Bowie

by Marc Spitz

  Kizilcay was raised in an Istanbul orphanage but found a way out through music, largely inspired by his love for the Beatles. “David once said that my knowledge starts with the Beatles and ends with the Beatles,” he recalls today. In terms of preference this may be semiaccurate (he is also a jazz aficionado), but in terms of ability, Kizilcay was a prodigy. A conservatory student, he could play guitar, drums, bass, keyboards and any number of exotic woodwinds, strings or horns. Asked to contribute to the soundtrack of an animated British antiwar film, When the Wind Blows, in late ’86, Bowie turned to Kizilcay and ended up recording vocals over one of his finished demos. Kizilcay had relocated to Bern but ended up making the forty-five-minute trip to Bowie’s chalet in the small lakeside town of Lausanne to eat dinner, drink wine and talk music. “We used to see each other twice a week,” he tells me, “to work on songs together. Sometimes he’d come to my place and my wife would cook for him. During one of these sessions, David heard the demo. One day he called and said, ‘I loved that demo. Can we turn it into a big classical explosion?’” They added trumpet, trombone, more guitar and bass, as well as one of Bowie’s most committed vocals of his eighties oeuvre, helping both the film and the soundtrack become a huge hit in England. “It became something very powerful,” Kizilcay says. A good start back to creative solvency for certain.

  If Kizilcay primed Bowie for the give-and-take that yielded quality results, Tin Machine found him in full-on embrace of the device. The party line on Tin Machine varies. Some see Bowie’s short-lived band (’88 to ’92, roughly) as the sonic and sartorial equivalent of your dad or uncle feeling his age and getting an earring or a too-fast Italian car. However, two decades on from their self-titled debut, this is a totally unfair dismissal, and the notion that Bowie gave himself an authentic jump start by enlisting three other dudes and ginning up the old droog spirit of ’72 may actually be the one that holds. I don’t want to be one of those rock writers who exult in the contrary just because it’s pleasingly perverse, but I tend to agree with theory number two. If I wanted to be perversely contrary, I would certainly try to convince you that Tonight and Never Let Me Down are underrated. There are entire websites devoted to such second opinions, and one of them does readdress the Tonight album.

  Tin Machine was guitarist Reeves Gabrels and Hunt and Tony Sales from the Lust For Life sessions in Berlin in ’77 and its subsequent tour. Gabrels, then thirty-two and a veteran of semi-successful East Coast bands like Rubber Rodeo, was married to Bowie’s Glass Spider tour publicist and traveled with the extravaganza with all-access credentials. He and Bowie would hang out backstage, watching television, smoking cigarettes and talking about everything except rock ’n’ roll. At night, Gabrels, a huge Bowie fan since the early seventies, would watch the dancers and the theatrics from the floor and wonder what was motivating his hero (if anything). “I said to myself, ‘I would love the opportunity to just collaborate with him and bring this back to something that wasn’t about having a dance troupe,’” he tells me. “But it was just a pipe dream, so I didn’t bring it up. Instead, we’d watch Fantasy Island with the sound off and make up our own story line.”

  When the tour ended, Gabrels’s wife, Sarah, slipped Bowie her husband’s demo cassette, containing short snippets of his solo and band work and showcasing his unique sound, which was improvisational and multinote but simultaneously hard and bluesy. When Bowie called a year later, Gabrels, a graduate of the prestigious Berklee College of Music in Boston, figured he was being pranked by one of his musician friends or old classmates. “I said, ‘All right, who the fuck is this?’ and David, trying to convince me that he was really himself, said, ‘Remember we made up a plotline of Fantasy Island?’ Which was something only he would know.”

  Gabrels flew to Switzerland in the early spring of 1988 and spent several days in the studio with Bowie just talking about their favorite records and playing around with guitars. “He told me that he was confused by the success he had in the eighties and didn’t know who his audience was anymore,” Gabrels recalls. “Suddenly people were mentioning his name in the same breath as Phil Collins. And you know, everything became pastels. Everything looked like you walked off the set of Miami Vice. Let’s Dance was a legitimate artistic thing and the following two albums were the dog chasing his tail. So with Tin Machine what you got was him finally screaming, ‘Fuck!’”

