by Marc Spitz
Bowie had been using a personal computer and a scanner since 1993, loading his hard drive with software designed for rapid lyric writing or electronically painting or altering his drawings once they’d been uploaded. Bowieart.com was an outlet to share these works as well as the work of painters and artists who inspired him. Bowienet at davidbowie.com would be a more all-purpose site. In ’93, the “Jump They Say” single was one of the first released as a CD-ROM that enabled fans to remix the track themselves on their desktop. The possibilities of personal computing had already been exciting him for a half decade by the time he launched his landmark website. “He wasn’t computer savvy at first,” Gabrels says. “Andy, my guitar tech, would have to turn it on for him. He very quickly became extremely savvy, however; but before that he was already using the jargon or the vernacular of the day to describe something that he really hadn’t experienced without a guide. It’s one of his many charms.”
It’s not really surprising that Bowie, at that point, was an Internet obsessive who had difficulty dragging himself away from the keyboard. Celebrities and, often, politicians suffer from a stifling cocoon syndrome, with vital information run through a filter by various minders and flacks. The Internet allowed Bowie to reconnect directly with the street, only this street was a superhighway without limits. Those who receive e-mails from Bowie today (his primary form of communication, by most accounts) more often than not find themselves clicking on links to YouTube clips that have knocked him out. EBay is of course another site that perfectly suits his tendency to collect and affection for the obscure.
The tour bus and the hotels on the Earthling trek were, for the first time, dialed in. The outing took the phone-in poll of the Sound and Vision tour in 1990 to its logical next step.
“On tour, we keep updated daily on what our audience think of the show, new songs, different running orders or whatever,” Bowie told the London Times. “We get a good understanding of what people are expecting from us.
Bowie also sensed the social networking potential of the Internet a decade before Friendster, MySpace and Facebook and was the first major artist to really cultivate a sense of community online. He did away with his icy homo superior persona almost gleefully. This, remember, used to be someone nobody could watch eat, according to Tony Zanetta’s account in Stardust. Now, for a small fee, we could chat with him; view his paintings, personal archives of photos and writings; and even share an e-mail address suffix! Now, of course, you can read the daily thoughts and whims of every one of your heroes, whether they are interesting or not. In 1998, you still had to imagine what was going on inside all those pointy skulls.
“The idea of fans communicating directly with their favorite artist was nurtured by Bowienet,” says Nancy Miller, an editor at Wired magazine, “offering fans live chats with Bowie and a sense of intimacy [via the Internet] that hadn’t been seen before. Bowienet was a proto-MySpace, in a way. I don’t think it’s overstating it to say that.”
“I welcome all you web travelers to the first community-driven internet site that focuses on music, film, literature, painting and more … the purpose of Bowienet is interactivity and community,” Bowie promises in his greeting to visitors. “Everybody has a voice.”
“Here was the landscape: At that time, there was basically eBay, a fledgling Craigslist, Google had just launched,” Miller says. “AOL was your ISP [for many] and Yahoo was your search engine. Most acts, like the Spice Girls, used their websites as basically billboards on a smaller screen: they’d advertise their tours, products, movies. If you were a pop star, you had a website, but if you were an ‘artist’ you did not. Artists don’t shill their stuff online! No! You were supposed to be a shoulder-shrugging, guitar-picking Luddite with two turntables and a vinyl press. I do think it’s fair to say that music sites like Pitchfork exist—or at least the cool music blog model exists—because of Bowienet. The idea of a singular, serious, legit indie music site with great influence where you can get music news, videos, downloads of genuinely cool music? That’s definitely germane. I don’t think Bowie got the attention he deserved for his influence there, necessarily. In the new-media world, yes, but not necessarily in broader pop culture. Bowie was coming up with ideas to save the music industry ten years ago, while Edgar Bronfman and other major-label execs were doing the twist. If they’d clicked on his website a decade ago, maybe the music industry wouldn’t be so screwed.”
In 2007 at the eleventh annual Webby Awards, which honor excellence in Internet innovations, Bowie was granted a lifetime achievement award. Bowie attended the ceremony and made fun of the award show’s traditional rule of limiting recipients’ speeches to five words. He took to the podium and quipped into the mic, “I only get five words?”
