by Marc Spitz
Defries figured that Mick Ronson would be the next big star after Bowie. To promote Ronson’s 1974 debut Slaughter on Tenth Avenue, the company paid for a huge billboard on the Sunset Strip. Despite his good looks and obvious talent, Ronson lacked front man DNA and the album fizzled. “It just didn’t happen,” says Suzi Ronson. “It was too soon. People said the record sounded too much like David Bowie without David Bowie. It was David Bowie without David Bowie. Mick should have been allowed to be given some time to meet other people. The relationship with Bowie after that was nonexistent. Bowie promised he’d come by the studio. Never did. We never spoke with David, never hung out with him that much afterward. He’d had enough of what we had to give him.”
“Mick was a great second banana for Bowie,” Charles Shaar Murray says. “He had everything you needed to be a front man except the temperament. Mick did not have the necessary degree of megalomania. He was comfortable riding shotgun, taking care of the musical details.”
Fame, a muted Broadway musical based on the life of Marilyn Monroe (and directed by Pork’s Tony Ingrassia) also failed. Wayne County’s Wayne at the Trucks tanked, Dana Gillespie did not make a mark; each one was a money pit, swallowing up cash that might have put the Bowies on the lifestyle level of his new social circle.
“One of the things David probably objected to was there was no money because it’d all been spent on lifestyle,” former Defries partner Laurence Myers says today. “This happened very often with artists. They loved driving around in the limos, then they get the bill because their contract says they pay for those things. Then they say, ‘Well, I haven’t got any money.’ Well, you chose to drive around in limos. You’re also often surrounded by a hundred different people every day wanting to party. These people, they either want to become your new manager themselves or they just want to be your friend, so what they do is they say to you, ‘You’re wonderful, you’re marvelous, you are brilliant and you are a genius and you are not being served. Why haven’t you got this? Why haven’t you got that?’ Sometimes they’re right. Sometimes they’re wrong. And then, from the artist’s point of view, it’s ‘Jagger’s got a bigger house than I do,’ or ‘I’m fed up with my old guy telling me what to do and running my life.’ It’s like a marriage. And David was doing loads and loads and loads and loads of cocaine. None of which helps.”
Back in New York, work continued on Young Americans through January of 1975 at the Power Plant in midtown Manhattan, with Tony Visconti producing. Bowie had already palled around with Lennon in L.A. Given his near constant coke paranoid state, it’s amazing that Bowie pursued Lennon so doggedly. The prospect of becoming matey with an actual Beatle clearly outweighed the risk of drawing FBI attention to himself—as it was suspected and is now well known that the agency had been monitoring Lennon closely for most of the first half of the decade. Bowie decided to record a cover version of the Beatles track “Across the Universe.” He invited Lennon, then also back in New York City, to come to the studio to play on it. During a jam session, Alomar produced a chicken-scratch guitar lick and an orbital riff that recalled the old R & B hit “Foot Stompin’” melted down into a slow, molten groove. Lennon and Bowie came up with the lyrics on the spot, with Bowie taking lead and the ex-Beatle providing falsetto backing vocals.
“I got to know David through Mick really, although I’ve met him once before,” Lennon told Mike Douglas during one of his famous guest spots on that other iconic seventies talk show. “And the next minute he says, ‘Hello, John, I’m doing ‘Across the Universe,’ do you wanna come on down?” So I says, ‘All right,’ you know, I live here. I pop down and play rhythm. And then he had this lick. The guitarist had a lick and we sort of wrote this song. It was no big deal. It wasn’t sitting down to write a song. We made the lick into a song.” Visconti, also a Beatles obsessive, was not at the sessions. “I would have jumped on the Concorde at my own expense to be there,” he later said. While he mixed the finished songs from the Sigma sessions in London, Bowie, Alomar and Lennon created a pair of last-minute additions with “Fame” and “Across the Universe.”
