Bowie

by Marc Spitz

  On May 2, Bowie arrived at London’s Victoria Station, returning to perform a scheduled six sold-out concerts at Wembley Pool. With fans waiting and cheering (Gary Numan among them) after the show, he got into a Mercedes Landau limousine and then apparently gave the kids a Nazi salute. Caught on film. Six days later the NME ran the photo with the caption “Heil and Farewell,” and Bowie had a bit of explaining to do.

  Unfortunately, he was happy to explain. In a Playboy interview with Cameron Crowe, Bowie said, “I believe very strongly in fascism. The only way we can speed up the sort of liberalism that’s hanging foul in the air at the moment is to speed up the progress of a right-wing totally dictatorial tyranny and get it over as fast as possible … Television is the most successful fascist, needless to say. Rock stars are fascists too. Adolf Hitler was one of the first rock stars … I think he was quite as good as Jagger.” Bowie is certainly not a racist, having a live-in lover in African American Ava Cherry, and he would later of course marry Iman, the Somalian supermodel. Nor is he an anti-Semite, considering that he has a lifelong friend in Lou Reed and spent his teenage years worshipping Beats like Allen Ginsberg and heroes like Bob Dylan. “It was all just talk,” Carlos Alomar has said. “You have to remember he’s a pseudo intellectual. He is what he reads, and at the time, he was reading so much bullshit.” Regardless, accusers and apologists often overlook the important point that the politics of an artist have little to do with the worthiness of his art. Are Walt Disney’s films less enchanting given what has been reported about his beliefs? Is Phil Spector’s holiday album A Christmas Gift for You any less gorgeous once the weather starts turning chilly? The guy who wrote the piano coda for “Layla” killed his mother. Does that make the song any less balefully romantic? If anything, the location of his perceived “seig heil” was unfortunate. Victoria Station to this day stands as a symbol of England’s resilience against the Nazi Blitz. The trains run on time. The girders are in place. It’s a triumph of British architecture and industry, and any countryman should be proud of it. The timing was poor as well. Alleged anti-immigration comments made by a drunken Eric Clapton that August during a concert in Birmingham would revive the Victoria Station scandal that summer and lead to the formation of the organization Rock Against Racism, which would find support among the burgeoning punk rock community. The Clash played one of its largest public rallies in 1978 and tweaked Bowie in the lyrics to their punk anthem “Clash City Rockers”: “Come on and show me say the bells of old Bowie.” Still, if his perceived political stance placed him firmly in the past, the music he was making, and would continue to make later in the year, would place him miles away from both his peers and the new breed of punks.

  “TVC 15,” a follow-up to the “Golden Years” single, proved an early New Wave hit, and Station to Station remained on the charts through the spring, making Bowie a household name (he made the cover of People and was even parodied by Cheech and Chong whose “Earache My Eye” is credited to “Alice Bowie”). The Man Who Fell to Earth, which was not a commercial success, earned Bowie some plaudits as an actor.

  When the Station to Station tour ended, Bowie, Pop, Tony Visconti and Carlos Alomar decamped to France to begin recording Iggy’s solo debut, named The Idiot, both after the Dostoyevsky novel and as a nod to Iggy’s behavior. It’s as astonishingly inventive, raw, funny and funky as the Station to Station record and is as much of a gateway to Bowie’s upcoming “Berlin trilogy” as that record was as well. “Funtime,” opening with a bleeding electronic hum, a random cough and someone screaming “Fun!” seems like a mission statement—a bunch of pros, a little buzzed and shaking off their pain with inspired fucking about in the French countryside. “Last night I was down in the lab,” Iggy drawls, “talking with Dracula and his crew.” Whether Drac is Bowie or not, the Château d’Hérouville, where Bowie and Mick Ronson made Pin Ups, was certainly a lab. You can hear beeps and humming inventions throughout the track.

