Starman

by Paul Trynka

  Crowe was late for their second interview, in June; pacing around anxiously waiting for the Rolling Stone reporter to turn up, David and Ava had snorted up huge lines of Freddy Sessler’s finest Merck and by the time Crowe arrived, ‘We were flying. We were fucked up, I’m not going to say we weren’t.’ The Bowie portrayed by Crowe, Ava Cherry and others is a classic, isolated narcissist, his mind racing from scheme to scheme. To Crowe, he dismissed, icily, the subject of MainMan; in reality, he was agonising over the fate of his masters: ‘the Tony Defries thing was really affecting him’, says Glenn Hughes, ‘addiction is all about burying your head in the sand. But this was his period of hell.’ It was natural that David would construct grandiose, omnipotent fantasies in his conversations with Cameron Crowe, for this was the man who had lost his music, his birthright. He had been emasculated. Dispossessed of a huge part of what had defined his life, he really was rootless and alien.

  Glenn Hughes returned to Los Angeles later in May, and was the closest witness to David’s desperate condition. Ava was finally off the scene; Angie was staying, briefly, and picked up Hughes from the airport, and on first impressions David seemed okay. But within days, as Bowie and Hughes stayed up for days at a stretch – four, five or more – their existence became that of lifeless wraiths, cut off from human warmth. Corinne – a source of succour, but also a gatekeeper who enforced his isolation – and driver Tony Mascia were busy with other projects, and Michael Lippman, too, had ‘his hands full, there was so much going on’. Over those weeks running up to filming of The Man Who Fell to Earth, David was lonely, and mostly alone, but for occasional visitors like Hughes.

  It wasn’t all darkness; David could be hilariously funny. He christened Hughes ‘old big head’, presented him with a portrait inscribed with his new title, and spent hours badgering the rock bassist to throw out his flares and blue denim. He’d lose entire days engrossed in painting, and shared his insights on various subjects freely. Hughes, a fellow soul fan, loved Stevie Wonder, and wanted to record with him. ‘No,’ Bowie instructed him. ‘It’s too obvious that you’re influenced by Stevie; do something with Nina Simone, instead.’ Only in later years did Hughes appreciate the depth of Bowie’s perceptiveness.

  But those moments of clarity and positivity were rare. Mostly, David would sit there, his forehead creased, ‘thinking, always thinking’, and watching the same movies again and again. From Hughes’ perspective, David’s involvement with the occult was exaggerated: it was something he was frightened of, rather than drawn to. Yet Bowie’s fascination with the Third Reich, often dismissed as publicity-seeking, ran disturbingly deep. ‘He would watch a lot of movies. Never-ending Nazi stuff, which he’d watch with this constant frown on his face.’ Sometimes Hughes would go home to crash out, and return to David’s house a day later to check on him, to see him sitting in the same place, wearing the same clothes, with the same frown, watching the same movies. Faced with the endless black-and-white footage, Hughes could manage little more than a coked-up ‘wow’. David showed no evidence of racism, but his fascination with Nazi lore seemed extreme. ‘I couldn’t analyse what he read or saw, I wasn’t capable – his brain was simply on a tangent to everybody else’s. It certainly wasn’t spiritual – who is spiritual when they’re on coke?’

  At the time, Hughes assumed David was making some kind of sense of the images and words flooding through his consciousness. In reality, Bowie was like a babbling drunk, convinced he’s discovered the secret of the universe. Other conversations that summer made his encounters with Cameron Crowe seem a model of rationality. Talking to the NME’s Anthony O’Grady in August, David opined that a fascist dictatorship was on its way, explaining, ‘It’s like a kaleidoscope – no matter how many little colours you put in it, that kaleidoscope will make those colours have a pattern … and that’s what happens with TV – it doesn’t matter who puts what in the TV, by the end of the year there’s a whole format that the TV puts together. The TV puts over its own plan … Who says the space people have got no eyes? You have – you’ve got one in every living room in the world.’ Then, perhaps sensing his interviewer’s realisation that he was talking gibberish, David added, ‘That’s theoretical, of course.’

