by Paul Trynka
David’s friends from 1971 and 1972 retain countless, varying impressions of the man, from David the iceman to David the boyish dreamer, but Iggy Pop probably describes it best: ‘You’re talking about a rather worldly, knowledgeable young buck who was ready to go out into the world and shoot his bolt. But who was focused on a particular target – success.’
That drive for success would cause confusion or resentment from those, like Iggy, Mick Ronson or countless others, who had a different agenda. By 1974 Iggy would be accusing David – ‘that fuckin’ carrot-top’ – of ‘sabotaging’ his work. Few of those left, damaged and bitter, in David’s wake would realise that the newly emerged star was as damaged by the process as they were.
In the heady opening days of 1973, though, David was ‘relaxed’ and ‘sweet’ according to his new lover, Ava Cherry. The routine was well established: a morning call from Tony Zanetta or road manager Jaime Andrews, followed by a long bus ride, which for the Spiders was invariably set to the only two tapes they had on the eight-track player: The Stylistics and The Buddy Rich Band. Check-in, soundcheck, a quiet moment as David did his make-up, show, and only then was it time to relax: Geoff MacCormack hanging out with David or other band members; Ronson hanging with Hutch; Woody and Trevor with each other, or occasionally their wives. Once they’d all left New York, Bowie’s main social contact with the band was at the aftershow parties, which were usually decorated by the best-looking local girls, selected from all the contenders by David’s hairdresser and PA, Suzi Fussey. This was where Hutch first learned the phrase, ‘No head, no backstage pass’: such transactions were always more explicit and more efficient in America. With Geoff to talk to, Bowie spent less time with Mick, who would chat to Hutch over Irish coffees in the bar. Meanwhile Garson the Parson would be preaching the benefits of Scientology to new band members like Hutch and Fordham.
For this second jaunt around the States, David took in a similar cavalcade of sights: the viewing cars in the trains, the Stetsons in Nashville, the routine at Elvis’s favourite hotel, the Peabody Hotel in Memphis, where a trio of ducks waddled through the hotel lobby; each sight shared with the wide-eyed Geoff MacCormack. With a larger crew, and Geoff in tow, David spent less and less time with Trevor and Woody, too. Yet when they did talk, he would reassure them, ‘Don’t worry, we’re all going to be really, really rich.’ Trevor and Mick were trusting – until Woody Woodmansey heard from Mike Garson that the new pianist was on a $800 a week salary and, stunned, shared the information with his fellow Spiders. Woody and Trevor were on £50 a week. When they complained to Defries, and asked when they’d get to see the riches David had promised, the MainMan boss was cold as ice. ‘Never mind what Bowie told you you’re getting – it’s what I tell you you’re getting.’
It was Mick Ronson who decided he’d had enough of this run-around about pay; a few weeks into the American dates he called Dennis Katz, now managing Lou Reed, to see if he could secure a record deal for The Spiders – without their singer. Katz soon called to say he’d secured a six-figure advance from CBS. The trio were buoyed up, until a traitorous roadie informed Defries of the band’s scheme. Characteristically hard-ball, Defries informed CBS that Katz had no right to negotiate for The Spiders, cutting him out of the deal entirely. Then he called a meeting with the band, and emolliently informed them, ‘Why didn’t you tell me you wanted a record deal? RCA are willing to sign you – they’ll pay you an advance – upfront, if you want some money?’ According to Trevor Bolder, Defries then embarked on a textbook divide-and-rule strategy, seeking out Ronson and offering him his own solo deal.
Meanwhile, as he plotted with Ronson, Defries lulled David’s rhythm section into a false sense of security. Normally he barely bothered to register their presence, now, when Woody Woodmansey returned to the attack with his usual bluntness, demanding the sidemen receive a rise to £500 a week, Defries was uncharacteristically helpful, assuring them he’d discuss the money situation with RCA. During their last American dates in California, the manager reported back, ‘RCA have agreed to pay you £500 a week,’ he told them. ‘But you can’t have that until we get to England – until then, you can have £200 a week, but when we get to England you’ll get all the money, upfront [as back-pay].’ Delighted that Defries had finally seen sense, the Yorkshire duo chorused, ‘That sounds all right.’
