Bowie

by Marc Spitz

  Bowie makes a devil sign as he serenades a Euro-trash blonde and yet another would-be MainMan star, gender-bending Amanda Lear, on “Sorrow.” “Space Oddity” feels like an oldie among Pin Ups’ new-oldies. The high point of “I Can’t Explain” is sure, sultry backing vocalists the Astronettes dancing in slow motion. Marianne Faithfull appears in a nun’s habit and duets with Bowie on Sonny and Cher’s classic “I Got You, Babe.” She sounds like Natasha Fatale from the Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons. She returns later for two more numbers, her signature song the Jagger-Richards penned “As Tears Go By” (also given the Natasha treatment) and a Cabaret-indebted wedge of cheese called “20th Century Blues.” The Troggs make an insane appearance as well. Watching a bootleg of 1980 Floor Show, one wonders if they were placed on the bill to make Bowie look that much prettier. They resemble cave children. Lead singer Reg Presley appears genuinely demented. After the Troggs, the event’s last act, a Spanish flamenco group named Carmen (which Tony Visconti was then producing), somehow makes absolutely perfect sense.

  The show was broadcast on U.S. television show The Midnight Special, one of the weirder moments in seventies TV (and this is an era that includes Lidsville, Circus of the Stars and “Next Stop Nowhere,” aka the Punk Rock Episode of Quincy). “I remember watching it,” says Camille Paglia. “He had one costume with the two hands coming from behind to grab his breasts. It was the most sexually radical thing you could ever imagine seeing on American television at the time. He was pushing the envelope so far. He was a performance artist even before the phrase ‘performance artist’ was in circulation.”

  And with that, Ziggy was gone. “Each man kills the thing he loves,” Wilde wrote in his most famous poem, “Ballad of Reading Gaol.” Ziggy Stardust was killed by all three of the means Wilde itemizes. The “flattering words” and “kisses” of others made Bowie see his creation as a great triumph but a potential millstone. Surely the option to do so was there. Bowie might have remained Ziggy Stardust for decades. Ultimately Ziggy is done in with Bowie’s own “sword,” to use Wilde’s word, shocking even those close to him, like the Spiders, with its abruptness, as though if there were second thoughts, he might be spared.

  The haircut remained for another half year or so. Some things are harder to kill.

  I associate certain rockers with certain drugs. When I think of Sid Vicious, I think of heroin more than I think of, say, the bass guitar. I love the Pogues, but when I think of Shane MacGowan, I think of streams of whiskey. I associate certain rockers with certain drugs mostly when I am actually consuming those drugs. There’s an old punk rock album by a Los Angeles eccentric named Black Randy (and his band the Metro Squad) entitled Pass the Dust, I Think I’m Bowie (Randy re-creates the Hunky Dory sleeve on the cover). When someone is passing me the disco dust, I don’t necessarily think that I am Bowie, but I certainly have thoughts about Bowie. When the Beastie Boys acted like they still did coke, they thought of Bowie. You may recall this lyric from 1989’s “Car Thief” (from Paul’s Boutique, still their best record): “You be doing nose candy on the Bowie coke mirror / My girl asked for some but I pretended not to hear her.”

  They actually make Bowie coke mirrors. I bought one on eBay UK. But since I don’t do coke anymore, I gave it to a girlfriend as a gift. She uses it as a compact.

  16.

  ALTHOUGH THERE’S NO WAY to measure this in any forensic sense, it’s wholly possible that David Bowie did more cocaine in the mid-1970s than anyone else in popular culture: the Eagles, Elton John, the Stones, Rick James, Oliver Stone, Hollywood Henderson or Julie Your Cruise Director.

  By 1973, cocaine, long a recreational substance and status symbol with an extensive history of glamour, was so firmly entrenched in the culture that President Nixon declared war on the cocaine cowboys importing it from Colombian killing fields in private planes and disseminating it throughout the cities and suburbs until coke abuse took on the properties of a biological epidemic. Disco swingers wore “Coke Adds Life” pendants, and 18-karat gold spoons against their hairy chest or perfumed cleavage. Consumption was often done in restaurants and bars with the same élan one would use to sample from the wine list. As late as 1974, many people still weren’t convinced it was at all addictive.

