by Marc Spitz
There are those who consider Scary Monsters Bowie’s last perfect album. There is certainly an energy that Scary Monsters possesses that many of his worthy “good” records (1995’s Outside, 2002’s Heathen) cannot claim. More accurately, it may be Bowie’s last “young” record. That’s to say his last perfectly confident statement, the final time that David Bowie’s search for the “new” in our world of sound feels pure, as opposed to betraying itself, somewhere in its sequenced tracks, as a means to merely revive himself. “There is an opportunity to draw a tidy line there,” Charles Shaar Murray says.
There are tracks on Scary Monsters that vie with his best seventies work. “Up the Hill Backwards,” one of the album’s four singles, has an acoustic Bo Diddley beat and decidedly un-Diddley-like lyrics about tabloid culture (Bowie’s divorce from Angie was finalized the year of the album’s release). The title track finds Bowie singing in his Michael Caine Cockney voice for the first time since the late seventies. “Fashion” has a great dissonant guitar, courtesy of Fripp, and a bass line that wouldn’t be out of place on a post-punk effort by Gang of Four or the Slits.
Scary Monsters was another American Top 20 hit record, but Bowie was not through keeping critics who might have been prone to relegate him to the past on their toes and remained, as Charles Shaar Murray had pointed out, a “moving target.” How else does one explain the sudden decision to take over the role of John Merrick in the touring company of the Victorian gothic tragedy The Elephant Man and open it on Broadway? Bowie was, after all, one of rock’s more classically handsome stars. Much discussion commenced over how on earth he could convincingly inhabit a horribly deformed sideshow freak, which was likely the point. The other key factor had to have been the pure challenge of it all.
“No one with a history of back trouble should attempt the part of Merrick as contorted. Anyone playing the part of Merrick should be advised to consult a physician about the problems of sustaining any unnatural or twisted position,” a warning in the print version of Bernard Pomerance’s play reads. Bowie was a student of movement since the days of Lindsay Kemp’s traveling show Pierrot in Turquoise. He might have connected with the Merrick character on an empathetic and emotional level as well. He too had been an attraction, a performer many people immediately dismissed as freaky (recall Aretha Franklin’s Grammy acceptance speech). Merrick was erudite, sensitive and quick witted, as intellectually sharp as he was physically frightening and fascinating. This juxtaposition appealed to Bowie as well. Bowie’s tormented memories of MainMan and Tony Defries might have had a hand in his unpredictable choice to take on the stage play. Merrick was managed by “Ross,” a vulgar individual who had no real respect for his client’s intellect and chewed on and on about “tuppences” he received from gawkers, also oblivious to the real man underneath all the grotesque folds and boils.
While recording Scary Monsters in New York City, Bowie’d met with the play’s director Jack Hofsiss to discuss the part. As with his first major film role in The Man Who Fell to Earth, Bowie would have to prove himself to investors and the established crew. And as ever, Bowie did so with strict professionalism and commitment. According to Hofsiss he impressed the director with his new take on the character. He would play Merrick as a streetwise Cockney with a wry delivery, not the slurping hamminess some less intuitive artist might have gone to.
“His perceptions were right on the money,” Hofsiss has said. Bowie and Corinne Schwab flew to London to view the body cast of the actual John Merrick at the London Hospital archives and his hood and coat sketches and models he’d built. “David asked pertinent questions … he wanted to know how Merrick walked, how he spoke,” P. G. Nunn, the hospital official, has said. “I told him he could not have run because he had no hips. And there was a great distortion of the mouth because the tongue was thick and pushed to one side.”
As with his role as mere keyboardist on the 1977 Lust for Life tour, David found it easy to become a working part of a larger production, keeping his ego in check and collaborating with cast and crew toward a greater end during the arduous rehearsal period. After playing in Denver and Chicago, The Elephant Man was the most talked-about show of Broadway’s fall season, thanks to good word of mouth for Bowie’s performance, which found him disappearing into Merrick as deftly as he had disappeared into the Turkish section of West Berlin after his L.A. psychosis. While the Bowie name on the program ensured a sold-out run, Bowie the artist could find anonymity in this role and, as he had with Low, deliver something wholly inventive. View what little footage is available from the Broadway run and it’s uncanny. Moments after his startling appearance, one quickly loses track of “David Bowie,” international superstar, onstage. He acts mostly with his eyes and body and uses his gift for mimicry to affect Merrick’s impaired speech. “I completely forgot that I was watching Bowie,” says then rival Gary Numan, who took in a performance while on tour in New York. “He became this grotesque figure and I gave him a genuine heartfelt standing ovation at the end of it.”
