by Paul Trynka
Defries liked Coco’s old-school efficiency, her command of languages and her cosmopolitan background; born, she told her friends, during her mother’s shopping trip to Bloomingdales, New York, she had been educated in America, Europe and Kashmir. Defries initially encouraged her rise, in order to diminish Angie’s influence. By the autumn of 1973, Coco had become David’s personal assistant (a job Suzi Fussey turned down, eventually to marry Mick Ronson) and was installed in the top floor of Oakley Street, where she controlled access to David.
Corinne would become a central character in David’s life: intelligent, slim, witty, she seemed in other respects almost anonymous. This was part of her charm, and her effectiveness. She was happy to devote herself utterly to David and seemed to have no agenda of her own to impose on him. Many years later David would sing of ‘your soothing hand that turned me round’ in his song devoted to Coco, ‘Never Let Me Down’. The song speaks of her as a lover, but in reality her role was more complex, like a combination mother, sister, lover and – most crucially – all-purpose intellectual confidante, rather like the paid companions hired by refined ladies of a certain age. ‘David liked her because she was intellectual and they could have good conversations,’ says Ava Cherry, who also points out that Corinne was ‘in love with [David] from day one’. David savoured Corinne’s utter devotion to his cause, and would occasionally taunt Ava with stories of how indispensible she’d made herself. In February, Ava was sent over to New York, ostensibly to link up with Tony Defries and prepare David’s move to the city, but Cherry soon concluded that Schwab ‘systematically did nothing but try and get me out’.
In Ava’s absence, David turned to another exotic creature: Amanda Lear. The one-time muse of Bryan Ferry and acquaintance of Salvador Dali, Lear helped celebrate David’s twenty-seventh birthday by taking him to see Fritz Lang’s 1926 masterpiece Metropolis. In the weeks before he left for America, David immersed himself in Lang’s work, which along with the staging he’d first planned for Arnold Corns started to form the basis of the imagery for his next American tour. From 1971 on, he’d dreamed of presenting his shows as a three-dimensional spectacle. Now he planned a new, grandiose vision, without any compromises.
David arrived in New York on 1 April, 1974, sailing the Atlantic with Geoff MacCormack on the SS France. The one-way journey was laden with symbolism, both positive and negative; David intended to base himself in America, a country he’d long dreamed about, to soak up its vibe and conquer it. And he needed to sort out his problems, in the form of Tony Defries.
As far as soaking up the vibe, the move to New York was perfect. After moving in to the Sherry Netherland Hotel by Central Park, Bowie used Ava Cherry as his guide to the soul scene. Ava suggested they check out Harlem’s Apollo Theater, where it turned out there was a show on the 26th topped by Richard Pryor, featuring The Main Ingredient: one of RCA’s few cool bands, the Harlem outfit had changed line-up in 1972, recruiting new singer, Cuba Gooding Sr, and scored a huge soul smash with ‘Everybody Plays the Fool’. The Apollo’s audience was overwhelmingly black, with the red-haired, pasty-faced Bowie sticking out like a white cat in a coal scuttle. ‘He loved it,’ says Ava. ‘He soaked all of it up.’
There was another joyful source of Americana to be explored in 1974, in the charismatic form of Norman Fisher, a stockbroker turned art collector, famous for the lavish parties he’d throw in his tiny Downtown apartment. David remembers them as ‘the most diverse soirees in the whole of New York. People from every sector of the so and not so avant-garde would flock there – Norman was a magnet.’ Fisher turned David on to the most gloriously eclectic art and music: Florence Jenkins, the famously inept opera singer who attracted huge audiences in the 1920s, drawn by her ludicrous costumes and atonal performances, was one typical example. As well as good company, Norman also supplied cocaine for his social circle. ‘[But] he did not want to,’ says Ava. ‘Norman just wanted to be friends and hang with people.’
Fisher remained a close friend of David’s for years, and epitomised the glamour of New York. But in his role as David’s supplier, he unwittingly contributed to a profound transformation. ‘I saw David at the NBC Special [in October 1973] and didn’t see any cocaine problem,’ says Tony Zanetta. ‘Then in April 1974, there it was: full-blown.’
