by Marc Spitz
I remember seeing the “Let’s Dance” video world premiere on MTV. I would spend full days laying on the cool, white-tiled floor in my grandparents’ house, which was situated on the eighteenth hole of the Woodlands Country Club in Fort Lauderdale. Between 1981 and 1988, I watched MTV seven hours a day. I wanted my MTV. It showed me how to live, or at least how to look. I bought a pair of army pants with ties at the ankles and lots of pockets for the storage of ammunition (I put Jolly Ranchers in them) after seeing Joe Strummer in the “Rock the Casbah” video. Pants weren’t much of a commitment, of course. You could take them off and put on another pair, maybe some Guess or Girbaud jeans. Bowie’s new videos made me commit. I had not been motivated by Billy Idol, Dale Bozzio, Nick Rhodes, Terri Nunn or any of the other great blondes of the day to dye my own hair, but when I saw Bowie tapping his toe while strumming his guitar against the wall in that sweaty café, something clicked over in my brain and I found myself standing for the first time in hours. I got a ride to the Eckerd drugstore in my grandfather’s car and endured the full blast of the air conditioner and the Mantovani cassettes, which made the molecules slow and the ride feel three times as long. I found the ladies’ hair products aisle and bought a bottle of something called Sun-In, because the poster in the display featured a woman whose hair resembled Bowie’s as he danced the blues. When we got back, I emptied an entire bottle, soaking my rabbity brown hair. I pulled off my shirt and walked out to the golf course and found the lemon tree that sometimes kept long drives from braining us as we lay out on the chaise lounge, and I baked my head. Every fifteen minutes or so, I’d walk inside and see if I was starting to change. Frustrated by the delay, I bit into the lemons, puncturing them with my teeth, and squeezed them onto my head like it was a fillet of sole. The lemon juice stung my eyes and dried on my cheeks as I reclined and let the chemical reaction take place. I was convinced that by the time I opened my eyes, I would have hair the hue of a baby chick’s ass. Just like David Bowie’s. Instead, my hair looked brown … with blotches of sickly orange scattered across my injured and blistering skull. “Maybe you have to wash it?” I reasoned to myself as I inspected myself in the laundry room mirror. Something about the chlorine in the water must certainly function as some kind of activator. But the heat of the shower spray and, later, the hair dryer only seemed to set the Cheez Doodle–dust orange. Defeated, I padded back into the kitchen, grabbed a Cel-Ray soda and turned on the TV. Nina Blackwood was announcing a video by the Tubes. I looked more like her than I did before, which was no relief. Her hair was terrible. MTV played “Let’s Dance” constantly in the summer of ’83, as they would “Modern Love” and “China Girl” later in the year. Each time, I was reminded of the fact that I was not and could not be David Bowie. By the time he released his next album, Tonight, Bowie’s hair was brown, and so was mine. I had already decided that I wanted to be Morrissey and Michael Stipe and Paul Westerberg instead, but who knows what would have happened if I’d achieved that bright, beautiful yellow the first time? Maybe indie rock only exists because of the thousands of kids who realized that they could never, ever look like David Bowie.
24.
NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR, the year that Bowie had sung about so worriedly a decade earlier on Diamond Dogs, wasn’t exactly the end of free society, but it was certainly a bad year for the artist. Bowie’s heretofore perfect creative choices slowly veered toward either the apathetic or the desperate over the next four years, up until about ’88 (when most agree, he made a valiant effort to recover his mojo).
