by Marc Spitz
The album track “Ian Fish, UK Heir” is an anagram of “Hanif Kureishi.” “It’s very awkward for everybody with Bowie, and he’s very aware of that,” Kureishi says. “He makes sure that you’re okay. He knows it’s really freaky. ‘Ah, it’s David Bowie.’ He’s just thinking this is an interesting writer he wants to talk to. So he calms you down. He’s always in that position with the rest of the world.”
It was Bowie’s first full soundtrack, as his work with producer Paul Buckmaster for The Man Who Fell to Earth was abandoned after John Phillips got the job. The discipline of having to conform to an already completed film project seemed to help Bowie focus. Despite its status as the interpretation of Kureishi’s fictionalized childhood, it’s Bowie’s most directly autobiographical work since Hunky Dory. Bromley is all over it. “Living in lies by the railway line … Screaming along in south London,” he sings. While the film was critically acclaimed and the soundtrack drew his best reviews in a decade, it remained the great, lost late-era Bowie record until it was reissued on CD in 2008. “He was amazed how little the BBC paid,” Kureishi says. “Nobody ever paid him so little in his whole life. He was really shocked.” If he felt like a struggling artist after his paltry BBC wage (and the failure of Black Tie), 1995’s Outside placed the artist back into the willful fringe. In fact, a decade and a half on, it remains possibly the ultimate art-fuck record of all time, born out of a jam session in Mountain Studios in the early fall of 1994, shortly after the completion of the Buddha soundtrack album, that included Bowie, Kizilcay, drummer Sterling Campbell, a returning Mike Garson, Carlos Alomar and Brian Eno. “We were just checking levels to separate the instruments and we started to jam,” Gabrels says. “Suddenly Brian was holding up a sign that said ‘Just Continue,’ and he started in with his electronic noises. Suddenly everyone starts to look at each other like ‘Hey, there’s something happening here,’ and we decided to finish an album like that. David was painting the whole time that we were playing. He had an easel set up in the studio. As we went on, Bowie did all the segues that tell the story throughout the album in real time as we jammed. All the different voices. Baby Grace, Algeria Touchshreik, Leon Blank, Nathan Adler …” The unusual approach to recording was nothing new to anyone familiar with Eno, but the more classically trained Kizilcay was initially thrown. “He cannot even play four bars,” he tells me. “I must say this. He’s too clever. An interesting guy but I don’t know how he became so famous. He cannot play two harmonies together. No idea how to play the keyboard.”
Experiments like running Martha and the Vandellas’ version of “Dancing in the Streets” (as opposed to Bowie’s own duet with Jagger) through the headphones and instructing the band to jam along with it, then playing back the results with the original song dropped out of the mix perplexed Kizilcay. “He’d spent time writing us letters. Everyone got a different letter,” he says. “I was in Arabia and I was going to marry the sheik’s daughter, so I was to play funky Arabic disco?”
When word got around that Eno, who’d spent much of the eighties and early nineties working with U2 (in addition to producing the Manchester band James’ immortal “Laid” and creating the start-up tone for Microsoft’s Windows program) had reunited with Bowie, the anticipation was high that they’d come up with another masterpiece on par with their “Berlin trilogy.” Outside, in my opinion, is as good a record as Low, “Heroes” or Lodger. Rather than being ahead of its time or behind its time, it’s simply Bowie’s most of-its-time work since his late-sixties hip pie folk material. Bowie was fascinated by the apparent fin de siècle disintegration of culture, the speeding up of information and the primitivism exemplified by the body piercing, tattooing and body manipulation of the Lollapalooza nation; the performance art of Los Angeles–based artist Ron Athey, an HIV-positive firebrand who shoved spikes into his forehead, leaving pools of contagious blood on gallery floors; and the industrial rock of bands like Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor, once a shy Ohioan Bowie obsessive, then a fishnet-clad drug addict who recorded his masterpiece The Downward Spiral in the house where the Manson family butchered Sharon Tate and her friends. “I would put on Pretty Hate Machine on the Tin Machine tour to clear everyone out of the back of the bus,” Gabrels laughs. “And then sometime in ’94 David came to me and said, Oh, Reeves, you gotta hear this record!’ It was The Downward Spiral.” Once the music was recorded, Bowie began to put together the album’s narrative (sorry, its “non-linear gothic drama hyper circles” as the promotional material described it). Basically, it’s the end of the millennium and society has become so jaded that something called Art Crime or Art Murder has become the next big thing (wasn’t it the next big thing in 1974 when Divine declared as much in Female Trouble?). Nathan Adler, a kind of Philip Marlowe meets Harrison Ford’s Deckard in Blade Runner, is some kind of culturally plugged-in detective pursuing a missing child (Baby Grace) who is feared to be a victim of the phenomenon. For all its highfalutin backstory, Outside succeeds largely because the music itself is so exciting. Like The Buddha (and unlike Black Tie), nothing here feels like a sketch (which is truly impressive given its spontaneous origins).