Reviewing his performance in the New York Times, John Corry wrote, “When it was announced that David Bowie would play the title role in The Elephant Man, it was not unnatural to think he had been cast simply for the use of his name. Fortunately, he is a good deal more than that, and as John Merrick, the Elephant Man, he is splendid.”
Fans clamored to catch a view of Bowie as he walked the short trip from his hotel to the theater every day. Security became an issue. Hofsiss has stated, “David had to isolate himself to come down from the performance and avoid the crowds outside the stage door. A lot of theaters on Forty-fifth and Forty-sixth streets had connecting passageways, so David could exit the theater several ways.”
Another fan had come to see the show as well. Mark David Chapman, in New York with an evil mission to assassinate John Lennon on December 8, caught Bowie in the show just days before. “The day after John was shot, I offered to restage the show so that David could leave the stage periodically when he wasn’t needed to keep his time onstage to a minimum,” Hofsiss has said. “He absolutely refused. We increased the security at the theater, but he made no demands.”
If anything, Bowie must have felt grateful to have a few hours of distraction each night. The murder of Lennon, as it did to any fan of rock ’n’ roll music, shook him to his core. Lennon had been a sort of substitute Terry figure, the older brother he could genuinely look up to and admire. Marc Bolan, whom he’d lost in ’77, had also played that role early on; while technically younger, he’d been the alpha personality to the shy and searching David Jones. The horrible suddenness and violence forced Bowie to reevaluate. After completing his run in The Elephant Man, Bowie flew back to Switzerland and spent the next three years out of the public eye, raising his son and resuming the semihabitual low profile that had always enabled him to cook up projects that meant something to him and eventually to his fans.
A second best-of, ChangesTwoBowie, marked the end of his contract with RCA. Anything Bowie recorded for another year and a half he would have to share with Tony Defries, per their severance agreement, so he found other ways to record and create.
Bowie was in Switzerland in July of 1981 when he got word that Queen was in town recording Hot Space, the follow-up to their worldwide smash The Game, in Montreux. Bowie dropped in. A jam session and John Deacon’s bass line led to “Under Pressure.” The entire song was written, recorded and mixed in one day. Its legacy was once in question, thanks to Vanilla Ice’s sampling of it for his “Ice Ice Baby,” but the song has in the intervening years seen its dignity restored. Roller-disco-friendly bass line aside, it’s one of the more complex singles in either Bowie or Queen’s discography, a suite of sorts, complete with scatting, finger snaps, “Young Americans”–style falsetto and “Heroes”-worthy emoting. Bowie and Queen’s Freddie Mercury might have been tempted to engage in a camp-off (as Bowie would do with Mick Jagger mid-decade on their much less enduring duet, “Dancing in the Streets”), but both men, especially Me
rcury, are uncharacteristically restrained. Next he collaborated with Euro-disco king Giorgio Moroder on the song “Cat People (Putting Out Fire)” (with gasoline, no less), the theme from Paul Schrader’s kinky remake of Cat People starring Nastassja Kinski and Malcolm McDowell. It was recently revived by Quentin Tarantino for a New Wave inspired set piece in his World War II epic Inglourious Basterds. French actress Mélanie Laurent stands in a blood-red cocktail dress as she applies makeup and prepares to meet her fate. It looks like a Berlin music video.
Bowie continued to act as well. There was talk of him playing Abraham Lincoln in avant-garde theater person Robert Wilson’s opera The Civil War. He played the title character in the BBC production of Bertolt Brecht’s Baal, with stained teeth, filthy clothes and fingerless gloves. “Bowie is dressed down, and looks sufficiently debilitated, but one fault of the production is that we don’t get a really convincing impression of either his bodily deterioration or his supposed intellectual brilliance,” the NME griped in its review. “But the point is more Baal’s unceremonious way with spectators, the violence he inflicts upon the social habits of upper and lower classes alike; he is a free-traveling germ, and the only tension in Brecht’s narrative is over the question of Baal’s ruthless misanthropy—can he discard everyone.”