  “Nightclubbing,” like Iggy’s later release “Lust for Life,” was given a second life two decades on in the film adaptation of the Irvine Welsh novel Trainspotting. “Baby” is a demented lullaby where Iggy comforts his child by telling him all about the “street of chance,” where the chances are always “slim or none.” Sleep well, kid. The album marks the first appearance of “China Girl,” later a massive hit for Bowie in 1983. Iggy’s rendition is more or less the same melodically, with pretty Chinese bells ringing throughout. It’s evidence of his hidden pop (and not Pop) talents. “Dum Dum Boys” is an elegy for the Stooges, closing the lid on the band’s coffin (until their 2007 reunion album The Weirdness, anyway) with a roll call: “What happened to Zeke? / He’s dead on a jones / How about Dave? / OD’d on alcohol / Well, what’s Rick doing? / Oh, he’s living with his mother … James … he’s gone straight.” Well, not exactly, but Pop and Bowie had certainly gone “straighter” than they’d been. Bowie would reinvent Iggy and Iggy would reenergize Bowie. For the next year, Bowie would record two albums of his own and one more of Iggy’s, tour the world as Pop’s keyboard player and plan another massive arena tour of his own. Both of them, by the almost immovable logic of rock ’n’ roll, should have burned way out by ’77 as the Stones were doing with Keith Richards losing himself to heroin and facing jail time in Toronto. They not only inspired each other, they inspired the very punks who were taking potshots at their peers, like Rod Stewart and Robert Plant, daily. Of all the British rock titans, only the Who would survive punk in a similar state of grace. Compare Bowie’s after-punk fate to that of Mick Ronson, still given to fringe and sequined glam wear, having spent most of ’75 playing arenas as part of Bob Dylan’s mighty Rolling Thunder Revue tour. His platinum shag was intact as well. “Punk came in, and when it came in, it came in with a vengeance,” his widow, Suzi Ronson, recalls. “A total changing of the guard. Went to Wardour Street one night in ’76 or ’77. Mick was still wearing glitter stuff and high heels. We were standing there getting our drinks. It was scary as hell. Safety pins everywhere and kids taking the piss: ‘Look at ’im in ’is glitter gear.’ Pushing us a little bit. ‘You’re not doing so good now, are you?’ We ran down the street in our high-heel platforms terrified of these people coming after us. That was our introduction to punk. David was very smart, you see. He disappeared. Regrouped and absorbed in order to be able to create again.”

  “I probably didn’t really realize the weight of punk and what it was doing in Britain,” Bowie has said. His lack of canniness did him favors. The fact the The Idiot and Lust for Life are both excellent didn’t hurt either. When the tour hit the Palladium, even the Sex Pistols came out to see Bowie’s pal “the Godfather.”

  “Bowie’s affiliation with Iggy gave him a punk pass, yes,” says Tony James, another South London suburbanite, the bass player for Generation X. “It definitely did. Bowie had produced Raw Power when we were in New York Dolls–type bands, long before any of us even thought of being a punk band. He was two or three years ahead of everybody else in terms of spotting Iggy. All of the early punk bands loved Iggy and the Stooges. They were one of the few bands that had that raw sound. Bowie has that sort of godfatherish role for having produced that record.”

  “The big thing with punk,” says Siouxsie Sioux, “was that it was the first time that women were actually involved in music. Bowie especially with all that turning around of gender and role playing, we felt attracted to and felt empowered by that. Rod Stewart and Led Zeppelin were too blokey. Too male and very hetero. They just didn’t open it up and raise any question marks. Or raise any possibilities for any other way than just straight down the middle.”

  “I don’t know if he was even that aware of punk brewing,” music writer Simon Reynolds says. “He was in L.A. and then went straight to Europe pretty much, right? Did the massive self-immersion in European high culture as a kind of inoculation against America/rock/decadence. Whether deliberate strategy or accidental, being out of the UK for 1976 was a great move. He was able to come in early
the next year and eclipse punk, in many people’s eyes, show it up as very traditional and backward looking.”

  The Idiot marks a reversal in the Bowie/Pop relationship. In the early seventies, as Bowie was figuring out his identity (or identities), the Stooges proved a powerful influence. Listening to Iggy’s solo debut, it’s clear that the American maverick is now taking cues from his English pal.

  “The last offering I’d heard from Iggy was the Metallic KO live album,” journalist Kris Needs wrote in Zigzag magazine in ’76, “recorded when he was still the demented daredevil from Detroit, dodging bottles and getting bashed in the face over high speed, pounding riffing from his Stooges.” The live document of the Stooges at their most depraved (circa late 1973/early ’74), Metallic KO is one of the most beloved live albums of all time, not simply for the music, which is brutal and profane (especially their cover of “Louie, Louie”) but also for the live audio of an almost terminally unhinged Pop taunting the audience and being pelted in return with eggs and garbage.