  Glenn Hughes didn’t imagine that aliens were controlling his TV, but the cocaine would bring similar delusions: by the end of the year he was hiring guard dogs and security to deal with imagined intruders. Yet, in his view, David positively revelled in his own world. ‘David used to drive his Mercedes alone through Los Angeles, on blow, the most paranoid son of a bitch in the city, wearing a hat, all the way from Doheny Drive to Beverly Hills. I tried it once that year, but I was too paranoid, too loaded. He arrived at my house and I’m, How the fuck did you get here?’

  David had undoubtedly learned to use cocaine, savouring the impact it had on his psyche. ‘He – and this is glamorising it – did use the drugs to enlarge his capabilities in every dimension,’ says Hughes. ‘It really magnified his intelligence, if you will. But it had its way with him.’

  Ironically, it was playing the part of an alien that would force this damaged creature to abandon his quest and come back to earth. Even as he started to prepare for the upcoming movie shoot in New Mexico, waiting for the mostly English crew to assemble, David seemed capable of utter focus and dedication. In a strange way, David’s frazzled mental state seemed to accentuate his almost child-like earnestness. He was still a showbiz pro. Given direction by Nicholas Roeg in rehearsal, he was calm, almost pliant; none of those present remember any trace of nervousness.

  Shooting of The Man Who Fell to Earth had been delayed by problems with the intended backers, Columbia Pictures, who withdrew after realising their choice for leading man, Robert Redford, had been supplanted. The newly formed British Lion company, led by producers Michael Deeley and Barry Spikings, stepped into the breach. There would be constant disputes over budgets and other issues, but when filming commenced late in June at Lake Fenton, New Mexico, the tight schedule and budget became an integral part of the movie’s feel. When a passing tramp turned and belched in the opening shot, Roeg incorporated the scene as a motif. Everyone pitched in: Bowie’s limo driver, Tony Mascia, performed the same function for the character of Newton. Roeg and his star shared the same instincts. ‘During filming, we were close and not close at the same time,’ says Roeg. ‘We didn’t go out for dinner, but we were very close in understanding.’

  If, for Bowie, his greatest movie was a depiction of his condition, adrift in LA, the perfect example of the city’s emotional blankness was the fate of Maggie Abbott. In February she’d persuaded both Roeg and Bowie to work together. In March she’d negotiated with Michael Lippman, who demanded a large fee but was negotiated down. Around June, she gave a joint party for David and Charlotte Rampling in LA. Then in July, she heard that she had been barred from the New Mexico set. The woman who’d made the movie possible didn’t see Bowie for another ten years, when she bumped into him at another movie industry party. In true Hollywood fashion, to avoid losing face, Abbott ‘pretended I didn’t know him. He did the same.’

  Geoff MacCormack accompanied Bowie and Coco Schwab to New Mexico, where he was given a sinecure as David’s body double. The three spent a healthy few weeks at the Albuquerque Hilton and later in Santa Fe, relaxing and sightseeing in the run-up to the filming; David used the break to start painting during peaceful afternoons in the conservatory of his rented ranch-style bungalow. Over the course of just a couple of weeks he visibly filled out, and his skin regained some of its natural glow. Roeg was worried about David’s weight fluctuating, should he binge on cocaine, and there seems to have been an understanding that David would not indulge during the shoot. When Bowie did succumb, Roeg decided not to react, and to see where the ambiguity of the situation would take them. ‘I did not do or say anything. You can’t reason someone out of anything. I’m not into the guilt thing or trying to cure anybody of our humanity – everybody has a sense of shame, guilt, secret happiness, accu
sation or praise. There are certain things I wouldn’t want to know about someone anyway, and I wouldn’t want them to know certain things about me. It all goes back to this idea of exposing yourself. You have to live with yourself first.’

  With its echoes of Howard Hughes, and of David’s own life, The Man Who Fell to Earth seemed, for all its art-house values and rarefied conceptualising, simple in tone. The movie was totally reliant on Bowie’s charisma – and his vulnerability. Leading woman Candy Clarke was Roeg’s partner; being directed in her sex scenes with Bowie by Roeg was something she says Roeg ‘got a kick out of. You English people can be very kinky.’ Clarke’s own recollections of her leading man focus exclusively on his physicality. ‘He was so perfect for the role that it was very easy to imagine he was from another planet – he was beautiful, really at the height of his beauty. Really thick hair, dyed that lovely colour, and his skin was just gorgeous.’ Her memories seem to involve scant sense of Bowie’s fragility, but for one instance, when ‘he’d drunk some milk, saw something in it – and then got sick’. (His absence meant that Clarke had to record one key scene – where Newton reveals his alien, genital-free body, and Candy’s character pisses her pants – solo.) Otherwise, Clarke recalls Bowie’s condition as surprisingly robust; when, at the end of the movie, Mary-Lou lifts Newton from the floor and places him gently on the bed, Clarke attempted to lift him up only to find ‘he was very heavy – I couldn’t budge him’. The crew had to rig up a seat, mounted on to a skateboard, to allow her to move the apparently emaciated entity.

