Bowie

by Marc Spitz

  “I wanted to put the stage environment into a place one couldn’t actually pin down,” Bowie told an interviewer that year. “With high-tech columns against a fifties Singapore look. I’d seen Blade Runner and was intrigued the way Ridley Scott did that. There was a huge element of Chinatown in his twenty-first-century city.” Blade Runner offers a double-edged metaphor for his new career path as well. “A new life awaits you in the Off-World Colonies,” a creepy, emotionless voice intones at the start of that film, as the camera pans across the rainy, corrupted, neon Hellscape that is Los Angeles, 2019, patrolled by hovercrafts and lousy with Replicants. “A chance to begin again in a golden land of opportunity and ad venture.” Ironically, the soundtrack, by Vangelis, owes much to side two of Bowie’s Low, that hallmark of gloriously negative angst rock.

  Nile Rodgers, who’d signed on to produce Let’s Dance after meeting Bowie in a New York City nightclub, was expecting to produce a catchy but typically suspicious and unsettled David Bowie record (as all of his albums of the seventies as well as Scary Monsters had been, with the exception of Young Americans). “I was expecting Scary Monsters 2,” Rodgers has said. Bowie shocked him by confessing, “I just want to make a good groove record.” Rodgers, with a then unbroken string of number one records with both his own band, Chic (“Good Times”), as well as Diana Ross (“Upside Down”) and Sister Sledge (“We Are Family”), was the go-to man for such an affair. He and his partners, bassist Bernard Edwards and drummer Tony Thompson, knew R & B, obviously, but they were also fans of the old and new waves of rock ’n’ roll. In 1982, four full years before hip-hop integrated rock, only a handful of artists in America—Rodgers, Michael Jackson, Blondie and Prince among them—were chipping away at that wall that Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler would smash through with a mic stand in the video for their Run-DMC duet “Walk This Way.” All of them had enjoyed crossover success except Rodgers. Jackson had drafted Eddie Van Halen to loan his signature guitar sound to “Beat It,” creating a crossover smash in the process. Blondie topped the charts with “Rapture.” Prince and his racially mixed band relied on angular New Wave riffs and angsty, staccato synth grooves as much as they did roller-disco funk or sexy slow jams. It had angered Rodgers, a onetime member of the Black Panthers, that Chic’s music was only played on pop and R & B radio despite its New Wave sensibility and futuristic production. The Clash’s dance hit “The Magnificent Seven” was in heavy rotation on New York City R & B and disco bastions like WBLS and WKTU. There seemed to be a double standard at work, and for Rodgers, whose stepfather was white (his teenage mother had had an affair with a conga player), it was especially vexing.

  Raised in Greenwich Village, Rodgers began playing guitar at sixteen. By his early twenties, he was making a living with a series of high-profile gigs, including with the house band at Harlem’s Apollo Theater and on the classic PBS children’s program Sesame Street (where future Bowie collaborator Luther Vandross and Fonzi Thornton also worked for a time). By twenty-seven, Rodgers was an international star, but one who could not get played on MTV or white radio as an artist or a producer. He had crafted Debbie Harry’s 1982 solo debut KooKoo but it had failed to achieve the kind of success Blondie had enjoyed.

  “Working with [Rodgers] was an eye opener,” Bowie told Penthouse the following year, “because he pointed out to me a lot of things I hadn’t really noticed about America, about the changes that have taken place for him and how difficult it is now for him to get music played on white radio or white television and boy—he’s talking white radio, white television. When I started watching the cable music channel MTV, I found the racism extraordinarily blatant,” Bowie added.

  “Bowie was the most outspoken critic of the Michael Jackson issue,” says Alan Hunter of the channel’s refusal to play Michael Jackson and other R & B pop artists pre-Thriller. “He slammed [late VJ] J. J. Jackson [an African American]. He was being interviewed and out of nowhere he said, ‘Why don’t you play any black people?’ J. J. sputtered for an answer in defense of MTV.”

  Rodgers, then only thirty, was a huge Bowie fan, having toured England in the Ziggy-mad year of ’73. He felt out of place in his outfit at the time, a straight R & B combo called New York City. “I was very embarrassed doing those old soul standards,” he told The Face in 1984. “I just didn’t fit. Sometimes blacks can be straighter than whites, older middle-class blacks. I’d come in with brocade jackets, patched jeans, and silver purses dangling from my shoulder. I was doing lots of acid. I saw myself as a rock superstar.” Chic, according to legend, was inspired to add female singers Norma Jean Wright and Luci Martin to the band’s then unsuccessful lineup by noticing the models on the covers of Roxy Music sleeves.