There’s probably no better metaphor for the decline in the quality of David Bowie’s recorded work in the mid-eighties than the life, work and death of pop artist Patrick Nagel. Nagel, an L.A.-based commercial and fine artist, would sieze on a photo image, usually of slyly grinning female fashion model, and blow out all realistic facial detail with a saturated and usually fairly gaudy color scheme. The end result would call to mind Warhol’s silk-screened portraits without any of the New York–bred street wisdom and wit, but rather a feel-good, West Coast, sun, sex and fitness aesthetic (probably why Nagel rip-offs still grace the walls of strip clubs all around the world). His most famous works include a portrait of Dynasty star Joan Collins and the sleeve for Duran Duran’s second album, Rio, which broke through the same year as Let’s Dance. “Health” was the rage in ’84. Within a year John Travolta and a lyrca-clad Jamie Lee Curtis would appear on the cover in promotion of the film Perfect, in which Travolta’s cynical reporter uncovers what most everybody already knew about these fitness clubs: they’re social networks, places to party and pick up sex partners who are already sweaty. But like being a drug-crazed miscreant, being a health nut requires some commitment. If your passion isn’t really there, participating in either world, dark or light, can prove fatal, as it was in Nagel’s case. On February 4, 1984, Nagel died of a heart attack after participating in a celebrity “Aerobothon” to benefit the American Heart Association. According to the Los Angeles Times, the artist was “out of shape from too many martinis and frozen Snickers.”
In Bowie’s case the only thing that died from his new, golden image was his stature. This was the period where some fans got off the bus, griping, “He stopped being good once he stopped doing blow.” I can remember hearing this as it pertained to Bowie in my own school cafeteria. Bowie was truly healthy. He had stopped doing drugs. He wasn’t even drinking, a device he’d used to wean himself off coke in the late seventies. There is nothing wrong, of course, with such physical fitness for Bowie the person, but for Bowie the artist, who still chain-smoked cigarettes and loved good, strong coffee and English breakfasts, embracing the Nagel-propelled, neon-lit, ocean-breeze-blown “fitness” trend was a means to an end, and it would bite him back. Bowie was, after all, still intoxicated, only in the wake of the Serious Moonlight world tour and platinum sales of Let’s Dance, it was unprecedented mainstream appeal that made him weave off course. Unsure where to navigate now that there was virtually no trace of the fringe about him, Bowie opted to pursue material success again; the pendulum swung toward commerce, but this time around it got stuck there, rusted, perhaps, by a shower of cash and acclaim.
This is not to judge Bowie or take him to task for an uninspired release or two. He was probably sincerely exhausted, having toured all points east and west and turned in high-energy performances at each venue. A longer spell of rest and salubrious recovery time and he might not have been so easily pressured by those who suggested that he rush out the follow-up to Let’s Dance. Bowie was, after all, new to EMI, and it’s natural to want to maintain a certain stock standard. And so Tonight, released in September of ’84, arrived less than nine months after he ended the Serious Moonlight tour in Japan. The album contained just two new Bowie originals, both of which are its high points, the infectious fluff of a lead single “Blue Jean” (another Top 10 hit in England and America) and the moody, jazzy “Loving the Alien.” “This Is Not America,” another bit of dark jazz in collaboration with guitarist Pat Metheny, does not appear on the album but was also released that year on the soundtrack to the Timothy Hutton/Sean Penn spy thriller The Falcon and the Snowman. Also very strong, it suggests what the sound of a follow-up to Let’s Dance might have been if the art/commerce balance had some time to restore itself and Bowie decided to spend more time on a follow-up record. The remainder was comprised of ill-advised covers. Does anyone really need to futz with the Beach Boys’ “God Only Knows”? Other tracks were written in the late seventies with Iggy Pop and Carlos Alomar and already recorded by Iggy, including “Neighborhood Threat” and the title track. An all-star team of eighties producers, engineers and studio men welded it all together, including Hugh Padgham, a veteran of Phil Collins’s solo albums, and Derek Bramble, a veteran of the excellent but monumentally slick disco act Heatwave.