  Gabrels, and later the Sales brothers, figured they’d simply be helping Bowie complete his follow-up to Never Let Me Down and were taken aback when he informed them that his next vehicle (appropriately dubbed Tin Machine, after an automobile or an airplane or hovercraft—anything that transports from a less desirable locale to a new one) would be a full-on band project. He would simply be David Bowie, lead singer of Tin Machine.

  This was clearly another branding decision, à la Let’s Dance, but at least it was, after a half decade of meandering as stylists and producers made suggestions, one that was self-devised. Bowie clearly had a vision for the kind of noise he wanted to make and didn’t feel like his audience would be ready for it if it were sold to them as a David Bowie album.

  “I argued with David that I didn’t think it was a good idea to make it a band,” Gabrels says. “But he needed to make something that would fall on the barbed wire of expectation. Fall on it and absorb the shock so that if all else failed he could run up the back of it. If the band didn’t make it through the barbed wire at least he’d have the opportunity to run up its back and jump over.”

  As work began on the Tin Machine record in Mountain Studios with producer Tim Palmer, it became clear to all involved that a band was a band, no matter who is singing lead. An authentic gang-of-four dynamic began to take shape. “He wanted to get back to that sweaty vibe,” says Hunt Sales today. “Four guys in a basement.” Forget that the basement was an expensive studio in a gorgeous lakeside town in Switzerland. This was, again, art and commerce, Bowie’s eternal pendulum rhythm. “One for them, one for me.” Only it had been “Three for them, none for me” since Let’s Dance.

  “Heaven’s in Here,” the lead of the album’s fourteen tracks, serves to formally announce the return of a star to newly sharp focus. It’s a hard, unadorned retro blues that calls to mind the early Rolling Stones, while Hunt Sales’s live, kit-abusing drums are nothing if not the antithesis of all that awful, canned eighties percussion. On the title track, a chugging rocker with a Sun Studios rockabilly beat, Bowie shouts, “C’mon and get a good idea / C’mon and get it soon.” “Crack City” sees the return of the steely rock ’n’ roll drawl that had been mothballed since the days of the Ziggy rooster cut. Hearing Bowie spit out lyrics like “They’re just a bunch of assholes / With buttholes for their brains,” one can imagine them being written over a particularly surly breakfast. This was not Bowie’s only foray into stinging social commentary. Tin Machine reminds me of “Repetition,” a brutal track on Lodger about domestic violence and economic oppression. Best of all is “Under the God,” with Gabrels’s ferocious riffing and Bowie’s disgusted antiracist rants about skinheads in boiler suits looking for minorities to annihilate. If there was any doubt left over about his fascist leanings given his mother’s history and his insane ranting to Cameron Crowe in ’76, this track served to put it to bed for good. Even the ballad (“Amazing”) is as serviceable as anything Aerosmith produced during the same period. And what is it about John Lennon’s “Working Class Hero” (given a reggae-ish workout here) that is so irresistible to a world-beating artist post–stadium tour? (Green Day recorded it in 2007 after conquering the planet with American Idiot.)

  Some weren’t buying the new austerity, of course. According to some, this was filet mignon chopped up to resemble dog food, faux sloppy art rock made by a wealthy professional musician and his more or less virtuoso pals. “When I first saw Tin Machine, I thought, ‘Okay, they’re well-dressed men playing this angular sharp-edged indie rock sound,’” says Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth. “The thing that I didn’t buy into—this isn
’t happening because you guys play too well. And what is really interesting about truly underground music is that the musicality is really sort of primal and raw and new. Tin Machine can’t reference this kind of music because they’re too good as players. It’s okay to a degree but it was putting on the airs that it was an indie rock band and it was hardly that. I felt a little affronted by it.”

