by Paul Trynka
In a blitz of recording, the title track, ‘Young Americans’, was first to go down, on the first day; in essence, the song comprised a succession of TV-style images, from Nixon’s resignation – announced just three days earlier on the 8th – to Afro Sheen, the hair-care product whose adverts bookended Soul Train. The song’s story of a newly married couple echoes Bowie’s own planned seduction of America: like ‘Oh! You Pretty Things’, the song name-checks its audience.
It’s impossible to miss the musical change signalled by ‘Young Americans’, but the song’s lyrics are just as emblematic of his magpie tendencies. A complete about-face from Diamond Dogs’ fractured imagery, ‘Young Americans’ is observational – musical reportage that even includes dialogue: ‘They pulled in just behind the bridge. He lays her down, he frowns, “Gee my life’s a funny thing” …’. The backing might have been funky, but the lyrical style was a straight lift from Bruce Springsteen, whom David and Geoff had seen back at Max’s. To make the homage even more specific, David had laid down a cover of Bruce’s ‘It’s Hard to Be a Saint in the City’, which he delivered in his new, baritone croon, a kind of cross between Elvis, Sinatra and Bryan Ferry. During the session, Tony Visconti discovered Bruce lived nearby – in a caravan, he remembers – and they invited the New Jersey singer down to the studio. Bruce was puzzled, confused that this English glam singer was covering one of his songs and praising him so extravagantly; in the end David’s enthusiasm won him over, and they talked about music late into the night.
Although on many other songs the soul element was low-key and understated, the title track of Young Americans was self-consciously funky, a statement of intent. Exactly as he had done with Ziggy, David was ‘repositioning the brand’, as Dai Davies put it. But the move was intuitive, not calculated, says Ava Cherry. ‘He was so happy doing this – it was simply living out what he wanted to be, living out a dream.’
Several tracks from those sessions illustrated that Bowie’s love for the music he was channelling was deep and heartfelt, notably the astonishing ‘It’s Gonna Be Me’. It’s a gloriously stark, slow eight-bar blues, backdropped by Mike Garson’s minimal piano. David cajoles, sketching out image after image of regret and his own sexual addiction. His voice is breathy, pitch-perfect – Aretha meets Judy Garland – in one of the most accomplished vocal performances he would ever commit to tape. ‘Can You Hear Me?’, recorded in the same early sessions, is equally subtle, the final mix benefiting from a typically haunting Visconti string arrangement. ‘Win’, started but not completed at Sigma Sound, is an almost spiritual meditation which represents a neat antithesis to the white man’s conventional take on R&B. Where Surrey bluesmen like Eric Clapton expressed a faux-empathy with the downtrodden, David Bowie uses soul to celebrate success: ‘All you got to do is win – that’s all ya gotta do.’
In the coming months, many critics, notably Creem’s Lester Bangs, would tear into Bowie’s assimilation of R&B; it was brazen, unashamed. Yet Bowie’s unapologetic overnight makeover was a triumph compared to his friend and rival, Marc Bolan. Influenced by girlfriend Gloria Jones, Marc had dabbled with R&B for over a year, even playing with Ike and Tina Turner on the B-side to ‘Nutbush City Limits’. But Bolan could not bear to totally abandon his trademark style; his R&B was a compromise, buried under those familiar languid vocals. Bowie, in contrast, turned funky late, but went all the way. More self-secure than Bolan, he would not hedge his bets, and his confidence in the studio was not fuelled by the cocaine; it was innate. As confirmation of his imminent success, a small group of fans gathered round the studio each night. They were given the title of ‘the Sigma kids’, regarded as a kind of lucky charm, and were finally invited in to listen to the rough mixes – perhaps predictably, they were wildly enthusiastic.
The sense of focus around the Sigma sessions provided a powerful contrast to David’s chaotic private life. Ava, his girlfriend, had helped inspire his work in the city; but during the recordings he’d frequently disappear, a cat on the prowl. ‘I knew the party was going on somewhere else,’ says Cherry of his nocturnal escapades. When Angie arrived in Philadelphia there was yet more drama, when she heard Ava was on the scene and ran off towards a hotel window, threatening to throw herself out.
