by Marc Spitz
“Aladdin Sane, that’s me having a go at trying to redefine Ziggy, and making him what people wanted,” Bowie would tell the NME years later. “The Ziggy Stardust album told the whole story. There was nothing more to say. And I knew when I was making Aladdin Sane that the bottom had just fallen out of the whole idea. That was a tough period and I felt for the first time and the only time like I was working for somebody else. Tony Defries and his MainMan organization had seemingly made me a star and I felt obliged to do something to live up to Tony’s expectations. Yeah, Aladdin Sane was kind of a sellout.”
As such, it worked brilliantly. Released that April, Aladdin Sane was, at the time, the biggest advance hit in UK chart history, debuting at number one in April of 1973 and cracking the U.S. Top 20. “The Jean Genie,” written in New York and recorded in Nashville and London, was released as the first single. Shortly before the Winterland tour date, Mick Rock had shot a video with Marilyn Monroe lookalike Cyrinda Foxe on the streets of San Francisco. Bowie does his best James Dean in black leather. The short was fed to UK and American music shows in advance of the album’s spring release. “I actually directed four Ziggy videos in total. This short was supplied to music shows in the UK and America, although in truth there were few outlets for ‘promo’ films as they were then dubbed. It was shot in one day and one night on a shoestring in San Francisco to promote his new single ‘Jean Genie.’ It was edited in one eight-hour day, and I drove the editor nuts. He said he’d never work with me again. You’ll note that it’s full of cuts. No special effects. There isn’t even a dissolve. We didn’t have money for anymore time, but with the advent of MTV in the early eighties, the legendary rock critic Lester Bangs said it was ‘the moment the modern music video began,’” Rock says of the landmark clip.
U.S. tour number two began in February of 1973. This time, as Defries had strategized, the venues were twice as big (the tour opened on Valentine’s Day at Radio City Music Hall and closed a month later with a March date at the Hollywood Palladium). As strategized, or prophesized, Bowie actually needed the bodyguards who were employed for the show this time. Bowie’s head security man, Stuey George, kept busy twenty-four/seven filtering out the crazies and facilitating the groupie access.
“I was like the Paris Hilton of my day,” says Lori Mattix today. Mattix, best known as Jimmy Page’s seventies girlfriend, was, at the time, the queen of the Sunset Boulevard glitter scene. “I was young. I was also a teen model. I was very aware of what was going on. At the time I had this girlfriend named Sable [Star]. She was a dedicated groupie. All she wanted to do was fuck rock stars. When I told her that Bowie’s security had called me and that he wanted to take me out to dinner and was going to send a limo for me. She said, ‘Oh, no, you can’t go see David without me. If you fuck David and I don’t, I’m gonna kill you.’”
According to Mattix they were picked up in Bowie’s limo. After the show, Bowie wanted to go to the Rainbow on the Sunset Strip, but once there, they were accosted by a drunken patron. “Some guy jumped over the table. He screamed, ‘Fucking faggot.’ Started attacking him. Yelling all these profanities. This guy swung at David. Leaped over the table … the bodyguard stepped in.” Paranoid about the violence that was still hair-trigger in America, they piled into the limo and headed to the hotel. Ironically the mellow soft-rock hit “Danny’s Song” (written by Kenny Loggins and most famously sung by Anne Murray) was playing in the car. “And Sable leans over,” Mattix says, “and sings to him, ‘Even though you ain’t got honey, I’m so in love with your money.’”
Back at Bowie’s room at the Beverly Hilton, they reportedly sat around the white shag carpet smoking a joint with Bowie’s security crew, while the star was secreted somewhere in the luxury suite. “We were in the living room getting high and drinking champagne. Sable was fogging up the windows and writing ‘I wanna fuck you’ on them. At first I said, ‘Yeah, go, you can have him.’ ’Cause I was afraid. Forty-five minutes went by. And then an hour went by. All of a sudden the door opens, David comes walking out. So beautiful. I was mesmerized. He had flawless white porcelain skin. Carrot-red hair. Red kimono. A sight to be seen. My fear was gone.”