  “So much publicity has gone out on heroin that people don’t want to get started on it,” Irwin Swank of Chicago’s Bureau of Narcotics is quoted as saying in a Newsweek cover story on the cocaine craze. “But you get a good high with coke and you don’t get hooked.” Mr. Swank, clearly a glass half full kind of Narco.

  Bowie certainly got hooked, and like most doing the white line at the time, coke provided more of a psychological balm at first. Bowie likely used massive quantities of gak to completely remove all traces of Ziggy Stardust and cauterize the wounds. Even then, there were detectable particles of Ziggy in his personality and so, Bowie surmised, his entire psyche needed breaking down until there was absolutely nothing left. Each bump he plugged his nose with, fed into the nostril on the end of an antique knife (his preferred method), was rock ’n’ roll chemotherapy. As a former mod, Bowie’s appreciation for the energy that speedy drugs can afford a busy and enthusiastic artist was already in place. The blow would, as is its way, get the better of him eventually, but for a time, it certainly fuelled a dizzying period of creativity and action. Bowie used coke like a sculptor uses a chisel.

  “David was actually very grounded. He was, like, a very solid individual,” Tony Zanetta says. “He really wasn’t a very wild person at all. He was a very disciplined artist. Where he went astray was in his experimentation with coke. It was like one day he had to drink a glass of wine, and the next day he was a terrible cocaine addict. It seemed at first that it was an affectation, that it was part of his stardom personality. But because of the nature of coke, you don’t just dabble in it. I think it affected him more than he bargained for.”

  Cocaine helped David Bowie exist as a fabulous rock star offstage. Sigmund Freud, another celebrated user, wrote of ingesting “a little cocaine, to untie my tongue,” and this was likely a bonus for David, who was at heart a painfully shy, suburban kid and now was suddenly looked upon as the life of the ongoing glitter party.

  Cocaine makes for good ritual as well. Whether you are alone, writing, or at a party, it actually slows things down (speedy as it is) and gives one the illusion of control as it’s prepared, mathematically divided and shared. When you no longer recognize your life as it was, the heartbeatlike chop chop chop rhythm of lines being cut can be soothing, as ironic as that might seem. There were even medicinal properties. A smoker since his teens, Bowie was emptying two packets of Marlboros a day into his lungs. The cigarettes punctuated every second of his seemingly ceaseless inspiration and facilitated him in getting it all out and down on paper, again via rhythm and ritual. A natural bronchodilator, cocaine is appealing to smokers as it deconstricts the vascular tissue in the lungs, making it easier to chain-smoke and, certainly for a time, sing.

  Finally, Bowie was working-class. He spent the sixties and early seventies watching friends like the much younger Peter Frampton, and later Marc Bolan, as well as peers like Pete Townshend enjoy the spoils of fame while he struggled to pay bills. The preponderance of coke seemed to function as confirmation that he’d made it. It was also an ideal drug for Bowie’s highly sexualized new world. “Until you’ve got a mouth full of cocaine, you don’t know what kissing is. You never get tired! You’re on 4th speed all the time, and the engine purrs like a kitten with the stars in its whiskers,” Aleister Crowley wrote. Every wham-bam assignation went off more smoothly with a toot.

  Bowie had already recorded two tracks for the follow-up to Pin Ups in October 1973 at London’s Olympic Studios: “1984,” that sinister Winston Smith-meets-John Shaft wah-wah-pedal orgy, and the B side “Dodo.” The following month, however, he was no closer to completing a follow-up to Pin Ups. With MainMan losing capital by the day, the pressure was on. However, fueled by cocaine, titanic creative ambition and t
he sense that from now on everything he laid his long fingers on would be golden, Bowie ignored it all and set about planning another elaborate stage show, or perhaps a film or a Broadway show. He also began work on writing and producing an album for Ava Cherry. He produced a version of his “The Man Who Sold the World” with English pop sweetheart Lulu (“To Sir with Love”), who was looking to move her career and image in a more adult direction. This is another Bowie hallmark: taking an artist at a career crossroads, usually one who has seen better days professionally, and reinventing them as a different pop entity, one boasting the Bowie glow.

