by Marc Spitz
“Imagine my surprise when he opened it to show me his collection of R & B and jazz recordings, from old Delta blues to jazz,” Alomar says. “He had them all. David was infused with soul music well before his sessions in Philadelphia. It is no secret that the British idolized American black music and studied it religiously. And it was no wonder that given the chance to record at Sigma Sound recording studio, he jumped at the opportunity.” Sigma was founded by Joe Tarsia, the chief engineer at Cameo-Parkway Records, the great Philly-based label responsible for “96 Tears” by? and the Mysterians and Dee Dee Sharp’s “Mashed Potato Time,” among others. In the late sixties Cameo-Parkway was taken over by Rolling Stones manager the late Allen Klein. Phased out, Tarsia opened up a studio, Reco-Arts, on North Twelfth Street in the Center City district in the summer of ’68. He soon noticed that the room had uniquely warm acoustics, likely because the prewar heating system’s steam heat had worked its way into the wood. Later, while eating at a nearby Greek diner, Tarsia came up with the name Sigma Sound.
By the early seventies, Sigma had become the favored studio of the producing and songwriting team of Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff (who were inducted into the Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame in 2008). Starting with the hit “Cowboys to Girls” by the Intruders, Gamble and Huff’s Philadelphia International Records acts, backed by the MFSB (Mother Father Sister Brother) house band (a sort of East Coast version of Motown’s Funk Brothers), launched the career of the O’Jays, Teddy Pendergrass, Lou Rawls and the Spinners. While carrying on his fantasy lifestyle of a bona fide City of Brotherly Love soul man (and allegedly carrying on an affair with one of the Three Degrees) Bowie did not neglect paying real respect to the black music he loved where it counted. For the new album Bowie would put together his own version of a crack Philly soul backing band—Mother Father Sister Bowie, if you will. “Bowie knew that the easiest way to change your sound was to change your musicians,” Alomar explains to me.
Shy, somewhat effeminate and overweight, Luther Vandross became a key to this new sound. He would, inside of five years, transform into a superstar in his own right, largely due to Bowie’s encouragement of his songwriting skills and his one-of-a-kind voice (which he could use to project like a gospel preacher or seduce like the most improbably on-point loverman who ever lived). In late ’74, however, Vandross was merely Alomar’s old high school classmate, a Diana Ross–worshipping misfit come down to Sigma Sound from New York City to kill an afternoon. Vandross was familiar with “Space Oddity” and knew who Bowie was but did not even know the correct way to pronounce his name. Bowie was lurking around while Alomar played the version of “Young Americans” that the band was working up. Vandross instantly responded to the song but felt it needed something and suggested the song’s signature backing vocals on the spot. At that very moment Bowie, given to lurking and eavesdropping in such situations, as he had with Tony Visconti upon their first meeting in 1967 at Essex Publishing’s offices, walked in. Rather than taking offense, Bowie declared that he loved the idea, and everyone grabbed their instrument, intent on giving this new take a workout. When the jam was over, Bowie enthusiastically picked Vandross’s brain for more such ideas and, after some bashful deliberation on Vandross’s part, got him to share a song the younger singer had written called “Funky Music (Is a Part of Me).” This track, more down and dirty than “Young Americans,” would also be worked up with the Sigma band and appears on the Young Americans album retitled “Fascination.”
“It was the first time that I ever had someone of his stature be encouraging,” Vandross recalled. “[Bowie] was constantly telling me, ‘You’ve got to stick with this. You’re going to make it. Trust me, you’ve got what it takes.’” Bruce Springsteen, then like Bowie making a transition from cult hero to superstar with Born to Run, was another in-studio visitor (he and Bowie discussed UFOs). By the time the tour resumed in late summer, Vandross was both an official backing vocalist and a sometime support act, which made him the unwitting scapegoat for those who were perplexed and even angered by Bowie’s new direction. Such fans were legion at first. “David Bowie was the end-all for me. It was because of him that I wanted to be a stage performer,” says Cherie Currie, then lead singer of teenage proto-punks the Runaways, who was also in the audience at those second-leg opening dates at the Universal Amphitheater. “But I was disappointed that he was in his zoot suit and didn’t have the Bowie haircut out.”