Angie’s behaviour was all the more extreme in that she was one of the few at the time who didn’t drink or do drugs. David and Angie were caught in a bizarre cycle where David would decide he needed her and call her up; Angie would arrive, only to be ignored, which provoked a crisis. ‘It was a very odd relationship, very weird to be around,’ concluded Zanetta, who realised during these weeks that David was considering finally ridding himself of Angie. The timing was significant, for it followed, by only a few days, David’s belated understanding of his relationship with MainMan.
The devastating conversation took place in a New York hotel at the end of July. Coked out of his mind, as was Zanetta, Bowie poured out his woes: ‘Did I work this hard, to have nothing?’ The pair were discussing the money that was pouring out of MainMan, when Zanetta realised that David thought he owned half the organisation. ‘It was odd,’ says Zanetta. ‘He didn’t understand that he didn’t own [half of] MainMan. We were sitting there, going over what had gone wrong and trying to keep it all together. I adored both David and Tony, so this was more than heartbreaking – it felt like the end of the world.’
Traumatic as the situation was for Zanetta, for David it was far worse. He’d simply always assumed he owned his own company, his own music; the situation, as mapped out by Zanetta, was so horrifically different, he seemed incapable of comprehending it. Zanetta tried to explain to him that he owned half his own revenue, less expenses, but had no share in the other MainMan enterprises. The obvious next step, if David wanted to ensure he had received everything he was entitled to, was to hire an accountant and go through the books, where every penny of expenditure was documented. But David had no interest in analysing his predicament. Defries had created a magical aura, a cocoon where David could create. Now the magic bubble had popped. Over subsequent weeks, David made no effort to investigate his contract with MainMan; he was only interested in terminating it. ‘It was coming to an end between them,’ says Zanetta, their conflicted go-between. ‘Part of that was money. Part of it was Defries’ megalomania. In fact, they were both megalomaniacs’.
‘Tony had been a total father figure,’ adds Ava Cherry. ‘David would do everything Tony said, would listen to his every word. When he heard about the money he was simply … afraid.’
The ramifications of David’s deal with MainMan were complex; there were indeed advantages to the way David’s contract was set up, for it gave him control of his masters – as long as he remained with MainMan. Defries himself maintains that MainMan’s unique position as owner of David’s master recordings increased his royalties from the industry standard 10 per cent to 16 per cent, a cut that was, in the early 1970s, unusually generous. But one crucial aspect of their relationship is beyond debate. David believed he was a partner in MainMan; in reality, he was an employee. His failure to even question his own status displayed staggering naiveté.
This discovery was a devastating blow to David’s self-esteem. As he saw it, his father figure had betrayed him. Ava Cherry, and Coco, comforted him throughout the distraught crying jags that overcame him whenever he thought about his situation, but most of the time, his problems were too bleak to contemplate. Instead, David fixed on Angie, deciding he could no longer cope with her outbursts. For months to come, he would continue to play his public role with his wife – maintaining the image that, as Scott Richardson puts it, ‘had made the world fall in love with them’ – but David’s emotional detachment from Angie was part of his detachment from MainMan. Angie, more than David, had defined MainMan’s image; it was she who had established the company’s cradle at Haddon Hall, who had formed the relationship with the Pork crew. As Leee Childers points out, ‘MainMan had been created in Angie’s image.’ For David, both were now encumbranc
es. But in the short term he would keep his counsel, while he worked out how to cut himself loose.
The summer of 1974 was temperate and balmy, and when David resumed his tour – the band now augmented with Carlos Alomar, Ava Cherry and most of the Sigma crew – his personal traumas were briefly forgotten in the excitement of creation. For the time being, David informed Defries, via Tony Zanetta, that he was planning a new stripped-down production, and wanted to ditch the Hunger City set and play against a white backdrop. Defries affected nonchalance at the news that the $400,000 construction was destined for the trash-heap.
Over seven nights at Hollywood’s Universal Amphitheatre, David’s claim to bona fide superstar status was laid out in the most convincing fashion. His previous ‘retirement’ seemed only to add to his unpredictability and glamour. The Hollywood aristocracy turned out; Diana Ross made a conspicuous appearance in a silver gown, as did her fellow Motown stars The Jackson Five.