Following the American tour, the Bowies sailed alone to Japan on the cruise ship the SS Oresay, departing from Los Angeles. The band followed via airplane the day after his arrival. While Bowie was working to conquer America, the Ziggy Stardust record was selling steadily on the Japanese charts, and by the time he was able to take up a local promoter’s lucrative offer ($6,000 per show for ten shows) to perform there, he had accumulated both a loyal teenage and college-age fan base and the kind of curiosity—and on occasion, scorn—from their parents’ generation that he had inspired in England and America at the start of the decade.
A student of Kabuki theater, thanks to the tutelage of Lindsay Kemp, Bowie eagerly consumed the local sights and culture, and the Japanese would come to have a major impact on Ziggy’s third stage costuming. Bowie could now afford costumes and commissioned nine new stage costumes from designer Kansai Yamamoto (whose models had inspired the Ziggy haircut the previous year). The new look for Aladdin Sane would be drawn from both Noh and Kabuki and feature high-collared satin cloaks designed to be removed with flourishes to reveal a second layer underneath, or sometimes just a pair of briefs.
While the Bowies were taking bullet trains all over Japan, the Stooges were stuck in Los Angeles, their career in limbo despite the masterpiece that was Raw Power. In lucid moments, they rehearsed for a tour that was not destined to come together.
“The whole world was a bit stoned and upside-down,” Stooges guitarist Ron Asheton told me in an interview shortly before his death in 2009. “A wild unknown frontier. I enjoyed it but it got scary and very tiresome after a while. All that drug stuff happening and seeing your world crumbling. Toward the end of the first Stooges, I was the only one that was not using, and I’d see pieces of equipment missing—‘Hey where’s that practice amp? Hey, wait a minute, where’s that reverb unit?’ And just to see no interest in music. Music only became the means to get some more money to get some more drugs. ‘Okay, we played the show, where’s my money?’ And they’d say, ‘Oh, we played for drugs.’”
Hard drugs had sunk in, and they became impossible to manage or promote. Leee Black Childers had the unenviable task of minding them during this period. “There we were, the top of the Hollywood Hills with nothing happening,” he says. “We’re thousands of miles from the center of activity, which was New York, and nothing was happening but rehearsals, rehearsals, rehearsals. That was horrible. And then, right, all of a sudden after this long period of don’t do anything, let yourself go flabby, then they were just suddenly pitched out.”
Word came from London: the Stooges were no longer MainMan artists. It was down to Childers to inform the band. Throughout 1972 and ’73 it was made very plain by Defries that the ax could come down on anyone at any time if they didn’t pull their weight. It was Defries’s way of keeping everyone in line.
“This is the way the company worked with everyone, from roadies to stylists to everyone. And it’s part of what also kept it functioning to the point that it did, but it’s also part of what made it so exhausting,” Childers says. “It was made clear to you daily. You were told by either David or Tony Defries daily. One of them would say, ‘You know, Tony’s not really happy with what you’re doing.’ And then the next day I’d hear from Tony, ‘David doesn’t really see what you’re here for. He’s starting to question why you’re on the tour.’ I’ll admit there were days while staying at the Beverly Hills Hotel, all expenses paid, when I would go into the stairwell where no one could find me and sit in there and cry and shake. Because you’re put in this position of ‘If it’s all taken away from me, then I’m absolutely nowhere.’ I had nothing to fall back on. I’m worse than I was to begin with. And every once in a while, and frequently, someone got the chop to keep that feeling always at hand.”
In New York, Zanetta was the firing squad. H
e’d take the soon-to-be-ousted victim to a small Mid town café. He’d buy a lavish dinner, and when the check arrived, he’d inform the unfortunate scenester that they were no longer a part of the MainMan organization or the scene. Defries soon cut his losses with Iggy in a similar way, sending word to Leee Black Childers that they were beyond the pale. “Unfortunately promoters were scared of booking us,” Pop said at the time. “I kept the group writing and rehearsing, building up enormous studio rental bills because I wanted to play somewhere. If I couldn’t play on stage, I’d play in a rehearsal room.”
“It was a tragedy, really, for the business and for rock ’n’ roll, that a lot of people who might have been contributing a lot of stuff were put on hold through what could have been very, very, very important creative periods in their lives,” says Childers. “It was very ‘Show me some results.’ And there were no results. All we were doing was hanging around by a swimming pool. We were all in Siberia. We were all forbidden to show our faces.”