On the surface, David remained friendly. He loved Woody’s drumming, but it was probably the drummer’s bloody-mindedness during the Aladdin Sane sessions that marked the turning point. Once Defries had told David of Woody and Trevor’s treacherousness – that they’d been planning to cut a record deal behind his back – the question of David’s next musical move suddenly became clearer.
David’s attitude to Mick Ronson was more complex; the guitarist was stubborn, but he was obliging, a problem-solver and as close a musical friend as he had. Defries wanted a Ronson solo album both to head off The Spiders’ revolt and to add another act to his entertainment stable. David had recently discovered a Richard Rodgers’ song, ‘Slaughter on Fifth Avenue’, and saw it as a brilliant vehicle for Ronson’s own solo album. He even suggested his friend – and Angie’s lover – Scott Richardson as a collaborator. Encouraged by the vision of a glittering solo career, with a musical agenda provided by David, Ronson went along with the plan. As the entire tour party prepared for their most ambitious trip to date – a ten-show stint in Japan: still exotic, unexplored territory for most British musicians – David’s rhythm section were content, unsuspecting, for what would turn out to be The Spiders’ last ride.
Geoff MacCormack, who kept David company now that Angie was being ‘encouraged’ to keep her distance, had become an enthusiastic convert to the luxury of international cruising. He was disappointed to find his second trip, from Los Angeles to Yokahama, was on the SS Oronsay, a 1940s liner in the twilight of its career that was nicknamed ‘SS Rancid’ by the childhood friends. They spent the trip practising phrases from Geoff’s Japanese primer, or treating passengers to Latin records they’d picked up in New York. Finally arriving in Yokahama on 5 April to a five-hundred-strong welcoming crowd, David was resplendent in a wide-lapelled tartan jacket, flanked by frowning matrons irritated at the intrusion, his excitement at the bizarre culture clash equalled only by his exhaustion.
It was during this leg of the tour that many of the contradictions in the MainMan empire were becoming exposed. Endless stories of The Stooges’ depredations filtered out of LA in those weeks, with allegations they’d spent company cash on smack and abortions for groupies. Defries, always disapproving of drugs use, ordered them thrown out of MainMain’s mansion on Torrenson Drive.
David was upset, but didn’t attempt to talk Tony out of his decision. Then, within weeks of Iggy’s sacking, another of David’s protégés left MainMan, a split resulting from a management meeting where a drunken, impassioned Tony Zanetta proclaimed their business was now based on ‘stars, not boring rock ‘n’ rollers’. The next day, sober, Zanetta was staggered to find his outburst had inspired the sacking of Mott The Hoople, the company’s main rock ‘n’ rollers. (Their career was unharmed, for Ian Hunter, sceptical of Defries, had never signed his management contract.)
MainMan’s lack of focus and the way the company was expanding in random fashion was highlighted once the party hit Japan. When David formed a mutual admiration society with Kansai Yamamoto – championing his designs, accompanying his family to the Kabuki theatre – Defries promptly announced that he would now represent the designer in the West, via a Japanese division, MainMan Tokyo. That spring, Defries also floated the notion that David was to star in a movie based on Robert A. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land. No names were attached to the announcement, which was suspiciously vague. It’s likely the grandstanding was aimed as much at RCA America as the general public, for while David’s album sales were phenomenal in Britain – where Aladdin Sane debuted at number one in May, bumping The Beatles’ ‘Red’ and ‘Blue’ greatest hits albums off the top
– they were underwhelming in the US.
In Japan, though, David’s was the biggest debut tour of recent years; every aspect of his distinctive rock ‘n’ roll recipe – the clothes, make-up, all the theatrical elements – seemed to strike a chord with the Japanese youth. For all the band, mobbed at stage doors every night, drinking in the deliciously alien Japanese culture by day, the tour was an idyllic experience; until Woody, outraged that his promised wage rise had not yet materialised, once more set out to confront Defries, with bassist Trevor Bolder in tow.
As ever, Woody came straight to the point. ‘This is a joke! We’ve been promised more money, and now we find the roadies are getting more than us!’ Defries, unused to being challenged, momentarily lost his cool. ‘Well? I’d rather give the money to the road-crew than to you.’
Woody shot back, ‘Well, if that’s your attitude – you can stick it up your arse!’ before bundling his bassist out of the room. Shortly after the meeting, Woody announced he and Trevor were going on strike. Mick Ronson eventually talked them around. ‘Don’t make trouble,’ he told them, ‘not when it’s going so well.’