Marc Bolan was another attendant on the triumphant hero. He had bitched about David in print earlier that year, deriding his American success as all marketing gloss. Now, pudgy and nervous, he paid due fealty to the man who had so often paid tribute to him. ‘David was obviously at a high point and Marc at a low point,’ says Zanetta, who sat with the two of them at the Beverly Wilshire hotel. ‘But David did not gloat at all, he was very kind.’ Later that year, Marc would tell Melody Maker how he would be directing David in his first movie. By then, with David being courted by Hollywood’s biggest stars, Marc’s bravado seemed unbearably sad. Iggy Pop eventually turned up, too. After his split with MainMan, and well-publicised attacks on ‘that fuckin’ carrot-top’ for sabotaging his Raw Power album, he had finally split from The Stooges following a legendarily disastrous last tour. His last public performance had been a pathetic affair at Rodney’s English Disco, which culminated in him stabbing his chest with a blunt steak knife. Now mocked around Hollywood as a trashcan drug user, Iggy missed David’s show after being beaten up by a bunch of surfers in the parking lot. He turned up later to cadge food.
Burying himself in musical preparations throughout the LA shows, David seemed genuinely happy; over successive nights he coached Ava Cherry, ready for her solo number, which was Luther Vandross’s ‘Maybe It’s Love’. He was the perfect mentor: rehearsing and encouraging her. ‘He walked me through the whole thing, the movement, the way I would enter the stage. He was very nurturing, it was wonderful.’
David had even seemed gracious and hospitable when a young BBC director, Alan Yentob, appeared in Hollywood, explaining that Tony Defries had, in a momentary lapse, agreed to give him access. Impressed by Yentob’s explanation of the theme of the documentary – that this would be an exploration of a significant, serious artist in his new, American setting – David agreed to grant him an interview.
Yentob’s documentary would be unforgettable, a gripping depiction of a fractured, dislocated existence. One of the main contributors to that fractured aura was a local celebrity who introduced himself to David after one of the first Hollywood shows. Freddy Sessler, concentration camp survivor and rock ‘n’ roll fan, was ‘the kind of guy who can make a party happen’, says Iggy Pop. Sessler is one of those characters whose existence is rarely acknowledged in the wider world, despite the influence he had behind the scenes. For decades he acted as companion to Keith Richards and Ron Wood, loved for his Chico Marx-style gruff humour and for his ability to source the best drugs in the West. With customary ease, Freddy gained admission to the Beverly Wilshire, his pockets bulging with vials of pure ‘Merck’ – medicinal cocaine, far more powerful than anything available in New York. This was the mother lode, the drug lauded by Sigmund Freud as ‘this magical substance’. From then on, Freddy would be David’s companion, too.
Over those weeks in Hollywood, David was also being courted by the UK’s most glamorous movie icon: Elizabeth Taylor. Their first meeting was awkward – Terry O’Neill, who photographed David for the Diamond Dogs sleeve, invited David to a shoot at director George Cukor’s house, for which David arrived ‘two hours late – dishevelled and out of it. Liz was pretty annoyed and on the verge of leaving, but we managed to persuade her to stay.’ Liz’s irritation with David was outweighed by her own instinct for publicity. A huge star in the 1960s, Taylor had fared less well in the 1970s and was eager to be associated with Bowie: O’Neill’s photos showed the two frolicking like teenagers, Liz embracing David, holding his cigarette suggestively.
Within days she was making high-profile visits to David’s rehearsals, and floating the idea that David would star in The Blue Bird, a remake of Maurice Tourneur’s 1918 movie, in the press. Her adoption of David as an up-and-coming superstar was made official during a party for Ricci Martin – Dean’s son – in Beverly Hills, where they sat close to each other, chatting softly.
There was another star in the cavalcade of celebrities gathering around David and Liz that evening: John Lennon, then in the midst of his so-called ‘Lost Weekend’ with May Pang. John was ‘saucer-eyed‘, according to Pang, at seeing so many of his movie heroes in LA and was soaking up the vibe at the party, chatting with Elton John. Taylor called John and May over, introducing them to David in her sing-song, almost childish voice. John was chummy, ‘But David was odd,’ remembers May Pang. After a few seconds he told them, ‘I have to go now.’ A few minutes later they walked into another room to see David and Liz, still huddled together. ‘It was strange – David was very thin, I remember he seemed stand-offish. John didn’t know what to think. Me, him and Elton were looking at each other: what was that about?’ Lennon was not offended, merely puzzled.