Bowie in this period could still be described as dangerously enthused in a way that brought Terry Burns’s Beat-era mania to mind. He simply had no off switch mechanism, by design. Projects were brought up, sketched out and then either abandoned altogether or put on the back burner indefinitely. While on tour, Bowie would turn his hotel suites into mini film sets, using his high-tech video equipment to make short film demos, building sets out of materials he sent out for and constructing elaborately drawn backdrops. David would shoot separate videos of himself later, then have them edited by some tech-savvy MainMan employee at great expense, so that, in the final edit, he would essentially appear to be walking throughout the city as though he was marooned in some nightmarish Sid and Marty Krofft dimension. These videotapes never make it into the many museum retrospectives of Bowie’s video work, but there is a pair of documents that clearly demonstrate where Bowie’s psyche was at during this period.
Alan Yentob, producer of the 1975 BBC Bowie documentary Cracked Actor, had been to the Ziggy retirement concert at the Hammersmith Odeon in 1973 and had remained fascinated by Bowie’s pursuit of masks and personas. “I loved the idea of a guy that was acting out rather than a pop star,” Yentob explains. “I was intrigued by his art school origins. I called it Cracked Actor [named after the Aladdin Sane track; it was nearly titled The Collector] because I saw that he was trying out different personas. I also thought that he was so much in tune with a generation who was not sure about what they were after either. It could be a culture study too. To that extent I found him rather attractive. I was slightly wary about films about rock ’n’ roll stars, but to me it was an interesting canvas. If I could get the access.” Yentob approached Bowie and Defries and was surprised to find them willing to grant him as much access as he required, starting with the Los Angeles tour dates. The only condition was that Yentob and his two cameramen would never know exactly when they would actually get that access.
Cracked Actor took up much of Yentob’s professional and personal life for most of the fall of 1974. When he did capture Bowie, it was often at three or four in the morning, when the star, who was neither eating nor sleeping, decided he was ready to communicate. “During some of those conversations we had, David was speaking partly in riddle,” Yentob says today. “He was talking about himself partly in the third person.”
Watching it now, as it’s available on imported DVD, one can actually imagine Bowie’s hair getting thicker as his head shrinks with malnutrition. He weighed around eighty-five pounds (losing a reported two pounds in sweat each night) and subsisted on cocaine, coffee, Marlboros, red and green peppers and whole milk from the carton. “There’s something in them that my system needed,” he later said of the drugs, dairy and veg diet. The film’s most famous scenes concern Yentob and his camera man driving through L.A. and the Arizona desert in Bowie’s limousine, while the latter is at intervals silent with chilling coke paranoia or rambling mysteriously.
“I was always pursuing the idea of David journeying around America searching for an identity,” Yentob says, “having dumped Ziggy and the [first incarnation of] the Diamond Dogs tour to become a soul singer. The thread of that narrative was picked up in our conversation. I ask him about him being in America and he talks about feeling like a fly in milk.”
“There’s a fly floating around in my milk,” Bowie says during this scene. At first it seems like he’s announcing it to nobody in particular, but then it becomes clear that this is his answer to Yentob’s question about how he feels being in America. “He’s a foreign body—and he’s getting a l
ot of milk; that’s how I feel. A foreign body.”
“I knew what was going on, that he was obviously not eating. He was emaciated. Clearly taking drugs,” Yentob says. “But I was quite outside it. The relationship was a professional one. Later we became friends.” Yentob would film Bowie at various points in his career, including 1978 and 1997, once he recovered from his cocaine addiction. “He was much less self-conscious,” he says. “It was just music and he was a grown-up and he wasn’t experimenting with role playing. Basically he’d gotten through that. He’d sort of grown up.”