But it was not going well.
Even as David was being vibed up by Defries, who grandly told him how much money they’d make in Japan, the last reserves of that calm, that energy, were being drained. On their last night in Japan, Geoff and David spent the evening dining in an exquisitely peaceful restaurant, with Geoff’s newly acquired Chinese girlfriend, and David’s companion, a beautiful, blue-eyed French-Japanese woman. ‘I knew he was trying to think of some angle that would allow us to stay in Japan,’ says MacCormack, ‘but there was no way.’ The pair had a boat to catch, the Felix Derzhinsky – named after the notorious founder of the KGB – whose crew and passengers were treated to an impromptu Bowie and MacCormack performance of ‘Space Oddity’ and ‘Amsterdam’, followed by a seven-day train journey through Siberia and on to Moscow. MacCormack’s photos document the endless steppes, stop-offs for food, and two days in the dog-eared Moscow Intourist hotel. When they finally reached East Berlin, the bombed-out hulks of buildings seemed greyer and more ominous than anything they recalled from 1950s London. The memory would stay with them both.
The entire crew were weary on their return to London. The costumes were frayed, too, held together with home-made repairs. There was a brief respite with a party at Haddon Hall – which Tony Visconti and new wife Mary Hopkin attended – but as if to confirm the unrelenting grind of what was nearly sixteen months of repetitive, gruelling touring, David’s Earls Court show on 12 May was famously disastrous. Both lighting and PA were pitifully inadequate for the venue, and the familiar ‘jing-jing-a-jing’ introduction of ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide’ was transformed into, ‘Jing-jing-a … oh shit,’ as rhythm guitarist John Hutchinson fell off his podium in the stygian gloom. All the extra musicians, including Hutch and the sax section, were still reading charts on manuscript, which they couldn’t make out in the dark, while none of the band could hear themselves through the lousy monitoring.
The show was a disaster, but the negative press it generated was forgotten as the tour rolled on into June. Reviewers and audiences alike were transfixed by the spectacle and the smoking music: ‘A total success, based on an inspired and uniquely amazing talent,’ was Sounds’ verdict on the Newcastle show. David was on a high; on 6 June, he partied into the night at ‘Hallam Towers’, a nouveau-riche hotel in Sheffield. Rival singers Lulu and Labi Siffre happened to be in the city, and played an impromptu show at the bar – but their gaze, and that of the audience, was fixed on David. Lulu’s own star seemed in the descendant: it was now a decade since she’d first notched up hits like ‘Shout’, while her Eurovision success of a few years before seemed to signal a permanent move to the lounge, chicken-ina-basket circuit. But the tiny Scots singer was undeniably charismatic, with an infectious energy. Later that evening she disappeared … and so did David, his absence loudly publicised by Angie, who marched up and down the hotel corridors knocking on doors in search of her missing hubby. Witnesses like John Hutchinson thought Angie seemed to enjoy the drama of chasing her husband around, advertising that Lulu had become another notch on the Bowie bedpost. The hilarious episode was enjoyed by all the band and crew; the next morning, David’s shaven eyebrow seemed to curl a little, in appreciation of the hubbub of gossip over the previous night’s events. But the episode also illustrated the stress and drama generated by his and Angie’s supposedly open marriage.
Throughout June, David Bowie’s defiantly extravagant cavalcade was a much-needed burst of colour in what was otherwise a grim summer, with unemployment rising, and the UK paralysed by strikes and overshadowed by an IRA bombing campaign. The success of Lou Reed’s ‘Walk on the Wild Side’, a hit in both the US and UK that summer, underlined Bowie’s magic touch – hearing Lou drawl how Candy Darling ‘never lost her head, even when she was giving head’ every few hours on BBC Radio 1 represented a delicious cultural marker for a generation, while David’s own unstoppable momentum was illustrated by June’s announcement that he would soon be recording a new album in France, with yet another American tour to follow in the autumn. Later in the summer the BBC’s Story of Pop magazine hit the streets: the ‘First Encyclopaedia of Pop’, it started with Elvis – and ended with Bowie.