David’s obviously transformed state would be yet another factor in the breakdown of his relationship with Tony Defries. David thought that moving closer to Defries would invigorate their relationship; instead, they became more estranged. Diamond Dogs won mixed reviews on its release in April 1974, but was David’s best-performing album in the US to date, peaking at number five. Defries, however, preferred more showbiz concepts, like Ziggy Stardust, and the concise songs it contained. Furthermore, he considered David’s nascent plans for his next, grandiose tour with disapproval.
This was typical inconsistency from a man overseeing a company that now employed twenty-five full-time staff and had its own travel agency, plus a TV, radio and movie production company. It was all the more galling to David, considering how Defries loved to boast of his own largesse, such as his scheme to fulfil his staff members’ ‘ultimate fantasy’. (Leee Childers had his teeth done; Cherry Vanilla’s bonus was spent on a boob job.)
As ever, Defries’ generosity did not stretch to David’s musicians. In his first weeks in New York, David had arranged a recording session with Lulu, calling in Main Ingredient founder Tony Silvester to help. Silvester suggested his new guitarist, Carlos Alomar. One-time member of the Apollo house band and a session regular for everyone from Peter, Paul and Mary to Roy Ayers, Carlos Alomar turned up at RCA studios and was struck by Bowie’s red hair, and ‘mousey skin. It was so translucent. And the black under his eyes was somewhat alarming.’ After the session Alomar invited David over to his house in Queens for a decent meal and was impressed when the singer actually turned up, spending the evening talking about soul records, and quizzing Alomar on his work with Chuck Berry and James Brown. ‘He’s always surprised me like that – he’s willing to go right in.’
That evening David asked Carlos to join for his forthcoming tour and, thrilled at the prospect of leaving behind ‘the chitlin’ mentality’ – represented by notoriously cheapskate employers like James Brown or Chuck Berry – Carlos found himself a white manager to negotiate the deal. Only then did Carlos discover that MainMan would only pay half of the weekly $800 he was getting from The Main Ingredient. Regretfully, he returned to his session work and left David to find some cheaper musicians.
In his quest for a new band, David phoned Keith Christmas, who’d played acoustic guitar back on the Space Oddity album. A virtuoso musician, with a distinctly English folk style, Christmas was out of place in Bowie’s new surroundings. Arriving in New York he found David surrounded by ‘a punch of pretentious fucking posers, so full of themselves with their dyed white hair and shaven heads. There was something distinctly sleazy and unpleasant about it.’
The audition itself was a non-event – Christmas was an acoustic guitarist, and his playing on the electric was barely competent – but the surroundings were bizarre: the cavernous RCA studios on the Avenue of the Americas, empty but for Bowie, Christmas and an engineer rolling tape. Whenever David wanted ‘a toot’ he would beckon Christmas down the corridor, to huddle together furtively in the toilets. ‘So this is all strangely paranoid. I’ll never forget he had this double-sided razor blade with which he’s chopping out lines. When he stuck his finger on a little bindle of coke and held it up to my nose I saw how much his hand was shaking; and the meaning was, I want this stuff so much, I will risk severe personal injury for it.’
The experience was disturbing. Yet, behind the paranoid, scary facade, Christmas believes, on reflection, this was exactly the same person he’d known in 1969. ‘David actually seemed like he was completely in his element. It was a continuation of the Art Lab days in terms of who he was as a person; the people had changed, the drugs might have changed. But the actual person might not
have changed at all.’ In Beckenham, David asked Christmas to embrace his hippie trip, just as he asked Bob Grace to join the sexually ambivalent Sombrero scene. The furtive ritual of sniffing cocaine in a toilet was a new trip, for a new persona; but it was not a persona he would lay aside so easily.
Within the first few days of arriving in New York, David contacted an old friend of Ossie Clark, Michael Kamen – another talented, transplanted Brit with a hefty coke habit with whom David hung out. Kamen ran a rock ‘n’ roll band with sax player David Sanborn and recently recruited guitarist Earl Slick, but was also a formidably trained classical musician. Kamen had recently written the music for a ballet based on the life of Auguste Rodin; Bowie and MacCormack attended the New York premiere and were transfixed. Kamen’s cross-cultural connections echoed David’s own ideas on dance and staging, and the composer was engaged as musical director.