In 1982, Bowie appeared as Catherine Deneuve’s mysteriously aging vampire lover in Tony Scott’s horror film The Hunger. That year Bauhaus, yet another Bowie-mad act from Steve Strange’s generation, cracked the British Top 20 with a cover version of “Ziggy Stardust.” Bauhaus was not post-punk or New Romantic, but rather the alpha band of a subgenre of both: Goth rock. They appear in the killer opening sequence of The Hunger performing the genre’s most iconic song, “Bela Lugosi’s Dead.” Siouxsie Sioux had also transitioned out of punk and post-punk into a more Gothic realm, as had the Cure. In America, bands like L.A.’s Christian Death adopted the slim, elegant-Nosferatu pose of Bowie’s Thin White Duke, as well as the more strangled end of his druggy croon, and made it a touchstone of the movement.
“Again, almost without exception, the Goth performers were glam fans who briefly got caught up in punk and then reverted to type,” Simon Reynolds says. “Bauhaus were totally about that. Their cover of ‘Ziggy Stardust,’ it’s almost like karaoke. It shows the circularity of glam, where fans grow up to be idols, having learned the art of posing from their idols.”
The Hunger is a cult hit among Bowie’s Goth fans today, but it was not the acting triumph that The Elephant Man was. There are moments of great, MTV-informed style (lots of gauzy light, neon and doves) and impressive makeup effects (Bowie ages seventy-five years), and who can fault a lesbian sex scene between Susan Sarandon and Deneuve? But by the third act it plunges into the standard blood-and-gore horror film it had initially been, according to director Tony Scott. “The original script was like a B horror movie,” Scott says of the film today. “My focus was to make it esoteric, and, um … strange and sexy. I was fighting what was on the page. We were one step away from giving them teeth. You know, vampire teeth. And I fought that to the death. I got criticized. I got slammed. It’s a Goth rock touchstone, yeah, but at the time, people hated it. It took me four more years to get another movie.” (That movie, by the way, was Top Gun.)
Viewing these smaller pursuits, from The Elephant Man to his Queen and Moroder recordings, to Baal and The Hunger, one could wonder, especially with a pop chart now ruled by Bowie clones and drones, whether he was done trying to compete on a larger scale and becoming a more selective and less commercially ambitious artiste, à la Brian Eno. One would certainly be dead wrong. The Bowie that was to emerge from semi-exile and resume recording and touring would be yet another reinvention. He would again successfully remove all competition, old (the Stones) and new (Duran Duran and Spandau Ballet), from his path. The eighties, however, with their greedy lust for everything big, loud and tacky, would inform Bowie and not vice versa. The culture of the decade would inflate him to a stardom even bigger and more unwieldy than Ziggy had been. The new Bowie—let’s call him “Straight Bowie”—would no longer be able to handle it. Straight Bowie would never be truly, authentically, crucially and comfortingly freaky again.
“I said, ‘End up in a suit,’” Kim Fowley says, recalling a conversation he had with Bowie in 1972 when Bowie asked, jokingly, “How should I end up?” “After all of the masquerades. All the masks and the costumes, at the very end of it, end up in a suit,” Fowley answered. “Like Sinatra. He had a sixty-year career. The guys who have long careers always ended up in a suit. When I saw the suit in the ‘Let’s Dance’ video, years later, that guy actually listened and observed everything. Maybe he was gonna end up in a suit anyway, but he certainly ended up in a suit. You can only be Liberace so long.”
23.
THE FORCE WITH WHICH MTV took over the culture between 1981 and 1984 and changed the way we process entertainment (essentially in rapidly edited bits) has been well documented, but MTV also changed rock stars themselves, officially transforming them from marketable images to genuine corporate brands. What is David Bowie of the early eighties but a logo or mascot for his own corporation as well as MTV’s? His yellow hair, Cyndi Lauper’s bright red hair, Ric Ocasek of the Cars’ inky helmet head, Tina Turner’s frosty wig, Mark Knopfler’s stupid headband—they all became icons of the age, selling their own product and the lifestyle and ethos of the “MTV generation.” “Too much is never enough” was the slogan, recited by Bowie, and Lauper, Billy Idol, and the Police, in one of the channel’s promo bumpers from this era. Not since the post-Beatles sixties had Bowie invested so heavily in such a preprogrammed zeitgeist, and while the rewards were considerable in terms of record and concert ticket sales, the participant in such synergy ran the risk of becoming indistinguishable from the other brands and icons that flashed across the sixteen-inch screens in millions and millions of homes. What is a David Bowie if he is indistinguishable anyway? No different than Huey Lewis or Pat Benatar or Men at Work?
