Starman

by Paul Trynka

  The decision to rid himself of Pitt steeled David’s resolve in other respects. During a BBC radio session produced by Bernie Andrews on 25 March, a dry-run for the album sessions, John Cambridge found a skipping bass drum part too tricky. David and Ronson were both calm and patient. ‘Course you can do it, come on,’ Ronson kept repeating, and Cambridge managed to finish the session. But within the next fortnight, John was gone. His replacement was Mick ‘Woody’ Woodmansey – who had taken John’s place in The Rats when Cambridge left after being asked to rehearse on Easter Bank Holiday. A more expansive drummer, and a more serious, forceful personality, Woodmansey’s complex rhythm patterns and extravagant rolls suited the band’s move to a freer, more improvisational sound. Visconti, though, admired Cambridge’s solid, no-frills drumming, and was surprised to see it was Mick Ronson, rather than David, who had instigated the sacking.

  When it came to music, it seemed Ronson was every bit as unsentimental as Bowie. And as the album recording began, on 18 April at Trident, it was the guitarist who commanded the sessions, moving into the realm of recording with the same intensity with which he’d mastered the guitar. Visconti, whose studio experience far outstripped Ronson’s, fondly remembers that ‘It was Mick who was our guru – anything he told us to do, we’d do.’ It was Ronson who worked on arrangements, persuading Visconti to switch to a Gibson short-scale bass for a more fluid guitar-like sound, wrote out synthesiser lines for Ralph Mace, or even duetted on recorder with Visconti. Mick was omnipresent, dominating the texture and the mood of the album christened The Man Who Sold the World – in stark contrast to Bowie, who was at times, says Visconti, ‘just plain difficult to nail down’.

  David had been remarkably unassertive during his first Mercury album; this time around, he seemed more confident, but still often surprisingly casual, leaving huge amounts of work to Ronson and Visconti, who points out, ‘As a novice producer I just couldn’t understand why David wouldn’t want to be in the studio every minute with us.’ In recent years, David has occasionally seemed needled by Visconti’s comments, pointing out his own, dominant role in the writing: ‘Who else writes chord sequences like that?’ But Ken Scott, engineer on the session, also remembers Ronson and Visconti dominating every aspect of a record from which Bowie was largely absent. ‘Tony and Mick did take over. How much it was David not wanting to have anything to do with it, and how much was Tony taking over I don’t know. But I think it was more Tony’s ideas [on the album] than David’s.’

  Visconti’s frustration with Bowie derived more from ‘them and us’ divisions than any musical disagreements. David’s infatuation with Angie was understandable, but more galling was the fact that ‘David was the only one out of all of us who had money in the bank, from “Space Oddity”, while we were living on nothing.’ These strange, sometimes pleasant but often dysfunctional circumstances were the backdrop for what would be Bowie’s first great, albeit flawed, album. In his previous works, there had been little emotional commitment: ‘Space Oddity’ encompassed simple alienation, and even in a sweet, personal song like ‘Letter to Hermione’ he’d sounded disappointed rather than distraught. Yet for this album, he could ride on the wave of noise created by Ronson and Visconti, using them as a vehicle to intensify his own emotions.

  The recording of The Man Who Sold the World encapsulates an issue that would resurface throughout David Bowie’s career; how much was his own work, and how much that of his subordinates? For detractors – using arguments which parallel those who criticised contemporary artists like Andy Warhol, who simply mapped out concepts and left associates like Gerard Malanga to produce their screenprints or movies – this reliance on his sidemen was a flaw.

  Visconti’s own feelings on the subject are complex, but he summarises his own account by stating, ‘With a smile on my face, I have to say that Mick and I couldn’t have made such a stunning album with anyone else.’ The meaning seems simple: that the album is a Ronson and Visconti album, with David Bowie, as opposed to a David Bowie album with Ronson and Visconti. Yet the ownership of the album is complex, for Bowie unlocked a creativity in both Ronson and Visconti that might otherwise have remained dormant. In his Lower Third days, David’s songwriting consisted mainly of outright theft. The moral position here was more nuanced. Without Bowie, Visconti and Ronson’s collaborations, as the band Ronno, were utterly forgettable. Can one really ‘steal’ something that, without you, wouldn’t exist?