The grandiose staging for David’s new show, novel as it seemed, was in fact based on ideas he’d toyed with since May, 1971. When constructing fantasies of how to present Arnold Corns, he’d imagined the band playing in an open-sided boxing ring, surrounded by huge pillars, each of which supported a single white spot: ‘Remorseless, it has to be,’ he told a bemused Freddie Buretti. ‘I don’t want any colours, I want it all stark.’ Later, his ideas for the Rainbow shows were restricted by budget and time; now he raided MainMan’s fast-dwindling coffers to realise his fantasies. A huge stage backdrop represented Hunger City, a decaying future metropolis, with thirty-foot-high skyscrapers, augmented by a motorised bridge, a remote-control mirrored module, and a cherry-picker in which David would descend from the heavens. For ‘Rebel Rebel’, Bowie would perform in the boxing ring, with a couple of oversized leather boxing gloves; even the mask he used harked back to the mime he’d filmed for Ken Pitt.
For many fans, the remodelling of David himself was far more dramatic than the new, mechanised backdrop. He had arrived in New York with his spiky carrot-top essentially intact; now it was consigned to history, in favour of a forties-style ‘do, with parting and floppy fringe, while the Yamamoto outfits were ditched for a double-breasted suit with high-waisted trousers, a skinny jumper and braces. The style was obviously influenced by 1940s Harlem, as well as Sinatra, another hero. Yet in essence David’s consciously ‘cool’ image came from closer to home, namely Roxy Music’s Bryan Ferry, whose stage movements he studied closely; David practised Bryan’s gestures, including a distinctive movement which the Roxy singer made with his index finger, and incorporated the wiggle into his own repertoire of stage mannerisms.
When the tour opened in Canada on 14 June – less than a year after Bowie’s ‘retirement’ – the sight of goggle-eyed Ziggy clones aghast at David’s new earthly manifestation, and overwhelmed by the visual smorgasbord – which included loose ‘street’ dancing, choreographed by Toni Basil – was a vindication of the weeks of preparation. Yet there was chaos with the equipment which meant David was in constant danger of electrocution. The set blended conservatism – an emphasis on the hits, and some self-consciously bombastic arrangements – with subtlety and risk; ‘The Jean Genie’s’ verse was turned into an urban rap, like Lou’s ‘Walk on the Wild Side’, while The Ohio Players’ ‘Here Today and Gone Tomorrow’, delivered at later shows, was delivered straight, show-casing the soul pipes David had been developing ever since ‘Pity the Fool’. Old-school session hands Herbie Flower and Tony Newman ensured the rhythms were slick and relentless; the show ‘rocked real hard’, as Detroiter Robert Matheu, a veteran of shows by the MC5 and Stooges, remembered.
Yet the first run of shows, the product of such intense work and obsessiveness, would become famous as a beacon of cynicism, thanks to the ill-will surrounding the recording of the Philadelphia shows between 8 and 12 July. Bassist Herbie Flowers was the prime mover in a threatened strike by the musicians who arrived at the venue and noticed extra microphones: these were the first indication they’d received that MainMan intended to release an album of the night’s performance, without paying any extra fees. Guitarist Earl Slick recalls benefiting from Flowers’ staunch performance as a shop steward in a stand-up row between MainMan and the musicians. Today, Flowers insists the row ‘was blown up out of all proportion. We did ask, “Do we get any money?” and we were told we would get the American Musicians’ Union rate.’ Only a trace of disdain remains in his remark about the tour’s staging. ‘I’ve always liked opera,’ he remarks. ‘But this was pantomime.’
John Peel, David’s old champion, was less generous in his assessment of David’s prosaic cover of ‘Knock on Wood’, which trailed the live album in September, proclaiming it ‘lazy, arrogant and impertinent’. The same would apply to the David Live album when it followed in October: despite many creative moments, the performances were bombastic, sounding like the output of a leviathan corporation, rather than a singer. Still, it would be one of David’s most successful US releases to date, peaking at number eight; in the UK, it was held off the top slot by the Bay City Rollers. Many early Bowie uptakers, the people who’d first championed Bowie in the press or looked him out at tiny clubs like Friars Aylesbury saw it as mere filler, a sign of a creative drought. Yet within a few months, they’d be forced to rethink.
