Starman

by Paul Trynka

David arrived in New York on 17 September, 1972, with Angie in tow. Their week-long cruise across the Atlantic on the QE2 was well publicised, highlighting their status as eccentric 1930s-style glamour icons. Defries considered David’s stated fear of flying an affectation, inspired by one occasion when David wanted to avoid flying with Angie to Cyprus to see her parents. He naturally incorporated David’s intermittent phobia into his palette of publicity gimmicks, while David likewise became addicted to the quirky, cosmopolitan charm of travelling by boat and the temporary fear of flying became permanent.

  In their first couple of days in New York, Bowie and Ronson set out to find a replacement for the various temporary Brit pianists who’d helped them out so far. Annette Peacock – a delightfully genre-busting artist who was briefly signed to MainMan – suggested her own pianist, Mike Garson, who was scraping a living giving piano lessons. It was Ronson who oversaw the auditions at RCA, sitting in with Garson in the main studio and showing him the chords to ‘Changes’. Mick had an amazing ear for detail and fell in love with Garson’s playing after just seven or eight bars. David, too, was overwhelmed – ‘he was simply extraordinary’ – and grew to love sitting alongside the bearded, almost gentle musician on the tour bus, finding out how he ticked. Garson brought a decadent, almost Weimar ambience to the music, which perfectly offset The Spiders’ no-nonsense R&B. He made his debut at the Cleveland show, and would quickly become integral to David’s music. He would also become a key player in the ultimate dismemberment of the band he augmented so perfectly.

  For David, being on the road was the fulfilment of fantasies he’d treasured ever since Terry had turned him on to Jack Kerouac. He loved the long drives along the American highways in their rented bus, and as the band drove from Cleveland to Memphis, and then back to New York, he spent endless hours surveying the landscape and buildings along the roadside, or chatting with George Underwood and Birgit, George’s beautiful, dark-haired Danish-born wife, who’d come along for the adventure.

  George was as obsessive a Yankophile as David, overjoyed to be in the land of Elvis Presley and Muddy Waters. It was during the drive from Cleveland to New York that he was messing around on an acoustic and started to strum out the distinctive stop-start riff of Muddy’s ‘I’m a Man’. David started strumming along with him. ‘And then he wrote the song,’ says Trevor Bolder.

  Other passengers claimed to have contributed to that jam too, notably Will Palin, but it was Bowie who appropriated it. David had messed around with some words that afternoon – at least one person remembers a variant of the song that went ‘We’re bussing, we’re all bussing’ – but by the time they reached New York, ready for their prestigious slot at Carnegie Hall on 28 September, David had come up with a complete lyric, which he sang in New York for Cyrinda Foxe, with whom he was canoodling – very publicly. The song was called ‘The Jean Genie’; everyone recognised its sensuous, reptilian hero as inspired by Iggy.

  The Carnegie Hall show was, despite Bowie’s forty-eight-hour bout of flu, a triumph, inspiring a deluge of press coverage. Defries particularly loved the Rolling Stone cover story, which applauded David’s music but commented cynically on how he was invariably flanked everywhere by three security heavies. Defries quipped, with an all-knowing smile, ‘Without the security guards, he wouldn’t be on the cover of Rolling Stone, would he?’

  For all Defries’ big talk, the initial number of confirmed shows booked for David was tiny, but the deluge of press and audience enthusiasm generated a flurry of interest from promoters which allowed MainMan to add another eight weeks of dates. The extra shows seemed to vindicate Defries’ genius in promoting David as if he were already America’s biggest star, but the empty seats inside many venues would take their toll, both on MainMan’s finances and David’s psyche. In the UK, David was not yet mainstream, but he had enough fans for the glitter kids to gather in little groups and brave the derision of rockers who hated ‘that poof Bowie’. In American cities with a good radio station or a cool head-shop, like-minded fans could gather and the venue would be full. But outside of those cosmopolitan enclaves, few fans ventured out, and in the Midwest many of the venues’ seats were conspicuously empty. Normally an English band touring the USA could rely on their record company for expertise on the ground. But this was the downside of Defries’ obsession with signing to RCA, where David would be the biggest fish in a small pond. ‘David was stuck on the worst record label in the world,’ says Dai Davies, who was sent out to rustle up more shows. ‘And ultimately, the more money they took off RCA to try and make things happen, the longer it would take David to pay them back.’

