by Paul Trynka
For David to realise his vision, he had to have the best. That included the studio, Trident, already familiar to David, but then at its height of popularity after its conversion to a state-of-the-art twenty-four tracks. Trident’s main engineer, Ken Scott, was fast becoming, says Grace, ‘the hot guy at the time’, primarily thanks to his work on George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass. Scott got on well with David, who decided to share the production role with him. In June, David, Grace, Ken Scott and Mick Ronson assembled at Scott’s house in Catford, south-east London to select an album’s worth of material from the Radio Luxembourg demos.
Scott had engineered David’s last two albums, and agreed to the producer’s role, figuring he’d gain useful experience. ‘I thought David was good, but he’d never be a superstar. This would be the perfect time to practise production, so if I fucked up it wouldn’t really matter. But when we were sitting there listening to those demos, this lightbulb went on. I thought, Bloody hell! This is for real!’
Some kind of floodgate had been unlocked, so much so that ‘Star’, ‘Moonage Daydream’ and ‘Lady Stardust’ were among the high-quality compositions saved for a later day, for there was a conscious decision to build the new album around the piano. The three standout songs – ‘Oh! You Pretty Things’, ‘Changes’ and ‘Life On Mars?’ – all featured broadly similar piano runs, rolling forward with an irresistible momentum, but each boasted distinct, gorgeously memorable melodies.
The contrast with ‘Space Oddity’ could not be more pronounced; whereas the melody on that song was constrained, claustrophobic, Hunky Dory’s standout melodies were fluid, swooping over an octave or more. ‘Life On Mars?’ is a typical example, cheekily based on the chord sequence of ‘Comme d’Habitude’, aka ‘My Way’, a song for which David had once crafted a set of lyrics at the behest of Ken Pitt. His attempts were rejected, and if the setback had rankled, then revenge was sweet, for the new song was grandiose, its melody arguably superior to Jacques Revaux’s original. The main tune arrived in Bowie’s head on the bus to Lewisham to buy some shoes: he hopped off the bus, ‘more or less loped’ back to Haddon Hall and completed the song by the late afternoon. The lyrics were enigmatic, a succession of fragmentary images witnessed by the ‘girl with the mousy hair’, rather in the style of McCartney’s ‘Eleanor Rigby’. Only when we reach the chorus, with an octave leap over the words ‘life on Mars?’, do we realise the song is about a yearning for escape, or transcendence. It’s a thrilling trick – and a solidly traditional one, drawing on songwriters like Harold Arlen.
David’s three previous albums had all been complicated recordings, overshadowed by politics. With Hunky Dory, David set out to satisfy himself, not record company executives: a freedom reflected in the album’s freshness. The recording process was simple, dominated by David’s child-like optimism and focus – much of which came from the reassuring presence of Mick Ronson, who as arranger carried the burden of translating the songs from piano sketches to luscious epics.
Mick didn’t share David’s sense of calm. He had taken some refresher piano lessons on his return to Hull; nonetheless, the assignment was far scarier than anything David had thrown at him so far. Although David did occasionally lose his composure – shouting, ‘Just play the song right!’ when the rhythm section messed up a take of ‘Song for Bob Dylan’ – he was masterful at motivating people, pushing Mick forward, challenging him, ‘Go on, do it! If it doesn’t work out it doesn’t work out – but have a go!’ Mick impressed both Ken Scott and Bob Grace with his quiet efficiency, but Ronson’s friend Trevor Bolder noticed the guitarist was ‘a bag of nerves’. While Bowie sat in the Trident control room, looking down on the recording area, Ronson would be on the studio floor, checking though manuscript pages, nervously dragging on one after another of his trademark roll-ups; close up, you could see his hands shaking. But there was little time to worry, for the sessions were rushed and David was impatient. For the songs where he played piano, there would sometimes be just a couple of run-throughs, and then the band would have to find their own way through, like session musicians, living on their wits. ‘It was always on the edge, wondering if they would make it through,’ says Scott. Occasionally they would have a rest, watching Rick Wakeman overdub piano parts at Trident’s celebrated Bechstein, on which McCartney had pounded out ‘Hey Jude’.
