by Marc Spitz
In 2001, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, a sister film of sorts to Velvet Goldmine (they also share a producer) was released. Based on John Cameron Mitchell and Stephen Trask’s hit off-Broadway play, the film also traffics heavily in Bowie myth and iconography from the Berlin Wall to the Calvin Mark Lee–style third eye on the forehead of Michael Pitt’s rock ingénue Tommy Gnosis. When Mitchell’s Hedwig subjects Pitt’s Gnosis to a “six-month curriculum of rock history,” he/she actually points to the famous Mick Rock shot of Bowie, Iggy and Lou Reed at the Dorchester Hotel press conference in 1972 during the montage.
As far as his less canonical music and iconography was concerned, he spent much of the late nineties sketching. He composed tracks for the soundtrack for the French-based video game Omikron before joining Gabrels in Bermuda to work on material for the follow-up to Earthling. Unbeknownst to Gabrels, Bowie was about to do a tonal about-face, withdrawing from the agit–art rock of Outside and the drum and bass of Earthling to produce a series of new material that amounted to his most introspective since the late sixties. Bowie had put forth the notion in the press of revisiting Ziggy Stardust as a musical around this time as well. Like many in the grip of pre-millennium tension, he seemed to be sensing his mortality, and the slow, searching mood of the new songs, like “Survive,” and “Thursday’s Child” (inspired by the autobiography of the late cabaret singer Eartha Kitt), lend this theory some validity.
“Hours … was sort of the anti-Earthling,” says Plati, who was brought in after the Bermuda sessions, as well as a short session in London, to aid in the production back at Looking Glass in Soho. “No beats, no technology, just naked songs. I try not to interpret lyrics other than to find my own meaning in them—which I think is the point. ‘Survive’ hit me in particular because I was going through my own rough patch at the time, so I connected with it.”
Hours … is a good record to put on the morning after you did something regrettable. It will likely put your transgressions in perspective and allow you to catch a breath or two before calling your rabbi, priest or Zen master. It’s easy listening for uneasy people. “Survive,” the album’s best track, is even more explicitly haunted by regret. “I should have kept you,” Bowie worries, “I should have tried.” His voice is reminiscent of the old Deram recordings, perhaps deliberately so (“Who said time is on my side?” he laments at one point). Musically, it’s an affecting melody, strummed on a guitar that, after Earthling, sounds refreshingly solid and wooden. Another track like “If I’m Dreaming My Life” feels a bit more sketchy and seems musically indecisive but thematically, it’s in perfect pitch with the ongoing elegant bummer that is the record as a whole. The actual rockers fare better here.
Again confident enough to throw his arms around cyber culture without worrying that the gimmick would hold sway over the music (justifiably so, as much of Hours … is as strong as its three predecessors), Bowie and online music site Bug Music launched a contest that offered fans a chance to write lyrics to one of his and Gabrels’s musical compositions (posted on Bowienet with just a hummed melody). Bowie and Gabrels would record the winning song live on the Web. Of the reported eighty thousand submissions, Bowie chose the submission of Alex Grant, an Ohio student with a New Wave haircut. In May of 1999, Grant was flown to New York City to watch Bowie sing his words—and to be watched. While it seems quaint now, at the time, this was truly inventive and drew heavy traffic to the simulcast (run on Rolling Stone magazine’s site). During the webcast, Bowie seems respectful, reading the lyrics off a stand and loaning them more conviction then words like “Grown inside a plastic box. Micro thoughts and safety locks / Hearts become outdated clocks / Ticking in your mind” really deserve.
“‘What’s Really Happening?’ was really cool to do—it was a new way to reach out to his fans,” Plati says. “Sure, it was an experiment—what wasn’t? Remember, there was no blueprint for any of those sorts of things. We were doing webchats around the same time—they felt incredibly cutting-edge!”
