by Paul Trynka
Bolder, Woody and Hutch, for all their exhaustion, were fired up to be playing the Odeon and all three of them relished the presence of Jeff Beck, guesting on guitar. Their attention was mainly on Ronson, as Bowie and band rampaged their way through what Sounds’ Martin Hayman called ‘one of the best concerts I have ever seen’.
Hutch was the first one to get a hint that something unusual was happening, when David walked over for a word, the first time he’d spoken to him in weeks. ‘Don’t go straight into “Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide”,’ David instructed his old friend. ‘I’m going to say something there.’
When David announced, ‘Not only is it the last show of the tour, but it’s the last show that we’ll ever do. Thank you!’ during the break, Hutch and the others were confused. Then they saw Bolder mouth the words, ‘He’s fuckin’ sacked us!’ The moment the closing notes of ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide’ died out, Bowie and Ronson disappeared. Woody and Trevor were left to find their own way home.
Presiding over the glittering gathering marking the tour’s close at the Cafe Royal the next night, David posed alongside Mick Jagger; they were the undoubted stars of a party that included Lou Reed, Keith Moon, Barbra Streisand and Elliott Gould. It was a sweet moment, the two of them out-camping the other, equals at last. Woody and Trevor were rock ‘n’ roll lepers, Trevor desperately questioning Ronson – who was non-committal, not letting on he’d known anything – while Woody’s attitude was ‘Bollocks. I want to do something else, anyway.’ But the news of Woody’s sacking was not confirmed until he received a phone call from a MainMan flunky a week later, the day of his wedding to girlfriend June, officiated by Mike Garson at the British Church of Scientology headquarters.
Bolder, meanwhile, had heard nothing, until he was asked up to a gathering at MainMan. Walking in to see MacCormack, Zanetta and others gossiping and pouring themselves drinks, Bolder started to have a go at David – ‘What are you up to? How can you treat people this way?’ – when he was pulled away by Mick Ronson. ‘Keep your mouth shut and don’t say anything, otherwise you’ll be gone as well. Just cool it and be quiet.’ – When Bowie spoke to him again, telling him his next album would be a collection of covers, and started playing some of the songs he intended to record, Trevor did as Ronson advised. ‘Only then did I realise how much Mick was looking out for me. I had a wife and kids, nobody else did, Mick had been the best man at my wedding. So he protected me.’
By now, Scott Richardson had been recruited by Bowie as a general rock ‘n’ roll companion and sounding board, accompanying him to gigs, helping him choose songs for his covers album, and delegated to assist with Ronson’s solo album. Richardson was one of a couple of people aware, like Bowie, that Roxy Music’s Bryan Ferry was also planning a covers album – the knowledge, if it didn’t inspire Bowie’s own covers collection, certainly put a rocket under the project. Not only was Ferry a rival, he’d also had the audacity to criticise Bowie in print the previous winter, pointing out how he liked to ‘push all [his] band back – like props in their little boxes’.
The recordings at Château D’Hérouville – a glorious, slightly tatty, compact castle just outside Paris where Marc Bolan had recorded The Slider – were cheerful on the surface, with long lunches in the sun, but overshadowed by future portents, each participant conscious this was the end of an era. ‘It didn’t feel comfortable to me,’ says Ken Scott. ‘I had other things on my mind, my wife was pregnant and I wanted to fly back to England. My mind was elsewhere, and there were legal problems, because my royalties weren’t getting paid. And that seemed to be the general thing.’
The awareness that this adventure was coming to a close imbued the album with a kind of desperate nostalgia. David, Ronson and Richardson simply picked out a bunch of 45s – The Pretty Things’ ‘Rosalyn’, The Kinks’ ‘Where Have All the Good Times Gone’, Syd and the Floyd’s ‘See Emily Play’ – and played a couple of the records to the band each morning; they learned each song in the same key, then bashed it out. David was more obviously disengaged from Angie, at ease in the studio, enjoying the carefree atmosphere of simply playing other people’s songs, happy to let Mick Ronson bear most of the musical burden while he honked away on his schoolboy saxophone. He was nevertheless rushed, as always, and keen to lay down his vocals as quickly as possible. Ava Cherry was over in Paris on a modelling job, and after tracking David down to the Château, they spent cosy afternoons together cuddled up before the huge Baroque fireplaces. David was calm, but distracted, and Ava noticed how he would defer his decisions to Tony Defries, reliant on him – almost like a child. For her to become anything more than a temporary fixture in David’s life, Tony had to give his approval: he was the gatekeeper to David’s personal life, like a father or a priest, and had to be honoured. Her ritual offerings took the form of demo recordings, which David recorded with Ava in the studio.