  Since the mid-seventies, Rodgers had envied the career path of his old acquaintance Carlos Alomar. “My whole life I’ve been following Alomar,” he said. “All the things I wanted to do, he got there first. He had the Apollo job, the Bowie job …” When the Bowie collaboration began, the Chic leader figured he would finally have a chance to demonstrate that he could make a real New Wave record for a mostly white audience. As they worked through the winter, recording the demos Bowie had written in Switzerland during his extended hiatus (as well as Iggy Pop’s “China Girl”), it became clear that it was now both David Bowie and Nile Rodgers’s turn to cross over with something that not only combined the best of both genres but, like Station to Station, created something new entirely, a sort of future-funk blues that felt both modern and classic at the same time. The sound that Rodgers and Bowie hit upon in the winter of ’82, holed up in the Power Station, would also be used to create Rodgers-produced soulful New Wave hits for Madonna (“Like a Virgin,” “Material Girl”), Duran Duran (“The Reflex,” “Wild Boys,” “Notorious”), INXS (“Original Sin”), the Thompson Twins (“Lay Your Hands on Me”), the B-52s (“Roam”) and even Mick Jagger (She’s the Boss) by the end of the decade.

  David Bowie the free agent was a hot property but the star opted to sign with EMI on the strength of Queen’s recommendation. Finally free of Tony Defries in a contractual sense, eight years after leaving MainMan, with his divorce final and enough artistic credibility and cultural cachet to bank for life, he was no longer hampered by the past. Like Roxy Music’s Avalon, a major hit for the veteran art rockers in 1982 (also granting them a fresh, young MTV audience), Bowie’s new material would be unapologetically romantic and defiantly pleasing to listen to. In fact, that would be its edge.

  In the years since Let’s Dance’s worldwide release in the spring of 1983, it has been unfairly maligned by Bowie purists as his sellout record, but it’s every bit as high concept as his canonized seventies efforts. Unlike some of its more diluted, less successful follow-up efforts, like 1984’s Tonight and ’87’s Never Let Me Down, Let’s Dance was, in its way, as revolutionary as Ziggy Stardust, Station to Station or Low.

  “This record is pure celebration,” Charles Shaar Murray raved in his NME review of Let’s Dance’s title track, “a tribute to love and life that is as uncontrived as anything he’s ever done in his entire career … With this album, Bowie seems to have transcended the need to write endlessly about the dramas of being David Bowie and about all his personal agonies. This album just goes straight to the heart of it: it is warm, strong, inspiring and useful. You should be ashamed to say you do not love it.”

  Side one opens with a chukka-chukka rhythm at once funky and strange, followed by a soothing electronic riff and Bowie announcing, “I know when to go out, I know when to stay in. And get things done.” “Modern Love” is the sound of someone who’s been away, reflecting some (“It’s not really work / It’s just the power to charm”). The new times terrify him some, but he’s going to use the fear and stay positive. “China Girl” differs from Iggy’s ’76 version primarily thanks to Bowie singing the melody and a soulful “little China girl” before the verse (which is more or less identical to Iggy’s). The arrangement of the Chinese bells is altered slightly for maximum pop impact as well, but
who can blame him? How else does one take lyrics like “I stumble into town, just like a sacred cow / Visions of swastikas in my head” into the British and American Top 10? And just putting the song on Let’s Dance enabled Iggy to survive the eighties and probably the early nineties too (up until his fluke Kate Pier-son duet hit “Candy” anyway). Completing the front-loading of the album (three hit singles in a row) is the title track, easily the most unconventional number one hit single of the modern era. With wood-block percussion, short bleating horns and Tony Thompson’s titanic drums driving the track for nearly eight minutes, Bowie pours out his most romantic and insistent vocal performance since “Heroes.” He starts out cool and flirty (“Put on your red shoes and dance the blues”) and finishes all sweaty (“If you should fall into my arms, tremble like a flower”). I interviewed the singer/songwriter M. Ward in the summer of 2009 and took a moment to ask him about his striking cover of “Let’s Dance,” which breaks the hit down to its basics and reimagines it like a Nina Simone torch song. “I always wanted to do a stripped down version of a dance song,” he says. “The beautiful thing about ‘Let’s Dance,’ I found are the lyrics. The production is great but it tends to hide the fact that the lyrics are so good. It’s a song I remember from my childhood, but I didn’t really realize what Bowie was saying in that song until I recorded it.” “Let’s Dance” also introduces the concept of “Serious Moonlight,” the title of the world tour. Bowie told an interviewer around this time that the term “serious moonlight,” a refrain throughout the song and the moniker of the Let’s Dance world tour, is essentially meaningless.