“The Pretty Things Are Going to Hell” (“they’ve worn it out but they’ve worn it well”) is an elegy for the specter of glitter, which still clearly haunts Bowie in his weaker moments: “You’re still breathing but you don’t know why / Life’s a bit and sometimes you die.” Well, always you die, and that notion seemed to be sinking in, one that was possibly not, what with the potential Y2K glitch looming, the most sellable fin de siècle product. The cover sleeve to Hours … based on the Pietà by Michelangelo, the statue of the body of Christ displayed in St. Peter’s in the Vatican, literally features Bowie hanging on to himself, cradling his own visage in his arms as if to telegraph to his fans that a bit of comfort would be quite nice right about now. Few responded to the collection. Hours … marked the first Bowie studio album to fail to crack the American Top 40 in over a quarter of a century (intent on giving it a post-millennial fair shake, Bowie reissued it in 2004 on his own ISO label as a double disc). Bowie played “The Pretty Things” on Saturday Night Live in the early fall of ’99, at the Net Aid benefit concert in October of 1999 and in an episode of VH1’s Storytellers, and committed to a series of intimate club shows in Paris, Dublin, Italy, Denmark and New York City, marking the first time fans could see him in a relatively intimate venue in three decades.
Shortly after the record hit shops, Gabrels announced that he was leaving the fold after a decade as Bowie’s guitarist (a run that rivaled Carlos Alomar’s and lasted three times as long as Mick Ronson’s). The Storytellers taping would mark his last time playing alongside Bowie. Page Hamilton of early-nineties grunge-metal rockers Helmet was drafted as a replacement for the live dates. Earl Slick and Mike Garson, both seventies all-stars, returned, and Plati was given the role of official musical director of the shows. Always one to make a virtue of a possible free fall, Bowie used the occasion to pull up more-obscure songs like “Quicksand” from Hunky Dory and “Stay” from Station to Station. These were true fan shows and seemed the first instance of Bowie realizing he could literally play anywhere he wanted, without having to mount a high-concept stage show for each album. “Reeves’s workload got heavier and heavier,” Zachary Alford says, “and I think that wore him down a bit.” Gabrels cites various reasons for his choice. It was partly due to a desire to take the business out of the music business and just play again, partly a sense that he’d been there and done it over the course of eleven years and partly because of friction between himself and Schwab.
“She is not a very happy person,” he says. “I felt like for a long time, I just got tired of doing what was necessary to maintain my own safety against whatever sort of crap she might pull. The band would come offstage and if she wanted to see a movie that was playing on HBO she would tell David that the crowd wasn’t into it so she could get back in time. He’s like anybody: you can bum him out, you can grind him down.”
Post-Gabrels, Bowie did exactly what he did post-Alomar at the end of the eighties, shortly before the Sound and Vision tour and the repurposing of himself as a “band member” with Tin Machine: he started looking to his past for inspiration, or at least some kind of graceful stopgap. That fall it was announced, appropriately enough, that Bowie would headline the first Glastonbury festival of the twenty-first century, some thirty years after he played the inaugural event in support of The Man Who Sold the World. As the sun set over the rolling fields, Bowie took the stage, bowed calmly and walked to the mic to sing “Wild Is the Wind” as the crowd let forth an enormous cheer. He introduced “Changes” by letting the crowd know he’d just written it the first time he’d played there. The following day, Bowie and the band returned to London to do a recording for the BBC Radio Theatre to be packaged alongside sessions from the early seventies. Between the club dates in the fall and Glastonbury in the summer, Bowie and Plati planned to record an album of revisited material from Bowie’s mid-to-late-1960s output. With a working title of Toy and a track list that reportedly included “I Dig Everything,” “Can’t Help Thinking About Me” a
nd “Let Me Sleep Beside You,” the album was conceived as a sort of Pin Ups without the hits.
The birth of Bowie and Iman’s daughter, Alexandria Zahra (Arabic for “inner light”), on August 15, 2000, put the sessions on hold, and by the time the album was ready for release, Bowie’s relationship with his label Virgin had become tense (they were reportedly eager for an album of new material, not a seminovelty covers album, in order to generate excitement for the back catalog, recently released for digital download).
Bowie began negotiating with different labels, eventually signing a lucrative deal with Sony; the Toy material was broken up and either redistributed to B sides or retitled for inclusion on his next project, Heathen, which would find him reunited with a key figure from the era in which they were recorded. In the years since producing Scary Monsters in 1980, Visconti had kept busy with projects for artists as diverse as the Boomtown Rats and Debbie Gibson. He was recovering from a divorce (from John Lennon’s former girlfriend May Pang, who also dated Bowie and appears in the “Fashion” video) after eleven years of marriage. The reconnection with Bowie marked a sort of acceleration in his producing activity (he’d follow it in rapid succession with albums by the Dandy Warhols and Manic Street Preachers as well as Morrissey’s 2006 release Ringleader of the Tormentors).