And then he was off again.
I never interviewed David Bowie for Spin magazine, where I was on staff between the winter of 1997, when I was twenty-eight, and the spring of 2006. My behavior at that magazine and my identity as a music writer was mostly derived from my Bowie-ist nature. I wore sunglasses wherever I went, inside and outside. They were ridiculous aviator-style frames with red lenses. I dangled a lit cigarette from my lips, inside and outside as well, before and after the New York City smoking ban. My look was not modeled on Bowie; as I said before, I’d determined the futility of that back in 1983. It was modeled on Nick Kent, or footage I’d seen of Nick Kent, with his scrawny frame and leather jacket and drawled, vaguely campy speech. Bowie looked at Syd Barrett and Lou Reed, and later Iggy Pop, and said to himself, “This is the kind of rocker I want to be,” and picked bits for himself from each, fashioning them into something new. I did the same with those who profiled rockers. Not that I left the rockers themselves out of my amalgam. I wore the sunglasses and the leather jacket and smoked my ciggie with total conviction, as Bowie did with his tunic “man’s dress,” on Beckenham High Street or his Red Hot Red rooster cut, hoping that people would notice and it would become something of a delivery system for an ability or an expression that was much more sincere and serious. I also never worried whether the real me, a shy Long Island kid who often had to do a shot of whiskey before I could talk to anyone, much less a rock star, would become subsumed in this invention.
One of my first print bylines at Spin was what they call a “sidebar,” a dipshit addendum to someone else’s feature, and it was timed to the release of Velvet Goldmine, Todd Haynes’s 1998 Bowie-inspired hypersexual love letter to the glitter-rock aesthetic. I was to trace all the points in David Bowie’s career so that the reader would, I suppose, know what the writer of the Haynes feature was talking about when he cited certain milestones and could then compare them to their treatment in the film. Pre-Google this was more difficult than it would seem but hardly a challenge.
As Bowie spent the sixties trying to figure out a working formula, I spent much of the nineties in Los Angeles, taking meetings on studio lots and trying to sell screenplays and eventually falling on my sword, which was actually more of a hypo needle; in one fit of self-destructive verve, I actually pitched an unwritten script, off the cuff, about a cat that shit money. Sober and finally employed somewhere, I felt like I was playing catch-up.
One day I left my sunglasses and cigarette behind at my desk (which was more like a shared pod with three or four other ambitious new hires) and returned from lunch to find them missing. I checked in the art department offices, and there I found a series of Polaroids taped to the glass door of the art director’s office. Each shot was a portrait of a Spin employee wearing my shades and dangling one of my cigarettes from their mouth, affecting the pose that I was sure nobody had noticed yet but was absolutely committed to: the cartoon-decadent Nick Kent facsimile. These were senior staff. The editor in chief, among them. I was horrified, embarrassed too, but mostly thrilled, and in the days that followed, I really amped up that guy, “Bad Marc,” as he came to be called. The exploits and marketability of “Bad Marc” finally got the real me ahead. A few issues after that Velvet Goldmine sidebar ran
, I was writing cover stories for Spin. They also got the diffident and well-meaning me into a lot of trouble. Bad Marc took drugs, so good Marc did too. Bad Marc picked fights and treated women like shit. Good Marc had to commit. This was 1999, now, the year of Fight Club. Dangerous dichotomies. Slippery slopes. But it all went back to Bowie. Ziggy Stardust was the original Tyler Durden.
28.
“I LOVE Velvet Goldmine,” says the film’s director, Todd Haynes, just over a decade after its original release. “I’m so proud of it. It was the first film of mine that met with much more of a mixed reaction when it first came out, especially in the English press, but it was a film I always meant as a gift to young people, as a kind of tripped-out druggy movie, an experience film. Those kind of films don’t get made anymore—like Performance—weird, trippy, complicated and beautiful. That meant so much to me growing up. A place where your imagination and creativity can be nurtured by a film. What’s so cool is the movie became that for a mass of young people. And it’s still a film that young teenagers, particularly girls, come up to me and tell me how much it changed their lives. And it became a huge Web obsession and a flash fiction inspirer. They gave out prizes for the best triple-X story, best double-X story, and best softcore story all involving the Velvet Goldmine characters. I also love that it inspired kids and exposed them to all this great music.”