At first, the musicians wondered if David’s impatience derived from a selfish desire to monopolise the studio time for his own singing, but it turned out he only required a couple of takes to nail a perfect vocal, his microphone technique perfected by years of experience. ‘He was unique,’ says Scott, ‘the only singer I ever worked with where virtually every take was a master.’
The truth was, he was simply burning to download his work from his mind and commit it to tape. ‘The Bewlay Brothers’, for instance, arrived during an unsettled day and was recorded, solo, later that evening. Its title derived from a cheap old-fashioned pipe Bowie had once briefly owned, and the lyrics were inscrutable even to their creator. ‘Don’t listen to the words, they don’t mean anything,’ he told Scott as they prepared for a vocal take. ‘I’ve just written them for the American market, they like this kind of thing.’
The album’s lyrics – which were dense with allusions, with both ‘Quicksand’ and ‘The Bewlay Brothers’ among his most evocative collection of images – usually came quickly (‘I can’t remember much redrafting at all,’ says Mark Pritchett). The result was a dazzling collection of musical and lyrical imagery. The songs obviously drew from both traditional English and cutting-edge American influences – ‘He stole from the best,’ as Trevor Bolder puts it, reiterating David’s self-proclaimed role as a ‘tasteful thief’ – but the borrowed riffs and name-checking merely contributed to the simple, child-like radiance. In his days around Haddon Hall, playing with Zowie, tinkering with his Riley, or flirting with Freddie, David had forged a new manifesto, post-modern – where you could pick and choose from the works of Warhol or Lou Reed, leaving the joins showing – and post-sexual, where the singer is free to play the role of man, woman or child. Hunky Dory had the unspoilt, overwhelming charm of a new beginning.
*
If David’s new record was naive and simple, Defries’ means of selling it were hard-bitten – strictly old-school. The sessions were drawing to a close before he ensured he was free to sell the results to the record company of his choice. He and Laurence Myers were already negotiating with RCA, sending them over half of Hunky Dory, before Defries set out to rid himself of Mercury.
Vice President Irwin Steinberg and A&R Robin McBride had flown over to London in the happy expectation of extending David’s contract to include a third album for the label. Their fate was like that of a general who has lost the battle before his troops even take the field. ‘We were totally blindsided,’ says McBride, who had arranged what he thought would be a pleasant lunch at the Londonderry Hotel only for Defries, soberly dressed and immaculately groomed, to bypass the normal pleasantries and announce, ‘David will never record for you again.’ Instantly, Steinberg pointed out David owed one more album under his contract. ‘If you insist on a third album, you will get the biggest pile of shit ever seen on a record,’ Defries responded. Steinberg was a brilliant, well-read man, McBride explains, but his instinct when faced with an argument was to say ‘fuck you’ and walk away. Which is exactly what he did. ‘If you want a release, you will have to pay,’ he informed Defries. ‘You will have to refund Mercury for all the recording expenses, all the art expenses, all the packaging and promotional expenses that we have undertaken on David Bowie’s behalf.’
This was exactly the response that Defries had hoped for; he assented to those costs, letting Steinberg believe he had won. Only later did McBride and Steinberg discover that David had already recorded an album intended for another label; only later did they realise that by buying back the two Mercury albums at cost, Defries had actually ended up making a huge amount of money. McBride and Steinberg, music fan
s both, had been taken, in the consummate example of Defries’ aggression and brinksmanship. For both, it would represent one of the most humiliating setbacks of their careers.
Although he acknowledges that Defries did not utter an untruth in that fateful meeting, McBride found the encounter detestable, only rivalled by his meeting with Dylan’s famously aggressive manager, Albert Grossman. ‘They have both helped in the success of some terribly talented people,’ he notes. ‘But both personalities belonged in the same garbage can.’
As David finished Hunky Dory that summer, Defries was developing an almost messianic sense that he could remake the music industry, buoyed up by his coup at Mercury. He and David were hanging out together more and more, at the Sombrero or back at Haddon Hall. Defries disapproved of drug use, the mark of a loser, but rapidly bought into the Bowie lifestyle, savouring the exotic sexual frisson. David also shared Tony’s fascination with Americana – and together they became obsessed with the biggest coup: breaking America. When Andy Warhol’s play Pork, which so flagrantly symbolised this new world, debuted in London that summer, it was natural that David and Tony would come to witness the event. What few could have predicted was how they would adopt Warhol’s work, using it to sell America back to itself.