“Leon Takes Us Outside” is a preamble much like Diamond Dogs’s “Future Legend,” setting the mood. “It’s happening now,” Bowie sings with new confidence on the title track, a middle-aged legend exciting himself. “The Heart’s Filthy Lesson,” the lead single, is NIN-style funk with Garson’s distinctive piano running through the track (Reznor, who remixed the song into a minor alt-rock hit, would collect on the favor by pinching Garson for his equally ambitious double album The Fragile in 1999). “A Small Plot of Land” is a flat spread of electronic jazz, segueing into “Hallo Spaceboy,” Bowie’s most convincing rocker in two decades (since “Rebel Rebel”). Its lyrics hearken back to the halcyon days of glitter as well (“Do you like girls or boys?”). “The Voyeur of Utter Destruction” asks the question, what if the outro of “The Bewlay Brothers” was expanded into a four-and-a-half-minute song? On “We Prick You,” Bowie demands, “Tell the truth,” as if willing himself completely out of his late-thirties torpor and into the new, abrasive realm of industrial rock ’n’ roll (one, of course, fully indebted to him already).
An offer was made for a Bowie / Nine Inch Nails package tour, one Reznor was initially somewhat reluctant to accept. “There were similar sensibilities in their creation of art,” says Mike Garson, who would work with Reznor on The Fragile. “Trent, being young, obviously he grew up on David and he was a hero to him. But they became peers at that point.”
“I was afraid to meet him because he is my hero,” Reznor says. “If I had to say there’s one person I’ve wished I could be, for a multitude of reasons it would have been him. I was kind of afraid to really be around him and meet him, because almost everybody that you end up meeting like that, they can’t live up to the superhero that you’ve created in your mind. And he didn’t in an odd way.” Reznor at the time was living out the nihilistic lyrics of The Downward Spiral, addicted to drugs and alcohol and so full of doubt and self-loathing that the acclaim and fan worship could only seem perverse. Bowie recognized his former self in his new collaborator and tried to offer some big-brotherly guidance.
“I saw a guy that was at peace with himself and seemed happy, and still was making music that I thought was good but wasn’t about to die every night,” Reznor says of Bowie. “I remember a couple of nights of him putting his arm around me like I’m his brother, giving me some advice. I think later we talked and he said, ‘I saw a lot of myself in where you were at the time,’ which is bad things about to happen. He had been there himself. And I knew he’d been through a lot of bad shit. And somehow I was in the midst of this bad shit with a lot more bad shit to come, and it made me feel like, all right, someone can come out the other end and still be cool. I was jealous when I saw him, because I was like, ‘Fuck, man, my life feels like it’s spinning out of control, and it’s not spinning upward.’”
Like Cobain, Reznor saw
Bowie as a sort of older brother figure, a survivor who used his pain to make beautiful art but realized that he did not have to linger in a stale and nihilistic energy field, that age and wisdom were possible, as well as a better navigation system through the obstacles of extreme psychic pain and megafame. Cobain never got there. Happily, Reznor seems to have found his way.
Bowie rehearsed with his new band, anchored by new drummer Zachary Alford and bassist Gail Anne Dorsey, whose extreme-looking crew cut perfectly fit with this gleefully assaulting new aesthetic. “Aside from her magnificent voice, she played only the fattest, most tasteful bass lines,” says Alford of Dorsey. “She is a knight in shining armor. That’s why we call her ‘Dame’ Dorsey. She has a sense of style and poise. She’s just breathtaking. A powerhouse. She adds a smoothness to the music that just glues the whole thing together.” Gabrels and keyboardist Peter Schwartz rounded out the lineup for the rehearsals in New York, and the tour opened in mid-September on the East Coast. NIN, despite being the bigger act at the time, opened, with a characteristically riotous set.