  Gabrels himself observed, “Chops was a liability,” what with their combined playing experience totaling about seventy-five years. The dark suits in which they appeared on the cover of the album could not have helped them avoid this problem, as it tended to make them look like a gang of clean-cut bankers. Even more polarizing was the goatee that Bowie grew for the first time in his career: a neatly trimmed mustache and beard that threw many older fans almost more than the startlingly bleak and unadorned new sound. Bowie with facial hair?

  In the continued interest of giving the Tinners a measure of respect they have been denied for nigh on two full decades, it should be noted that Tin Machine took the Sunset Boulevard leather and fringe and hair-spray and glitter out of rock ’n’ roll a full two years before Nirvana broke as well. In 1989 and 1990 most rock stars took the stage in spandex and fringed leather. Tin Machine, in the mirror at least, was a by-product of three little stars and one very big star fed up with the rock ’n’ roll scene.

  Released in May of 1989, the album was a chart hit in England and the single, “Under the God,” was embraced by modern and hard rock radio in America. Critics were divided, however. While Q praised the band for sounding “hysterical and full of life,” others found them a distasteful fraternity, especially since much of Bowie’s appeal hinged on his sensitivity to both his male and female sides. “I didn’t understand Tin Machine, I have to say. It had an ugly macho side to it,” says writer Jon Savage of the music.

  “For me that band was absolutely necessary,” Bowie said in 2003. “It accomplished what it was supposed to do, which was bring me back to my absolute roots and set me back on the right course of what I do best.” Tin Machine embarked on a tour that found Bowie playing large clubs and theaters for the first time since the early seventies (their live set can be heard on the 1991 release Oy Vey, Baby). In between Tin Machine and Tin Machine II, however, Bowie had to put together a career-retrospective tour he’d agreed to do which seemed, in light of his recent creative rebirth, something of a chore.

  In late ’89 indie label Rykodisc, which had done a similar thing with Frank Zappa’s back catalog, made an offer to rerelease Bowie’s now classic RCA albums on newly remastered and repackaged CDs. Bowie saw this as a good business opportunity but insisted that the only way he would agree to it would be if each album included bonuses and rarities. This was long before that became common practice. He shot a video clip with Gus Van Sant (then fresh off his breakthrough film Drugstore Cowboy) for a remixed version of “Fame” as a promotional endeavor as well. Produced by Arthur Baker (of New Order fame), the best thing you can cay about “Fame ’90” is that it’s much better than the Police’s “Don’t Stand So Close to Me ’86” but far inferior to George Michael’s “Freedom ’90.”

  A four-disc box set, named Sound and Vision after the 1977 single off Low, was also planned, containing even more rarities, including a pair of Bruce Springsteen and Chuck Berry songs (“It’s Hard to Be a Saint in the City” and “Round and Round”). In yet another example of his renewed commitment to innovation, even while filling the coffers, Bowie decided to make the set list selection for the promotional Sound and Vision tour an interactive event. A phone line was set up and fans could call in and vote. The songs with the most votes would be performed on the tour. But there was one glitch. Egged on by a prankish NME editorial staff, many of the callers were voting for Bowie’s ’67 novelty single “The Laughing Gnome” to be played alongside serious fare like “Station to Station” and smashes like “China Girl” and “Modern Love.” Bowie took this with appropriate good humor but disqualified the votes, noting that it was not a sincere request.

  Adrian Belew, from the ’78 touring lineup, was recruited, as were Erdal Kizilcay, drummer Michael Hodges, keyboardist Rick Fox and yet another dance troupe, La La La Human Steps. As with the White Light tour following the spectacle of 1974’s Diamond Dogs outing, Bowie’s post–Glass Spider trek was a study in understatement. Even La La La Human Steps was corralled and less intrusive. Bowie hid much of the band in darkness, opting to sing much of the material by large, static monitors (often showing videos of his classic hits), and his stage costume was nothing more elaborate than a white shirt and black trousers. For all its class and commercial success (another sold-out run), Sound and Vision, on the heels of Tin Machine, seemed like more of a professional obligation than something truly new and exciting. This was, critics agreed, good Bowie again, but it was hardly liberated Bowie.