Collaged from hundreds of hours of Andy’s phone conversations by Tony Ingrassia – a graduate of the Theatre of the Ridiculous – Pork was scheduled to open on 2 August, and promised a healthy dose of outrage. Two gorgeous nude boys, the ‘Pepsodent Twins’, stood impassively on stage throughout the show, while ‘Amanda Pork’ – obviously based on Factory regular Brigid Polk – talked incessantly on the phone, frolicked topless, masturbated and engaged in hilariously deadpan conversations with the Andy Warhol character, played with a languid precision by Tony Zanetta. The play caused predictable outrage, inspiring a Daily Mirror exposé which ensured the Roundhouse was packed for most performances.
The Warhol troupe were aware of David even before they’d arrived in London. They’d seen a ‘titillating’ news story complete with photo of David in his Mr Fish dress in an issue of Rolling Stone that had also featured Pork. Within days of their arrival in London, stage manager Leee Childers and Kathy Dorritie, who played Pork, hit the town, looking for laughs or getting laid by posing as journalists for Circus magazine. It was Leee who spotted a tiny ad for a Bowie gig in the NME, and set out with Kathy and Wayne County (or ‘Vulva Lips’) for the Country Club in Haverstock Hill, in search of ‘the man in the dress’. Instead, he complained, they found ‘a folkie’.
After the show, Leee and Kathy were initially more taken with Angie’s energy and enthusiasm than with the unassuming composure of the flaxen-haired ‘folkie’, but when the Warhol troupe were invited to Haddon Hall after David, Angie and a group of Gem regulars turned up for a performance of Pork a couple of days later, they found the ‘quiet and almost drab’ creature had metamorphosed. Tony Zanetta, a kind of simulacrum for Warhol, was the performer who found himself fixed in David’s laser beam. ‘He can walk into the room and every single head would turn and it was like a light was shining. It was uncanny.’ They spent the evening locked in conversation, talking about artifice, makeup, glamour; Zanetta telling David about the Theatre of the Ridiculous, while David reciprocated with stories of his Lindsay Kemp days. David was warm, unaffected, with an instinctive genius at building rapport. Zanetta and the others were fascinated by the singer; after their nights at the Sombrero, and the spectacle of Haddon Hall, they felt they had found kindred spirits, who shared their almost child-like enthusiasms. Defries was as fascinated as David; by now he luxuriated in the atmosphere at the Sombrero, and the delicious sensuality of being surrounded by Dana Gillespie, whose career he also promised to take in hand.
Beyond his lofty talk, Defries was practical, too. At the Haverstock Hill show on 26 July, David and Mick’s sound was lousy, put to shame by the support group, Tucky Buzzard. It turned out their engineer, Robin Mayhew, was working with a new kind of PA system that would allow a singer free-rein to wander around the auditorium. Mayhew was hired and told to build a new system: ‘Sort it out,’ Defries told him, ‘it doesn’t matter what it costs.’ He hired Mick’s old Rats roadie, Peter Hunsley, too, but there was a limit to his generosity with Laurence Myers’ money. Whereas the road-crew were kept on retainer, the musicians – Trevor Bolder and Woody Woodmansey – were sent back to Hull, while David and Defries prepared for their trip to the New York offices of RCA in September.
David was calm, self-possessed, free of self-doubt. Defries was positively messianic, eager to walk into the home of the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll, and tell them how much they needed him and his client. He wasn’t afraid to set his sights high. ‘You’ve had nothing since the 1950s, and you missed out on the sixties,’ he would tell RCA. ‘But you can own the 1970s. Because David Bowie is going to remake the decade, just like The Beatles did in the 1960s.’
9
Over the Rainbow
It was, I’ll do anything, play anything, say anything, wear anything to become a star. And there’s nothing wrong with that. And there was a tremendous hunger on the part of the audience for it, too. It was that moment in time.
