by Paul Trynka
In the afternoons when the troupe remained in the city, at the Michigan Palace or Chicago’s Crown Theatre, there would be extended jam sessions where David would be filled with energy, pointing out riffs and directing arrangements, and over the October dates, new songs were added one by one: the devotional, gospelly ‘It’s Gonna Be Me’, and a funked-up version of The Flares’ 1963 Doo Wop hit, ‘Foot Stompin”.
The autumn and winter of 1974 was the period most marked by a cocaine blitz, one in which David would famously describe himself as permanently ‘out of my gourd’. Yet even outsiders, although shocked by David’s physical deterioration, were somehow convinced that this was simply another phase, one which would pass. ‘He’s such a survivor,’ Mick Farren points out, ‘plus we weren’t all dropping dead back then.’ Only in retrospect, says Farren, did he reflect on the psychological burdens David had assumed. ‘It’s like what Lennon said about Elvis: “I don’t know how he did it, ‘cos there were four of us and it nearly killed us.” And of course there were only two of David.’
David’s performance on The Dick Cavett Show, taped on 2 November, 1974, during the New York dates, was the high watermark of his ‘out of my gourd’ period, and the perfect embodiment of the tour’s prickly, paranoid energy. Sniffing loudly, with his eyes flitting from side to side, David bares his teeth several times in a grimace almost like those of the skeleton masks that had freaked him out in Boston. As if in reaction, Cavett mentions black magic and how ‘some people said they’re scared to sit and talk to you’. David’s main response is to fiddle obsessively with his cane, and for a moment Cavett looks truly worried, as though his guest is drawing a pentagram on the studio floor. At odd moments – a little chuckle here, his statement that when he’s on stage ‘that’s it, [I’m] complete’ – he still manages to impersonate a normal human being, but mostly he revels in his fractured condition. Together with Alan Yentob’s Cracked Actor, screened by the BBC on 26 January, 1975, this would be the definitive depiction of Bowie in his most alien state. But in the sense that he is exploring the limits of his mental condition, he is also recognisably David Bowie, in exactly the same way that the coked-out David witnessed by Keith Christmas was merely another manifestation of the person he’d known in 1969.
As if in tribute to David’s newly minted image as an icon of excess, the police raided the end-of-tour party at Atlanta’s Hyatt Regency on 1 December. Backing singers Geoff MacCormack and Gui Andrisano had noticed a couple of ‘strange guys with bad taste in clothes and suspiciously short haircuts’ hanging out in the hotel suite and warned their fellow musicians. When the police broke in, none of the crew was holding, but the suite contained nine phials of cocaine, ten lumps of hashish, five bags of grass and three roaches. Tony Zanetta, who had booked the suite, was dragged off for an overnight stay in the cells, but finally released without charges.
After an exhausting drive back to New York, David had booked studio time to complete Young Americans at the Hit Factory, around 3 December. After David added more overdubs and completed ‘Fascination’ – based on a Luther Vandross song – and ‘Win’, Tony Visconti flew over to London with the tapes, to mix them at his home studio, happy at finally completing the thrilling, but gruelling sessions.
In his first few days back in New York, David had also called up John Lennon and May Pang; he was nervous about meeting the ex-Beatle again, and at one point called Tony Visconti over to the Sherry Netherlands hotel to help ease the conversation along. Although their meeting in LA had gone nowhere, David and John had a huge amount in common. Bowie would talk about John frequently; John was interested in David, friendly, but invariably slightly puzzled. ‘David was still very nervous, John was happy to hang out,’ says May Pang. The atmosphere remained slightly awkward, all the more so when Paul and Linda McCartney – who had just bumped into John and May – entered the picture in mid-January.
The four of them went over to the Sherry to meet David, who repeatedly played the various mixes of his new album for them, ‘and we had heard it already. In lots of different states,’ says Pang. David was about to replay the acetate for John for at least the second time when John told him, ‘David it’s great, a great album … is there anything else we can listen to as well?’ David looked devastated; John hadn’t noticed Paul had made almost exactly the same remark a few minutes earlier, and when the couple returned to their apartment on 52nd Street that night, the phone was ringing as they came through the door. ‘Yes David, sorry man, I didn’t mean that,’ John consoled his offended, cocaine-fuelled friend.