  In the first few weeks, though, the feeling of infallibility was hardly punctured. When the band convened in New York’s RCA studio on 6 October, most of them were surprised to find they were going to record their Greyhound bus jam, ‘The Jean Genie’ – the session was so rushed that co-producer Ken Scott didn’t even make it to New York. The song was like a musical collage; the titled blended Jean Genet – Lindsay Kemp’s idol – with Eddie Cochran’s rocker, ‘Jeanie Jeanie Jeanie’. But the sound was a complete lift – how could anyone have the cheek to record it? ‘We all looked at each other and just thought, This is “I’m a Man!”’ said Bolder, who like Ronson knew the song via The Yardbirds’ version. It was recorded in just a couple of takes – the mid-song crescendo of The Yardbirds’ version was moved to the beginning, while the chorus was as simple as could be, with the band merely staying on one chord. It was a consummate example of explicit homage in a grand tradition, for as Underwood and Bowie both knew, Muddy Waters had borrowed the riff from Bo Diddley in the first place – as would Mike Chapman and Nicky Chinn a few short weeks later, for the Sweet’s hit ‘Blockbuster’.

  Released on 25 November, ‘The Jean Genie’ would hit number two in the UK. It was a one-trick pony of a song, but that didn’t matter. It kept up the momentum; Lou’s ‘Walk on the Wild Side’ shot up the chart in parallel. Lou’s hit was self-consciously cool, David’s childishly simple: both contributed equally to David’s growing legend.

  Meanwhile, the tour dates continued, moving south from Detroit and Chicago to St Louis and Kansas City. There was gossip that David had turned to drink to help cope with the stress of some of the poorly attended shows in the Midwest, notably St Louis. Not true, according to his inner circle, but Ian Hunter, whose own tour with Mott The Hoople criss-crossed the states that autumn, bumped into his mentor several times and noted ‘glimpses of sadness’. Some of it was sheer bewilderment; George Underwood remembers David’s worries that audiences weren’t even reacting to the shows, ‘but they were simply open-mouthed, in amazement and shock!’

  Despite the niggling worries, there were long periods when David would be ‘up’, working on songs or enjoying the peaceful train journeys. David, accompanied by George and Brigit, or Ronson, savoured the names of the huge beasts – Texas Chief, San Francisco Zephyr – and vied for a place in the Zephyr’s magnificent Vist-a-Dome, a Plexiglas viewing pod which gave panoramic views across the ever-changing landscape. ‘A couple of the band or friends, gladly one and the same most of the time, would often come and sit with me on these stretches,’ says David. ‘Ronson would love it, so too would my old chum George Underwood and his wife Birgit. At about 10 at night we’d creep up there, the air rich with the smell of grass, and laze around with guitars and a bottle of wine, watching the western moon get bigger and shinier into the early hours of the morning.’

  The gorgeous ‘Drive In Saturday’ was inspired by the succession of images he saw on the train to Phoenix, and debuted in the show there on 4 November – but there was a constant conflict between the buzz of ideas and the demands of his schedule, from which he was starting to shrink. ‘The work had to be defined by him, but that wasn’t necessarily what had to be done when you’re on the road. It was always a conflict,’ remembers Zanetta. ‘If left to his own devices he’d stay in a dark room in bed all day long. You had to force him to do things.’ The tour prog
ressed with bursts of activity, then sudden stopovers, a disorientating existence in which many people – Angie most obviously, but David too – seemed almost manic depressive, oscillating between energy highs – business and sexual – and days of utter, exhausted torpor.

  The nervous energy carried David through to Los Angeles for a four-day break before two shows at Santa Monica, dates full of promise thanks to the enthusiastic promotion of Rodney Bingenheimer, who by now had opened Rodney’s English Disco on Sunset Strip. A mirror-walled temple to English glam, it was laid on with every staple a Brit muso could need: Watney’s Bitter, sausage rolls and teenage Valley girls. It was this period that most closely resembled Fellini’s Satyricon: the streets were full of boys and girls, men and women offering services both sexual and pharmaceutical; Quaaludes were the drug du jour, popped like jellybeans by most of the crew, although David rarely, if ever, indulged. Prompted by Lisa Robinson, Leee Childers had booked band, crew and hangers-on into the swanky Beverly Hills Hotel, where the two stars – Bowie and Defries – had their own bungalows. Elton John overlapped with Bowie on their stay; David dropped in on him and found him isolated, dwarfed by a mountain of vinyl records. Cyrinda Foxe was flown over from New York. Andy Warhol, film director Paul Morrissey and Iggy Pop were on the scene, while Rodney’s girls descended on the party in a frenzy of what Tony Zanetta called ‘kiddie decadence’. ‘Cracked Actor’, written over that week, was an almost literal depiction of the sleaze on offer; the line ‘since he pinned you baby’ was a straight lift from the paranoid drug argot developed by Lou Reed and John Cale in the Velvets: ‘pinning someone meant they were on drugs – you’d pinned them, you’d got them,’ says Cale.