“Bowie seemed like the veteran of the business,” says original MTV VJ Alan Hunter (who appears as a dancer in the video for “Fashion”). “I was worried about his direction at the time. I would pine for these artists from the seventies that I loved. People like Bowie and Yes. Are they going to have to take that Kajagoogoo approach to continued success?”
What does the early-eighties David Bowie stand for? In a word: positivity. This is why the Straight Bowie of Let’s Dance was such an easy sell to the masses. Gone was any trace of the nihilism and decadence of the early seventies. Let’s Dance put forth as feel-good an ethos as the Cars’ “Shake It Up” or Prince’s “Let’s Go Crazy.” That the motivation for this existential hedonism was Cold War–era mutually assured nuclear destruction—was only a formality. Choosing worry-free happiness or, as Wham’s T-shirts read, “life,” was self-empowerment. Around this time, Bowie sat down for an interview with his Hunger costar Susan Sarandon and explained, “When you’re young and you’re determined to crack the big dream of ‘I have a big statement and the world needs to hear my statement,’ there’s something a bit irresponsible about your attitude to the future. A nonrecognition that the future exists. I think it’s important for youth to have that. My son keeps me remembering that there is a tomorrow. That never really occurred to me before. ‘Tomorrow? This is it. This is now. This is what’s important. Everything’s impermanent, therefore I will just live for the second.’” “Do you worry about the world he is inheriting?” Sarandon asks. “Yes, naturally one has to start taking very positive stands on things. It’s much easier to be nihilistic.” This was the very man who wrote, in the single “1984,” a decade earlier: “You’ll be shooting up on anything, tomorrow’s never there,” and sang those lyrics with a perverse air of encouragement, as though he tacitly approved.
Bowie was for the most part free from the drug addiction that nearly cost him his health and sanity in the mid-and late seventies. He was a single parent with a son on the edge of his teens whom he
adored. To try to fake the angst that fueled his late-seventies work (as well as 1980’s Scary Monsters) would be hard in the new age. He was thirty-five years old, rich and beloved by millions. He spent his days skiing the Alps and his nights with his loving son in a gorgeous house. It seemed a good time to explore this positivity rather than cast around for a superficial edge.
“In the history of the arts one is a rebel when one is young. The high romance dies. Wordsworth was a radical revolutionary in his youth but oh, over time the artist always matures, becomes automatically more conservative,” says Camille Paglia. “Anyone who is still a rebel in middle age or in old age is a fraud! Rebellion is a youthful mode. How can you continue to be a rebel when you’re a millionaire? People who demand that a maturing artist remain a rebel are stuck in adolescent crisis. They want to mummify the pose of rebellion in a major artist of Bowie’s rank. I completely and totally reject that. Bowie, my goodness, broke through so many boundaries. Then he would have been a lesser artist than he is if he had continued like that. Major artists evolve. You can’t have the audience tyrannizing the artist. ‘No, no, stay the same.’”
“It’s hard to say ‘Hey, you can be a nice guy without being a wimp.’ It’s hard to make people believe you don’t have to be a tooth-gnashing, vampiric drug creature of the night to say something important,” Bowie said in ’83. “That same attitude, that same image, has been coming from one particular area of rock for the last fifteen years but it hasn’t done anything except produce casualties.” As he prepared to reenter the pop arena, he had the notion that if one could transform the great futurescapes of 1974’s Hunger City setting for Diamond Dogs and template for its groundbreaking tour or the Los Angeles of Blade Runner (released in ’82 and directed by The Hunger director Tony Scott’s brother Ridley) into something uplifting, it would be quite impossible to resist: a disorienting spectacle of preconceived good feeling.