  “Sometimes Iggy sings just like David, especially when he goes down deep. The backings could be straight off Low,” Needs continues, adding, “This is a very strange album, morbid, obscure and unsettling. Like Low it’s aimed squarely at the cold, mechanical future. An attempt to recycle the ‘Search and Destroy’ style on record might have sounded posed and hackneyed in the light of the new wave.” Bowie and Pop clearly found various techniques that worked and inspired them both. They’d often sit together in an available room and read each other’s notebooks, pulling out the best bits and fiddling with nearby instruments until a song came together (some of 1977’s Lust for Life was composed on a ukulele). “I’ve always been in the habit of watching my instrumentalists and seeing if they get that gleam in their eye,” Iggy has said. “If they do, I’m off like a shot to get the tape recorder.” While many credit Bowie with restoring such focus and drive to Iggy, others feel he dismantled the more honest and unruly elements that made the first three Stooges albums so thrilling.

  “I must admit that while I can see how important the Iggy albums are,” Reynolds says, “I don’t really enjoy them that much, give or take the odd song. I think it’s because Iggy is American through and through, and his authentic artistic being is the wildness of the Stooges. It’s ‘Raw Power’ and ‘I Got a Right.’ When he does the croon it’s like he’s been forced to wear a tux and a bow tie. It seems more mannered than Bowie’s croon, where the manneredness seems authentic and to spring from within. But it could just be something where the grain of his voice and its range doesn’t suit the croon style like Bowie’s higher voice does. Iggy always seems like he’s crooning through a belch.”

  Crooning through a belch, by the way, was the last thing Joy Division’s Ian Curtis ever heard, as The Idiot was still spinning on his turntable when he was found hanged in May of 1980.

  19.

  IN JANUARY OF 1975 Brian Eno, then twenty-seven, was nearly killed by a taxi while walking in the Maida Vale section of London. While recuperating in the hospital, a friend brought him some records to help pass the time. They were mixed in stereo, and when one of the speakers in his room malfunctioned, he could only hear the hum of the muted strings and not the harp that was the intended lead. Eno could not get up so he had to lay there and make do. After a while, he found himself enjoying it. Brian Peter George St. John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno was born on May 15, 1948, in the rural town of Woodbridge to a family of eccentrics. A talented but antisocial child, he created internal worlds, drawing and building models. “I loved it to the point that my mother would ask me why I never went out to play,” he would tell the author Michael Bracewell. “The feeling I like is the feeling of making a world of some kind, and that’s what I still like, the feeling of being inside this world and wondering what it would be like if everything was like that. Creativity is always a very strong desire to make a world of your own, in some way, and that could very often or very likely result in wanting an alternative to the one you’re in.”

  There was a military base near Suffolk where Eno heard American rock ’n’ roll music, developing an affinity for early doo-wop. His working-class father, a postman, took advantage of a government grant to send Eno to art school. Questioning and precocious with a healthy disrespect for authority, he incurred the wrath of his teachers with his inquiries and would be expelled from one school and censured at another before he was through. Like Bowie, Eno was a compulsive scribbler, keeping a series of diaries (some have been published) in small black notebooks.

  In 1967, while at art school (his second) in Winchester, Eno bought the first Velvet Underground album. He thinks he may have been the first person in Britain to own it (although the fact that Bowie had a promotional advance copy trumps this claim). Eno is certainly responsible for the most famous quote about it: “Only a few thousand people bought that record, but all of them formed a band of their own.”

  A father when he was barely out of his teens himself, Eno’s prospects seemed bleak: genius or postman. He formed a band called the Maxwell Demon (the name of the Eno–Brian Ferry–Marc Bolan pastiche character in Velvet Goldmine), named after James Clark Maxwell, the scientist who first separated hot and cold molecules. Rather than a guitar or bass, Eno played an electronics testing device. It would emit noise to signal that hardware was functioning. Eno discovered it after taking a job in a retail outlet. Onstage, he would wear feather boas, makeup and velvet corsets, a sartorial choice he would bring to his next band. As a founding member, Eno helped Roxy Music delineate itself from the glut of post-Bolan glitter rock and become, like Bowie, one of the seventies’ true innovators.

