’d grown up). It’s implicit that naming their boy after the Greek word for “life” was in part intended as a message to the Bowies’ parents’ generation. When you have a child, a pact is formed. Mother and father are bound to try to give their offspring a better life than their parents gave them. Naming the boy Zowie was tantamount to tracing a line in the sand in a way, akin to mandating, “Now this has to be new.” And yet, giving him the very proper, English first name “Duncan” and the third name “Haywood,” in addition to the latter being a tribute to Bowie’s father, was a characteristic nod to conventionalism from the half-urban/ half-suburban Bowie. While Bowie was building his image as a way-out, sexually ambiguous rock curiosity, they raised their baby with an eye toward health, accountability, companionship (neighbors would nanny when business called)—everything that would seem antithetical to the rock ’n’ roll lifestyle. The flair for duality worked to their advantage when it came to parenting.

  Again, we must return to art and commerce, straight suburbanization vs. urban hipster progression. Money was still a concern. Bowie was about to be without a record label for the fourth time in his short career, but he wasn’t the anxious, migraine-stricken, too-thin figure he’d been just a year or so earlier. Creatively, however, he was moving at an almost unstoppable rate toward a solid vision, and everyone knew it.

  Bowie booked time at London’s Radio Luxembourg Studios, shortly after his appearance at Glastonbury, and worked like mad. Backed by a local group from nearby Dulwich College named Runk, Bowie laid down nearly three dozen songs, many of which would end up on his next two albums (Hunky Dory and The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars), including early versions of “Hang On to Yourself” and “Moonage Daydream.” Melodically, these versions are the same as the ones that would appear on the Ziggy Stardust album (discounting a slightly altered chorus for “Moonage Daydream”) but the tempo plods like that of many demo tracks do, and Bowie sings somewhat meekly at the high end of his register (Ziggy’s voice would, of course, be much more aggressive and sure). Given what was later done with this undeniably sophisticated material, listening to these tracks today can only really feel like an excavation.

  He wisely suggested to Runk (guitarist Mark Carr Prichard, bassist Polak De Somogyl and drummer Ralph St. Laurent Broadbent) that they change their name, and so the legendary Arnold Corns was born (“Arnold” being an homage to Pink Floyd’s debut single “Arnold Layne”). The Arnold Corns material would become widely bootlegged, and the single “Moonage Daydream” would be released in a limited run on local label B and C Records. Hearing the demos, which also included “Life on Mars?” “Oh! You Pretty Things” and “Andy Warhol” (written for Dana Gillespie to sing and recorded by both artists), Tony Defries felt they were remarkable and went about scheduling meetings with major labels in New York, intent on wresting a rock star–sized deal. Sensing, perhaps, a turning point, even Mercury Records attempted to extend Bowie’s contract, but Defries promptly informed them that his client would “not record another note” for the label and reportedly paid off all the outstanding debt himself, so as to be complexly free and clear of the past.

  Bowie’s contract with Essex Music had expired as well and his new publisher, Bob Grace at Chrysalis (soon to be a major industry powerhouse but then an upstart with just Jethro Tull on its roster), was equally thrilled with the new material, farming out “Oh! You Pretty Things” to former Herman’s Hermits singer Peter Noone, who would take a watered-down version of the bleak and doomy ditty into the English charts that December (famously changing the lyric “The Earth is a bitch” to “The Earth is a beast,” which seems even more harsh if you ask me).

  Most crucially, David Bowie himself knew he’d made a breakthrough. He was beginning to synthesize all of his influences, from Bob Dylan, to the Velvet Underground, to British music hall, to modern jazz and avant-garde, into something entirely his own. Before going i
nto the studio in July and August of 1971 with engineer Ken Scott producing, Bowie brought Ronson and Woodmansey down to put the band back together (Trevor Bolder was recruited to replace Visconti on bass). Ronson and Woodmansey were shocked by how sharp the new material was and set about helping bring Bowie’s vision to light.

  In Haddon Hall and during sessions at Trident Studios in London, Ronson began writing string arrangements for new songs like “Life on Mars.” “He used to write the strings sitting in the toilet,” Suzi Ronson says. “In the loo. Without even a keyboard. Only by ear. It was quiet in there.” Yes, one of the grandest, most sweeping pop singles of all time was partially created in the bog.