  “He invited me to his concert. And back at the hotel, he said to me, in very heated language, ‘I want to make an MF of a record with you,’” Lulu said. “‘You’re a great singer.’ I didn’t think it would happen, but he followed up two days later. He was übercool at the time and I just wanted to be led by him. I loved everything he did. I didn’t think ‘The Man Who Sold the World’ was the greatest song for my voice, but it was such a strong song in itself. I had no idea what it was about. In the studio, Bowie kept telling me to smoke more cigarettes, to give my voice a certain quality. My take on it is that he wanted me to sing on something of his and wanted to produce me. He wanted to make me different somehow. It was the package that was great. We were like the odd couple. A lot of people had raised eyebrows.” This must have delighted Bowie. While “The Man Who Sold the World” was not a chart-topping hit (while Bowie’s background vocals can be clearly heard on this faithful version, it’s not a duet), it got a lot of attention for both of them, especially after a short film was shot to promote the single. Lulu is featured in a full man’s suit and fedora hat. “It was very Berlin cabaret. ‘The Man Who Sold the World’ saved me from a certain niche in my career.”

  Bowie spoke enthusiastically about adapting the Russian underground comic book Octobriana for the screen as a vehicle for 1980 Floor Show starlet Amanda Lear, but shortly before the holidays, his own theatrical production began to occupy most of his time. Rumors that Bowie was even being tapped to produce Queen’s second album began to circulate around this time.

  Once he finally did enter the studio early in the new year, he produced and performed much of the new album himself, and when another musician was required, like bassist Herbie Flowers or drummer Aynsley Dunbar, Bowie would dictate how he heard the music in his head, and it was re-created faithfully. Call it cocaine precision, or whatever you like, but for the next three records, right up until his first Eno collaboration in ’77, Bowie was the last word in the studio.

  “I have to take total control myself. I can’t let anybody else do anything, for I find that I can do things better for me,” he admitted to the writer William S. Burroughs during a tête à tête moderated by Chris Copetas that November (it appeared in a February 1974 issue of Rolling Stone). “I don’t want to get other people playing with what they think that I’m trying to do.”

  In London early in the new year, Burroughs was invited to Bowie’s Chelsea home for dinner. Bowie, who’d been an avid reader of Burroughs since his teens, spent much of the interview discussing writing technique and the future of media. Burroughs and his partner the British modernist writer Brion Gyson had famously developed a “cut and paste” style of writing where words were randomly chosen from a hat or basket and strung together toward the end of achieving an alternate, spontaneous and truthful form of communication—randomness as its own medium, in a sense. Bowie would employ the cut-and-paste technique, as he informed Burroughs, not as a means to write lyrics, but as a means to create the actual story. He would write forty full scenes, put them in a (very large) hat (maybe a chef’s hat?) and randomly select the content and order of the production. “I get bored very quickly and that would give it some new energy,” he said. Bowie also volunteered that he would like to bring an actual black hole onstage. Burroughs, with typical dark wit, warns him that black holes can be very expensive.

  Pork director and MainMan artist Tony Ingrassia was flown to London to help develop the theatrical production, a musical adaptation of Orwell’s 1984, but the project soon fell through when MainMan failed to secure the permission to adapt the book from Orwell’s widow, Sonia Blair. “I did a fast about-face and recobbled the idea into Diamond Dogs: teen punks on rusty skates living on the roofs of the dystopian Hunger City; a post-apocalyptic landscape,” Bowie told the Daily Mail in ’08.

  Bowie decided that he would tell his own paranoid, politicized dystopian story, transposing his creation Hunger City for Orwell’s London, and a “real cool cat” named Halloween Jack for Winston Smith. “1984” and the Orwell-quoting “We Are the Dead” would remain in the production, and Bowie would write the rest of the score around them. Paranoid, dystopian fantasy was all the rage in the Watergate era, just check Woody Allen’s Orwellian slapstick Sleeper, released in December of ’73.

  Meanwhile MainMan was in credit free fall. Bills were coming due for limousines, studio time, expense accounts, rent, mostly for projects that tanked. Product from their only reliably successful artist was crucial. They lacked the time to plot a full stage production, so the master plan shifted slightly. Bowie would record an album, and the tour itself would be the production, a brilliant bit of making a virtue of necessity. Why couldn’t the rock ’n’ roll tour be the stage show, after all? Inspired, Bowie dedicated himself to crafting his own record in a way that he hadn’t displayed before. Without Visconti or Ken Scott or Mick Ronson and the Spiders, the music’s quality all fell to him and he was determined to meet the challenge. Drummer Dunbar, bassist Herbie Flowers, guitarists Alan Parker and Tony Newman, as well as Garson, the lone holdout from the Spiders purging, convened in December at Olympic Studios, with engineer Keith Harwood (who produced “All the Young Dudes” for Mott the Hoople and was then fresh from work on Led Zeppelin’s Houses of the Holy) assisting with the production. Work was quick and disciplined. Everything was laid down smoothly until MainMan failed to pay the Olympic Studios bill and the album work relocated temporarily to Ludolf Studios in Norway.