May Pang remembers that Lennon was taken aback by the size of David’s coke habit, remarking to May, ‘I’ve never seen such mounds of the stuff!’ But John enjoyed his company, and although he was puzzled when David told him that he was planning to add a cover version of ‘Across the Universe’ to the album, he instantly agreed to turn up at Electric Lady studio around 15 January, for he was a studio hound. ‘He loved being in on the recording,’ says renowned engineer Eddie Kramer, who worked the session, ‘and just playing guitar – he was a ridiculously good rhythm player. ‘
In the studio, the environment they both loved, John’s empathy with David was obvious, Kramer observed. David too was obviously having a blast: ‘Whatever stimulants he was taking didn’t affect his ability to be creative,’ says Kramer, who was present when Carlos Alomar started playing the riff, adapted from a Rascals song, ‘Jungle Walk’, that he’d added to the band’s live version of ‘Foot Stompin”. ‘David said, “I’ll have that,” or words to that effect – and he took the riff that Carlos played and made a song out of it.’
Lennon was playing around on the acoustic in the lounge, singing a couple of lines from Shirley & Company’s disco hit ‘Shame, Shame, Shame’ over the top of the same one-chord vamp. ‘So he was working it, and David walks in and hears that,’ says Pang, who remembers David leaving the room and returning with a complete set of lyrics within twenty minutes.
David had misheard ‘shame’ as ‘fame’ – a subject he’d been discussing with John earlier – and also the title of yet another disastrous MainMan project, a Tony Ingrassia play launched just a few weeks before. The misheard word would give him his biggest hit to date. Although some key recollections vary as to whether Carlos started the vamp first and John joined in, or vice versa, Bowie ‘was very much in charge, he knew exactly what he wanted’, says Kramer, who watched David work the elements into a song once John had left the studio. Part of Lennon’s own guitar vamp survived in the three acoustic chords – F minor, C minor, and B flat – that open the song and punctuate the main theme before the last verse. Carlos’s riff, effective on ‘Foot Stompin”, was the killer element on ‘Fame’; but it’s Bowie who makes sense of it – he plays the crunchy ascending guitar riff at the end of each line.
Restricted mostly to a single chord, ‘Fame’ is obsessive, monotonous and claustrophobic. On Hunky Dory, David had worked with piano chords; here he was playing with sound itself, using the studio as a giant cut-and-paste machine. Yet the emotional impact was just as powerful, for the song was an almost literal rendition of his life, jump-cutting from his omnipresent worries about money – ‘what you need you have to borrow’; to his loneliness – ‘takes you there where things are hollow’.
‘Fame’s’ last-minute addition to the album, which had already been trailed in the press as Fascination in December, would be the making of Young Americans; it would also arguably break it, too, for David felt compelled to include his version of ‘Across the Universe’, the song that had inspired Lennon’s arrival in the studio. The cover version was a horrible mess, marred by David’s warbling vocal, the most extreme example so far of his mimicking of Bryan Ferry and Scott Walker’s style, and an obvious flaw that the album’s detractors would latch onto. (Lennon was just as puzzled as everyone else: ‘Why that song?’ he asked May Pang.) When ‘Fame’ became David’s first US number one, the following September, John was as delighted as David. ‘He had that competit
iveness with the others guys [i.e. Paul McCartney] – and he thought it was great,’ says Pang, who disappeared from John’s life in February, as the ex-Beatle returned to Yoko and The Dakota. May would later marry Tony Visconti, whom she’d met at the Sherry that winter.
The excitement around the recording was one of the few high spots in a bleak winter. Much of David’s Christmas was spent in a coke-fuelled haze with Tony Zanetta at the Sherry Netherlands. David had lost his very last vestige of faith in Tony Defries, and in all of MainMan, on 18 November, the day that the company made its grand entrance – and its ignominious exit – on Broadway. Fame was a chaotic, confused comedy based on the life of Marilyn Monroe, written by Tony Ingrassia, the mastermind of Pork. Pork had launched the MainMan circus; Fame, which closed after one performance, was its death-knell, for Bowie deeply resented the reported $250,000 that had been lost on its production, money his hits had generated. David’s conversations with John Lennon at Electric Lady confirmed his decision. John had just divested himself of Beatles manager Allen Klein, commemorated by one of his last great songs, ‘Steel and Glass’, which mocked Klein’s LA tan and his infamous BO (‘you leave your smell like an alley cat’). Defries frequently claimed to have learned his trade from Klein; if John had had enough of Klein, David had had enough of Defries.