  “‘Re-make/ Re-model’ uncannily reminds you of all the rock songs you ever heard,” the NME wrote of the debut’s opening track. “Until you listen for Eno’s synthesizer.” “Editions of You,” off the follow-up, 1973’s For Your Pleasure, stands as evidence that only Stevie Wonder was Eno’s rival as far as expanding the scope of a classic pop track with electronic eccentricity and vision. After parting ways with Roxy (who immediately became more of a slick affair with lead singer Bryan Ferry’s super-elegance unrivaled and unchecked by the equally personable and naturally questioning Eno), Eno released a pair of solo records that can be considered straightforward, if typically eccentric, pop, but in the wake of Here Come the Warm Jets and Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy), he was rapidly tiring of the standard procedures of rock ’n’ roll studio recording. Another Green World (1975), Discreet Music (1975) and Before and After Science (1977) are direct results of the abovementioned car accident. Another Green World in particular points the way to the sound Eno, Bowie and longtime producer Tony Visconti would perfect on the three Bowie records they would make together between 1976 and 1979. At their best, these records, Low, “Heroes” and Lodger, as well as much of Eno’s solo work, are marked by sturdy and masterfully structured song-writing thrown into the sonic playpen and fiddled with by precocious and gifted children. With Eno, Bowie pursued a stripping away of all learned musicianship and a return to primal, childlike innocence. Unlike many wealthy and world-famous artists, they preserved an urge to ask “Why not?” and retained a boundless enthusiasm for new toys (in this case, prototypes and rejects from the rapidly advancing synthesizer technology). Each album from both Bowie solo and Eno solo is unique. Eno’s rhythm section tends toward the jazzy and noodling (see Another Green World’s “Sky Saw”), whereas Bowie prefers a more smashing and dramatic drum sound and a louder, more danceable bass, but for this period, which was crucial not only to Bowie’s career, but to the progression of modern pop, or pop as “art,” the two men shared a cause. When they’d find themselves losing inspiration, Eno had devices to illuminate their path. Among these, perhaps his most famous, were the Oblique Strategies. These were aphoristic suggestions printed on cards and randomly generated and applied. These instructions (“Honor thy error as a hidden intention”) were supposed to subliminally inspire the musicians to create spontaneously and more freely.
Bowie adored them.

  “I’d got tired of writing in the traditional manner that I was writing in while I was in America,” Bowie recalled in 1978 (while in the midst of his Eno period), “and coming back to Europe I took a look at what I was writing and the environments I was writing about and decided I had to start writing in terms of trying to find a new musical language for myself to write in. I needed somebody to help with that because I was a bit lost and too subjective about it all.”

  Bowie, Visconti and Eno even chucked out the traditional approach to recording an album, even more remarkable given the back-to-back commercial success of both Young Americans and Station to Station. Given the support that RCA threw behind Bowie during the split with Defries, Bowie might have felt obliged to deliver a third big hit and further solidify his status. Instead, he threw out the model and any schedule and decamped to France to see what would happen. Musicians now do this all the time. A band like Radiohead will routinely bunker for two or three years, recording bits and pieces of ideas from rehearsals or jams or experimentation among its individual members. In 1976, this was unheard of. Artists turned in records in time to be released for holidays and summers. “The three of us agreed to record with no promise that [the new album] would ever be released,” Visconti wrote of the sessions for Bowie’s follow-up to Station to Station. “David had asked me if I didn’t mind wasting a month of my life on this experiment; if it didn’t go well, hey, we were in a French château for the month of September and the weather was great.”

  Life in the Château was, in its way, a return to the Arts Lab for Bowie, a shift back to art by the eternally metronomic art vs. commerce swing. It was highly glamorous hippie-style living. For the most part, RCA left him alone, a decision they would soon come to regret. Bowie was committed to the process, sensing that it was a key to his future, and so he placed himself far from any shortsighted influences for the time being, knowing full well that they would eventually weigh in. The inevitable scolding he knew he would receive only made the experimentation that much more satisfying.