“There was no intermission at all,” then NIN drummer Chris Vrenna says. “We designed a four-song band segue that would slowly introduce Bowie and his band as NIN and Trent exited. The first song of this segue was ‘Scary Monsters.’ Bowie came out and performed with NIN. Then we did ‘Reptile’ from The Downward Spiral, where Trent and Bowie shared the vocals. Then our backdrop curtain went up and Bowie’s entire band and the entire NIN band performed ‘Hallo Spaceboy’ off Bowie’s record. Lastly, the NIN band all left the stage and Trent and Bowie sang ‘Hurt’ with his band. Trent would wave good-bye afterward and then Bowie’s show continued on from there. It was fairly complicated to pull off, with both bands on moving risers and changing backdrops and scenery throughout the whole segue.”
It was conceived as a seamless shift, and it was, when Bowie’s arrival didn’t trigger a mass exodus from the venue. It didn’t help that Bowie’s set only featured a handful of older hits. The bulk of the material was from Outside, and no amount of rubber T-shirts or black eyeliner was going to make a depressed fifteen-year-old kid sit through that. Bowie, to his credit, fully acknowledged this and seemed to relish the challenge of having to win them over. What living legend ever gets the opportunity to do that, after all?
“I slip onstage after a set by the most aggressive band ever to conquer the Top 40,” Bowie said at the time. “I do not do hits, I perform lots of songs from an album that hasn’t been released, and the older songs I perform are probably obscure even to my oldest fans. I use no theatrics, no videos and often no costumes. It’s a dirty job but I think I’m just the man for it.”
“We had to front-load our set with harder music, industrial music, like ‘Hallo Spaceboy,’” Gabrels said. “We had to blow that song early just to come off the peak of Nine Inch Nails ’cause they had built their set to a climax.”
“Oh, it was definitely harder to win over their audience,” Bowie’s drummer Zachary Alford says today, “but I think that is what made it seem real for David. He felt empty just playing the hits again for the umpteenth time. It was like painting by numbers for him. Having to get out there and put your neck on the chopping block, not knowing what the audience would do at the end of the song, that was exciting for him, not to mention for us! I mean, it really made us play our hearts out and probably gave him some of the feeling of the early days. And the material was amazing. There were critics who kept throwing the term ‘difficult’ around. I mean, come on. You gonna tell me Low is not difficult? Lodger is not difficult? These guys were just idiots who wanted to hear the Sound and Vision tour all over again and David wasn’t having it.”
When the Outside tour hit Europe in November, Morrissey was booked as the support act. Like Bowie, the former Smiths singer had his own die-hard fans who would have been perfectly happy to see a full-length set by their own hero, not an abbreviated support set. What began as an honor on the part of the opener soon turned into a war of egos. Morrissey was a major David Bowie fan, just like Reznor had been, but he was not ready to do anything akin to performing a segue number (possibly singing “I Know It’s Gonna Happen Someday” and a shared Bowie or T. Rex song). Morrissey’s refusal to alter his set or cede some independence to the older star created an air of tension from the start.
“He got on the bus after sound check and told the bus driver to take him to London,” Gabrels says. “He left his band there looking all worried ten minutes before they were supposed to go on. He left the tour manager and everybody. He just did a runner. I’d thought it was going great. Maybe he wasn’t getting the level of adoration that he required. Not as many flowers as he expected.” Unaccustomed to being treated like support, Morrissey was apparently further irritated by the closet-sized dressing rooms and took to baiting the crowd at earlier performances with “Don’t worry, David will be on soon.” He would later explain, “I left because Bowie put me under a lot of pressure, and I found it too exhausting. You have to worship at the temple of Bowie when you become involved.”
