by Paul Trynka
Having secured his meeting with Warhol, David enlisted Lisa Robinson as a co-conspirator to link up with Andy’s musical protégé. Once he’d learned Lisa was friends with Lou Reed, David was ‘absolutely intrigued’, says Robinson, who arranged for them to meet over dinner at the Ginger Man, a ‘really straight’ restaurant by Lincoln Park where Lisa would go out for steaks with her friend Fran Lebowitz. Lou and David chatted: Lou was drunk and manic, David whispered flirtatiously, while Lou’s wife Betty looked on adoringly.
Enthralled as Lisa was by David, she didn’t quite realise the scope of his ambition. Lou explained he was about to record his debut RCA album with Richard Robinson, who had recently produced the Flamin’ Groovies’ superb Teenage Head. Lou’s chat with David was friendly enough, an upand-coming artist paying tribute to one whose career had apparently tanked, but there was no mention that David was thinking of working with Lou; his furtiveness would soon cause ‘a bit of a falling out’, says Lisa.
Later that evening David’s party, plus Richard and Lisa, moved on to Max’s Kansas City. This was both viper pit and arcadia, a place where, says Leee Childers, ‘Each night was different and each night was proclaimed the last good night of Max’s for years – and of course it only got better and better.’ The back room had seen endless cultural and sexual unions, many of which seemed hugely significant in later years, none of which seemed so at the time. ‘No one, including Andy Warhol, thought that any of this was important, much less that anyone was going to remember it,’ says Childers. ‘Everything was of itself the minute it was happening and then it was over and that’s how the whole back room was. That’s how I remember it – in flashes.’
Although most of those involved could not appreciate the wider significance of the scenes played out in the back room at Max’s, one unabashed fan from Beckenham could. For the fragile, thrift-store decadence and glamour of Max’s would become the raw material of David Bowie’s art. Just like the English bluesmen of the sixties, Bowie would be accused of exploiting his influences; without doubt, they did indeed bring him money and fame. Yet his encounter that night with a down-on-his-luck heroin addict who would one day become his closest friend – his ‘twin atom’ – reveals him more as a fan than exploiter.
In the seven months since David discovered the colourful story of Iggy Stooge, the Detroit singer’s life had taken successively more picaresque turns. Abandoned by his record company, he had suffered heroin overdoses, van smashes, being stranded in the Detroit projects clad in a tutu, and had recently been booted out of guitarist Rick Derringer’s house following the apparent theft of Liz Derringer’s jewellery by Iggy’s underage girlfriend. After hearing snippets of Iggy’s recent history from Lisa Robinson, David asked if they could meet. Lisa made more phone calls, and eventually Iggy was persuaded to pull himself away from the TV in his friend Danny Fields’ apartment, and walk up to Max’s.
In future years, David would be seen as cold and manipulative, eyeing Iggy much as a Victorian collector would a choice hummingbird destined for stuffing. The reality was almost the opposite, for it was Iggy who manipulated the event, ‘almost dancing’ into the meeting, Zanetta noticed. Bowie and Defries were both enthralled by the cheeky raconteur. Iggy could turn on the flutter-eyelashed flirtatiousness and build rapport just like David, but there was an idée fixe about his manner that fascinated, and slightly unnerved, David.
Their discussions about music, and Iggy’s future, continued the next morning, over breakfast at the Warwick, which in Defries’ distinctive style could take hours, interrupted by endless phone calls and scheming. Iggy was impressed by Defries – his ‘big vision of what he was going to do’ – and he liked David. He could see beyond the charm, and judged him ‘very canny, very self-possessed and a … not unkind person. Which you don’t usually see in people so self-aware.’ David played him Hunky Dory, while Iggy made polite noises. ‘It wasn’t anything to do with what I was trying to do, but I realised, in terms of song-craft, he can do A, B and C.’ By the end of the meeting, Iggy had agreed to come over to London, once he’d completed his methadone programme, and sign to Gem.
Bowie and Defries had set out to close a recording deal – and returned with an empire. Within three days in New York, Defries had signed David’s contract with RCA, discussed the re-release of David’s old Mercury albums, recruited Zanetta to the cause, formed a relationship with Lou Reed and had recruited Iggy to the Gem fold, promising to secure him a new record deal – a promise Defries fulfilled a few weeks later, signing Iggy to Columbia.
