Bowie

by Marc Spitz

  “I was only thirteen but I watched Top of the Pops and thought maybe I was Ziggy Stardust all along. I felt and still feel that there was Ziggy Stardust in me,” says Ian McCulloch of Echo and the Bunnymen. “I used to draw it in the back of exercise books or wherever, and I’d always draw—it’d be roughly Bowie’s face but with my lips on it. The Ziggy album was my way out. I used to sing it all the time, but not in front of people, just closed in at home, and I’d wait for everyone to go out or be downstairs, and I’d sing along to Ziggy and try to hold the notes like he did.”

  “It was simply being sucked in by that larger-than-life, slightly unreal persona that makes people want to be more than they are. It’s something a lot of rock stars have but Bowie, at that time anyway, had it more than anyone,” Gary Numan says.

  “Bowie represented a way for me to get out of myself, and also to escape from where I was,” Dave Gahan of Depeche Mode recalled. “[My hometown] Basildon was a factory, working-class town. Bowie gave me a hope that there was something else. This world that he seemed to be a part of—where was it? I wanted to find it. I just thought he wasn’t of this earth. And that was really attractive to me, to live in a different persona.”

  “He was my hero,” says Dave Wakeling, then a Birmingham teen and later cofounder and singer in post-punk ska legends the English Beat. “I wasn’t much one for theatrical kind of pop. It can be such crap. I couldn’t watch something like ‘Pinball Wizard.’” But Bowie got away with it ’cause he’d actually been in theater productions and added this lovely backdrop of Buddhism and all the things I was interested in. He had his aesthetic down perfectly I thought. I’d practice having conversations with him as a kid. I’d think about all the things I’d ask him. When I finally did meet him years later, I just stood there making noises like I had a mouth full of cotton balls.”

  Siouxsie Sioux watched Top of the Pops while in the hospital with ulcerative colitis. The performance provided her with three minutes of escape from her bleak and antiseptic surroundings. “It meant such a lot,” she tells me. “I was in a room where all kinds of people were coughing their guts up or walking around with blood hanging from a cradle on a support.”

  Seeing Bowie seemed just as important as listening to him, if not more so. Once the images started getting out (and they have only just recently stopped), there was nothing that could contain him. The full flowering of the visual Bowie was well timed to his meeting with writer turned photographer Mick Rock in mid-March of 1972. While backstage at Birmingham’s Town Hall, Bowie and the Cambridge-educated Rock discussed Syd Barrett. Rock had met the tragic Pink Floyd leader and taken photos of him that were already iconic. He wanted to know about Bowie’s involvement with Iggy Pop and Bowie was interested in hearing all about Syd.

  “Oh, Mick Rock. Love your name. Is it real?,” Rock says, imitating a twenty-five-year-old David Bowie the first time they met. “Of course his given name was Jones,” Rock remembers. Mick Rock began taking photos of Bowie almost immediately thereafter and remains, to this day, the photographer most closely associated with the star. “From the get-go I found him to be a fascinating person. He had a way of being very quite visceral, but also absolutely cerebral. He’s a very intellectually inquisitive person for somebody who is so kind of tactile. He synthesized in all these influences: Kabuki theatre, mime, the Living Theatre, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Clockwork Orange, the Velvet Underground, and they all went into the character and music of Ziggy Stardust and the timing was perfect.” The photos manage to frame both Bowie and Ziggy, the subject appearing both warmly human and almost impossibly beautiful and superhuman at the same time.

  “David and Syd, they did have similarities in the sense that they were both incredibly beautiful and experimental, plus they sang with an English accent which was virtually unprecedented at that time,” Rock says. “David could switch it on for the camera very easily. More aware of the camera than anybody I had known up to the time and since. He revolutionized the image of rock ’n’ roll.”

  Rock, Bowie and Angela took in a Joe Littlewood play in London’s East End and soon Rock joined the Haddon Hall extended salon. “I was not an artist before the first time I picked up a camera (and even then it was many years before I seriously considered myself in that light),” Rock says. “I had a scholarship to Cambridge University to study modern languages and literature. Deranged poets that used chemicals and sex and sleep deprivation to open themselves up to new ways of expressing themselves fascinated me. So starting with Syd and on to Bowie, Iggy, Lou Reed, Freddie Mercury, the people that drew me in, I saw them like Baudelaire or Rimbaud or Byron. Of course you gotta remember how young we all were and how young the alternative culture was. This was a new age and I wanted my piece of it and photography turned out to be my means of access. To me these characters were not just rock ’n’ rollers. They were visionary artists.”