For a generation of kids, the Bowie tour’s escapism, his visions of transcending the bonds of earth, represented a vital beacon of hope, of glamour. But on the tour itself, what had started out as thrilling was becoming drudgery. Week by week there was less camaraderie backstage; Bolder and Woody hardly exchanged a word with David over the summer, while David’s renewed friendliness with Hutch had evaporated by the time they returned to the UK. Ken Fordham’s unflappability endeared him to David, who named him Ken ‘Funky’ Fordham, because he so obviously wasn’t. But with shows at forty venues over fifty days, with sixteen matinee performances, everyone felt that ‘Defries was working us to death’, says Bolder, who was amazed that David survived without losing his voice. Instead, any damage seemed psychological; during a day’s layoff in Torquay, Devon, the band took off to see the sights – promoter Mel Bush lent Hutch his flash green Rover to tour the countryside – but David didn’t emerge from his room all day. ‘No matter how nice the day was, you wouldn’t see him. He was going very pale and thin,’ says Hutch. David’s charisma still shone through, and still he seemed ‘excited and thrilled’ in the dressing room before he went on, says Suzi Fussey, but there was a tense, almost hysterical edge to his public persona. Sometimes he seemed shaky, while his skin was stretched over his skull, pale and waxy; the contrast with the previous January’s photos for Melody Maker, when he looked joyous and gamine, is almost painful to behold. Even Freddie Buretti’s costumes, frayed and worn, were obviously at the end of their life. As David recalls, it was during these dates that his enthusiasm finally gave out. ‘I really did want it all to come to an end. I was writing for a different kind of project and exhausted and completely bored with the whole Ziggy concept, couldn’t keep my attention on the performances with much heart. Strangely enough, the rest of the tour was a success … but I was wasted and miserable.’
In the run-up to the Hammersmith show on 3 July, only the roadies, MacCormack, Garson and Ronson had been informed that this endless cycle of euphoria, boredom, excitement and exhaustion was coming to a close. It wasn’t just David’s stamina that was at breaking point – MainMan’s cash reserves were exhausted, too.
Around mid-June, Defries became aware that the forthcoming US dates could expose MainMan to huge losses. That same week, it became obvious that David’s unparalleled, amazing streak of creativity was coming to an end, with the announcement that the next single would be a Hunky Dory track, ‘Life On Mars?’.
Defries had performed an amazing financial sleight of hand over the previous months, by persuading RCA to underwrite his hefty financial losses on the two American tours. With the establishment of MainMan, more or less independent of Laurence Myers, in Ju
ne 1972, he’d lost access to his ex-partner’s cash reserves. From that point the company’s financial situation was always on a knife edge. When, early in 1973, RCA finally refused to underwrite the next US tour, Defries decided to tackle the potential crisis head-on: he would ‘retire’ David. David would stave off exhaustion, Defries would stave off a financial catastrophe, the Bowie enigma would be sustained and, a crucial side benefit, the troublesome Spiders could be eliminated.
As David and Defries’ plans progressed, the musicians, bar Ronson, remained oblivious. Zanetta had asked a couple whether they’d like to play with MainMan’s latest act, Ava Cherry. ‘Why would I want do that?’ Hutch had replied, happy in the knowledge a tour of America was imminent, with a possible jaunt to Australia thereafter, ‘I’m in David’s band!’
As for David, his secretiveness about their imminent disbandment did not derive from sadism; rather, this was theatre, the chance to ensure the tour’s Hammersmith finale was a set-piece of the most gripping drama. ‘Pure showbiz,’ remembers Suzi Fussey. ‘He loved that.’ Scott Richardson, a confidant of both Bowie and Ronson throughout the final tour, knew what was coming, but still reckoned ‘to break up a band like that is astonishing. I have to credit Bowie with having a lot of courage: to say “I’m not coming back.”’
On the evening of the Hammersmith show, David gave no clue as to the evening’s denouement. Suzi Fussey, ministering to him in the dressing room, had been tipped off by Defries, but had to feign ignorance, as did the roadies and the various MainMan staff. ‘David acted as if everything was completely normal,’ she says. ‘I don’t know if he was delusional and thought no one knew.’ Despite the imminent drama, he seemed rather more relaxed than normal, grateful for the coming rest. ‘Relieved, I think,’ says Fussey. ‘He had been frightened of becoming a parody of himself.’