  “We did Diamond Dogs very fast indeed,” Flowers said, “doing basic tracks in three days in the little studio at Olympic. Bowie was writing a lot of the stuff as we were going. I think it was a semi–rescue attempt from his proposed George Orwell musical. The music was weird. I have to say I found it mildly unattractive at the time.”

  Diamond Dogs was Bowie’s most brutal and hopeless statement since The Man Who Sold the World. The warmth of Hunky Dory was almost completely gone, save the stomping first single “Rebel Rebel,” which was rush-released that February (with the two-year-old “Queen Bitch” hastily slapped on as B side) to provide the company some much needed fiscal plasma.

  Diamond Dogs opens with a sucking, electronic hound’s bay, played on an electric guitar. Bowie’s voice melts over the creepy soundscape, as does a muted version of the Rodgers and Hart standard “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered”: “And in the death / As the last few corpses lay rotting on the slimy thoroughfare …” In a sort of proto–Star Wars “crawl,” a monologue (entitled “Future Legend”) tells the story of packs of marauding dogs with “red mutant eyes” patrolling the wasted streets of Hunger City. The party is over. It’s the year of Diamond Dogs. It’s also not rock ’n’ roll, we are informed as “Diamond Dogs” begins, it’s “genocide.”

  The sound of a concert crowd is heard, then a cowbell and finally a Stax-style groove from the underworld. Bowie’s Diamond Dogs band was a funkier crew than the Spiders from Mars ever were, and they work it out as Bowie spits non sequiturs in the jaded commentator’s voice he’d honed on Aladdin Sane (“As they pulled you out of the oxygen tent / You asked for the latest party”).

  “Sweet Thing” and “Candidate,” a mini-suite (whose lyrics were among those completely written, according to Bowie, with the Burroughs cut-and-paste technique) broken by an extended saxophone solo, introduces a new Bowie voice to the palette, the crooning coke-lizard basso profundo. Bowie would employ this
one on virtually every album that would follow. It’s not quite English, vaguely American, slippery with coke nasal drip but certainly no less beguiling than any of his other voices. It will appear later in both “Rock and Roll with Me” (which actually mentions “lizards lying in the heat”) and “We Are the Dead” (which contains the cut-and-paste-derived phrase “defecating ecstasy,” perhaps an argument against the technique?). “Rebel Rebel” is heralded by a strange, scratchy loop, until that magnificent riff blasts through. It’s Bowie’s last great glitter anthem, one for the road for the English Disco kids on Sunset (where it was played every ten minutes by the house DJ). It revisits familiar Bowie territory: a “hot” young “tramp” worrying his/her parents with his/her sexy nihilism (“You got a few lines and a handful of ’ludes”). The world is ending, but who cares, “Rebel” suggests; “we like dancing and we look divine.” “1984” is slotted in and segues into the equally Orwellian “Big Brother,” which is one of those songs where the verses and choruses are okay but the bridge is a must-hear: “I know you think you’re awful square / But you’ve made everyone and you’ve been everywhere,” Bowie sings. (Did the end of jaded glitter have a better lyrical summation? If so, I can’t come up with one.) “Don’t live for last year’s capers,” Bowie warns on the track, and it’s clear that he has officially ceased to do so himself. Diamond Dogs was no fun. But it was Bowie’s best-sounding, most complex record to date, and it still pulls you into its romantic and doomed world three and a half decades on.

  The recording was completed at Ludolf at the suggestion of the Rolling Stones (who had just finished their own 1974 release It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll there). Bowie and Jagger’s friendship, begun the previous year when Jagger attended Ziggy’s retirement show, was still in full bloom, with the elder, more famous icon often sharing advice or recommendations with the younger star … that is, until he realized that Bowie would steal all the best ones.