  Rock spent the rest of the spring and early summer traveling on the tour and documenting the ascent of Ziggy Stardust almost from the beginning, early on capturing another shot that became a part of the pan-sexual Ziggy myth.

  “He’d really hit his stride that summer with the release of the Ziggy album. It was at Oxford Town Hall June 12, 1972, when I took the infamous guitar gnawing shot.” Rock is speaking of his famous photo of Bowie, his feet splayed, biting Ronson’s guitar. Of course it only suggests fellatio, but that was enough for those with sexually fertile minds, in other words, everyone in the audience and everyone who saw the photo. “There were a thousand people there, his biggest audience to that date” Rock says. “He really was just trying to bite Mick’s guitar,” Rock says. “He’s not really on his knees. His feet are splayed. He is tenderly gripping Mick Ronson’s buttocks, of course.” Ronson had been desperately searching for a guitar move to call his own. Townshend had the windmill; Jimmy Page had the violin-bow solos. Perhaps this was not exactly what he had in mind. After the show, Bowie rushed offstage and asked Mick if he caught the moment on film. Mick went home, stayed up all night and developed it. Defries purchased a page in NME and the shot was run as an ad, thanking those who caught the tour.

  “It certainly caused some fuss and helped fuel David’s controversial image,” Rock says. “The summer of ’72 changed everything not only for David but also for Iggy Pop, Mick Ronson, Lou Reed, and of course in a more modest way at that time, myself. It all spins around David Bowie. And it’s all done on a shoestring. Smoke and mirrors. I remember sitting in a cab with David driving through Hyde park that summer going to his new management office, and he told me he hung out with Overend Watts of Mott the Hoople a night or two before,” Mick Rock says. “They’d just been dropped by their label, Island Records, and they were going to break up. They didn’t know what else to do. David thought this was crazy. He thought they were a great band although to be fair to Island Records they had never really taken off or sold many records. And he told me he already had a song for them. We got to his manager’s office and David picked up his acoustic guitar and cranked out ‘All The Young Dudes,’ which of course was a huge hit and finally put Mott the Hoople on the map and into the annals of rock ’n’ roll.”

  The members of Mott were not pretty. They were pub rockers, but they had a genuine appeal and a great front man in Ian Hunter, who wore sunglasses everywhere and had a great voice. Ronson would join Hunter’s band after leaving the Spiders. Mott was about to break up when he offered them “All the Young Dudes.” Defries negotiated a deal and signed them from Island to CBS, where the Stooges were newly signed.

  “Well, he offered us ‘Suffragette City’ first,” Hunter says today, “but I knew that wouldn’t work because it was okay, but it wasn’t that great, and English radio was closed up to us because we had two or three singles out already and our time was up. But then he came back with ‘Dudes,’ and very seldom in your life if you’re in music do you get to sit behind a hit and know it’s a hit. We were sitting in an office on Regent Street and he sat on the floor and played it on acoustic
guitar and the first thing was ‘Can I do this?’ and the second was ‘Why is he giving it to us?’”

  “If they were doing okay at the time, I don’t think they would have wanted to link up with me, because they were quite macho, one of the early laddish bands,” Bowie told NME. “But things weren’t good, and I literally wrote that within an hour or so of reading an article in one of the music rags that their breakup was imminent. I thought they were a fair little band and I thought, ‘This will be an interesting thing to do, let’s see if I can write this song and keep them together.’ It sounds horribly immodest now but you go through that when you’re young. How can I do everything? By Friday? So I wrote this thing and thought, ‘There, that should sort them out.’ Maybe got my management to phone up their people.”

  Ian Hunter had worked in a factory and knew well that being in a band was better. “It’s a question of alternatives, it’s as simple as that,” he says. “I’ve been in factories, I know what that is and I don’t want to go back there.”

