Bowie

by Marc Spitz

  Local artist Guy Peellaert was commissioned to do the cover art for Diamond Dogs. His book Rock Dreams (a collaboration with English rock journalist Nik Cohn) sat on every suburban hipster’s coffee table. Like a gatefold album, it was glossy and ideal for the de-seeding of weed. In dreamy, color-saturated Edward Hopper–style portraits, Peellaert would depict, say, Elvis and John Lennon chatting in a malt shop. Peellaert had just completed the sleeve for It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll when Bowie commissioned the cover for Diamond Dogs, which would beat the Stones to the shops and mark the end of career tips and raves coming from Jagger’s famous lips whenever Bowie was within earshot. The Diamond Dogs cover depicted Bowie’s head (still with full Ziggy flaming-rooster haircut) atop the body of a reclining greyhound in a carnival freak show setting, with the dog’s bollocks on full display. When RCA saw the cover, they balked and insisted that the pooch genitals be airbrushed out.

  Diamond Dogs was always conceived to be performed live. On the track “Candidate,” Bowie sings, “My set is amazing, it even smells like the street,” so by the time a returning Tony Visconti was brought in to assist with strings and final mixes (this after falling out with the increasingly ego-maniacal and now culturally irrelevant Marc Bolan), Bowie set about planning how to present the tracks live.

  Toni Basil, the actress and choreographer who had appeared in Easy Rider and would go on to create David Byrne’s iconic hand gestures for the Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime” video (and of course have one chart-topping hit of her own with the immortal “Mickey”), was hired to put together dance numbers for a set list that would include tracks from all of Bowie’s RCA albums as well as The Man Who Sold the World and the “Space Oddity” single. Nothing would simply be sung and played this time around. In fact, the Diamond Dogs “event” would be so theatrical that the lighting designer hired, Jules Fisher, was a Tony Award winner. Furthermore, Fisher suggested that Bowie hire an actual theatrical director for the tour.

  “I had long been wanting to bring theater and rock ’n’ roll closer,” Fisher says today. “Even at this juncture, I suggested we hire a director. So I introduced him to Michael Bennett, who was a rising star at the time.”

  The New York–born Bennett, a dancer and choreographer himself, had worked with Stephen Sondheim on Company and would direct the original production of A Chorus Line two years later. Bowie and Bennett took in productions of ongoing shows in midtown and hit it off socially, but ultimately Bowie decided not to hire the future legend.

  “David thought, ‘Well, I’ll do this myself,’” Fisher says. “I’ve created my own persona. I built everything I am. Why do I need another person to do this? I tried to explain that Michael wouldn’t make him do something that he didn’t want to do, like dance steps. That he’d build the show around what David could already do. But he wasn’t interested.”

  Defries convinced RCA to bankroll the Diamond Dogs tour by insisting that it would put Bowie in and even beyond the realm of the Rolling Stones. With peerless sound and unprecedented sets and presentation, it was designed to make Bowie. The groundwork had been laid in America with the “cancellation” of the never-actually-scheduled U.S. tour number three following Ziggy’s retirement.

  U.S. fans who were convinced that they would never see Bowie again would not only be able to see him; they would be treated to the grandest, deepest, loudest rock spectacle ever mounted. Hunger City would be constructed onstage, an actual urban landscape built up, then torn down and transported to the next city after the final encore. “He was very clear in his vision for the set,” Fisher says. “He wanted something that referenced German expressionism. [Robert Weine’s 1920 silent film] The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and [Fritz Lang’s 1927 masterwork] Metropolis, were two films that he was fascinated by.” Fisher flew out to London to meet with Bowie, who would watch these films in his high-tech screening room on a virtual loop. “We had a very casual tea, which I drank and relaxed. He said, ‘This is the world that I want. This is what I’m interested in now and this is what I want to show.’ He was dealing with nihilism, the emptiness of the world. I think that fit in with Metropolis. The lonely man, the lonely figure in the big world. So a lot of our images onstage fit that.”

  Fisher hired New York–based scenic designer Mark Ravitz, who studied under Fisher at NYU and had recently begun working with Kiss (he’d go on to create their famous lit-up logo). “The three words that were relayed to me were: power, Nuremburg and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis,” Ravitz tells me. “I drew up a whole Chinese menu of ideas. Columns A, B and C. Different sketches. Roughs and different looks. He came to New York and I put them all out in front of him and his whole entourage. They’d pick like you’d pick from a menu. ‘I like this. I like that.’ Nobody said anything to me about a budget. It was pretty much the sky’s the limit.”