Involving an ex-Beatle at the eleventh hour could be seen as Bowie building up antibodies or fortifying his stock value for what now seemed like an unstoppable clash with Defries. With the help of his new personal assistant Corinne “Coco” Schwab, a onetime MainMan secretary, Bowie hired a lawyer, Michael Lippman (who declined to be interviewed for this book). On January 29, 1975, Bowie went to the RCA offices with Lippman to let them know of his professional intentions. Bowie was visibly shaken and paranoid during these meetings. He’d recently taken the master tapes for Young Americans and secured them in a bank vault so that Defries could not manipulate them in any way. He’d then sent a copy to RCA to make sure if he broke from MainMan they would be loyal to him and not his imperious manager. Bowie relaxed only after RCA executives assured him in person that they would back him and not Defries whatever transpired. A week later, Defries, like Kenneth Pitt before him, received a memo of severance. According to legend, when the furious Defries asked RCA why they sided with Bowie instead of MainMan, Glancey responded, “Because you can’t sing.” Predictably, Defries sent RCA an injunction to prevent them from releasing the album in America, England and France, freezing all Bowie activity. Laurence Myers, Defries’s old partner, who was now doing separate business with RCA, was brought in since both parties trusted him.
“Those meetings between Bowie and Defries was like the Vietnam peace settlement,” Laurence Myers says. “We had Michael and David in one room, and we had Tony in another room, and the middle room was me and RCA.” A settlement was eventually reached, details of which have been widely reported, though the agreement remains confidential. What is believed by most is that Defries would own a piece of David Bowie’s recordings from approximately 1972 up until 1982 (but not, crucially, any of his blockbuster 1983 album Let’s Dance and beyond). The long-delinquent MainMan accounts would be settled by RCA, who insisted on having their own staff auditors make sure the checks were indeed paid out.
Defries would go on to discover John Mellencamp (renaming him Johnny Cougar). He would resurface in the nineties when Bowie was working out a deal to securitize the RCA material as “Bowie Bonds.” Neither has publicly spoken about the details of the split, although sources have indicated, off the record, that the bad blood has not gone away some thirty-three years on.
“There are the rumors. And the rumors are very, very powerful,” Dave Thompson, Defries’s biographer, says. “That Tony screwed Bowie all the way down the line, and then when they broke up Bowie screwed him back, and then they’ve had this sort of acrimonious gimme gimme gimme relationship ever since. David has been content to let people believe what they will, and Tony, I don’t think, paid any attention to what was being said. So we’ve had this incredible game of Chinese whispers for the last thirty years about the nature of their relationship, the nature of their contract, the nature of their parting. And I think we’re gonna find that none of it is basically true.”
With regard to his personal life, David was increasingly replacing both his longtime MainMan retinue as well as Angie with one of the company’s secretaries Corinne Schwab. Schwab, who is still Bowie’s assistant, is considered by some the bête noire of the Bowie story, a figure so devoted to him, or supposedly void of her own personality, that she gave over her entire life to facilitate whatever it is David needs.
“There is no Coco. There is only David,” Zanetta writes. “She’s the one who does all the dirty work. She is a very, very sad case. The woman does not have her own life. She’s his alter ego, his devil in disguise.”
“Coco was definitely a force to be reckoned with,” Carlos Alomar has said. “She was definitely branded the biggest bitch in the whole world, which she was. But apparently she loved David very much and she was very dedicated to him so I could never fault her for that. She would forsake her own needs to please David.”
“She’s laid down her whole life for hi
m,” Natasha Korniloff has said. “David has only to utter the words ‘I’m hungry’ and in the middle of nowhere Coco can cook a meal over a candle and put it in front of him. He can be cold, tired, hungry—but put something warm around him, feed him, and he’s happy. He just sits there receiving everything and he doesn’t really care where it’s coming from.”
This perception is fueled by the fact that in four decades, Schwab has not turned to the media to respond to such portrayals and conduct personal damage control, something even former vice president Dick Cheney eventually took pains to do in an effort to allay long-standing whispers about his dark personal character. In a 1993 cover story on David in the UK men’s magazine Arena, Schwab granted one rare interview to journalist Tony Parsons, but this reads more like a prepared release than an actual tape-running, all-questions-permitted sit-down. “His singular vision as an artist also incorporates the ability to transform and to give focus to outside ideas. He moves, progresses, changes and grows with every project,” she says, or “says.” What is certain is that the fastidious and preternaturally disciplined woman provided some sense of order in Bowie’s increasingly unhinged day to day existence in 1975.