  Mott didn’t absorb into the Bowie circle as smoothly as the already perverse Iggy Pop or the opportunistic Reed, but they were won over by his drive and talent. “I think Bowie was more analytical than we were and definitely more ambitious. He was a planner. And he’s an extremely bright individual,” Hunter says. “There was obviously something different with David right from the off. I mean, we were doing all right but David was meteoric at the time. And he still had time to be pretty unselfish. He liked Mott so he therefore gave more to us. If I had been David I wouldn’t have given. He helped a few people along the way.”

  Mott dutifully put on the glam drag as well. They felt funny about it but realized it was necessary to succeed. “People were going to grab it and use it,” Hunter says, “because there were thousands of bands trying to get on. David took it to the extreme, you know; we sort of did it, but it worked. Otherwise you’re going back to the factory.”

  Rock shot a video for Bowie’s new single “John, I’m Only Dancing” during sound check for Ziggy’s sold-out show at the Rainbow in August. Lindsay Kemp and his troupe performed onstage behind Bowie and the Spiders for the full theatrical effect. In essence, the teacher had become the pupil. “David gave me the music which he’d recorded for Ziggy Stardust, and then as we played the songs I outlined my ideas for the production,” Kemp said. Kemp found David in the full flush of fame to be recognizable, however. “David said to me, ‘Look, you may not like some of the songs from Ziggy Stardust because they’re very rock ’n’ roll,’” Kemp tells me. “But I loved them all, obviously, I loved the gentler, more romantic, say sentimental numbers like ‘Lady Stardust.’ That was the opening of the show. But I mean, I staged them all. ‘Queen Bitch’ was me, you know, wearing my Flowers dress actually. And Starman was me as well. And we danced together during those numbers. I just loved that world, but it was also my world. I’ve always been kind of a rock ’n’ roller. Someone once said I was probably the world’s most famous silent rock ’n’ roll star. Certainly that world of hedonism and bright lights and living for the moment appealed to me. I was terribly thrilled, but I was also absolutely amazed, because it had only been like, you know, a year since he was performing for ten pounds a week.”

  Meanwhile, both Iggy Pop and Lou Reed wound their way to London, both struggling a bit with the transition from American, urban toughs to slinky glitter femmes. Iggy was writing lyrics for what would become the Stooges’ third album, Raw Power, and Reed had moved with his then girlfriend Bettye Crondston into a small furnished apartment in the Wimbledon section of London, far beyond the excitement of Soho.

  “Lou was a junkie as far as I could tell,” says Suzi Ronson, who was dispatched to do his hair. “I went over to Wimbeldon and thought, ‘What a wreck these people are.’ I had a similar thing with Iggy a bit later. Went to do the Stooges’ hair and they couldn’t hold their heads up. And they smelled awful. Never had any experience with drug users. I’m young. No clue. I remember apologizing to Tony. ‘The haircuts might not be straight, they couldn’t hold their heads up.’”

  Being transplanted to a strange country, surrounded by Bowie’s people and strongly advised on what to do and essentially how to “be himself,” was disorienting for Iggy Pop. Under pressure, he had recently altered the core lineup of the Stooges, transferring Ron Asheton to bass and appointing James Williamson, who was deemed more marketable, to lead guitar. Lou Reed, not a MainMan artist, was just as shaken up but far less malleable. “My first impression of him was of a man honor-bound to act as fey and inhuman as he could,” Angie writes of Reed at this period. Mick Rock, a huge fan of the Velvet Underground, was fortunately around at this time and provided a warm, bonding energy, acting as Reed’s UK emissary.

  Early sessions for Reed’s album at Trident Studios that summer were tense. It became obvious that the new material was very strong. Perhaps because of the pressure on Bowie as his Ziggy persona ascended, or the fact that Reed was older and nastier and out of his element, the spark and tension sometimes blew up. There was not a surplus of clean communication.

  “There’s only one person with a viler temper than mine, and that’s Bowie,” Reed is quoted as saying. Bowie counters with, “When he’s not being troubled by things around him, Lou’s a very generous person, with time and conversation.”

  Angie recalls in Backstage Passes, “Though Lou and David managed to create a brilliant mix, they attempted to outdo each other in performing the roles of tortured creative artists.” She describes seeing David curled up in a “fetal ball” beneath the toilet at one point.