  The set would include a bridge that would rise and fall with the aid of brakes designed by the Porsche motor company. The backdrop would be a series of silk-screened paper skyscrapers, each one dripping blood. At the climax of each show, Bowie would tear them down, as if to lay waste to a dying city and, as was becoming a recurring theme, start again. “It was creative destruction,” Ravitz suggests. “Urban decay.”

  The set was built in New Jersey and shipped up to Toronto, where tour rehearsals began in the late winter of 1974. There, spectacular new devices like the bridge (which would rise and fall hydraulically, seemingly at Bowie’s whim) and a crane that would place Bowie high above the audience during “Space Oddity” were tested.

  “It looked real,” Fisher says. “You saw a bridge with streetlamps held up by two buildings. And it was actually held up by steel cable and was an elevator and could lower onstage. So this bridge lowered while he was on it, under a streetlamp; he was wearing a trench coat, on a rainy night. Like Casablanca. One night in rehearsal, the bridge fell very rapidly while he was on it. It was very scary. It was frightening. It was a tech rehearsal in Toronto, where we put the show together. It went very fast and he jumped off at the bottom and we all ran to him and he was okay. He said he was okay and he didn’t break anything. It was a drop of maybe fifteen feet. It wasn’t a free fall, but it was high speed. It really crashed to the ground with him on it, very fast and very, very scary for all of us.”

  That spring MainMan issued a press release formally announcing the tour. The touring band, Flowers, Garson, drummer Tony Newman, guitarist Earl Slick, and keyboardist Michael Kamen (with backing vocals and dancing from Guy Andrisio and Bowie’s childhood friend Geoff MacCormack, who performed as “Warren Peace”), seemed to further liberate Bowie from his past. Leading this new crew through untested material during rehearsals at the Capitol Theater in Port Chester, New York, that June, he found himself playing with his vocals, singing the material any way he liked.

  “When I started rehearsing with the band for this tour, I suddenly realized I was enjoying singing again,” Bowie told Los Angeles Times critic Robert Hilburn, then writing for NME. “I hadn’t enjoyed it in a long time. It was just a way to get my songs across. But when I started rehearsing I began enjoying it and I found I actually had a voice. That’s really exciting for me. My voice has improved in leaps and bounds. I’ve been flattered by some of the things the musicians have said about my singing.”

  The Diamond Dogs tour opened at Montreal’s Forum on June 14. Anticipation was massive. Audiences filed in as weird tape loops and animal noises bleated out of a PA system which was set in the middle of the floor for maximum impact. There was no opening act and a delay of nearly an hour ratcheted up the suspense.

  Finally, the lights dimmed, and the eerie “Future Legend” blared out of the PA. Then Bowie appeared, seated in the palm of a giant hand, set inside a massive, glittering mirror ball. The lights flared up and hit the mirrors just as the guitarists stroked out the wah-wah riff of “1984.”

  “Each song is linked together so that no delays occur during the show, and he doesn’t even take a bow at the end,” journalist Chris
Charlesworth wrote in his Melody Maker review. The band was often hidden behind flats at stage right, and Bowie did not break down the fourth wall and address the audience with any “Hello, Cleveland”–style salutations.

  “I think it was the first time I saw a rock show where the star didn’t connect with the audience at all,” Charlesworth says today. “He behaved as if the audience wasn’t there. I don’t think they were put off by it. As I recall David’s fans accepted it because his fans were more open than most, knowing as they did that David was a rock singer who experimented with different ideas. They expected him to be different and adopt personas like an actor, and that was why they liked him. I think, by and large, David attracted a more intelligent, well-read, cultured fan than, say, Led Zeppelin, or—heaven forbid—out-and-out boogie merchants in blue denim.”

  Some of the material over the course of the two-part two-hour concert was familiar (“Rebel Rebel” was quickly followed by “Moonage Daydream” from the Ziggy album) but Bowie no longer resembled Ziggy Stardust. His hair was flat and parted. He wore a designer suit and suspenders. For “Sweet Thing,” he stood on the bridge in a trench coat. His backing singers/dancers would tie him in ropes for “Diamond Dogs;” for “Cracked Actor,” he sang into a skull, Hamlet-style, and “Panic in De troit” found him singing and shadowboxing in Everlast gloves. Bowie appeared in the crane, over the now dazzled crowd, singing “Space Oddity,” and during the encore of “The Jean Genie” and “Rock and Roll Suicide,” a spotlight was thrown on David and the dancers, creating shadows that extended to the rafters of the arena. Each new number seemed to stand and satisfy on its own but blend perfectly into the production at the same time.