Coming off the juggernaut of Let’s Dance, Tonight sold strongly until most people realized that it was not very good. The same year saw debut full-lengths from Lloyd Cole and the Co
mmotions (Rattlesnakes) and the Smiths’ self-titled release. These bands appealed to the smart college kids who used to live and die for Bowie. New releases from R.E.M. (Reckoning) and Prince (Purple Rain) more than delivered and often improved on triumphs of the previous year. And let’s not even get into Run-DMC’s debut album, which was the warning shot that hip-hop was no longer going to be about shouting out one’s zodiac sign or giving one for the treble and two for the bass. The field was a fast one, and Bowie was winded and weighted with subpar material. “It was rushed,” Bowie admitted years later. “There wasn’t much of my writing on it, ’cause I can’t write on tour and I hadn’t assembled anything to put out. I didn’t have any concept behind it. It was just a collection of songs.”
“The album contains an awful lot of classy filler,” Charles Shaar Murray says. “There’s no center. I think that ‘Loving the Alien,’ for example, is a really flawed attempt by Bowie to create a genuine Bowie epic.” Worse, Bowie tried to hang opulent, leaden and often overlong music videos on the whole lazy affair. As this was the era of Paul McCartney’s Give My Regards to Broad Street, Mick Jagger’s Running out of Luck (co-starring Rae Dawn Chong!) and Dylan’s Hearts of Fire, when all sixties megastars decided it was time to “act,” Bowie, easily the most gifted of the lot, appeared in a twenty-two-minute music video entitled Jazzin’ for Blue Jean, directed by Julien Temple. Temple, a quintessential “big eighties” director who, oddly, can create low-key, captivating documentaries like The Filth and the Fury and The Future Is Unwritten (on the late Joe Strummer), would also bring Bowie into a similarly distended big-screen musical version of Absolute Beginners, also starring Patsy Kensit, not yet the chic queen of Britpop but rather the chipmunk-cheeked lead singer of the band Eighth Wonder. I’m not sure if Jazzin’ for Blue Jean intends to seriously address Bowie’s family history of schizophrenia (I’m thinking, er, not), but David is cast in dual roles: the superego (a nebbish named Vic who stalks girls in pubs and has difficulty maneuvering his hair dryer) and id (Screamin’ Lord Byron, a campy rock star who enters the video on a stretcher, an oxygen mask over his face as if he’s just walked out of a “Diamond Dogs” lyric). A nod, of course, to Romantic poet Lord Byron and proto–shock rocker Screaming Lord Sutch, he sort of qualifies as a new Bowie “character” and certainly has his own dance (hold your arms, point your palms at your face, let your wrists go slack, shake them both to the beat). It’s fun watching Bowie, notorious for his entourages, try to blag his way past the black doorman with lines like “Great Jesse Jackson speech,” but the only real payoff comes when “Mr. Screamin’” takes the stage to sing the hit.
Much better is the cameo that Bowie shot for John Landis’s 1984 release Into the Night, in which Jeff Goldblum plays Ed Okin, an insomniac who somehow gets tangled up in a bloody jewel-smuggling fray involving Michelle Pfeiffer in a red “Beat It”–video jacket. As this is a Landis movie, Bowie is not the only cameo and ends up wrestling to the death with another rock legend, Carl Perkins, in a gore-spattered luxury hotel room. As a fifties rock enthusiast, Bowie must have felt a real teenage thrill getting his on-screen ass throttled by a bona fide rockabilly super-cat. His short, funny turn as Colin Morris, of her Majesty’s secret service, makes one wonder why he was never cast as a Bond villain in all these years.