  Ronson, solid, good-natured and even, held the project together. “We are concentrating on the feeling rather than the technical side of the music,” he said at the time. “He is an interesting person but I never know what he is thinking. However as long as we can reach him musically it’s alright.” Ronson helped Reed flesh out his musical ideas and Bowie prompted him to delve into tales of New York City that so fascinated him. From “I’m So Free,” to “New York Telephone Conversation,” to of course “Walk on the Wild Side,” it’s one of the essential Big Apple records. Fortunately the edginess and unease of Reed’s London stay worked well with the tone of the record. The sneering phrasing, the world-weariness, the lost sighs that bleed, almost reflexively, into “Perfect Day” and “Make Up” works on Transformer; fatigue and desperation become sexy. It’s Reed’s most famous album but it’s also his best. There have been musically more interesting and lyrically more poetic or wittier songs on other Reed records (“The Power of Positive Drinking” from Growing Up in Public, and “Romeo Had Juliette,” which opens New York, come to mind) but Transformer, even more than its follow-up, the bona fide concept album Berlin, is its own desolate sonic planet. “Mick was very proud of the Transformer album,” says Suzi Ronson today. “He knew the songs were fabulous and was given a free hand. When you’re a musician, that’s what you want. You don’t think about ‘When am I going to get paid?’” Ronson was paid under his MainMan contract and has no points on the record, which has sold consistently over the last four decades. Nobody really expected Transformer to be a smash anyway, but early in the new year, it became Reed’s first recording to chart, cracking the American Top 30, and remained on the charts for most of ’73. “Walk on the Wild Side” was all over the radio.

  “When you think about it, it was one of the quote-unquote unlikeliest hits in the world,” Reed once mused to me in an interview. “As far as my abilities in that direction, you don’t notice ‘son of “Wild Side.”’ There hasn’t been a sequel. These really simple things are really hard. As far as I’m concerned, there’s this thing you managed to grab hold of for a second and then it’s gone. You can’t do it again ’cause it’s not there to do. Very strange process. I don’t for a minute understand it. I’ve given up a long time ago any explanation for anything.”

  The cover photo, shot by Mick Rock, shows the former black-clad downtown bohemian Reed fully immersed in glitter rock androgyny, s
omething he would later, somewhat sheepishly, trade back for his downtown tough black leathers.

  “The year started out with David Bowie fast gaining recognition as one of Lou Reed’s trendy disciples,” Billboard wrote; “the year will end with the tables neatly turned.”

  On tour, Bowie got his wish by vicariously introducing fans of “Wild Side” to the music of the Velvets. Reed’s set was full of VU classics. “I decided maybe some time has passed,” Reed told me in his iconic sneering style. “Maybe they’ll get it this time around.”

  With England fully conquered, Bowie began to truly plan out the American invasion. The cult of Bowie was taking root in the major cities but there was nothing about the Ziggy album to warrant the grandiosity with which they were about to tour across the States. In the fall of ’72, with both Reed and Pop in tow, David, Angela, Tony Defries and the MainMan entourage hosted a press event at London’s posh Dorchester Hotel for American journalists flown in at RCA’s expense and select members of the British press. The event was conceived as a preview for the fall tour of America, and journalists from Playboy and Rolling Stone were put up and treated to cocktails, hors d’oeuvres and quips. The event has passed into Bowie legend, largely because of a photo of Bowie, Iggy and Lou that Mick Rock snapped. Iggy is in the center holding a pack of Lucky Strike cigarettes in his mouth, like a dog holding a chew toy. He appears elated to be there. His posture is loosey-goosey, his hair platinum blond. Reed, in dark aviator glasses, is the exact opposite. His posture is rigid and he is smirking. Bowie looks determined and proud. Defries lurks in the background, grinning at the spectacle of it all. Marc Bolan is represented by proxy on Iggy’s T. Rex T-shirt.

  It is the modern-rock equivalent of the famous Million-Dollar Quartet shot of Elvis, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis over a piano in Memphis’s Sun Studios. “It was just a hotel suite,” Charles Shaar Murray says. “The whole project was staged in the media … as much as Ronson was Bowie’s chief collaborator on the music, Defries was the main collaborator on the media event: Ziggy Stardust the event.”