By the time David, Mick and Angie – who had spent most of the trip visiting her parents in Connecticut – returned to London, David had become obsessed with the singer he had met at Max’s. ‘He talked about Iggy for a full week – it was definitely all-consuming,’ says Bob Grace, a recollection shared by Ken Scott and Trevor Bolder. ‘Iggy and Lou, it was,’ says Bolder, ‘always Iggy and Lou.’
David was purposeful, clear-headed, in the days following the New York trip, but wired, too, filled with nervous energy as he prepared to unveil his new songs and his new band. The unofficial debut of what would become The Spiders from Mars was planned for Friars Aylesbury, an assembly hall in an ancient market town an hour out of London, known for its enthusiastic audiences. In the middle of September, Ronson called Bolder and Woodmansey back from Hull for their first show as a band. Rick Wakeman, David’s first choice as pianist, had joined Yes just a few weeks before, so David phoned an old friend from Kent, Tom Parker, to play piano, jabbering in nervous gratitude when Parker said, ‘Of course!’
When David took to the Friars stage on 25 September he was shaking: he had dressed up in baggy black culottes, red platform boots and a women’s beige jacket, worn over his skinny, naked chest. ‘Does anyone have a heater?’ was one of his asides, in a set of rambling song introductions that took in Lou Reed’s sense of humour and why New Yorkers felt compelled to stare into subway tunnels. ‘We didn’t know if he was on drugs, or just nervous,’ says Kris Needs, a Bowie fan who’d designed the flyers for the night. The set was a primitive version of what would become a well-honed set, starting out with acoustic songs, including Brel’s ‘Port of Amsterdam’, with the band only joining in halfway through. But as Ronson cranked up his Les Paul and the energy levels increased, David’s announcements grew shorter and the applause in the half-empty club grew in intensity. After closing the set with a ruthless version of ‘Waiting for the Man’, Bowie walked into the dressing room, exultant. ‘That was great,’ he announced to Needs. ‘And when I come back I’m going to be completely different.’
Few people, outside David’s immediate circle, realised how soon he’d come back, or how different he’d be. But within the tiny coterie of people – David, Angie and the band, Defries and a small crew of roadies – the activity was feverish, with David and musicians spending most of October crammed in Greenwich’s Underhill studio – the polystyrene-lined basement of a down-at-heel Georgian building that also contained a car parts showroom and an escort agency. Hunky Dory was not yet released, and David was burning to record its successor. Already, he had eight or nine songs that they’d run through each day, playing each tune just a few times before moving on to the next, to keep the feel loose, un-studied. It felt democratic, ‘a band thing’, says Bolder.
Several key songs they rehearsed – notably ‘Moonage Daydream’ and ‘Lady Stardust’ – dated from David’s last bout of songwriting in the spring, yet most of them had been assembled with astonishing speed within the previous few weeks. In the wake of Hunky Dory’s writing blitz, this was impressive. Yet that was, literally, only half the story. Bowie’s on-stage chatter at Aylesbury showed him struggling to articulate his obsessions with Americana, figureheads like Dylan, Reed and Warhol, and the ‘presumptuousness of the songwriter’. Bowie’s invention of Ziggy Stardust, a concept that would encompass all these diverse obsessions was simple, like all great ideas.
In later years, David Bowie would claim the idea o
f Ziggy Stardust came to him in a dream – gifted by the same god who had told his father to find a job at a children’s charity. If so, like ‘Oh! You Pretty Things’, it was an unconscious embodiment of all the skills that he’d mastered in the last few years.
David had experimented with a ‘rock opera’ back in 1968, when he’d worked on a sequence entitled ‘Ernie Johnson’ at Ken Pitt’s apartment – a bizarre, camp, cockney epic which culminated in the titular hero’s suicide. In comparison, Ziggy Stardust wasn’t really an opera, more a collection of snapshots thrown together, edited later into a sequence that made sense. The notion that Ziggy would be David’s own alter-ego emerged only at the last minute; it was a bodge-job, later refined into a concept.