  “The audience realized they were witnessing something totally different from a normal rock concert,” Charlesworth wrote. “The cheers grew louder, but few could imagine the surprises in store … To grasp every detail one would have to watch at least three shows … He can only be described as an entertainer who looks further ahead than any other in rock, and whose far-reaching imagination has created a combination of contemporary music and theatre that is several years ahead of its time.”

  The following concerts in Toronto and Ottowa hockey arenas were equally successful both critically and commercially. Word-of-mouth reached America, where tickets quickly sold out, many at a then unheard of price of ten dollars per person. The first leg of the tour ended in mid-July with two sold-out dates at New York’s Madison Square Garden, rock’s most prestigious arena. Filling “MSG” was confirmation that he’d succeeded at everything he’d set out to do with regard to rock ’n’ roll, theater and personal reinvention. Coke-stoked ambition had brought something entirely new to the Garden. Combining Broadway staging and Hollywood sets, and a loud, fluid, sexy rock ’n’ roll road show, Diamond Dogs the tour is the precursor to every ostentatious and risky outing that played there ever since, as well as each lazy and gilded one. Of all Bowie’s innovations, the first leg of his 1974 trek might have altered show business the most. Parliament Funkadelic’s Mothership Connection tour (in which a giant spaceship hovers and lands onstage) and Elvis’s Vegas period (not to mention every other pop star’s Vegas period, from Elton John to Cher to Celine Dion) would not have existed without it. Nor would U2 or Madonna’s early-nineties stadium tours or the millennial spectacles that ’N Sync, the Backstreet Boys and Britney Spears undertook (Mark Ravitz worked on the boy band’s tours as well). Kanye West’s 2008 Glow in the Dark tour, with its talking spaceship, neon piping and elevated pyramid, owes Diamond Dogs tribute. Following such a lasting creative triumph, not to mention a genuine commercial triumph, another artist might have done a victory lap. Typically, Bowie was about to rip it all down again and reinvent Diamond Dogs as a stripped-down soul revue (while casting himself not as the prophet of urban doom but rather as a skinny, slinky white soul boy in Puerto Rican street hustler gear). Hunger City’s skyscrapers and props would be placed in deep storage. There were rumors that the expense was simply too much to keep it going, but most likely Bowie had already moved on to something new. “After all the effort, I honestly don’t know why,” Ravitz says. “Maybe it was too much to deal with. The trooping around was too much. Or maybe it just didn’t fit anymore with the new music that he was hearing.”

  “If You Only Knew” by Patti Labelle; “Me and Mrs. Jones” by Billy Paul; “Wake Up Everybody” and “Bad Luck” by Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes (with Teddy Pendergrass on vocals); “When Will I See You Again?” by the Three Degrees: this is the wonderful sound of Philadelphia. “TSOP.” It’s elegant strings, a gently vibrating electric piano, velvety drums, a sax nuzzling in to fill a pocket of silence in the arrangement, filling up the mind with images of cognac-warm romance, fur rugs, a crackling Dura flame log, high heels and long, glossy leather coats with elaborate buckles and belts. Even the Philly soul that takes on man’s inhumanity toward man (like the O’Jays’ “Back Stabbers”) is arranged like a lusty and plush pop suite. This kind of stuff ruled the radio in the first half of the 1970s, and post-Ziggy David Bowie fell in love with these records so much that he started making them. When I was five years old, this same Philly soul nurtured me like Jif peanut butter and Kool-Aid did. With the exception of Chicago, Led Zeppelin, Elton John, Jethro Tull, Carole King and Wings, this is all I can remember listening to as a child, most of it via eight-track tapes played through the side speakers of a white plastic Weltron 2001 ball. Even today when I hear “Betcha By Golly Wow” by the Stylistics or “Games People Play” by the Spinners (who started out in the sixties as a Detroit-based Motown act and having had a hit with the Stevie Wonder–cowritten “It’s a Shame” but became a bona fide Philly soul phenomenon in the seventies), I am taken back to the summer of ’75, a certain time in American life when gloom, terror, anger and despair (exemplified by the Nixon resignation, which I watched on television with my babysitter the year before) seemed to be waning and Americans began hoping for a better way again. “Young Americans,” the Bowie song that shared radio space with much of the abovementioned soul songs on “black” radio, spoke to this hope. “Do you remember your President Nixon,” he asks. It’s one of Bowie’s least detached vocal performances throughout, and listening to it now makes me believe that his hope and love for America, his spiritual country since childhood, was painfully sincere as well. Bowie wonders, “We live for just these twenty years, Do we have to die for the fifty more?” It’s the sound of the seventies finding its better angels. Even today, as we in the twenty-first century search again for those angels, “Young Americans” has the power to erase some dead, hopeless feelings inside. Like every damn song I’ve mentioned in this section, it can still make me break down and cry.