During a break in the tour, eighties art star turned film director Julian Schnabel was in New York, finishing a biopic on eighties art star turned cautionary tale Jean-Michel Basquiat. When he conceived of the film, a movie “about an artist by artists,” as he told Charlie Rose, Schnabel reached out to his famous friends and acquaintances to cast it. Making seemingly an odd choice, Schnabel asked Bowie if he would be interested in playing Andy Warhol, Basquiat’s mentor. “He’s a very known person,” Schnabel said. “I need a pop icon to play a pop icon.” Bowie’s Warhol is not an impression so much as an abstracted interpretation. He doesn’t try to mask his English accent but still manages to affect Warhol’s speech with tone and rhythm. He wears the black turtlenecks associated with the art star but reminds us, with his garish leather coat, that this is the eighties Warhol. Crispin Glover in The Doors and most recently Guy Pearce in Factory Girl have brought the world-shaking sixties Warhol to life on-screen, but only Bowie, using perhaps his own memories of eighties inertia, tapped into the searching, fatigued energy of sixties and seventies icons in the go-go era. “I don’t even know what’s good anymore,” he whines to Jeffrey Wright’s Jean-Michel as they collaborate on a massive mural. Take away the “gee” and grimaces and the fey hand-on-hip posture, and it could easily be Bowie talking about his own career at the same point. The film stars many people who actually knew Warhol, including Dennis Hopper, who was amused if not a little freaked out by Bowie’s costuming. “David was wearing Andy’s wig,” Hopper says. As he had with his role in The Elephant Man, Bowie did the research. “He was a great actor. Great to work with.”
He was granted access to other items belonging to the deceased artist that were stored in the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. “This little handbag that he took into hospital with him, a very sad little bag with all these contents: a check torn in half, an address and a phone number and this putty-colored pancake that he obviously used to touch himself up with before he went in public anywhere, loads of herb pills too,” Bowie told Charlie Rose.
When Schnabel didn’t need Bowie on set, he’d walk into Soho in full costume just to test how people would react, relishing the double shock this would certainly elicit when they discovered that it was not a dead artist but rather a live rock legend looking a scream.
Bowie will always be an innovator because of his pure love for the shape, the feel and the power of a raw idea. He doesn’t always come up with the nut of a great notion himself, and certainly as he became more rich and famous, he turned into something of a curator and a champion of other people’s visions. Sometimes, in following each idea through to its realization, he will fail, but he remains a great cultural innovator because he sees these failures as part of the whole process. If one out of five hundred endeavors changes the world, who’s to say that it wasn’t worth it? A half dozen times easily, over five decades, Bowie’s faith in the sheer beauty of some thought changed the world. In the fall of 1996,
a thirty-four-year-old Wharton-educated Wall Street trader and investment banker named David Pullman had an idea: why couldn’t someone invest in securitized intellectual property? Anything that accrues royalties has value. Why can’t you issue a bond against the future earnings of a book or a film or a song, as you would a painting or a classic car? “John Steinbeck is ideal,” says Pullman. “Every seventh-grader in America is reading it.”
At the time, Bowie’s business managers were looking into their options as far as generating money off of Bowie’s back catalog. Bowie owned his master tapes and his publishing and had the option of buying out Tony Defries’s share of the generated royalties, provided he could get a large infusion of cash. “The business manager was trying to sell David’s catalog,” says Pullman today. “He mentioned it to me. ‘You’re on Wall Street. What can you do for this?’ They realized David wasn’t going to sell his catalog. His songs were his babies. So they said, ‘Can you help him?’ I asked them what they were earning. They were earning millions of dollars a year. A significant number. Sounded good to me. I asked him if the numbers were audited. They said yes. Are they audited by a big six accounting firm? And he said yes. I asked him if he had three years’ worth of history. He had five years’ worth of history. To which I said, ‘I can securitize that.’ He said, ‘What’s securitization?’”
Pullman explained that he could offer future royalties from Bowie’s back catalog and a fixed interest rate to an investment firm, generating Bowie a considerable advance. There would be no personal risk to Bowie or his family, and with the right stimulation via licensing, there was much money to be made. “He’d written a lot of iconic songs ideal for commercial film and TV,” says Pullman. “‘Heroes,’ ‘Golden Years,’ Young Americans.’ Not a lot of catalogs have those type of songs.” There was no indication at the time that every cell phone would have a popular song ringtone or that CDs would ever be replaced as a medium for listening to music. Bowie got it. “They went to David with the idea and David’s reaction was ‘Well, why haven’t you started already?’” says Pullman. “He picks things up very quickly. Very creative, innovative. He likes new. But not stupid new.”