  Rodney’s regular Nancy McCrado remembers her friends Sable and Queenie, both of them in their early teens, sneaking into Mick Ronson’s room, stripping off their clothes and waiting for him, naked. ‘Mick was really upset about it – pushed them out and locked the door.’ Later, Rodney’s girl Lori Madox sneaked with a friend into David’s room. According to Madox, David was tired but eventually proved more obliging than his lieutenant.

  Roadie Robin Mayhew, like McCrado, remembers that ‘Ronno wasn’t involved in the dubious scenes – he was more selective.’ Ronson ‘s focus was legendary; the perfect example was the afternoon at the Beverly Hill Hotel that he spent running carefully through a pre-show checklist with the roadies. He asked them a couple of follow-up questions, then the moment that business was concluded and the conversation started to wander, coolly informed them ‘That’s enough’ and ushered them out of the door so he could attend to the blonde who’d been waiting patiently on the bed. Most of the others did take advantage of Rodney’s girls – made up of a mix of ‘unsupervised rich kids or more desperate street kids’, according to regular, Kathy Heller. The girls were part of LA’s rich cornucopia of pleasures, which also included Lobster Thermidor, which everyone ordered from room service, or the Quaaludes offered by the young Hollywood boys who were desperate to get access. Even for those who’d seen some of the excesses of the sixties, like Robin Mayhew, ‘It was a total eye-opener.’

  For The Spiders, the roadies and bodyguards, this was their first experience of Los Angeles; it could never be equalled. The frenetic, confused buzz surrounding them intensified from the moment Mike Garson revealed he was a member of the Church of Scientology. He talked to David first, and was rebuffed (‘What a ludicrous idea, expecting David to sublimate his ego to L. Ron Hubbard,’ quips writer Mick Farren) before approaching the rest of the organisation.

  Bowie, Ronson and Bolder loved Garson’s musical input, which offset his religious fervour. For David, the issue became a joke, and he labelled the pianist ‘Garson the Parson’. But for the junior members of the crew, Scientology became a serious issue. ‘The other guys became obsessed, there was this righteousness about them, that they knew no wrong,’ remembers Mayhew. ‘It became bizarre, very black and dark.’

  Garson’s evangelism for Scientology started taking effect when they arrived in LA, where he persuaded most of the entourage to visit the Scientology Center and each musician was assigned his own mentor. ‘He tried to get me into it and failed,’ says Bolder, who during his visit saw ‘all these weird people doing weird things, tests, mind games – I didn’t want to know.’ Shortly afterwards, Bolder returned to his hotel room after a heavy night’s drinking at [famous Hollywood nightclub] the Whisky, only to open the door and see Garson and a woman who’d been assigned to recruit him, sitting on his bed. Bolder threw them out, ‘but Mike hounded me for years. But Woody did go back in there. And I think Scientology had a big influence on him.’

  Woody Woodmansey became the Spiders’ best-known Scientology convert, and from his first sessions with the cult, says Bolder, he was taught to ‘be more positive and speak your mind. And if you’re a type of person who speaks their mind anyway you’re going to speak it even more. He was confident that he was a Scientologist and everything was gonna be wonderful and he couldn’t fail.’

  Defries took little interest in the details of what was going on backstage, where the atmosphere was turning nasty and Stuey George in particular was becoming ‘far too heavy’, says Mayhew. ‘If there were fans hanging around he’d lay into them. We’re saying, “Don’t be so heavy” – he’d be shouting at the kids, effing and blinding, and it was very scary for them, this heavy, coloured guy with a limp, who looked like he’d been through it, heading for them.’ Tony Frost, the second of David’s three bodyguards, became another Scientology convert, adding to the haze of hype and confusion emanating from the MainMan circus.