Having a young child in the house again certainly turned Bowie’s mind to his past. He has a history of calling people out of the blue after they figured they’d probably never hear from him again. John Hutchinson, Keith Christmas, Mike Garson and now Tony Visconti had all been contacted this way. Visconti’s falling-out with Bowie reportedly had to do with his declining to mix the sound for the massive Serious Moonlight tour. They’d reconciled but were no longer as close as they’d been through the sixties and seventies, despite the fact that both men were living in lower Manhattan. A date for coffee led to plans to make their first album together in twenty-two years.
Bowie and Visconti began working on the Heathen album in Manhattan but relocated to Allaire Studios, situated on a two-hundred-foot-high top in the Catskill Mountains in upstate New York, on the recommendation of a mutual friend. Bowie had been somewhat blocked in the city and had a spiritual convergence of sorts as soon as he set foot in the building and began. “Walking though the door everything that my album should be about was galvanized for me into one focal point,” he said at the time. “It was an ‘on the road to Damascus’ type of experience, you know; it was al most like my feet were lifted off the ground.” There among the deer and the eagles soaring overhead, Bowie and Visconti created the record, one of Bowie’s best, with a renewed sense of purpose. From Picasso to Warren Beatty to David Letterman, you can see once perhaps less-than-accountable alpha males of the arts and letters melting when a little baby comes into their life. “Overnight our lives have been enriched beyond belief,” Bowie, a father again at age fifty-five, told UK magazine Hello. As they raised the little girl, in perhaps the greatest testament to his devotion to his new daughter, Bowie gave up smoking. A heavy smoker since the early sixties, Bowie began seeing a hypnotist in effort to stop in the mid-nineties. He’d taken to eating Australian tea tree sticks by the dozen. Cigarettes and coffee were his last remaining vices. With regard to the Marlboros, nothing worked until he became a father again, and even then, it was a struggle.
“I remember him coming offstage during that last tour of his and going backstage to see him,” says Mick Rock. “He’d officially stopped smoking. Maybe his wife had gotten on his ass, starting to get a bit worried about him. I think his father had died in his fifties. He’d stopped buying cigarettes. After the show, he was looking for a roadie to catch cigs off, looking around to make sure Iman wasn’t around.”
Before entering the studio with Visconti, Bowie found time to steal a scene in Ben Stiller’s fashion-industry send-up Zoolander among an egregiously long list of would-be thieves that included Winona Ryder, Billy Zane, Paris Hilton and Lenny Kravitz. When Stiller’s titular male model clashes with Owen Wilson’s Hansel (“Who you trying to get crazy with, ese? Don’t you know I’m loco?”), a “walk-off” is suggested. Ten minutes later, the rivals meet in an abandoned warehouse and audiences are treated to “the real world of male modeling. The one they don’t show you in magazines or on the E channel.” As bad techno plays, Stiller and Wilson limber up. “All right, who’s going to call this sucker?” Wilson asks. “If nobody has any objections, I believe I might be of service,” a familiar voice offscreen offers. And with the cue of “Let’s Dance” on the soundtrack, Bowie nearly makes off with the “best scene-stealer” honors (and would completely own it if Will Ferrell had not been in the cast).
Bowie and Visconti were upstate on the morning of September 11, 2001. Bowie, an early riser, happened to be at his upstate residence, watching the lone working television, when the first plane flew into the tower. Both Bowie and Visconti were eventually able to reach their loved ones and confirm that they were safe but were then faced with the awkward situation of being stuck up in the mountains while the city recovered. They made a halfhearted attempt to continue recording, but by sundown, they found themselves out on the studio porch watching orange smoke billow up into the sky to the south. They could see Ground Zero burning for the next week. Heathen, released the following June, was an across-the-board success, Bowie’s biggest critical and commercial hit since the early eighties, breaking the U.S. Top 15 in its debut week and the Top 5 in England. It garnered the most plaudits of any album since Let’s Dance.