  17.

  THE STRIPPED-DOWN and funked-up Diamond Dogs tour, renamed “Philly Dogs,” after the soul hit by the Mar-Keys and attendant dance craze, rolled back into the greater Los Angeles area for a full week of sold-out shows at the Universal Amphitheater in early September of 1974. Fans hadn’t been warned that this was an entirely new Bowie and were expecting a hard-rocking glitter gator, not a slicked-back soul boy in a blue Pierre Cardin suit. “They were staying at the Beverly Hills Hotel,” recalls Jeff Gold, then an employee at Rhino Records (not yet a label at the time but the city’s hippest record store, located in the Westwood area). “We went down there and waited outside to get his autograph on some records. There was a very nice black guy out there who would talk to us. He said, ‘He’s not gonna be out for another three or four hours. Get something to eat and be back then.’ We thought this guy was a bodyguard. Later that night, we went to the show at the amphitheater and the guy’s singing with Bowie on a disco song called ‘Fame.’ The ‘body guard’ we were talking to was actually Luther Van-dross. And somehow between the last tour and this new one, Bowie had gone disco?”

  During July and August of 1974, Bowie had indeed “gone disco,” causing many fans of Ziggy Stardust to quite literally do some soul searching. “Now I see disco as art, great pop
ular art,” Gold says. “But at the time, Bowie going disco was a horrifying, horrible, reprehensible betrayal by our hero. A betrayal of the highest order.”

  Unlike that of Gold—an obvious music fan who would enjoy a long career as an executive at both Rhino and Warner Brothers records—some anti-disco sentiment would occasionally manifest itself as subtle, and sometimes not so subtle, racism, as with the notorious “Death to Disco” rally-turned-riot in Chicago’s Comiskey Park in 1979, and while it seems quaint now with popular music being more or less fully integrated, we should not forget just what a radical thing this must have seemed in 1974 and ’75. Bowie would not be the first English pop star to have a crossover hit on “black” radio—Elton John’s “Bennie and the Jets” was a fluke crossover hit topping both the pop and R & B charts in 1973—but he would certainly be the first to fully embrace and pursue this style of music, with a full album and live presentation indebted to the sound of Philadelphia. Rod Stewart, the Rolling Stones, and of course the Bee Gees would record “disco” singles within the next two years. It would take the Bowie-indebted Kiss another two after that to go disco. None of them, not even clothes horse Elton, would master the right look to go along with the new sound. Only Bowie did the research. Bowie’s new stage wear was an homage to Harlem style. During the break between the Diamond Dogs and Philly Dogs tours, while holed up in the Sherry-Netherland Hotel in Manhattan, Bowie would often venture up to Harlem to study R & B shows and gape at the opulent, post–Super Fly fashion statements that the blacks and Puerto Ricans on the sidewalk and in the lobby were making: zoot suits, wide-brim hats, white shoes and fur trim. The next time he stepped onto a concert stage, he would be dressed in Harlem street-hustler garb. His escort during these trips was a guitar virtuoso five years his junior from the Bronx named Carlos Alomar. They’d met while Bowie and Tony Visconti were mixing Diamond Dogs in New York and bonded over music. Alomar, then working as a studio musician for RCA, told Bowie, in true warm but uncensored New Yorker style, that he was too skinny and took him up to the Bronx to meet his wife and mother and eat a home-cooked meal. A friendship and creative collaboration that would span the better part of the next two decades was begun. While at the Sherry-Netherland, Alomar was fascinated by a gigantic, black theatrical trunk that never seemed to be unpacked. When he asked what was inside, Bowie proudly opened it to display dozens of vintage records.