Over Christmas, David attempted to contact Defries, who was away on his favourite island hideaway of Mustique, without success. The two finally met up in January. The encounter was strangely dysfunctional, as far as those close to them can tell, with neither man coming to the point. David told friends Defries had accepted his decision to leave MainMan; Defries believed he’d smoothed over David’s concerns and persuaded him to stay. In later months, when their split became increasingly ill-tempered, Defries would tell his friends how ‘disappointed’ he was in David. He was let down by his ingratitude, his lack of understanding of commercial realities, his addiction to drugs (for added drama he speculated David was on heroin, too).
Later, when friends asked Defries, the supreme negotiator, why he had failed to negotiate a settlement at his meeting with David, he would coldly ask, ‘David had been working for me. Why would I want to work for him?’
Defries also seemed to astutely judge Michael Lippman, the lawyer David had found to represent him. Previously an agent for CMA, Lippman had pitched film work to both David and Angie; he’d been a fully qualified partner in a law firm rather than a mere clerk like Defries, and was liked and trusted by those around David, but could never match his opponent’s aggression. Defries told his friends that Lippman was a very junior agent with not much to offer, and that he’d advised Bowie to retain a more high-powered lawyer.
MainMan would be dismembered in David’s wake, all its artists subsequently dropped; Defries’ subsequent management career failed to make headlines. One singer did approach him for advice a few years later, Defries confided to his friends. Her name was Madonna.
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In later years, Defries would be painted as cynical and manipulative; but speak to anyone who worked with him, and a trace of the magic still lingers. For Defries ‘was never the demon figure he’s made out’, says Hugh Attwooll, one-time head of MainMan England. ‘He’s a man without care. He knew he could beat the system and he did it. All he said to David was that he’d make him a star. He didn’t elaborate and say, “I’ll use a lot of your money to make it work.” My view is that he gets rather a bad press. Because it did work – without it, David wouldn’t be as famous as he is.’
Over the next year, David would be dogged by disputes with Defries, who would retain a share of David’s future records for the remainder of the MainMan contract term, right up to 1982, with the right to reject any album should Defries deem it uncommercial. Such onerous conditions naturally made most observers side with David. But those who were there testify that, not only was Defries was the key figure in helping Bowie rise to fame, he was also an integral part of that period’s unforgettable magic.
‘What entertained him was the intellectual challenge of doing it – taking the risk and making it work,’ says Attwooll. ‘He spun a web of magic, which no one had ever done before, and persuaded RCA to spend huge amounts of money both in the UK and US. He was a very nice bloke, but what line he stepped over in achieving what he achieved is probably an argument that will never be satisfied.’
David, meanwhile, spent years dealing with the ramifications of the split with the figure who’d overseen his rise to fame. He’d put off his confrontation with Defries for months; David’s friends, including Coco Schwab and Ava Cherry, hoped the split would finally produce some resolution. But there would be none.
David Jones had embarked on a long, gruelling, ruthless journey in pursuit of fame and success; many of his peers had shown similar ambition, but few had transformed themselves so painstakingly from a mediocrity into an inspirational songwriter. Soon, he’d discover, the very stuff he’d created, at such personal cost, was lost to him. David’s friends hoped that his final split with his one-time father figure would bring ‘closure’. Instead, it brought crisis.
14
White Stains
He – and this is glamorising it – did use the drugs to enlarge his capabilities in every dimension. It really magnified his intelligence, if you will. But it had its way with him.
Glenn Hughes
David believed that cutting his ties with Defries promised mental freedom; independence in his business affairs seemed almost secondary. ‘Forget about the money,’ he had told a couple of people, ‘that’s all in the past.’ Above all, he had confidence in his music; his new album would finally bring him mainstream success in America, and represented the ultimate bargaining chip in his relationship with RCA who, early in January, confirmed that they were prepared to deal with David directly, effectively cutting Defries out of the deal.