  “It was an Americanism that I liked. Serious this … serious that …” Lyrically, however, the magic comes from trying to picture said moonlight. Is it blue? Yellow? Low hanging and full or an intriguing sliver peering through some windblown clouds? Or maybe it’s a half moon, like the tour set’s model or the mylar balloons dropped on the crowd in the “Modern Love” video? The other hallmark of “Let’s Dance,” of course, is the appearance of guitar god Stevie Ray Vaughn, contributing just one blues note midway through and taking the song out with his distinctive, fat but tough, weirdly melancholy style. Vaughn, then just twenty-eight, was a Dallas-born hotshot whose band Double Trouble had just started to come up from the bar circuits thanks to high-profile appearances at jazz and blues festivals like Switzerland’s Montreux (where Bowie first saw him in ’82). By the time “Let’s Dance” topped the charts, he had released his own hit record Texas Flood and opted out of playing on the Serious Moonlight tour (there were rumors that he’d fallen out with Bowie after Double Trouble were booked and then dropped as the opening act for the entire tour). Nobody has sounded quite like him since his death in a helicopter crash in August 1990, and each time another guitarist (whether it’s Earl Slick, who did the tour in ’83, or Peter Frampton, who toured with Bowie in ’87) plays the song, they can do nothing but humbly imitate the man. Most people stop listening to Let’s Dance here, but the album still has much to offer. “Without You” is a classy midtempo ballad that strongly resembles early-eighties Roxy Music. “Criminal World” has a pop reggae groove that acts like Sade and UB40 would do much with as the decade wore on. “Cat People (Putting Out Fire),” Bowie’s 1982 collaboration with Giorgio Moroder, reappears as well. “Shake It,” with its falsetto delivery and female backing vocals, is something like a godparent to U2’s 1993 hit “Lemon.”

  Straight Bowie appears stripped to the waist and shadowboxing on the album’s sleeve. He is tan, rested, with a little meat on his bones (he actually looks like he might be able to take you in that fight). The real achievement is the hair, however, his most radical tonsorial statement since the Red Hot Red Ziggy rooster cut a decade earlier.

  “I thought the Serious Moonlight preppy look was a terrific contrast to the sort of spaced-out pale scrawny look,” says David Mallet, who shot the trio of videos for the album’s three smash singles. “It was so different and unexpected. And he looked great.” “To me the Let’s Dance persona was the last massive and significant change to his image,” Simon Reynolds says. “He went from being cocaine-ravaged thin, with this totally gaunt, pallid face, to this new healthy look—blond hair, tanned looking, very exuberant.” Presenting himself to a live audience, Bowie would choose a peachy yellow/orange zoot suit. As a student of painting he must have known that the color of the fabric, like the color of his new hair, called sunshine and positive energy to mind. There were few rock stars of Bowie’s caliber touring the world in 1983. The Rolling Stones had made their stadium run in ’81. The Who had played their “farewell tour” in ’82. Rod Stewart, Billy Joel, AC/DC and Def Leppard were playing arenas, but none of them promised the theatrical experience that a Bowie concert did, and advance ticket sales were beyond brisk. Only the Police’s tour in support of Synchronicity came close. The Serious Moonlight tour kicked off in Brussels on May 18 and then traveled to Germany on May 20, followed by dates across England. American audiences were given a preview when David Bowie headlined the third and final day of the second annual (and last) US Festival in southern California (along with Stevie Nicks, the Pretenders and U2). Bowie, Van Halen and, most controversially, opening-night headliners the Clash were all rumored to be paid seven-figure fees by the festival’s sponsor, Apple Computers.