The petite Schwab is from a highbrow New York family and was already worldly and fluent in multiple languages. This clearly made Bowie feel comfortable and intellectually matched, but it was likely the consistent efficiency with which she handled his affairs without creating distraction or drawing attention to her own issues that brought her to power. Virtually nobody in Bowie’s circle could make similar claims, not his lovers and certainly not his managers or even his band and producers. Even better, Coco had developed a series of tricks and psychological devices to keep the ever-increasing list of personae non grata away, a list Angie Bowie had, by 1975, certainly made. “After four or five years I had really worn out my welcome with David,” Angie says today. “He didn’t like me anymore.” Angie lives with the fact that it was she who recommended hiring Coco in the first place, impressed by her work ethic when she first showed up as a temp in MainMan’s London offices. The Bowies’ split had been coming for a long time. In her memoir, Angie heartbreakingly writes of tracking David’s postfame activities through the press, as well as sending him messages the same way, by being photographed while out and about. With their child in school or in the care of a more or less permanent nanny, and Ava Cherry and Coco occupying the role of female companions, David and Angela were free to carry their estrangement to its furthest ends. Angie continued to try to make headway as an actress and a writer, and even a singer, only to find herself rejected at every turn. “As David and I broke up he made sure that I was blacklisted in the entire entertainment business,” she claims. “I felt betrayed. I felt that I would now never be able to work anywhere doing anything. I just kept thinking about my father and how he would have fought this battle. And I fell down a lot.”
“Angie was probably the most affected because she was really different than all those other rock girls,” says Tony Zanetta. “David wasn’t a star when she met him. She wasn’t a groupie like a Bianca Jagger. Angie was very much a part of building the success. And she was kind of left hanging. Because what is an Angie Bowie? Her identity has totally been Angie Bowie. It’s never been Mary Angela Barnett again. She was wacky, but she was a super-intelligent woman and had lots and lots of potential but got stuck. She could never really bring Angie Bowie to another level.”
David Bowie, meanwhile, was further peeling away the artifice of the Ziggy-era. Young Americans, released in March, was the first Bowie album in nearly three years to feature David Bowie and not “Ziggy” on its sleeve, and looking handsome with a retro matinee-idol haircut and smoldering cigarette to boot. It was rumored that Bowie initially approached Norman Rockwell to paint his portrait for the cover. As a musical experiment the album succeeds because it’s at heart a symbiosis and not some parasitic venture—not “Bowie does black music,” but rather “Bowie and black music do each other.” Unlike Robert Plant on early Led Zeppelin songs, Bowie never resorts to a stereotypically black voice; he is always David Bowie. The title track borrows the piano glissando from the Jackson Five’s “I Want You Back,” and Vandross’s vocal arrangements are pure church; but Bowie’s lyrics are, as they remain throughout the record, angsty and disquieted, the transmissions of an outsider looking in honestly, never an imposter. Black songwriters often addressed their listeners—as Marvin Gaye does on “What’s Going On” or Curtis Mayfield did on “(Don’t Worry) If There’s a Hell Below We’re All Going to Go”—as sisters and brothers. Bowie never assumes an easy brotherhood, and as a result he comes very close to enjoying one. Black listeners accepted this tribute in the right spirit.
Song by song, Young Americans is played so enthusiastically that no by-the-hour house band could re-create such sonic buoyancy. The European as soul fan and not soul man is the liberating ingredient. “He would always unblock a musician,” Alomar says, “and allow him his freedom of expression without losing sight of the musicians’ effect on the song. As an example, if you played guitar and you had Jimi Hendrix as the guitarist, would you show him what to play or would you give him a general idea of what the song needed and then adjust his performance to fit the song? Bowie always allowed every musician that freedom. He would play a version of a song on piano, guitar, synth, anything he could use to exact the effect he needed. It was glorious.”
Reviews were largely positive as well. Lester Bangs, who had previously singled out “Time takes a cigarette,” the opening lyric from “Rock and Roll Suicide,” as the worst ever penned, immediately saw the album as another in a long line of hipster white guys worshipping black culture and put it in smart context. “Now, as we all know, white hippies and beatniks before them would never have existed had there not been a whole generational subculture with a gnawing yearning to be nothing less than the downest baddest niggers they could possibly be. And of course it was only exploding plastic inevitable that the profound and undeniably seductive realm of negritude should ultimately penetrate the kingdom of glitter.” In his raw language, Bangs shrewdly points out that in most gay bars, nobody listened to white English glitter rock anyway. “Everybody knows that faggots don’t like music like David Bowie and the Dolls—that’s for teenagers and pathophiles. Faggots like musical comedies and soul music. So, it was only natural that Bowie would catch on sooner or later. After all he’s no dummy.” Bangs adds, “Bowie has just changed his props: last tour it was boxing gloves, skulls and giant hands, this tour it’s black folk.” That, in Lester Bangs’s terms, amounts to a rave.