Ziggy was David’s homage to the outsider; the main inspiration was undoubtedly Iggy, the singer with whom David was obsessed and whose doomed, Dionysian career path had already built its own mythology. David was well aware, though, that Iggy, too, was a mere creation. During their first meeting David had that learned the scary, gold-and glitter-spattered front man hid another persona: the urbane Jim Osterberg, who was disconcertingly reminiscent of Jimmy Stewart. Vince Taylor, the other inspiration, was an ‘American’ rocker, who was actually born Brian Holden in Isleworth, and had made it big in France. By 1966, he was washed up, and the teenage David had bumped into him during the period when Vince was hanging around La Giaconda, claiming he was the messiah and pointing out UFO sites on a crumpled map. Hence Ziggy was a tribute to artifice, a play on identity, alter-ego placed on alter-ego, a vehicle for rock ‘n’ roll which would allow David, if everything failed, to announce that this was all ironic, just a pose.
Ziggy’s surname, a reference to the Legendary Stardust Cowboy, was just as nuanced. The name encompassed David’s enchantment with glamour and glitter, referenced Hoagy Carmichael’s best-known song and even the relatively recent realisation that, as Carl Sagan put it, ‘we are all stardust’, all of our atoms recycled via supernovae. And what was Ziggy Stardust, but old vital rock ‘n’ roll matter, recycled, but fresh as a new world?
Ziggy wasn’t born fully fledged, though. He developed bit by bit. ‘It was never discussed as a concept album from the start,’ says Ken Scott. ‘We were recording a bunch of songs – some of them happened to fit together, some didn’t work.’ Once sessions started at Trident on 8 November, the work in progress sounded more like fifties rock ‘n’ roll than The Stooges. A cover of Chuck Berry’s ‘Around and Around’ featured in the early track listing, and songs like ‘Hang onto Yourself’ featured quotes from Eddie Cochran and Chuck Berry, as well as shades of Gene Vincent and Vince Taylor. David’s obsession with rehearsing and recording songs rapidly helped approximate the roughness of the Velvets or The Stooges, yet Ronson and his musicians – David, too – were too competent to summon up anything like The Stooges’ moronic inferno.
The straight-ahead rockers – ‘Hang onto Yourself’ and ‘Suffragette City’ – took Eddie Cochran’s teenage rebellion as a model, with the same mix of acoustic and electric guitars, as well as liberal musical quotes from ‘Something Else’. But where Cochran’s songs spoke to kids breaking the parental bonds, Ziggy Stardust’s message was explicitly about sexual liberation: ‘Henry … I can’t take you this time’ and ‘The church of man, love’. Images like ‘tigers on Vaseline’ or the ‘mellow-thighed chick put my spine out of place’, made up their own manifesto: theatrical, yet sleazy, all delivered with an arched eyebrow.
The two songs that would open and close the album were even less reminiscent of American heavy rock. Both songs were in a slow-burning, triple-time signature, 6/8 – like ‘House of the Rising Sun’ or Paul Simon’s ‘America’ – yet are starker, more stripped down. ‘Five Years’ and ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide’ are masterful, both built on minimal, almost unvarying broken chords, with David’s voice alone supplying the drama. Both songs illustrate how Ziggy could stage an emotional onslaught that David had never attempted – the desperation in ‘Five Years’, the urgency in ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide’, which completed Ziggy’s dramatic arc. The ending, ‘Gimme your hands … you’re not alone’, is pure show-business artifice, an act of audience manipulation worthy of Leni Riefenstahl, but Bowie’s sympathy for Iggy, Vince and all the other doomed rock ‘n’ rollers is absolutely sincere.
Some figures, notably Angie Bowie, dispute that David Bowie ever truly loved anyone; yet there is no doubt of his deep and enduring love for rock ‘n’ roll. ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide’ is all the more poignant given that, just a couple of years later, Iggy Pop, abandoned by Bowie, would stab himself on-stage, in an event publicised as a rock ‘n’ roll suicide that, his manager informed the press, ‘will only happen once’.
‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide’, along with ‘Suffragette City’, was among the last songs recorded in the album’s main sessions, demonstrating that the album’s central concept – Ziggy’s rise and fall – arrived late in the day, with Chuck Berry’s ‘Around and Around’ still on the track listing. But in that whirlwind winter, events were moving fast. Hunky Dory was released on 17 December, with the single ‘Changes’ following it on 7 January and immediately picking up radio play. A gorgeous song, based around one of the piano runs painstakingly worked out at Haddon Hall, with a stammered chorus that echoed ‘My Generation’ and hence emphasised its status as an anthem for a new youth movement, ‘Changes’ didn’t make the British charts this time around but ‘it was the breakthrough’, says Anya Wilson, who had to hawk it around the radio.