Asheton did not blame MainMan for putting them out. The fact that he claimed to be having an affair with Angie wasn’t even a factor. “Iggy’s insatiable appetite for other drugs progressed,” Asheton said. “We didn’t have a lot of product [to promote]. We didn’t have a big following. It has nothing to do with David Bowie. It was just about the disintegration of a band.”
After a couple of abortive recording sessions and comeback attempts, Iggy Pop hit the streets. Evicted from his MainMan-funded lodging, he was homeless and strung out. The Ashetons returned to Ann Arbor, and what many consider to be one of the more perfect bands rock ’n’ roll has ever known was put on ice for three decades.
By the time the Spiders returned to England for another round of tour dates, they too were fraying as a unit. There was talk of another U.S. tour looming, as well as an extensive Australian trek, but many seats on the last tour had not sold. U.S. tour three was not booked but within the next few weeks, it would be abruptly “canceled,” as Bowie and Defries were cooking up another PR masterstroke. Ziggy was about to “retire.”
“The stardom was kind of illusory, everyone was exhausted, and the Spiders had finally realized that they should be getting paid,” Tony Zanetta says. “I mean the fact that they asked for money. Well, the thing was that all the money was like in a paper bag. I mean it was literally in a brown paper bag. And the money would be doled out as people needed it. In the spirit of those times, when you’re young and you’re doing something because you have a passion for it. Most of us didn’t care about money. It was just fun to be a part of this whole thing. So once money started coming into it, it did become a little bit corrupted. And when those boys asked to be paid, it was taken as treason. Of course they should have been paid but David took that really as a betrayal. So when he retired, it was a business decision; it was also an opportunity to rest and recoup. I don’t think anybody ever intended that he was never gonna work again.”
Bowie did not inform anyone but Ronson, whose silence was secured with the promise of all of MainMan’s attentions as a solo artist (whether he wanted to be one or not, and by most accounts, he did not). The rest of the band had reportedly first become indignant once Mike Garson filled their heads with empowering Scientology dogma. Angie claims Garson was only there in the first place to infiltrate Bowie and the Spiders and bring them and the MainMan dollars to the church, something the pianist (who has had no ties with Scientology since 1982) now denies. Regardless of the actual motivations, it was decided that the Spiders would be done after their sold-out July 5 show at the Hammersmith Odeon. Filmmaker D. A. Penne -baker was hired by RCA to shoot the concert at the Hammersmith Odeon and capture Ziggy’s curtain call for posterity. It was intended for release as one of the first home video cassettes, a technology that RCA was then developing, but would remain in the vaults until 1983. The story of Ziggy’s retirement was also leaked to the press so there would be no second thoughts. The kids were killing the man and Bowie was breaking up the band. He would do it in style, in front of adoring fans, at the height of his popularity and power, with Mick Jagger in the audience and the documentarian who’d shot the iconic Bob Dylan documentary Don’t Look Back recording it all. Who cares whether it was true or not? Was it ever true to begin with?
“Tony Defries had very grandiose ideas on this next tour that he wanted to do, which we called tour three,” Zanetta recalls. “It was to be this mega-mega-tour. But the truth of it was, the business didn’t warrant a tour like that. David’s stardom was kind of illusory, it was more in the press. It didn’t translate into real numbers. So the promoters were very hesitant to do the kind of deal and the, you know, really major arena tour that Defries wanted to do. ‘Retiring’ was a business decision.”
“NME had already gone to press by the time he made the statement onstage. Already had our front page ready,” Shaar Murray says. “Bowie knew when the papers went to press. He knew that somebody had to have the story before he made the announcement, otherwise it would be almost a full week before the music press could cover it. Somebody from the MainMan office called me to ask for a contact number for Jeff Beck.” Beck ended up sitting in with the Spiders but does not appear in the Pennebaker film. “Ronno [Mick Ronson] wanted to invite Jeff to the show. I gave them the number, then it was, ‘Can you hold on a second, Charles, David would like a word,’ then David came on the phone and basically said this was going to be the last Spiders show. Cleverly ambiguous. He wanted the NME to know in advance. The previous week. I went of course straight in and told the editor. We started working on that front page immediately. Everybody in the office was sworn to secrecy. He told me I was the only person who’d be getting this story. He’d picked the NME. If anybody let it slip, if it reached the ears of anybody on any of the other music papers, it would be considered virtually a sacking offense.”