Velvet Goldmine takes poetic license with Bowie’s rise and fall but remains more or less a linear biopic fueled by extensive research, done largely by Haynes, a lifelong Bowiephile. It is an important and seldom-acknowledged touchstone in the larger Bowie story, as it marks the first time that the myth and minutiae of the Bowie universe were placed in context in the same way the Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley and Beatles myths had been treated before it. Many, however, view the film as a noble if ultimately unsuccessful experiment. For all its accurate costumes (designer Sandy Powell received a much deserved Oscar nomination), spectacle, sustained sense of camp, Wilde-via-Warhol acid wit and committed cast, there are those who feel that Velvet buckles under the weight of its own fan-boy gushing. Something as culture-shifting as glitter rock needn’t be examined or re-created with such a gimlet eye.
“It’s important for any hard-core follower of Bowie to remind them that the whole film is very self-consciously meant to be seen through the eyes of the fan—the Christian Bale character—with all the additional embroidery and dreaming that goes on in the eyes of the fans,” Haynes says. “Also, the language of glam rock was a heightened language. This is grandeur and elegance, rich, lush high camp that distorts reality and pushes it into something else, and I wanted the film to be a product of that—didn’t make sense for me to do a hard-core documentary-style version of the glam rock story. Something much more theatrical and winged.”
That the plotline, or subplotline, was borrowed from Citizen Kane did little to defend Haynes against those who wished to take him down a peg for his ambitions. Bale plays Arthur Stuart, a journalist and former superfan of Brian Slade, the film’s Bowie figure (played by Jonathan Rhys Myers), who creates and then destroys (literally, via an assassin’s bullet) an alter ego named Maxwell Demon (the Ziggy figure). On the anniversary of the stunt, Bale is assigned to retrace the history of Slade’s rise and fall and answer all the questions left unresolved by interviewing figures from his past, including Toni Collette’s Angie figure, Mandy Slade, and Ewan MacGregor’s Curt Wild, purported to be a mash-up of both Lou Reed and Iggy Pop, but given McGregor’s costume (nicked directly from the Mick Rock–shot Raw Power sleeve), lithe body and re-creation of the Stooges’ “TV Eye,” it’s, visually at least, more uncut Iggy than Lou. The relationship between Slade and Wild, however, may be more Bowie/Reed at its core. “The infatuation between the two of them,” Haynes says, “draws more directly from the Lou Reed and Bowie lore, which they very well may have been performing for the public—performed a romance, whether it was consummated or not. That became the sort of fantasy romance in my film.”
Haynes translates the Bowie history to suit a somewhat overwrought detective story, having his young journalist reveal an allegorical right-wing conspiracy that links Slade to a toothy, blond, heterosexual Reaganite pop star named Tommy Stone, a cartoon blow-up of Bowie’s Serious Moonlight-era persona. The Oscar-nominated director (for another stylistic homage, the Douglas Sirk–indebted 2002 film Far from Heaven), who first gained attention with his 1987 Karen Carpenter biopic Superstar, told with stop-motion animated Barbie dolls and never released (thanks to an injunction by Carpenter’s brother and bandmate Richard), was well-intentioned and certainly charming in his self-deprecation when queried about the film’s meta conceits. “I always wanted to do the film this way,” he insists. That the film’s mood offers almost none of the effervescence of the best of glitter rock might have something to do with its troubled production. Haynes admitted that the shoot (in London in the spring of ’97) was fraught with budgetary woes. He told Outsmart magazine, “[I thought,] ‘This should be fun. This should be the funnest thing I’ve ever done, damn it.’ But it was so demanding and so ambitious. Then we lost our financing right before we started and had to find alternate money, and it made the budget go down a million dollars, and the budget was already so bare-bones. That lost million sort of did us in.” The acting, however, by mostly British and Australian stars, is uniformly excellent (especially Myers, then just nineteen, and Toni Collette as Mandy Slade, who helps her husband achieve the fame he so desperately desires only to be pushed to the side and fall into a heartbroken and dissolute state).