  Much of the edge, intensity and euphoria of that LA week was audible in the Santa Monica shows on 20 and 21 October. They were a triumph, the seventeen-song set offering delight after delight, running across what would be five Bowie albums. Defries had sold the tour as the biggest by an English act since The Beatles; that night’s radio recording, for KMET, suggests that if anything he’d undersold his charges, for this set was more adventurous, more visceral and more proficient than anything the Fabs had delivered on stage in America. For years, the recording of the opening night’s performance would be a definitive rock ‘n’ roll bootleg; in the mid-seventies, many English punk bands would admire its high-octane assault, and copy Ronson’s modified chord sequence on ‘Waiting for the Man’.

  In the couple of days before David departed for San Francisco, he was required to sprinkle his magic fairy dust on yet another MainMan album, namely the tracks that Iggy and The Stooges had assembled at CBS studios in London. David’s relationship with Iggy was complex; while Lou Reed would always pay due fealty to David, Iggy was already confiding to friends that the Ziggy album sounded ‘Mickey Mouse’. When the singer heard ‘The Jean Genie’, he felt he’d been assimilated. ‘I just rolled my eyes and said, “Oh my God – not only has he done The Yardbirds but he’s done me too!” That was when I first realised he was taking a lot off me.’ The web of mutual respect and distrust was complicated by the fact that Angie had had affairs with The Stooges’ Ron Asheton – celebrated for his droll humour, he resembled a young Philip Seymour Hoffman and owned a scarily comprehensive collection of Nazi uniforms – and then James Williamson, the dark, glowering lead guitarist who cordially disliked David but was, says Angie, ‘smart. He knew when to keep quiet.’

  For all the openness of the Bowies’ marriage, it was a messy business, ‘a dumb thing to do’, admits Williamson. When he had met Bowie back in Haddon Hall, David had been enthusiastic and talkative. During the Iggy mixing sessions at LA’s Western Sound he was tense, preoccupied, ‘this super-stilted kind of stiff guy’, says Williamson. The mix was an exercise in damage limitation: James and Iggy had jumbled up the instruments on the multitrack and all David could do was pull out a few instruments from the sonic holocaust, adding an effect here and there. The results were, a few years later, the prime influence on seventies punk. But at the time it was the first of many half-cocked projects. And soon, Iggy and his Stooges would soo
n be sent to MainMan’s luxurious new house in the Hollywood Hills, where they would be ignored by Defries and return to their old, druggy ways.

  The last weeks of that first US tour included several cancellations, poorly attended performances in San Francisco and Seattle, arguments between Defries, Davies and the RCA staff on the ground and friction between the British and American halves of the entourage. None of those problems affected David’s songwriting, or his performances, which were riveting, night after night; when he was ‘up’ he was great company, camping it up with the Pork crew, or ‘taking the piss’ with the Yorkshire crowd. Yet behind the scenes, the relationship that had sustained him for the last two years was splintering.

  It’s impossible to pinpoint the moment at which David and Angie’s marriage was irrevocably doomed. By the autumn of 1972, Defries was gunning for Angie, irritated that she’d used her initiative to rescue the remaining Stooges, who’d been stranded in London without their singer. Although their plane fares, which Angie billed to MainMain, represented a trifling amount compared to the huge sums the company was haemorrhaging on the cancelled US dates, it was Angie’s alleged profligacy that Defries fixed on.

  For Tony Zanetta, who occasionally found himself miserable and isolated on the bus, a defining moment came during one of the first tour stopovers, in Erie, Pennsylvania. He’d noticed how David would often step out and become the focus of attention – but at other times would withdraw, lost in thought, or nerves. In Erie, David had retreated to his room when Angie started ‘fooling around’ with a bodyguard, Anton Jones, the two of them skinny-dipping in the motel pool. ‘David was like a lost child, looking for Angie,’ says Zanetta. ‘I’m sure he was very vulnerable and nervous. I didn’t think about it at the time – what did I know?’

  Angie had been jealous of David’s well-publicised affair with Cyrinda Foxe in New York; making loud remarks about her relationship with Anton seemed to be her way of getting back at him. ‘He makes me scream!’ she announced to Zanetta and Davies, apparently referring to his sense of humour, but with an obvious double-entendre. ‘It was an incredibly unhealthy situation.’