  Meanwhile Bolder and Woodmansey began working up the eccentric but fluid rhythms that would propel tracks like “Changes” and the Velvet Underground homage “Queen Bitch.” “By this time we were all kind of focused,” Woodmansey said. “David was writing almost on a daily basis as we all lived in Haddon Hall. I’d hear him on the acoustic and he’d just started writing on the piano. He’d say, ‘Woody, come and listen to this,’ so there was a lot of material to work on. We were all listening to stuff to get ideas on different approaches to recording etc., from Velvet Underground to Lennon and Neil Young. I remember hearing a Neil Young and Crazy Horse track where the drummer didn’t hit the cymbals until halfway through the song, but when he did it really lifted the whole track. I kind of got into the ‘less is more’ approach from this point. So we were continually working through Hunky Dory and then straight on to the Ziggy album. Seemed normal to us by then! Work hard and play hard!”

  “I saw it every day. I knew it was happening,” Angie says of this period. “It was easy. It was a piece of piss. If everyone hadn’t been so great and so perfect … If Mick Ronson hadn’t been so talented … If Woody Woodmansey hadn’t been such a laugh … If Trevor Bolder hadn’t been so solid … If Ken Scott hadn’t been such a great engineer … none of this would have happened. It was a convergence of events that caused something amazing to happen and I was just very grateful to be there and the person who may have orchestrated some of it. I’m a good organizer and I can get people moving.”

  Lots of artists have their “it all came together on this one” record: the one that allows them to have a long career and finally says, “This is who we are and what we are about.” It’s rarely the debut. The Rolling Stones had Beggars Banquet. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers had Damn the Torpedoes. U2 had War. Radiohead had The Bends. For David Bowie, it’s Hunky Dory.

  As Bowie finished the music and lyrics there in Haddon Hall that summer, the combined experiences of fatherhood, life changing, going to America and the end of his relationships with his father, John Jones, and father figure Ken Pitt poured out in song. It rang true. It was special. Life was chaotic. The future was uncertain. All that was true was a lack of constancy. The songs that reflected this would be collected under a classically ironic album title: Hunky Dory, an English slang term indicating that everything was right in the world. Hunky Dory is such a special record to so many people because everyone goes through similar transitions. Anyone who falls in love with a partner or a child or a sense of calm amid chaos that they wish to return to should own a copy. Nesting and fatherhood (“Kooks”). Death, pessimism and depression (“Quicksand”). Dread (“Oh! You Pretty Things”). Survival (“Changes”). Optimism (“Life on Mars?”), madness (“The Bewlay Brothers”) and a series of homages paid and cameos that draw sincerely and enthusiastically from Bowie’s recent experiences (“Andy Warhol,” “Queen Bitch”). Whether you’ve heard it or not, you’ve lived it. If you are going to buy a David Bowie album, this is not a bad place to start. Many of my rock writer friends and peers consider it his first shot.

  “The first Bowie album I actually lived with was Hunky Dory,” says British rock critic Charles Shaar Murray. “I was intrigued by the amount of sheer imagination involved. Bowie was one of the transitional artists on the cusp from hippie to post-hippie. He was the first to evolve a coherent vision of life after hippie. There was enormous range as well. It’s a very eclectic record. The unifying factor is Bowie’s own fractured sensibility. The tracks are all very different but he is what they have in common.”

  “In truth I didn’t really register David’s early recordings” says Mick Rock. “I later learned he had a hit with ‘Space Oddity’ in ’69. I’m not sure why it passed me by, because it’s a great record. Maybe it didn’t sound subversive enough to the hippie student that I then was! The first thing that made me really aware of him was Hunky Dory and that album floored me, the way Syd and the Velvets had. I must have played it twenty times the day that a friend gave it to me. Especially ‘Life on Mars.’”

  One of the keys to appreciating Hunky Dory is to view it as a piano-driven record. Bowie had written all of his previous material on an acoustic guitar. There was no room for a piano in his Plaistow Grove bedroom. There certainly wasn’t room for it while playing clubs or local bus tours with his previous groups. Haddon Hall gave him more of a sense of permanence, a home of his own where he could sit and compose with more comfort and deliberation. This affected the sound of the record (an inviting, plunked percussiveness) as well as the feel (warm, whereas Space Oddity and The Man Who Sold the World were albums you wanted to throw a blanket around). Hunky Dory is, like the best records, a triumph of sequence, a masterful rising and falling of moods that somehow unites as a complete and singular piece.