Scott Richardson
Breaking America had been a staple of every ambitious British rock ‘n’ roller’s career plan since the days of The Shadows, in the early sixties. David Bowie and Tony Defries arrived in New York convinced of their ability to conquer the new world. Given both their characters, that was no surprise. But no one could have predicted how, once in the country, their plans would become even more grandiose.
Defries ensured that the September 1971 trip on which he planned to close the RCA deal was heavy with symbolism by staying at the Warwick – the hotel famous for hosting The Beatles – and holding court for a cavalcade of visitors to build up a sense of event. Different people have different perceptions of that week: Lisa Robinson, who was central to the RCA signing, saw David as the star of proceedings, boyish, enthused, with Defries playing the role of Colonel Parker to David’s Elvis. Lisa, her husband Richard, and many others were caught in the spotlight of David’s charm, which he’d learned to focus with dazzling effectiveness: he’d pick words out of their sentences and repeat them, as if they had crystallised thoughts in his own mind, or when bumping into them again, he’d act as if he was barely able to function in the intervening minutes. Sometimes, talking to him, the objects of his attention would experience that giddy, tingly feeling you get when you’re in love.
Others saw Tony Defries as the star of the show: Tony Zanetta was enchanted by Bowie, but found Defries had a unique sense of power emanating from him. ‘[He was] a magical person, he seemed older than he was and very wise – like a sage.’
Dennis Katz, RCA’s head of A&R, was keen to close the deal. As Tom Ayers had told David, the label had seen Elvis Presley’s sales in seemingly irreversible decline; Katz desperately needed new talent and had been bowled over by an acetate of the earlier Hunky Dory tracks. But it was Richard and Lisa Robinson who would prove crucial to the signing; the couple were arbiters of cool, RCA’s ‘company heads’. Richard had joined RCA as house producer and Katz’s assistant in A&R; his wife Lisa was New York’s hippest music journalist; together they would prove David’s most potent champions.
History rarely records Laurence Myers’ role in the RCA signing; the Gem founder opened negotiations with RCA, and oversaw the contract, he says today. ‘I actually did the deal – I have to point that out as it’s so rarely recognised!’ Yet it was Defries who turned the signing into an event. Defries was adept at homing in on RCA’s insecurities, commiserating with them that RCA was best-known for producing washing machines. But he was ‘very, very charming’ about it, everyone remembers. Even the money wasn’t a problem; RCA agreed to a $37,500 advance on signature, a middling sum, ‘but that didn’t bother Tony,’ says Zanetta, ‘he always knew he could improve on the deal later.’
The RCA contract was signed on 9 September: a coup for Defries, w
ho’d promised David he would relaunch his career. But that was not enough. For over two days, 8 and 9 September, Defries’ ambitions would inflate from securing a single record contract to launching an entertainment empire.
Yet if Defries was the salesman, it was David who masterminded the product. He was a stranger in a strange land, where the main participants were constantly rushing around, calling their friends on the phone, hanging out at Max’s Kansas City and trying to out-cool each other, but he was equally in his element, enthralling the New Yorkers just as he had the Pork actors. By now, his talent for identifying people who could help him was as finely honed as his songwriting skills.
Over those two days, the entire structure of what would become MainMan was established. Zanetta was already being drawn in – he represented New York cool to David, while to Defries he was both inspiration and sounding board. He would soon be given the title of MainMain President, USA (his first job would be finding and painting an office) and become the dominant figure in the organisation after Defries, with many of his instincts and off-the-cuff remarks becoming company policy.
It was Zanetta who introduced David to Andy Warhol, an event usually described as ‘iconic’. The reality was more messy and inconclusive. David was tense, attempting to impress Warhol with a little mime, based on Kemp’s Pierrot schtick where he pulled out his own intestines; the little performance went down like a lead balloon, with Warhol remaining on the edge of the conversation. Instead David talked mainly with Alan Midgette and Glenn O’Brien, later editor of Interview. Warhol’s only fully formed line of conversation was that he liked David’s shoes. The meeting was filmed: but apart from the cheesy feel of David’s routine, the footage is notable for another reason: between Andy himself, Zanetta, who played Andy in Pork, Midgette, who’d famously impersonated Andy on a college tour, and David, who memorably played Andy in the 1996 film Basquiat, the footage features four Warhols. Which is, of course, a very Warholian happening.