  In Bowie’s frequent absences Ronson and Visconti laboured over several songs, notably ‘She Shook Me Cold’, ‘Black Country Rock’ and the middle section of ‘The Width of a Circle’, all of which emerged from band jams, with Ronson leading the way. Bowie took the lead for ‘The Man Who Sold the World’, ‘Saviour Machine’, ‘The Supermen’ and ‘After All’; but even in these songs, Bowie acquired, almost by osmosis, Ronson’s musical aggression, with the guitarist’s twisted lead guitar encouraging him to explore the most twisted, dark themes he’d so far attempted.

  ‘All the Madmen’ was a touchtone of the album: imposing and disturbing, its theme of madness, and the musical swerves from child-like whimsy to imposing, gothic heavy rock, were taken by many as an illustration of Bowie’s alien nature. This interpretation, however, overlooks its unique genius, for it is in fact a work not of alienation, but of empathy. The lyrics, delivered with a Syd Barrett-like childishness, address Terry’s move to Cane Hill – ‘a mansion cold and grey’ – in almost literal terms. Its talk of being ‘high’ on the ‘far side of town’, rather than alluding to drugs, or to Christ being tempted by the devil, refers simply to Cane Hill’s vantage point over London. There is an almost unbearable sadness about David’s declaration that ‘I’d rather stay here with all the madmen’, alongside Terry, than remain outside Cane Hill’s walls, with all ‘the sad men’. That this was a wish David proclaimed in song, rather than acting on it in real life, adds to the song’s poignancy.

  The intensity of the sessions overpowered occasional weaknesses. ‘She Shook Me Cold’ was a straightforward knock-off of Hendrix’s ‘Voodoo Chile’. Yet the conviction with which the song is delivered, and the unique timbre of Bowie’s voice and Ronson’s guitar, make the song gel in a way that David’s previous homages had never achieved. For the first time, David’s material was transcending its origins.

  The same applied to David’s lyrics. Many of the references were conventional post-hippie fare, from Nietzsche – endlessly name-checked by Jim Morrison – to Kahlil Gibran, whose books Bolan had posed with on Unicorn, Tyrannosaurus Rex’s third album. Whether David was a true adept of the philosophies he name-dropped is doubtful. Mick Farren was, as much as anyone in 1970, in the London intellectual vanguard, through his work with International Times and membership of the band Pink Fairies. A casual friend of Bowie, he describes him as, ‘a bit of poser. Everyone was. Except where some people would read a book jacket and bullshit, David would bullshit, then read the book quietly one Sunday afternoon.’ Today, David confirms Farren’s take, describing his philosophical investigations of the time as mainly consisting of ‘keeping a book in my pocket, with the title showing’.

  Still, if the scholarship was sketchy, it worked emotionally. ‘The Man Who Sold the World’ – its title at least surely influenced by Heinlein’s celebrated Man Who Sold the Moon – is the most poignant. Under- rather than over-written, it is all the more unsettling because of its simplicity. Ronson’s insistent opening riff is claustrophobic and vaguely menacing, as is the narrator’s meeting with a man: ‘although I wasn’t there, he said I was his friend’. Over two simple verses, multiple meanings emerge – all of them disturbing, speaking of death or loss of identity. Ronson’s guitar line for the chorus is childishly simple, as are the lyrics. But the guitar scales that punctuate the chorus march endlessly upwards, like a never-ending staircase – representing an eternity spent wandering. Like ‘All the Madmen’, the song is disturbing, with an emotional intensity that was new to Bowie’s work.

  The complex,
emotional environment that gave birth to The Man Who Sold the World became murkier still when on 27 April, halfway through the sessions, David wrote to Ken, informing him he now no longer considered him his manager and asking him – in mis-phrased legal jargon – to confirm within seven days that he would cease acting as such. A week later, he and Tony Defries were at Pitt’s Manchester Street office. Defries was low-key, but did all of the talking; as would become his style, he confronted the problem head-on but left troublesome details until later – in this case, compensating Pitt for the money he’d invested in David.