“Bowie seems to have finally realized that he’s just been trying too damn hard,” Pitchfork observed in its review. “Where 2000’s Hours was a brooding, wrist-slitting account of Bowie’s laments about growing old and irrelevant, Heathen is the sound of acceptance. He’s relaxed, even serene, and the songs clearly reflect this with a nonchalant charm reminiscent of the Bowie of old.”
The album opens with “Sunday,” which plainly evokes September 11. “Nothing remains,” he sings. “Look for cars or signs of life.” A faithfully jagged and tough version of the Pixies’ indie classic “Cactus” from 1988’s Surfer Rosa follows, with Visconti approximating Steve Albini’s startling drum sound and “you are in the room” ambience. Because Heathen is such a New York record (“Slip Away,” a sort of middle-aged “Life on Mars?” mentions local children’s show host Uncle Floyd and his puppet friend Oogie, the Yankees and Coney Island), it’s hard to continue to avoid reading into lyrics that in places seem to chillingly foreshadow the city’s darkest day as one listens. “Watching all the world and war torn / How I wonder where you are,” Bowie sings on “Slip Away” (written for the Toy sessions a year before).
On “A Better Future,” perhaps his most classic pop song of the new millennium, he pleads, “Please don’t tear this world asunder … Please make sure we get tomorrow.” It’s a terrible thing to say, but these odd bits of tragic prescience actually make the album even more powerful.
As Pitchfork observed, tracks like “Afraid” take the intense self-scrutiny of Hours … to more solid ground. “I wish I was smarter … I wish I was taller,” Bowie whines (over one of his better late period riffs) before arriving at actual conclusions: “I believe in Beatles”—a wry nod to John Lennon’s “God”—“I believe my little soul has grown.”
Covers of Neil Young’s “I’ve Been Waiting for You” and the Legendary Stardust Cowboy’s “I Took a Trip on a Gemini Spaceship” are delivered with fan-boy glee and affectionate irony respectively. (“I shot my space gun,” Bowie sings on the latter. “And boy, I really felt blue.”)
When Paul McCartney and others began organizing a 9/11 tribute concert the following month, Bowie was one of the first to sign on and quickly put a band together. “As New Yorkers, we’d been violated … and David is nothing if not a New Yorker at this point,” says Plati, who led the band that night. It’s Bowie who opens the entire concert, sitting on the Garden floor playing an odd instrument known as an Omnichord, a handheld synthesizer that plays preset rhyth
ms and basic chord changes. The melody was not, as a result, instantly familiar until he began to sing. Then it slowly became recognizable as not a Bowie song, but rather Simon & Garfunkel’s 1968 classic “America,” a tribute to the place that had been Bowie’s spiritual home since his half brother first gave him a copy of On the Road in the late 1950s.
“David’s opening of the show—solo, on Omnichord, performing Paul Simon’s ‘America’—was moving, haunting, eerie, to say the least. It was a surreal atmosphere anyway, and that really drove it home. You could hear a pin drop in the Garden. Though once we launched into ‘Heroes,’ the roof came off the place,” says Plati. “From my vantage point the audience on the floor was mostly firefighters and cops, and they loved every second of it—by the time the Who came onstage, they were totally gone.”
Shortly after helping a city deal with its grief publicly, Bowie was forced to deal with his own privately. His mother, Peggy Jones, died in April of 2002 at the age of eighty-eight. Having long since reconciled with her son, she lived in comfort at the St. Alban’s nursing home outside of London. Work, as it had always been, amounted to the only truly effective way of processing pain and loss. Bowie had not toured since Earthling, five years earlier, and an offer to headline the second annual Area tour (Area 2) organized by his neighbor Moby seemed under the circumstances a good idea. The two had struck up a friendship after Moby remixed Earthling’s “Dead Man Walking” (as he would later do with Reality’s “Bring Me the Disco King”).
In the months following 9/11 New York seemed to awaken from its cultural torpor and, with regard to rock and art anyway, become a great culture center again. “New York, I think, is his cauldron,” says Moby. “So many of his heroes came from here. New York, for all its problems, is still the world center for so many things. Look at his choices of where to live. Geneva. Berlin. If he lived in London his life would be miserable. He’d be tossed into a blender and pureed all the time. L.A., he lived there making Station to Station. New York makes perfect sense and there’s the historical context.”