Cracked Actor stands as proof that at one point, Bowie believed in it all entirely too much; there at 4 AM, with him patiently demonstrating his cut-and-paste lyric-writing method or submitting to a life mask casting backstage, it all seems so grave. Bowie is only twenty-seven but he’s already speaking of his life and work with a sense of morbid summation.
“If I’ve been at all responsible for people finding more characters in themselves than they’ve ever thought they had, then I’m pleased, because that’s something I feel very strongly about, that one isn’t totally what one has been conditioned to think one is,” he tells Yentob. “There are many facets of the personality that many of us have trouble finding and some of us do find. I’m very happy with Ziggy. I think he was a very successful character and I think I played him very well, but I’m glad I’m me now. I’m glad I’m me now.” He delivers the line with a self-deprecating laugh, as if to indicate that he is aware that all is not well, that “me” is one extremely messed-up cat.
The film also captures just how far beyond his own fans Bowie already is. While “Oh! You Pretty Things” plays on the soundtrack, Yentob interviews a bunch of still-glittering fans in the amphitheater as they ramble about space commanders and cadets. “It’s almost like they got the wrong invite,” Yentob says. “They couldn’t quite keep up with him. They were more confused even than he was. Baffled and confused. It’s one of my favorite sequences in the film.”
The film was not broadcast in America, but U.S. viewing audiences would get a taste of mad Bowie soon enough with his appearance on Dick Cavett’s late-night ABC talk show, shot in New York City and broadcast shortly after the Philly Dogs tour ended, on December 5. Cavett’s bone-dry Yalie wit had enjoyed an unlikely chemistry with wild, loose rock star guests like Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and the Rolling Stones. He’d played host to a drugged-up and barely lucid Sly Stone, but nothing compares to Bowie’s appearance.
The segment begins with Cavett, dressed in a cream suit and green wide-collared shirt, introducing Bowie with a disclaimer. “As soon as a critic tries to say what he is, he changes like a chameleon …” The camera then cuts to a series of out-of-sequence album cover shots: Space Oddity, then Aladdin Sane, then Hunky Dory, then Pin Ups, then Diamond Dogs, each one eliciting squeals from the studio audience, clearly full of Bowie fans.
“This is David Bowie,” Cavett informs the home audience. “This is David Bowie … by the same token, this is also David Bowie …” A more recent, coked-out soul boy promo shot is shown. “If all of these are true, can this also be David Bowie? He burst on the scene a few years ago in a dazzling explosion of bizarre costumes, makeup and glitter in an opus called Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars,” Cavett tells the audience. It’s clear he’s been prepped and is not reading off cards. “If the audience will hold for just a minute, I’m explaining this for all the square johns at home,” he quips. “He’s the only one I know who has appeared the same year on the best-dressed man’s and the worst-dressed woman’s list … Someone’s idea of a joke. Rumors and questions have arisen about Dave, such as who is he, what is he, where did he come from? Is he a creature of a foreign power? Is he a creep? Is he dangerous? Is he smart? Dumb? Nice to his parents? Real? A put-on? Crazy? Sane? Man? Woman? Robot? What is this? His fans have seen him do almost everything but sit and talk. Which they will see tonight. It will be a first for them. In this concert there’s still another David Bowie. Ladies and gentlemen, David Bowie.”
The band kicks into the “1984” wah-wah pedal-driven riff and Bowie, wearing his Puerto Rican suit with a wallet chain and a short tie with white shoes, his orange hair swept up, slinks out and sings.
After the commercial, Bowie is seated. He wipes the sweat off his skull and taps a walking cane on the floor. Cavett welcomes him like the perfect host he was. Bowie utters a clipped, polite “Thank you,” but still seems ill at ease. “You’ve got a lot of explaining to do,” Cavett then says cheerfully in a mock Cockney accent. Bowie looks genuinely worried. “You don’t have the trappings you’ve had in the past,” Cavett observes.
Bowie responds with a gigantic snort. It’s the loudest snort in the history of broadcast television.