  “One thing I can tell you is he wasn’t very happy on that tour,” Kizil-cay says. “Something wasn’t working. It was a weird atmosphere. Backstage he would get angry with us and say, ‘If nothing happens you should move onstage, do something special.’ I think he doesn’t like looking back.”

  Tellingly, almost immediately after the tour closed, Bowie set about working on Tin Machine II and seemed happy to move forward once again. Another tragedy, however, would force him to dig back into the catalog one last time. In November of 1991, Bowie’s friend and duet partner Freddie Mercury died of an AIDS-related illness at just forty-five years old. Bowie accepted an invitation to appear at a massive tribute concert at London’s Wembley Stadium on April 20, 1992. He took the stage wearing a lime-green suit, his blond hair slicked back. Clutching a gleaming saxophone, he seemed more than willing to reference the past. The fact that Tony Defries, his former manager, was in the audience watching the show didn’t even seem to put any damper on Bowie’s vigor. Everyone seemed to be willing to put ego aside to celebrate Mercury’s memory.

  “At the end of the sixties,” he told the crowd, “we were left with a legacy of quite wonderful bands … we all used to play the same dance halls and theaters, play the same clubs, try not to wear the same clothes, slept with a lot of the same people. One of the major rockingest bands of that time was called Mott the Hoople.” Ian Hunter emerged with his trademark dark glasses, then another figure from Bowie’s past. “I’d like to introduce you to the guitar player from the Spiders from Mars, Mick Ronson.”

  Ronson, looking slightly drawn, with his own blond hair still thick and long in defiant seventies style, launched into the familiar opening riff of that decade’s most enduring youth anthem “All the Young Dudes.” It would be Bowie’s first time onstage with his old guitar foil since The 1980 Floor Show at the Marquee Club in late 1973. With Joe Elliott and Phil Collen joining Bowie on background vocals, the track seemed more triumph than elegy to the bygone glitter age. Next, Annie Lennox, wearing face paint from the Michael Stipe school of application (part Keane painting, part Lone Ranger) and a Gothic prom dress, filled in for the absent Mercury on “Under Pressure.” Finally, with Ronson nailing Robert Fripp’s esoteric guitar part, they launched into “Heroes” with Queen’s Brian May, Roger Taylor and John Deacon behind him.

  The concert featured George Michael, Elton John, Guns n’ Roses, Metallica and even Spinal Tap, but Bowie’s set was one of the best and certainly one of the strangest. As “Heroes” ended, Bowie threw the band by falling to the floor and reciting the Lord’s Prayer.

  “I felt as if I had been transported by the situation,” he would say later. “I was scared as I was doing it. A couple of my pals were sitting near Spinal Tap, and they were speechless with disbelief …” It wasn’t exactly a Spinal Tap moment, more like a Blues Brothers moment, with Bowie doing Belushi in the church as the white light hits him.

  “This tribute is for our great friend Freddie Mercury,” Bowie announced. “I would also like us to remember our friends, your friends and my friends, who have died recently or in the distant past. And friends who are still living, and in your c
ase possibly members of your family, that have been toppled by this relentless disease. I’d particularly like to extend my wishes to Fred Drake. I know you’re watching and I’d like to offer something in a very simple fashion but it’s the most direct way that I can think of doing it.” He then dropped to his knees and recited the invocation. The “amen” was met with a huge cheer. He left the stage shouting, “God bless you. God bless you,” as the surviving members of Queen stared at each other, stunned. “I remember thinking it would have been nice if he’d warned me about that,” May later said.

  Someone as sexually active as Bowie must have had a there-but-for-the-grace-of-God attitude throughout the AIDS crisis. Peers from the seventies like Elton John used their money and power to help combat the disease in part as a sort of extended gesture of gratitude that they had been spared Mercury’s fate despite similar debauchery. Through the early and mid-nineties, with hard drugs and partying about to return to the zeitgeist with smacked-out grunge and the “Charlie”-fueled Britpop movement in the cultural queue, Bowie, one of rock ’n’ roll’s most heroic pansexual substance abusers, would enter a middle age marked by marriage, sobriety and fatherhood, as a human, even approachable space invader.