Over those weeks, Ava also observed Bowie and Ronson’s relationship up close. ‘Mick seemed very distraught – there was some scuttle about him doing a solo album and David wasn’t totally happy about it.’ Mick was both a friend who David supported and a rival; just as with Bolan, David wanted him to succeed, but was scared of being overshadowed. Mick himself was enthused by the challenge of a solo album – a ‘happy camper’ says Ken Scott – but according to Scott Richardson, much as he knew things had to change, Ronson was in mourning for his band and buried himself in work. ‘Really, he worked all the time,’ says Richardson. ‘Looking back on it now and listening back to it, Ronson was the force to be reckoned with musically and I think he was completely at sea about his future because that band had a real integrity. And they were gone.’ Bolder was later told that David had only done the album, Pin Ups, ‘to keep the band happy’. Considering Ronson knew he was leaving, that Trevor had been sacked then recalled, and Woody was gone, happy they weren’t. ‘It wasn’t fun,’ says Bolder. ‘It was all right. We did it, it was fun playing the songs. And Aynsley Dunbar’s a great drummer but he wasn’t a Woody Woodmansey.’
Throughout the Pin Ups sessions, David was simultaneously busy – dragging on a cigarette and drinking his usual incessant coffees while spinning plans for a new musical, Tragic Moments – and bored, sitting apart from the band and reading the paper while they chatted among themselves. For all the poignancy of this event, the musicians had a blast rambling around the Château, or catching a cab into Paris to ‘raid the chicks at the Crazy Horse Saloon’, says Richardson. ‘It was great. It didn’t feel like the ship was sinking from my perspective, but it obviously was.’
If, for David and Defries, Pin Ups derived from a simple need to deliver more product, the album itself sealed Bowie’s status as a phenomenon rivalled only by The Beatles or Elvis; the album entered the charts at number one, with its predecessors sitting nearby at thirteen, nineteen and twenty-six in the UK, while its standout track, ‘Sorrow’, shipped 147,000 copies before release in the UK. Although today it sounds obviously mannered, Bowie’s voice a self-parody, Pin Ups’ humour and carefree charm emphasised David’s humanity; its simple odes to Mod good-times a welcome contrast to the intensity of Aladdin Sane. For all that, contemporary critics like Rolling Stone’s Greg Shaw were quick to point out its weaknesses, citing its lack of edge and Bowie’s over-cooked voice concluding, ‘even in 1965, any of a thousand bands could have done better’. At a time of general nostalgia, with TV-advertised fifties and sixties compilation albums hogging the charts, Pin Ups was an uncharacteristically predictable move, and even industry friends like John Peel commented, ‘I’ll be glad when Bryan Ferry and David Bowie get this oldies business out of their normally diverting systems.’
In Bowie’s string of successes that summer, there was one minor setback. After abandoning his plan for the musical Tragic Moments – for which he’d recorded a fifteen-minute segment at the Château – David switched subjects to George Orwell’s 1984, working briefly on a script with Pork director Tony Ingrassia. Unfortunately, Orwell’s widow Sonia was no rock �
�n’ roll devotee, and when MainMan approached her for the rights to a show based on Orwell’s novel, she refused, describing the notion as ‘bizarre’. Bowie would be forced to refashion his idea into a more amorphous concept, but as he and Defries discussed the possibility of recording a TV show in the hope of finally achieving his mass-market breakthrough in America, David decided to feature a couple of the songs destined for the musical in The 1980 Floor Show, a one-off special for NBC to be recorded in October at his old London haunt, the Marquee Club.