John Hutchinson, from the Buzz, had been sitting in with the Spiders throughout the last American tour and the English tour (along with a flautist and horn players). Before the band went on that night, he was pulled aside by Bowie. “He came and found me and said, ‘Hutch, don’t start playing “Rock and Roll Suicide” until I tell you to.’ Now, I would normally have started that because it was an encore song. I would wait till the applause died down and play the intro on the twelve-string, but he told me not to do that. He told me something was gonna happen. So I figured he was going to say something—‘We’ve had a great tour, thanks very much and good night,’ you know? So I was kind of waiting to see so he wouldn’t catch me by surprise. I wasn’t really listening. Trying not to screw up the intro. I better be ready to hit that chord.”
Instead Bowie, out of breath and clearly exhausted, uttered the following words to a crowd that included his new pal Mick Jagger: “Not only is it the last show of the tour, it’s the last show we’ll ever do.”
Hutchinson hit into the C chord as the band, thrown a bit, tried to work through to the long end of “Rock and Roll Suicide” without messing up. “I heard him say, ‘It’s the last show we’ll ever do,’” Hutchinson says. “And I thought, ‘What?’ On the tour? It was only after we came off and I heard Trevor say, ‘He’s fucking sacked us!’”
While the band was sorting out what just happened, Steve Jones, future Sex Pistols guitar player, was stealing their gear out of the back of the venue. “We knew we wanted a band and there was no way we could afford to buy the gear, so we stole it,” he told Jon Savage in England’s Dreaming. That very gear might have been used in early Sex Pistols rehearsals. It serves Bowie right. In “Hang On to Yourself,” Bowie indicated that the beat comes out better on a stolen guitar.
The after-party at the nearby Café Royale was fraught. Bowie was celebratory and relieved. The Spiders were sulky and bewildered. Ziggy would live on long enough to record and release one more album. The following week, Bowie and Ronson almost immediately flew to France to record a collection of cover songs that inspired him called Pin Ups. The album was recorded at composer George Sand’s studio at the Châ
teau d’Hérouville in France. Marc Bolan, who recorded T. Rex’s 1972 album The Slider there, recommended it to Bowie. Elton John had immortalized it the previous year on his smash Honky Chateau album (its success was largely due to the “Space Oddity”–indebted “Rocket Man”).
In the sunny countryside, Bowie reflected on the last year’s ascension. The music of Pin Ups seemed to give him closure; he was taking the hits from the sixties, by the Kinks (“Where Have All the Good Times Gone”), the Easybeats (“Friday on My Mind”), Pink Floyd (“See Emily Play”), Them (“Here Comes the Night”) and the Who (“I Can’t Explain,” “Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere”), ones he could not make, and finally making them his own by camping them up Ziggy style. The album’s single, a cover of the McCoys’ 1965 ballad “Sorrow,” is easily its most restrained moment. The rest is maximum R & B slipped a ’lude (the tempos are slowed to the point of grinding) and laid out on a Vegas floor show (which is exactly how they would soon be presented).
Later that summer, Bowie returned one last time to Wardour Street to shoot a special promoting Pin Ups, called 1980 Floor Show. With Aynsley Dunbar, who drummed on the Pin Ups album, replacing Woody Woodmansey, and a three-piece backup band called the Astronettes, featuring his new girlfriend the now platinum-haired Ava Cherry who he was intent on turning into “the next Josephine Baker.” Bowie took over the Marquee’s stage, where he’d performed in three failed R & B combos as a teenager. Ziggy Stardust killed the sixties. Before being killed off himself, he would revive them.
Bowie first appears in Yamamoto clothing, debuting a new song, “1984,” its Orwellian themes and funky chicken-scratch guitar showing the direction he was headed musically. As tacky as it is (dancers spell out the title credits), the Floor Show should not work, but it’s a sexy production; the antithesis of the Kenneth Pitt–produced mid-sixties showcase Love You Till Tuesday. “1984” segues into “Dodo,” and Bowie reappears goatlike. He has no eyebrows, having spontaneously shorn them off during U.S. tour two (reportedly after Mott the Hoople rejected “Drive-in Saturday” as a single). A Calvin Mark Lee love jewel is affixed to his forehead.