From the moment he’d seen The Main Ingredient back in April, David had embarked on an obsessive exploration of cutting edge R&B, which soon extended beyond the obligatory Aretha Franklin to boxes of soul vinyl obtained for him by LA writer Harvey Kubernick, including Philly International singles by Harold Melvin and the Bluenotes and Patti Labelle, and MFSB, the Philly soul band who recorded the theme tune to Soul Train. David watched the celebrated music show every week, usually in a party atmosphere, along with fellow soul obsessives like Geoff MacCormack. Part of David’s fascination with Ava Cherry was the fact that she epitomised US soul culture. As with so many of his confidantes, he pumped her for information, all of which fed into his life and work. ‘My dad was a musician in the forties [in Chicago] – black guys used to wear baggy pants and they called them gousters. I told David once, “My dad has got a couple of pairs of ties and suits.” He was, “Really? Where? Can you bring some over?” So I ended up bringing over a couple of my dad’s silk ties and a pair of gouster pants that had suspenders [braces] on them.’
Many of David’s previous stylistic swerves had taken months of preparation; manifestos worked out at Haddon Hall, musicians persuaded down from far-flung spots like Hull. In America, things could move more quickly. The new line-up of musicians took a single phone call. The new look was based on a pair of pants. David put on his gouster outfit, with silk ties and suspenders, and then told his girlfriend, ‘I’m going to record a session now.’
13
Make Me Break Down and Cry
This was so fast. When it came time to do a song we were like, Cool, let’s go! Boom, boom, boom!
Carlos Alomar
During a brief stopover in New York, David phoned Carlos Alomar, the guitarist he’d met back in Queens but been unable to hire, thanks to MainMan’s stinginess. ‘Look, Carlos,’ he told him, ‘I’m going to be coming to Philadelphia, to Sigma Sound.’ He employed a persuasiveness honed over years of working with musicians. ‘I know you’ve just finished working there and I really want you to come down.’ The guitarist appreciated David’s charm, but needed little persuasion to leave the chitlin’ circuit, once he’d established David would match his existing salary.
Born in 1951 in Puerto Rico, and brought up in New York, Alomar had worked relentlessly – applying what he calls ‘due diligence’ to both his music and his schoolwork – ever since his father, a minister on 109th Street, died when Carlos was just fourteen. Being fined by James Brown (for missing his ‘hit me’ cue), or hanging out with Chuck Berry – rock ‘n’ roll poet and notorious skinflint – helped shape Alomar’s Buddha-like calm but cutting-contest competitive persona. Alomar brought his wife, session singer Robin Clarke, to the sessions at Sigma Sound in Philadelphia; together with their friend Luther
Vandross, the couple were probably the key influence in the genesis of what would become Young Americans – ‘They glued it all together,’ as Ava Cherry remembers. ‘Carlos was very even-tempered, never got mad; and he made David feel he could bridge the gap between soul and where he was.’
Tony Visconti, called back for a proper production job at last after a brief reunion with David, to mix Diamond Dogs and David Live, was overjoyed to be back in the creative pressure cooker. But he was worried about the singer’s obviously fragile state. When the pair discussed his condition, David assured him he was fine. ‘And I kind of believed him. In retrospect,’ says Visconti, ‘it’s hard to know exactly why, but I did. Whereas Phil Lynott told me much the same thing and I didn’t.’ But Visconti’s souvenir photo of David at the Sigma Sound desk shows him as skeletal, his skin grey and papery. As one of those in the studio with him remarks today, ‘David must have had an angel watching over him. That photo says it all – but in person, it was even more horrible.’
Inside the cocooning safety of Sigma Sound – a studio he’d first tried out with Ava Cherry, on 9 July – David was in his element. The basic routine was established from the first day, recognisable as the same routine from his first album with Visconti: David would strum through the song on guitar or piano, the musicians would pick it up and go for a take after a few run-throughs. But this time he dictated the feel he wanted, insisting that he lay the vocals down live along with the backing track; Visconti set up a dual microphone array to cut out some of the instrumental spill onto the vocal track and the tapes rolled. ‘But this was fast,’ says Alomar, ‘Remember, I brought most of the band so when it came time to do a song we were like, “Cool let’s go.” Boom boom boom. Our music was out in a week and he was like, “Holy shit!” These sessions were going so hard and so fast.’