  Serious Moonlight hit American sports arenas in July before traveling to the Pacific rim in late ’83 (over two million people would purchase tickets by the end of the run). Bowie’s big band (Slick; Alomar; Thompson; bassist Carmine Rojas, replacing George Murray; sax men Lenny Pickett, Stan Harrison and Steve Elson; keyboardist Dave Lebolt and backing vocalists the Simms brothers) all dressed in retro hepcat zoot suits and wide-brimmed hats in uplifting shades of green and peach. The set list drew from Bowie’s entire career, opening most nights with a bluesy “The Jean Genie” (Mick Ronson sat in with the band during a tour stop in Canada) and spacing the Let’s Dance material and other hits like “Heroes” and “Rebel Rebel” throughout lesser-known material like Low’s “What in the World” or the Velvets’ “White Light/White Heat.” “Modern Love” closed the show most nights. This would be Bowie’s first tour to employ massive monitors on either side of the stage, which the visually savvy star knew instinctively how to work for the nosebleed seats of stadiums. Thanks to rave word-of-mouth from the European dates, anticipation for the American leg and the chart success of “China Girl” on the heels of “Let’s Dance,” Bowie became one of the rare rock stars to grace the cover of Time magazine. “Yes, Michael Jackson may have sold more records, and yes, the Police can sell out Shea Stadium. But Bowie, in many ways, can meet them and match them both, and offer something else too. A Bowie concert, shorn of excessive theatrics, is a raved up tutorial in rock ’n’ roll survival. A history lesson with a horn section. This show is about the fall and rise of David Bowie,” writer Jay Cocks observed. Serious Moonlight was a blockbuster in part because it marked the first real generation shift in ticket buyers, from baby boomers to teenage future Generation Xers.

  Serious Moonlight was, like the ’78 tour, unencumbered by darkness, but Bowie’s taste in film roles had not mainstreamed along with his music. Prior to the release of Let’s Dance, Bowie filmed a small part in a homo-erotic film called Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence. Bowie played a yellow-haired British army officer who becomes the object of the painfully unrequited love of a Japanese officer, played by Ryuichi Sakamoto, then a Japanese pop star in Yellow Magic Orchestra (themselves a synth-pop act highly influenced by the Berlin trilogy). Sakamoto was in the crowd when Bowie took the Ziggy stage show to Japan and remained a devotee for a decade. The film, directed by Nagisa Oshima, the Japanese maverick who helmed In the Realm of the Senses, was filmed in the Pacific islands. Bowie shared an intense, blue-lit love scene with Sakamoto, who snatches a lock of his hair before leaving him to die, buried up to his neck in the hot sand.

  “He’s buried and he’s dying and he understands the love between enemies,” Sakamoto tells me, describing t
he scene today, “He is generating some special vibrations and I really felt that. It was a Christlike death … When I cut his hair when he’s buried, that moment in life really felt that spirit. I’d heard of that kind of love going on in the army. A man’s world.”

  It was a brave film for its time, and Bowie confused many of his longtime gay fans by giving an interview to Rolling Stone’s Kurt Loder early in the year where he dismissed his liberating early-seventies revolution as “youthful experimentation.” If there was one real contention that came with the massive success of the new Straight Bowie, this was it. With homosexual men just starting to die of “the gay cancer,” some felt this was an act of betrayal. Now that he was a mainstream pop star on the cover of Time, he was turning his back on the very community that supported him all along.

  “That’s about the time he was being very coy about not really being bisexual … that appealed to me because I was hoping that my sexuality, that I would outgrow it too,” says performer Justin Bond, a Bowie fan since the mid-seventies. “A couple of years later though, I was really turned off by him. I didn’t like him at all. Because of that bullshit. ‘Experimentation.’ By then I was a politicized queer radical and I was like, ‘Fuck him and fuck that.’ I didn’t feel betrayed, I just felt like he was a product. But then he lost his touch, didn’t he? For many people it was a betrayal. You can’t take that back. ‘Oh, no, I really am cool. I really am on your side.’ At a time when Reagan was in office and AIDS was rearing its head he decided he was going to cash in on his white, male privilege and put a distance between him and his stigmatized fans, and by doing that, he basically said, ‘Okay, I am the dick that you love hating. I am Rod Stewart.’ And that’s what he’s like now.” Professor Paglia offers a counter-theory. “Throughout the eighties, because of AIDS, a lot of punitive stuff was coming from gay activists. It was a period of censoriousness. If so and so does not fulfill the agenda for the socially approved message du jour then they’re a traitor. I hated that about gay activism. I follow the Oscar Wilde theory here, that the artist has no obligation to any social cause. The artist has an obligation only to art. This business of reading artists the riot act is what the Nazis did and what the Stalinists did. You’re asking art to serve a propagandistic purpose. Art is not a branch of sociology. It’s not a branch of social improvement. Not a branch of the health sciences. Bowie, in my view, had no obligation to say ‘I’m gay.’ His obligation is only to his imagination. It’s the extreme view but I think, quite frankly, it’s the authentically gay view. The other view is from people who have driven a wedge between gay culture and the arts. It’s the same attitude Gloria Steinem has about Picasso. Picasso was a bad man and therefore a bad artist?”