There were tragedies of the nonprofessional variety as well in ’84. David’s half brother, Terry, then forty-seven, was in serious decline after years spent in and out of mental health facilities. He’d met his wife, Olga, as a fellow patient at the Cane Hill asylum, but life outside the facility was never easy, and after several years of conflicts, often fueled by Terry’s penchant for self-medication with alcohol, she had recently filed for divorce. Terry fell into deep depression after the breakup of his marriage and was readmitted to Cane Hill, where he reportedly attempted to kill himself by jumping out a second-story window. David visited Terry in the hospital infrequently, but when he did he’d bring gifts, like a cassette recorder, cigarettes and some of his favorite books. On January 16, 1985, one week after David’s thirty-eighth birthday, Terry checked himself out of the hospital and walked down to the train tracks in the Littlehampton section of London. He calmly placed his neck on the cold steel tracks and waited for the train to come. All suicide is by definition selfish, but suicide by train is especially so, as it makes a victim of not only the deceased but also the train conductor. It is essentially the act of someone consumed by self-hatred (given the violence it wreaks on the body following the prolonged suspense and dread of first laying oneself across the tracks) and a kind of anger that can no longer be contained inside and is therefore inflicted upon an innocent. Unfortunately, in a country like England, where there are strict gun-control laws, it’s also a popular method of ensuring death (only 10 percent of all attempted train suicides survive). Millions of Bowie fans and tabloid readers were shaken by Terry Burns’s demise, and some went as far as publicly blaming David Bowie for being a negligent brother, while Terry, ill since David’s childhood, clearly needed the kind of constant professional care that nobody would have been able to provide.
Of all people, it’s Angie who provided an explanation for David’s absence. “David really loved him,” Angie says. “I think there is also the regret or the guilt that taking the time and trouble, private care as opposed to the national health care, could have cured him. I think David knew exactly what had to be done and I don’t think he felt he had the time or that he could take the time off from working as hard as he worked at his career to be able to support it. So in the end, Terry was just packed off to a national health mental institute and that didn’t solve anything. Sometimes people just throw their hands up.”
Bowie did not attend Terry’s funeral, opting to send a basket of pink and yellow roses and chrysanthemums instead. The card was inscribed with a brief message: “You’ve seen more things than we could imagine but all these moments will be lost, like tears washed away by the rain. God bless you—David.”
“When all the stories in the press appeared about David not attending Terry’s funeral, I don’t think it was a case of David didn’t want to go,” Angie later said. “I don’t think he didn’t want to do something about it. He just looked at the problem and realized the magnitude of it. It was so enormous that to have got involved he really would have been working on a voluntary basis taking care of someone who had already been abused by the system from an age when David was too young to have been able to do anything about it.”
Bowie did not tour in support of Tonight but, invited by organizer Bob Geldof, he did perform alongside dozens of New Wave favorites and his superstar peers the following July at the London end of the twin Live Aid concerts at Wembley Stadium in London and RFK Stadium in Washington, DC. The international broadcast of the event, on MTV, featured the world premiere of the music video for a hastily recorded duet of Martha and the Vandellas’ Motown classic “Dancing in the Street” with his old (probably platonic) friend Mick Jagger. Like the chart-topping single of the previous December, “Do They Know It’s Christmas” (on which Bowie did not sing but provided a recorded message of goodwill for the extended twelve-inch version), “Dancing in the Streets” would benefit Ethiopian hunger relief. Morally, it’s impossible to impeach the single, but musically, it accomplishes something nearly impossible: it somehow ruins a Teflon Motown classic. Van Halen’s 1982 version (and even Shalamar’s “Dancing in the Sheets”) is far superior. But again, it’s for charity, and the old friends certainly sound like they’re having fun in the studio.
The video, again helmed by David Mallet and shot the same day as the session on the London dockyards, is the camp-off that Bowie had refrained from having with Freddie Mercury four years earlier, full of eye rolls, mugging and Bowie and Jagger trying to out-boogie each other. “It’s a literal video,” says Mallet. “They’re literally dancing in the streets. It’s got its strange bits though. It’s basically what you can do in five or six hours. I think they brought a suit for each o
ther to wear but that was it. We literally made it up as we went along. I think it captured the chemistry between the two people.”
For his live spot at Wembley, Bowie had to throw a band together. He turned to Thomas Dolby, the professorial, somewhat Eno-like electronic pop star who was then scoring big MTV hits with “Hyperactive!” and of course “She Blinded Me with Science.” “He kept changing his mind about what he wanted to do,” Dolby says. “He started off wanting to promote his current single, which at the time was ‘Loving the Alien,’ and then as he got more focused on the event, he realized it was not about promoting your single, you needed to transcend all that and just do a classic performance that would make everybody smile.”