  For Pitt, the meeting was devastating. In hindsight, the warning signs were obvious, but David’s defection came as a cruel, unforeseen blow. All those around him at the time, including Wyper, remember him being obviously traumatised – but also touchingly anxious to ensure David’s career wouldn’t suffer. Today Pitt details a host of arrangements he had planned for Bowie – which included a trip to New York on a Cunard liner, using all of his Warhol connections – all of which might well have filled out the career limbo in which the singer would still soon find himself. When considering the suggestion that he was too gentlemanly for the music industry, a shadow passes over Pitt’s face before he responds, ‘Perhaps I wasn’t assertive enough. But my God, I put my hand in my pocket and spent the money on David, which they weren’t doing over that period.’

  In those early post-Pitt days, Defries played a fatherly, advisory role: in the main, he simply talked about solving problems. He was not particularly proactive at first, but was an accomplished name-dropper, who seemed to have a unique sympathy with the artistic temperament. He described how he would protect the precious items that they created, their intellectual copyright, as if it were a religious calling, and explained how he was at the cutting edge of such a process, liberating artists from the clutches of incompetent record companies.

  The Man Who Sold the World was completed on 22 May, but as the tapes were handed over to Philips, the record company was once again embroiled in problems that seemed to justify Tony Defries’ cynicism about record companies. For towards the autumn of 1970, he discovered that Olav Wyper, his champion at the label, was being ousted. David faced being an orphan artist.

  The loss of Wyper was soon followed by the disappearance of Tony Visconti and Mick Ronson. Their defection would become a well-known staging post in David Bowie’s career. Another setback is, in comparison, obscure. For by the end of the year, the new manager who promised to champion David Bowie had disappeared, too. Just at the point when he’d demonstrated how much he needed supporters to help realise his vision, David Bowie would be at his most alone.

  8

  Kooks

  It will either be a disaster, or everything will be hunky dory.

  Peter Shoot

  It’s the middle of 2007, and Tony Defries is holding forth. It’s an impressive spectacle: the way his conversation flits from subject to subject – analysing hidden patterns and trends, switching from science fiction to steel mills, the Second World War to electronic substrates – is enthralling. His voice has an upper-class languor, but he’s proud of his street-urchin credentials, and while his talk is grandiose there’s an engaging practicality to all of his high-falutin’ claims, a delight in the nuts and bolts of contracts, an innate understanding of how companies are organised, and a disdain for those who lack the command of such essentials.

  This is the man whose two role models, Colonel Tom Parker and Allen Klein, are two of the most controversial managers in the history of rock music. Fittingly, Tony Defries is the third. Like Parker, he was an integral part of his client’s rise to fame. Like Allen Klein, he and his best-known client suffered the most rancorous and public of splits.

  Defries is a master of the Big Lie: telling the masses his client was huge, when he was as yet strictly small-time; manipulating the truth on every level to advance his client; creating a fake reality that would have been envied by a Hollywood press agent of the thirties. But then there is the little lie: the notion that Tony Defries took a chance on David Bowie when he was a washed up, one-hit wonder. For as those who were at the centre of it all testify, the reality is rather different.

  *

  Soon after Wyper’s disappearance from Philips, Tony Visconti left Haddon Hall. He and his girlfriend Liz moved out in July for practical, household reasons – Haddon Hall was getting crowded – but it marked a change in Tony’s priorities: from David to Marc Bolan. That same month, Marc recorded a song named ‘Ride a White Swan’; by its October release he had shortened the band name to T. Rex – famously, so daytime radio DJs could pronounce it – marking his ascension from the underground to stardom.

  By September, Defries’ ambitions had extended beyond being a mere legal adviser to David, for it was at that time that he officially joined forces with Laurence Myers, using his relationship with Bowie, and Bowie’s social acquaintance, Lionel Bart, as leverage. According to Myers, Defries was employed initially as business affairs manager, with a promise that if his signings made money, Defries would have twenty per cent of Myers’ new company, Gem.