As the tour moved on to the Midwest, and then the east, early in October, the soul vibe became more obvious, and Hunger City’s skyscrapers finally met the wrecking ball. These shows were mocked by some observers as a patronising wannabe soul revue, but for band and crew these were thrilling dates, with the set evolving from one night to the next. Received wisdom would have it that David’s cocaine habit reduced him to such a state of dehydration that his lips adhered to his gums: Ava Cherry, who stood close to him on stage, remembers no such event. But there were many moments of crisis, in particular a show in Boston that November. Before the show started, he demanded a gramme of cocaine. ‘I’m not going on unless I get it.’ After scurrying around, a flunkie came up with the goods. But when David walked out on stage the first two rows stayed immobile. For some reason, most of them had dressed up in Halloween costumes for the occasion. ‘Skeleton masks, scary masks,’ says Cherry.
‘Why are they doing that?’ David appealed to his backing singers. ‘Why the masks?’ He was terrified, offended that his fans saw him simply as a freak. Then, as he made his way out of the Music Hall, he was handed a poster-sized sheet. On it were tombstones bearing his name. The poster troubled him for days. Later he mentioned it to Ava, when trying to explain his own behaviour: ‘If you don’t like some of the things I do, that’s why – I don’t live a normal life.’
Writer Mick Farren had been sent to report on the tour for the NME, and found himself relishing the weird culture clash, ‘like a crazed Funkadelic tour, with added cocaine, paranoia and Scientology’, he says. Farren loved the ‘James Brown vs Elvis vibe – obviously they’d cobbled it together on the fly, but it was kinda cool’. Photographer Robert Matheu remembered the same seedy glamour in Detroit. ‘The drugs were apparent in so many ways – they actually seemed to add to the overall vibe, there was a darkness to it. You know, an Ike Turner thing: Ike always had that vibe, you knew he was holding.’ The culture clash was reflected in backstage friction between the band: Kamen’s crew seemed at odds with the Main Ingredient players; Coco Schwab was lined up against Ava Cherry, or Angie when she turned up; the Scientology vibe was still present thanks to Mike Garson, plus there were ‘monstrous amounts’ of cocaine in evidence. ‘Piles of the shit everywhere,’ says Farren. ‘They must have been carrying half-ounce bags. This was about as excessive as it got – in a period of excess.’
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When he wasn’t on stage, David, whom Farren knew back from his Lindsay Kemp days, looked lost and, as in the later stages of his previous American tour, ‘lonely’. Most of the time he walked around in an overcoat with his hood up, nose dripping, twitchily rejecting any attempts at conversation. When anyone got in the lift with him, he looked terrified. Many outsiders remember the cut-throat, paranoid atmosphere, with different cliques trying to entice outsiders back to their room ‘for some blow’, each accusing the others of being drug-fiends, even of stealing money. But on-stage, David was always in command; the backstage friction gave the music an edge. ‘David had people playing against each other on stage, to make them better,’ says Ava Cherry, ‘like the James Brown thing, always that pressure of, You’re in, You’re out. Sometimes it was brilliant. Me and Diane [Sumler] would fight harder to be better than each other – ‘cos we were opposites.’
The atmosphere was all the more bizarre because the darkness and paranoia were offset by the mood of ‘the kids’, as Zanetta called them: Carlos, Robin and Luther were wholesome and loving, relishing their big break. Although guitarist Earl Slick had his own ‘mindless’ moments, as he recalls, he too seemed like a carefree child, in his element, and Ava Cherry, innocent and luscious, was ‘adored’ by most of the crew. In another bizarre touch, Zowie and his nanny Marion Skene were around for several dates. While David was generally distracted, when he made time for his son he was ‘absolutely attentive – focusing on him completely,’ says Zanetta. Likewise, David’s boyish enthusiasm was obvious when he concentrated on the music, and at soundchecks the whole crazy family would come together and unite, with a wired optimism.