Had Bowie himself been involved, as Bob Dylan was in Haynes’s far superior 2008 film I’m Not There, the end results might have coalesced a bit more gracefully. While the soundtrack is excellent (original versions of and faithful takes on Roxy Music, Brian Eno, Iggy and the Stooges and T. Rex hits from the era), you simply cannot tell the Bowie story (and again in Haynes’s defense, he never really claims to) or even the story of glitter without Bowie’s music. It wasn’t for lack of trying. “I had so much ammunition and support,” Haynes says. “From [the film’s producer] Michael Stipe’s involvement, literally calling Bowie at home, to Harvey Weinstein writing him a letter.”
Haynes’s friend and Sonic Youth bassist Kim Gordon explained the concept of the film to Bowie one night over dinner at Julian Schnabel’s in late 1996 (Haynes had directed the video for the Sonic Youth single “Disappearer”). “Kim tried to get him to concede to have his music licensed for the movie and he said he didn’t feel he was ready to do that,” Gordon’s husband, Thurston Moore, recalls. “He didn’t want to discourage Todd Haynes’s vision but he wanted to keep his music until there was a real Bowie film.”
“My feeling about it was that it was based fairly substantially on Ziggy Stardust,” Bowie said at the time, “and as I intend to do my own version of that, I’d rather not work with a competitive film.”
“‘Lady Stardust’ was going to be a song Brian Slade sings when he has his long hair,” Haynes says. “During the whole dreamy scene of seduction between Christian Bale and Ewan McGregor, I wanted to use the quiet part of ‘Sweet Thing’ from Diamond Dogs. We used ‘Baby’s on Fire’ [by Eno] where we were going to use ‘Moonage Daydream.’ The original script started out with seven Bowie songs in it. Finally, we just made a campaign to get ‘All the Young Dudes.’ That would be the anthem that would end the film. But we had to use [Roxy’s] ‘2HB’ instead.”
Bowie’s music has been used to great effect before and since in ambitious films helmed by auteurs like Uli Edel (the 1981 junkie drama Christiane F.), Wes Anderson (the 2004 hipster comedy The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, in which vintage Bowie songs are sung in Portuguese by Brazilian musician and cast member Seu Jorge) and Gus Van Sant (2008’s Milk’s brilliant use of Hunky Dory’s “Queen Bitch”). Its absence in the Haynes film is, for some, a fatal blow. This is not, after all, the Eno/Ferry story. Perhaps if the film had been a bit more happy-go-lucky, it would have sold itself a bit more easily to ske
ptics. Instead it seems to try to will Eno, Cockney Rebel and T. Rex songs into Bowie songs. “A lot of people also had problems with the Bowie character singing a Roxy Music song that was not even written at that time,” says Moore, tweaking the purists. “But really, so what?” Some critics praised the film, most did not, and except for its sustained cult following on video and the Web, Velvet Goldmine was a commercial flop. Bowie, ultimately the only real arbiter who mattered given the subject, offered his own review. Essentially, he’d enjoyed the sex scenes between Bale and McGregor, and Toni Collette and multiple partners in a hazy orgy scene. “But I thought the rest of it was garbage.” Haynes is naturally “disappointed” by this. “The thing that always made me sad about Bowie’s reaction to my film—and I understand everyone is protecting their own public depiction—but I just feel like I took everything he created with a great sense of freedom of invention. I took it to task and basically accepted it as a delicious fiction of his own making.”
Perhaps the ultimate verdict on Velvet Goldmine goes to Bob Dylan, who was impressed enough by Haynes’s body of work to allow total access to his own equally vast myth and Earth-changing music. “I thought Dylan would be the hardest of all, thought I’d truly lost my marbles even presuming. My career sort of began with some adversarial reaction—the Carpenters being my first denial, then Bowie,” says Haynes. “I thought, ‘Oh my god, now I’m taking on the meanest guy of all,’ but instead he said, ‘Sure, use whatever you want, you’ve got life rights and music rights. Pick any song from the canon.’” Asked if he applied any of the mistakes he may have made on Goldmine to I’m Not There, Haynes replies, “I think I just repeated all my mistakes and stand by them in both films.”