  With Pitt gone, it was time for Defries to eliminate another ‘old-school’ collaborator: David’s publisher, David Platz. Platz – a concentration-camp survivor and a respected but not necessarily loved businessman – considered David still under contract to Essex Music, with more songs to deliver; Defries simply told Platz the contract was terminated, and started looking for a new publisher. This was classic Defries grandstanding, breaking an impasse and sorting out the details later. The deal caused a long-running legal dispute, with David forced to hand over several songs in later years as recompense, but the legal ramifications were irrelevant. The Chrysalis signing represented a fresh start. Defries promised he would deliver a fresh start for David’s recording contract, too, once his Mercury deal came up for renewal in June, 1971.

  Defries showed plenty of chutzpah with Platz, as he had with Pitt. But when it came to signing deals, rather than terminating them, he seemed less pushy. In those early days it was Laurence Myers, not Defries, who boasted good connections in the music industry. One of them was Bob Grace, who had just joined Chrysalis to set up a publishing division. In September 1970, Myers called to ask if he’d meet one of his new clients.

  Unusually, no one from David’s new management company turned up for the meeting at Grace’s office. Instead, David and Angie arrived unaccompanied; but if David was nervous, he didn’t betray his concern for a moment. Instead, he was expansive, ravishing, charming, a natural-born salesman. Angie, too, exuded glamour. Both of them, says Grace, ‘really knew to work the system’, telling him about the songs David was working on, inviting him down to spend time at Haddon Hall, drawing him into their web. Before long, says Grace, Bowie was ‘sticking to me like a limpet’.

  Grace was already a fan of ‘Space Oddity’, and loved a new song, ‘Holy Holy’, that David played him. Soon he had agreed to pay what was, for Chrysalis, the unprecedented sum of £5000 for a five-year publishing contract with David. The deal was signed on 23 October, 1970.

  Tony Visconti was another insider who, like Bob Grace, was suspicious of David’s new manager. Part of this was prompted by the split with Essex, for whom Visconti still worked – his suspicions deepened with what Visconti regarded as Defries’ clumsy attempts to recruit him to Gem. Visconti’s dislike of Defries was compounded by Bolan and Bowie’s rivalry. Marc knew where he was heading, was more focused and seemed on the verge of a commercial breakthrough. ‘David and I had a parting of the ways,’ says Visconti. ‘I felt terrible, but Marc was about to become almost a full-time job for the next two years of my life.’

  Visconti’s departure left an opening for a producer and bassist; his immediate replacement was studio veteran Herbie Flowers, who over-saw Bowie’s next single, ‘Holy Holy’. The song was funky, its looseness and vocal sound obviously Bolan-ish, but as Flowers concedes, ‘Some records just don’t gel.’ The single disappeared into oblivion on its rele
ase in January, 1971. Even David’s supporters seemed to lose hope. ‘Maybe there’s something about Bowie that doesn’t run alongside the path of luck,’ declared Penny Valentine, the writer who had kept a close eye on Bowie’s career thus far.

  By the time ‘Holy Holy’ was released, Mick Ronson and Woody Woodmansey had disappeared, too. The abiding rumour was that Defries had sent them home, but in fact the pair weren’t pushed: they jumped. Mick Ronson was on his way to a Hype show in Leeds when he saw a sign on the A1 that pointed to Hull. The lure of his hometown proved too strong for the guitarist, who asked Woody, ‘Do we really want to do this? Or should we go back and do rock music like we’ve always wanted?’ And Woody replied, ‘Yeah!’ The pair would reunite with Rats singer Benny Marshall and record as Ronno, with Visconti, before recruiting Trevor Bolder on bass for live shows.

  Before the failure of ‘Holy Holy’, Defries had been bullish. But soon London’s newest management guru seemed to fade into the background. One reason was that he had to wait out the expiry of David’s contract. A second reason was that David was very needy, calling people up at odd hours, turning up at their door-step if they didn’t answer the phone, convinced that his own cause was paramount. Defries could be fatherly, but as his later lieutenant, Tony Zanetta, points out, ‘He wasn’t there to wipe people’s ass for them.’