Although it was his biggest hit record to date, Bowie opted not to tour in support of Young Americans. He made what would be one of his last public appearances for a full year, looking deathly gaunt but elegant in a white tie and wide-lapel tuxedo, to present a Best R & B Female Performance Grammy Award (he addresses the crowd with “Ladies and gentlemen and others” and rambles in both English and French before announcing the nominees) to Aretha Franklin for her rendition of “Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing” in the winter of ’75. The Queen of Soul responded with the unintentionally hurtful joke, “Wow, this is so good, I could kiss David Bowie.” Aretha amended, “I mean that in a beautiful way,” but it reportedly wounded him deeply.
In April of 1975, with New York “closing in” on him, as he would tell Cameron Crowe the following year, Bowie made arrangements to leave his unofficial second home behind as well. After drifting from Ava Cherry, he had started dating actress and Playboy Playmate Claudia Jennings. Jennings, who was killed in a 1979 auto wreck, is the willowy blonde who appears briefly in The Man Who Fell to Earth, naked and making out with Bernie Casey after he emerges from a swimming pool (also naked). She also appeared in the Roger Corman cult film The Great Texas Dynamite Chase and continues to be a cult figure among B movie enthusiasts. By year’s end, Bowie, more popular than ever, became both a genuine movie star and a death-and sleep-defying Babylonian.
While it’s an et
ernal magnet for rained-on English rock stars, there is something eternally foreboding about Los Angeles. I’m not actually sure what the source of it is. I lived there for five years in the early nineties. I cowrote a book about L.A. punk. Worse, I’ve walked in L.A. after selling my Toyota for drug money (again, early nineties). It is, with apologies to my many friends who do so, “dubious” to stay there for any length of time, as David Bowie keenly notes in the Cracked Actor documentary. Hearing a siren on Sunset Boulevard, he blanches and explains to director Alan Yentob that there is “an underlying unease; you can feel it on every avenue. It’s very calm. It’s a superficial calm they’ve developed to underplay the fact that there’s a very high pressure here. It’s a very big entertainment realm. How dubious a position it is to stay here for any length of time.”
Los Angeles makes no sense to me. It is of course a major urban center but it doesn’t look cavernous and easily, mathematically navigated like New York or Chicago or even San Francisco. There’s no grid logic to it. I tried to read City of Quartz to figure it out but I just got more confused. Plus, there are skunks and coyotes in the shadowy underbrush. In a city! It’s too primal. It’s a company town, centered above all on the entertainment industry, but it feels neither productive nor constructive to me. People are dying constantly. They overdose in massive plaster or adobe bungalows and on cold marble floors. Others get their thoraxes shot up with automatic weapons as the sickly smell of jasmine penetrates every surface. Violence hangs in the air like exhaust. You could be buying a paper in a clean convenience store, or a cup of coffee in a Winchell’s donuts, and suddenly a burst of gunfire shatters the illusion of safety and suburban calm and homeyness like that scene in Boogie Nights with Don Cheadle’s Buck Swope and the bloody bag of money. L.A. is John Holmes and Eddie Nash and Wonderland Avenue. It’s the death of Sal Mineo and Peter Ivers and Jack Nance, who played Henry in Eraserhead. Wheat germ killers. It’s the Black Dahlia and Sharon Tate. Nicole Simpson and Bonnie Lee Bakely and Lana Clarkson sacrificed. The chords of “Californication” by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Forever Changes by Love, Neil Young’s On the Beach and “Pacific Ocean Blues” by Dennis Wilson, just about everything the Doors ever made, the hazy, burbling death rattle that underpins Sly Stone’s “There’s a Riot Goin’ On,” “This Town” by the Go-Go’s, “Welcome to the Jungle” by Guns n’ Roses and “Fuck tha Police” by NWA capture it as do “Los Angeles, I’m Yours” by the Decemberists and most of Jenny Lewis’s recorded output. It’s that flute solo in “California Dreamin.” When I think of L.A. in the nineties, when I knew it, I have tremendous respect for the people I know, like Brendan Mullen, Pleasant Gehman and John Roecker, who lived through L.A. in the early seventies, when life was surely much, much cheaper. We lost River Phoenix at the Viper Room, but we had no Manson family or SLA. Joan Didion, as she does, reduces this pervasive sense of unease excellently in her collection of essays The White Album.