“He was very wired, I would say,” Cavett tells me today. “That would be my amateur diagnosis. Either that or a severe sinus problem.”
Bowie is clearly thinking too long and too seriously about Cavett’s softball questions. He seems at first earnest and then stuck. Slowly Cavett begins to sink along with him, making one valiant attempt after another, to the point of making the audience uncomfortable, to ease his guest.
“I wasn’t comfortable but I know how to look like I am,” Cavett says now. “I feel like if I go lower rather than higher in intensity with somebody who’s having trouble talking—or trouble breathing—that it works best and makes it look less like an emergency.” Cavett could have easily turned Bowie’s lack of finesse into a punch line, but he does indeed take the high road, and his intellectual curiosity seems genuine, even as Bowie appears to be distracted by his own cane (with which he seems to be drawing something on the floor). “There was something immediately likeable about him,” Cavett says. “Although the cane was distracting. I always like it when guests put their canes down and stop fucking around with them.”
Cavett gamely asks him about flying (“It scares me”), his parents (father deceased; he and mother have “an understanding”) and “black noise,” which Bowie explains is a sound so powerful it can destroy buildings. “A big one could destroy a city,” he says. Apparently the patent for the city-destroying device is for sale somewhere in France, he adds. Cavett nods politely. “I was drowning,” he says. “I had a drowning feeling and I thought, ‘Well, I’m going to get through this whether he is or not,’ and decided to just cast in any direction.”
Cavett finally asks his guest, “Do you want to be understood?”
“There’s absolutely nothing to understand,” Bowie replies. Bowie returns to his element, strapping on his acoustic guitar and leading the band through “Young Americans.”
“The reaction to him was all over the map,” Cavett says. “Some people thought he was just fabulous. Others asked, ‘Jesus, was he stoned or snortered or what?’ Some were puzzled: ‘Did he seem all right to you?’ You might say the hipper ones knew exactly what was going on. He intrigued people. Hardly anyone was neutral about it. I think that was the point.”
At the start of 1975, Bowie was hobnobbing with major celebrities like Elizabeth Taylor (whom he’d met at a party circa the amphitheater shows) and John Lennon (with whom he and Alomar had written and recorded “Fame” circa Lennon’s “Lost Weekend” period of estrangement from Yoko). Compared with what these people had, what he could show for his success was paltry: a town house in London and a rented apartment in lower Manhattan. He began to wonder aloud where the money was going. When Bowie was coming up, his needs were all taken care of, and at the time, he literally had nothing to lose. Now that he was an arena-filling attraction on every TV show booker’s short list, things didn’t seem to be adding up. Maybe it was drug-induced paranoia or maybe he was finally waking up to his own sense of fiscal responsibility, but Bowie began, to Defries’s chagrin, asking lots of questions around this time.
“I do remember one afternoon being in the office when Defries had some contracts for David to sign,” Mick Rock says, “and he said to one of his secretaries, ‘Take these to David a
nd don’t worry it won’t take long, David will sign anything.’ I told David about that many years later and he said Yeah it’s true. I would. I had my eyes on the star prize. Nothing else mattered. Of course later on I realized what I’d done.’”
On “Fame,” written during this period, Bowie sings, “What you need, you have to borrow,” with the same venom that Jimi Hendrix (another signer of a contested contracts with opportunistic managers, among them former Animals bassist Chas Chandler) sang, “Businessmen they drink my wine,” on his cover of Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower.” There’s a segment in Tony Zanetta and Henry Edwards’s book Stardust that best illustrates this odd, cash-poor rock star purgatory. He’d recently sold out a residency at Radio City Music Hall and debuted his new single on national television … and Bowie didn’t have enough money to go downtown and buy some records. He had to call his office and have Tony Zanetta loan him some petty cash.
“I have no idea what I’ve got. I don’t know what I’m worth,” he told the MainMan executive. “I don’t know who’s paying for everything. Where’s the money coming from for all these projects?”