Most of David’s previous projects had benefited from the adrenalin rush of improvisation that gave birth to them. It seemed natural to assume The 1980 Floor Show would be the same. Freddie Buretti crafted the costumes, and Bowie formed a vocal backing trio, The Astronettes, with Ava, Geoff MacCormack and Jason Guess, whom Bowie knew through a friend who owned a soul-food restaurant. Mark Pritchett, who’d worked on the sessions that gave birth to both Hunky Dory and Ziggy, came in to augment Ronson on guitar. The new material, notably ‘1984/Dodo’, was dense and intriguing, but the show itself was a mess – the settings looked cheesy, and the camerawork uninspired. Even the fans who’d been invited in to make up the audience were mostly underwhelmed. ‘It was really disappointing,’ remembers writer David Thompson, ‘with him doing the same three songs forty times.’ For the musicians, the main highlight was the sight of Marianne Faithfull’s backside, clearly visible in a perverted nun’s costume – it was certainly more pleasing than her singing, in a rather Teutonic version of Sonny and Cher’s ‘I’ve Got You Babe’, which sees singing partner – and, it seemed, lover – Bowie win cing at her frequent bum notes. Ava Cherry remembers Defries being convinced that the production ‘was going to give us the juice to go into America and really be big’. If so, he was wrong. The show was broadcast by NBC on 16 November, with its more intriguing snippets excised – Bowie’s costume was declared too provocative, as was the word ‘suicide’ in ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide’ – and the show, after its initial broadcast, was then sent to languish in the archives, seemingly for eternity.
The half-cocked management of The 1980 Floor Show was typical of MainMan’s increasing disorganisation. The main breadwinner, Bowie himself, had not as yet generated consistent profits across America, while the European market was, for some reason, completely overlooked. Although Iggy had been sacked and Mott, Lou and Annette Peacock had fled, the MainMan roster continued to grow amoebically, without any logic. Wayne County, later to become the celebrated punk musician Jayne County, was one of many artists who saw their projects – in her case the Live at the Trucks film and soundtrack – abandoned or confined to the vaults. ‘To this day I hate the man,’ she says today of Defries, ‘damn his eyes, damn his soul.’ Simon Turner – later a cult musician who recorded for the UK’s Creation and Mute labels – was another signing lost in the chaos, while guitarist Mark Pritchett remembers going to Sarm Studios in London’s East End to make a complete album with ‘some exotic South American bird, she was good’, which would prove another expensive, unrealised MainMan project.
Defries always had a strangely contradictory attitude towards money, unconcerned about spending it on ambitious projects, yet penny-pinching with smaller amounts. In those autumn months, there was unrelenting office gossip about Defries’ investments in the precious-metals market, taking advantage of the abolition of controls on the price of gold. At the time the stories seemed merely to illustrate his Midas-like skills of generating even more profits. By November, Defries had grandly declared that MainMan was now an ‘International Entertainment Conglomerate’ and put into execution his long-treasured scheme of moving his base of operations to America. Before the year’s end he had augmented the original Manhattan apartment with a loft apartment on the Lower West Side, a penthouse on the Upper East Side, several apartments for MainMan artists, and finally his pièce de resistance, a MainMan estate of buildings in Greenwich, Connecticut. The vacuum of power this left in London, the location of MainMan’s main money-spinner, was initially filled by Hugh Attwooll, who’d been hired as an agent with no experience whatsoever, and was promoted to ‘something between office boy, Chief Executive and money juggler’. Most of the income came from RCA advances, publishing income and PRS (Performing Rights Society) income, all of which was generated by David and which then went into ‘a big tub’, says Attwooll. ‘Or, rather a small tub actually. That was the problem.’ Attwooll is one of several MainMan executives who believe Tony Defries generally gets ‘bad press, which I’m not certain he deserves’, but through the course of 1973 it became obvious that ‘the whole thing was completely nuts’.
In the meantime, MainMan’s only proven source of income had his own eyes on America, a destination that would shape his next musical move, says his accompanist, Mark Pritchett. ‘He knew it was a multicultural place – black, Hispanic as much as white. And he wanted that Nile Rodgers, funky type of thing.’ This American vibe would inspire David’s last session at Trident, on ‘1984/Dodo’ – which would also be his last with both Ken Scott and Mick Ronson. ‘Within the first couple of takes, it became fundamentally clear that all of us – but Mick was the lead musician – weren’t black funky,’ says Pritchett. ‘This was not it.’