  It opens with “Changes,” a sort of state of the union demarking the end of the sixties (“Every time I thought I got it made / It seemed the taste was not so sweet”) and the call toward achievement, now and not later, that the coming decade demands (“Look out you rock ’n’ rollers / Pretty soon now you’re gonna get older”). “Oh! You Pretty Things,” another piano-driven composition, follows seamlessly. It’s the rare bit of science fiction that manages to be soulful (truly this is Bowie’s gift to the genre). “All the nightmares came today / And it looks as though they’re here to stay,” he sings, drawing from George Orwell, H. G. Wells, Kubrick and even Nietzsche and Ayn Rand (“You gotta make way for the homo superior”). The chorus presages the coming glitter movement (“Don’t you know you’re driving your mamas and papas insane”) while tweaking his own parents’ suspicions of his still unproven career (it’s also a shout-out to one of his favorite bands, the Pretty Things).

  “Eight Line Poem” is just that: a snapshot interlude of some bohemian apartment (“Tactful cactus by your window”) that still manages to pull the listener in. (I always wondered about the line “Clara puts her head between her paws.” Is Clara a dog? A cat? A ferret?)

  In the fall of 2007 “Life on Mars?” was named the third-greatest song of all time by the British music magazine Q (between the Beatles’ “Strawberry Fields Forever” and the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil”). Q lists are often a little dubious (Oasis and Radiohead’s first three records frequently edge out the Beatles, Stones and Beach Boys on their top-ten lists), but it’s no stretch to say that “Life on Mars?” is one of the best pop songs ever written. Even Barbra Streisand has covered it (surprisingly, her version is fairly faithful). It concerns a suburban girl transcending her “mousy hair” existence at the local cinema, where she is “hooked to the silver screen.” The song speaks to the longing for something more exciting that everyone has, the kind of universal theme that, when married to a sweeping melody and executed with style (Ronson’s string arrangements manage to be simultaneously epic and disciplined; Rck Wakeman’s muted, vaguely cocktail-jazz piano is bawdy and haunting at the same time … and played, famously, on the same instrument that Paul McCartney used on “Hey Jude”) will remain the stuff of best-of lists and subpar covers. “Kooks,” a kind of realistic lullaby to Zowie, warning him, essentially, “we are weirdoes, and you’re gonna get picked on,” captures the spirit of Haddon Hall in the imagination of a Bowie fan. Sonically, it introduces the loudly amplified acoustic strum that is a hallmark of the Hunky Dory sou
nd, also heard on “Andy Warhol,” “Quicksand” and the record’s closing track, “The Bewlay Brothers.” Sequentially, “Kooks” is the light to “Life on Mars?”’s pathos. “Fill Your Heart,” a song made famous by American freak folkie Tiny Tim, and the bemused “Andy Warhol,” on which Bowie instructs the proper pronunciation (“War-hole, as in holes”) of the Pop artist’s name, provide the comic relief to “Quicksand,” a track so bleak (“Can’t take my eyes from the great salvation of bullshit faith”) that the chorus is actually “Don’t believe in yourself. …” Somehow “Quicksand” skirts self-pity. I think it must be the sheer complexity of the lyrics that give it a fleet rather than a wallowing quality (shout-outs to Heinrich Himmler, Aleister Crowley, Greta Garbo and Winston Churchill included). “Queen Bitch” was Bowie’s most convincing rocker to date and, along with the Arnold Corns tracks, points toward not only Ziggy but the kind of English punk rock that would distill New York City street jive for English school kid consumption (and has anyone bettered that title?). On “Song for Bob Dylan,” Bowie expertly imitates Dylan’s tough, adenoidal “awww” (which ups the cosmic nastiness factor of “The Ballad of a Thin Man” and “Like a Rolling Stone”). Its title is a clever take on Dylan’s Woody Guthrie exhortation “Song for Woody.” Dylan was still laying low up in Woodstock following his 1966 motorcycle crash when Bowie penned the track, which outlines just how bad the culture needs him to return.

  “Now hear this Robert Zimmerman / Though I don’t suppose we’ll meet,” Bowie sings on the final verse, and it’s hard not to laugh when I think about how they did, obviously, meet, and how Dylan was apparently an “asshole” to Bowie. “The Bewlay Brothers” has long been interpreted as a song about Terry. Its lyrics presage the kind of cut-and-paste word jumbles that would mark Bowie’s mid-seventies albums (“The Factor Max that proved the fact / Is melted down”) but like “Quicksand” its potentially fatal cleverness or poetic pretentiousness is offset by a feeling of genuine lament (“And the solid book we wrote / Cannot be found today”) and the touched-by-God genius of some of those phrases he turns (“Kings of oblivion,” “stalking time for the moon boys”). The record ends with an ellipsis. Over Doors-like Latin percussion, the song fades into Victorian sing-along: “… I’m starving for me gravy / Leave my shoes and door unlocked / I might just slip away … just for a day … Please come away …”)