But by February 1975, the awful truth dawned that the freedom might be illusory; that although David had left MainMan, MainMan – and Defries – retained control of his existing masters. During his conversations with John Lennon – whose business savvy he admired – he discovered that Lennon had lost his own publishing, and at times despaired of escaping Allen Klein’s clutches. David’s contract with Defries, as an employee, was even more restrictive. ‘That was when David’s whole mood changed,’ says Ava Cherry, who witnessed David’s conversations with John. ‘He was always irritated after that, quick to get angry. David was a little bit naive – and he couldn’t believe he’d really signed so much away.’
While David was mired in his financial worries, the extent of his physical deterioration was revealed in gripping fashion, on 26 January, when Alan Yentob’s Cracked Actor was screened on the BBC. In later years, it would be acclaimed as one of the greatest music documentaries ever made. With the minimal interview time he’d been given, Yentob lingered over every shot, capturing perfectly the emptiness and loneliness in which David was sealed. Defries’ predecessor, Ken Pitt, was one of many disturbed by David’s fractured, disconnected state. He concluded simply that David ‘was ill. That was what all the Defries big talk had done for him. This was not the David I knew. It was very disappointing.’
An interview with Bruno Stein published in February’s Creem was even more alarming, indicative of what seemed classic cocaine-induced paranoia. David was obsessed with UFO cover-ups. ‘And I made sightings [of UFOs] six, seven times a night for about a year when I was in the observatory,’ he confided to the astonished writer, before pronouncing that Adolf Hitler was ‘a perfect figurehead’. In reality, these proclamations reflected an old obsession, dating back to when he was hanging out with Lesley Duncan at Redington Road. All those who had gone UFO-spotting with him around 1967, like Jeff Dexter and Wayne Bardell, confirm, ‘We did see UFOs – absolutely.’ Equally, Adolf Hitler was an old, favourite topic for debate, for David used to eulogise the work of Albert Speer back in Arnold Corns days. Yet what had been cheery, hipsters’ chat in the sixties became ominous and disturbi
ng in 1975.
While onlookers’ reactions to David’s state varied from horror to fascination to cynicism, one woman saw a solution to a movie casting problem. Maggie Abbott was an agent at CMA who’d been crucial in uniting her clients Mick Jagger and writer Donald Cammell with Nicolas Roeg for Performance – the definitive celluloid depiction of late sixties decadence. She’d first heard of David through a friend who trained with him at Lindsay Kemp’s studio – now he was, thanks to CMA, her client. Yentob’s documentary convinced her that he would be perfect for the lead role in Roeg’s upcoming project, The Man Who Fell to Earth. Abbott’s tenacity played a crucial part in the genesis of the film, not least because the BBC refused to release a video of Cracked Actor for Roeg and producer Si Litvinoff to watch, and she had to use ‘cunning charm’ to smuggle out a copy. ‘Nic and Si didn’t take any convincing, they knew as soon as they saw Cracked Actor, especially the sequence with David in the back of the limo.’ The pair, and Abbott, were struck by how, as Bowie gazed out of the car window, he seemed totally isolated, disconnected from the world – alien.
Roeg had planned to cast Michael Crighton, Mick Jagger and later Peter O’Toole to play Newton, the alien who comes to earth in search of water and is corrupted by earthly vices. Crighton and O’Toole were unavailable; Abbott talked Roeg out of using Jagger, her other major client. Watching the documentary, Roeg noticed countless facets of Bowie that resonated with the part. But the most important one was ‘that curious artificial voice. It wasn’t absolutely definable as a brogue or accent. Like, did it really exist?’ Today, Roeg admits that while the decision to cast Bowie was obvious in retrospect, ‘I don’t know if it was immediate.’ Likewise Maggie Abbott – who flew to New York in February, 1975 to show David the script – remembers his initial response as ‘cautious … cool’. His reserve was not so striking as his physical state, which was even worse than Cracked Actor had suggested; his hip bones jutted through the jump suit he was wearing, his skin was white, and his teeth grey. ‘Ghastly,’ is Abbott’s description. But he was astute: he understood the logic of her case, asked the correct questions, and was obviously intrigued by Abbott’s connections with Roeg and Mick Jagger. She, in turn, had no doubt about whether he would rise to the task. ‘He could sleep-walk through it,’ she told Roeg, who arranged to meet David a couple of days later.