Given time, it’s possible Ronson and Pritchett might have mastered the stripped-down funk that David envisioned. But right back to ‘Space Oddity’, David had become used to having his ideas put on tape instantaneously. ‘David wants it now,’ says Pritchett. ‘He’s not exactly first-take Dave, but it’s “Can’t you hear what I hear?” and if it’s take number four he gets frustrated: “I’ll get someone who can then.”’
Those Trident sessions marked the end of Mick Ronson’s partnership with Bowie; Mark Pritchett, who’d worked with David since the Arts Lab days, would be replaced later that year. Pritchett’s departure was hardly noticed, although Mick’s would be pored over for years by fans who knew that Ronson had been a key architect of Ziggy Stardust’s success. But such departures, says Pritchett – who would later be given parting gifts including David’s Jag and the Hagstrom twelve-string David had used since signing to Ken Pitt – are simply the price of progress. ‘Any musician that had any kind of contact with David that he enjoyed, I dare you to name one who would say that when the parting came they were in any way discarded like a spent toy. Not me. And not Mick.’
Mick’s own feelings were mixed; he was nervous of occupying the spotlight, but his own ego had been stoked up by the MainMan machine, which finally launched his solo career over the following months, complete with a promotional film to publicise his own album, which was recorded at the Château with Trevor Bolder, Aynsley Dunbar, Pritchett, Scott Richardson and others, directly after Pin Ups. Pritchett’s last project with David was the sessions that David booked that autumn, when he used Olympic Studios in Barnes – best-known for its Rolling Stones connection – almost as a demo studio.
This would be a creative period for David, although his activity was not confined to music, for Ava Cherry remembers him ‘staying up for forty-eight hours learning how to work a video machine, or reading fifty books at a time about one subject, stacking them up and reading them for days.’ The Astronettes, his backing group from The 1980 Floor Show, were just one of his musical projects, inspiring new songs including ‘I am a Lazer’ and ‘I am Divine’ – later reworked as ‘Scream Like a Baby’ and ‘Somebody Up There Likes Me’. Those sessions were later abandoned, for Jason Guess’s bland, wavery vocals were hopelessly inadequate, but they served their purpose as David was ‘working out how to do a soul thing’, says Cherry. They would become part of a host of sessions conducted at Olympic, as David developed new working methods. ‘You’d get a call, turn up, it might be just you and a drummer, it might just be you laying down something on your own, David would say, “These are the chords, can you give it a funky feel?” He may use your part, he may decide he doesn’t like it, or he might use the idea as part of something else,’ says Mark Pritchett.
This cut
-and-paste approach – rather than the organised, succinct sessions overseen by Mick Ronson – would become a hallmark of David’s post-Spiders style. Soon he adopted a similar approach to writing lyrics, inspired by William Burroughs, whom he met on 17 November for a Rolling Stone feature. Writer Craig Copetas bought him all of Burroughs’ books – none of which he’d properly read, despite later claims to have discovered the writer ‘as a teenager’ – and David instantly adapted Burroughs’ cut-up technique on songs like ‘Sweet Thing/Candidate’, writing a paragraph of text, then cutting it up into four- or five-word sections and shuffling them.
Celebrity encounters arranged for magazines are notoriously unenlightening, but the Rolling Stone set piece provided a perfect portrait of Bowie at his apogee in London. Copetas noted the contrast between the humble minimalism of Burroughs’ Piccadilly flat and Bowie’s materialism, recording the extravagance of Bowie’s new rock-star house and his coterie of attendants, who dispensed avocados stuffed with shrimp and bottles of Beaujolais Nouveau. The contrast in their intellectual approach was stark, too, with Burroughs’ outlook formed by books – he was surprised to hear that Bowie had never read T. S. Eliot – and Bowie’s from people, like Lindsay Kemp, Chimi Rimpoche and the cast of Pork. Nonetheless, there was an obvious rapport, Bowie hopping from Andy Warhol to Cuban musician Joe Cuba like a gadfly, or listening intently as Burroughs rapped about orgone accumulators and infrasound.
David camps it up impressively for Burroughs, discoursing on tribalism and the sex life of kids, in his vitality and enthusiasm he is still recognisably the same teenager who talked about poetry and art when making his unsuccessful debut album. And he exhibits exactly the same competitiveness, allying himself subtly with Mick Jagger, delighting in deconstructing him as ‘a white boy from Dagenham trying his damndest to be ethnic’.