It was in the closing weeks of 1971, as the final details of Ziggy’s mythical career were penciled in, that the hero was given his own costume. The aesthetic was half futuristic, half thrift-shop chic, masterminded primarily by Freddie Buretti. Freddie himself cut an exotic figure – with his high-waisted peg-leg trousers, skinny shirts and, occasionally, eighties-style oversize shades – but when he and David cooked up their new look, they based the designs on the Droogs, the futuristic teenage thugs in Stanley Kubrick’s legendary, banned film version of A Clockwork Orange. ‘But to lessen the image of violence, I decided we should go for extremely colourful and exotic material in place of the Droog white cotton,’ says David. Freddie designed and did most of the sewing on the skinny outfits, which were fitted with a generous, Tudor-style codpiece, copied from Britain’s popular Mod jeans, Lee Cooper. To complete the look, David searched out cheap, brightly coloured wrestling boots, custom-made by Russell & Bromley, whose showroom was based in North Bromley. These kind of boots could be seen on television every Saturday afternoon on ITV’s hugely popular, ludicrously choreographed wrestling shows, and completed the aesthetic of rock ‘n’ roll danger and Vaudeville camp.
It was Angie who encouraged the next phase of David’s makeover; within a few days, the flowing gold locks that David had worn throughout the recording were shorn. Thus, the final link with the 1960s was severed. Many of David’s contemporaries – Marc Bolan, and even the Nice’s Keith Emerson, who wore a silver lurex jumpsuit as he attacked his Hammond organ with a knife that October – had already glammed themselves up that year. But their outfits, with flared trousers and wavy hair, were in essence an evolution of the hippie look. The Ziggy persona – with its cropped hair and skinny silhouette – marked a ruthless break with the sixties. It was finely calculated, but impromptu; done in a rush. Freddie had hardly finished sewing David’s first sand-and-black quilted jumpsuit when David called Mark Pritchett late one night. ‘Can I borrow your Les Paul? The red one?’
It was raining the next day when David came to collect it, mentioning he was off to a photoshoot with Brian Ward, the Chrysalis photographer who’d first worked with David the previous spring. In comparison, this was a simple shoot, in black and white; David posing with Pritchett’s guitar directly outside Ward’s studio on Heddon Street, the tiny U-shaped passage leading off Regent Street, and then in the nearby telephone box. The ghostly post-apocalyptic Droogs feel was enhanced by the cardboard boxes left out on the street, th
e glare of the street lights and the early evening chill evident in the car windscreens, in what would be London’s coldest January for several years.
Although a BBC session on 11 January was booked to promote his current album, ‘Queen Bitch’ was the only Hunky Dory song – its campy New York vibe especially reminiscent of the Velvets’ ‘Sweet Jane’ – in the session, which was dominated by ‘Hang onto Yourself’ and the newly written manifesto ‘Ziggy Stardust’. This was a bold, risky strategy, considering David’s ever-changing musical identity, but Defries and Anya Wilson were happy to follow David’s instincts. ‘He was our golden boy,’ says Wilson. ‘People knew it was going to happen.’
Over that intense winter, David spent even more time thinking than he did singing. Earnest conversations at Haddon Hall ranged late into the night: freewheeling, philosophical, touching on Chuck Berry, The Velvet Underground, the post-industrial future and Hollywood glamour. Often David would talk to Anya Wilson and her boyfriend, Dai Davies, about ‘the pretty things’. They knew he didn’t mean his old friends from the blues scene. ‘These are the coming generation,’ he told them, ‘a change is on its way.’
As David developed his theme, they huddled round the huge corner fireplace, the air thick with the haze from his cigarettes, and listened to him develop a manifesto line by line: this was a new era, factory jobs were obsolete, and so were the Victorian values that defined their parents’ lives. The coming generation would not be restricted by work or conventional sexuality. This bisexual, glittering generation was the homo superior – and David would be their spokesperson.