  On its release in May 1976, The Man Who Fell to Earth would be mostly eulogised by critics. ‘Roeg has done it again,’ proclaimed the Guardian. Bowie’s crucial role won a near-unanimously warm reception: The New Yorker’s legendary critic Pauline Kael pronounced the plot ‘uninvolving’, but praised Bowie as ‘the most romantic figure in recent pictures’.

  David himself was confident, once the movie had wrapped, that it would launch him as not just a movie actor but as a multimedia creative force. The formidable focus with which he approached his next project seemed to vindicate his view, as did the success of Young Americans – a slow burner, but a commercial breakthrough in the US, winning gold status from the Recording Industry Association of America for 500,000 sales in July, with the single ‘Fame’ hitting number one on 20 September. The significance was not lost on David, who was still gently reminding writers of this breakthrough, five months later. And as ‘Fame’ ascended the charts, David was already crafting a follow-up album.

  Station to Station is usually regarded as the climax of David Bowie’s love affair with Freud’s ‘magical substance’, as well as his definitive statement on his rootless, confused existence in Los Angeles. Yet it was more complex than that, for the album was an almost scientific experiment in risk-taking: one of its key features, he told those around him, was to walk into the studio with no songs prepared. Station to Station was also a love letter to Europe, and would be a remarkably coherent statement from a man whose grip on reality was intermittent. Just a few months later, Bowie would describe the attraction of ‘watching artists crack open a bit – and seeing what they’re really like inside’. For the first time in years, underneath the clinical precision, the listener would find the real David Jones, devoid of masks, looking down into the abyss, and upwards in search of ‘that Godhead feeling’.

  There were brief rehearsals in LA before the album – not to work up material, but ‘to get loose’, says guitarist Earl Slick – before the small crew of Bowie, Alomar and Slick, bassist George Murray and drummer Dennis Davis convened in Cherokee Studios, a twenty-four-track facility that offered far more scope for experimentation than the sixteen-track set-up at Sigma. And this, Bowie told his musicians, was the ethos of the album: ‘Experimentation – and don’t worry about how long it takes,’ according to Carlos Alomar. This would be a journey into sound.

  The consistent reports that the album was recorded amid a blizzard of cocaine do indeed ring true. Bowie later remarked he could remember nothing of its making. These were indeed ‘weird times’ says Earl Slick, then just twenty-three years old. Slick’s tough, gnarly guitar is a centrepiece of the album, winding in and out of Alomar’s lithe, complementary melodies. Although most of the band remained in the studio for the early sessions, often they would be parachuted in and out, unsure of precisely what they were contributing to. ‘I was at the Rainbow on Sunset – I thought I had the night off,’ says Slick, ‘and I was in a state as usual. I lived in a state. Then Tony, the maitre d’ said, “Somebody is trying to find you,” so I got on the phone and they need me in the studio. It’s about fucking midnight and I’m trashed and I worked until whenever we finished putting a solo down.’

  The state of stretching the mind until it cracked was an intrinsic part of Station to Station; but what’s surprising, in retrospect, is that this state was conscious. Bowie seemed to weave in and out of it, relishing the effect both of being trashed, and in control. Blues writer and producer Neil Slaven by now had the quintessentially seventies job of star-minder, travelling with Glenn Hughes, charged with the futile task of keeping him off cocaine, and was therefore one of the few ‘straight’ people on the scene. In the studio, despite the omnipresent huge bag of coke on the mixing desk, David was completely rational. When Slaven mentioned that the topic of their last conversation, back in 1972, was Buddhism, David became enthused. ‘Oh, you’ll like this then,’ he told him, before handing over a sheet of yellow exercise paper with the lyrics of a new song, ‘Word on a Wing’. At times, Slaven looked at David, with his striking orange Weimar hair, and got the overwhelming impression of ‘I’m hiding behind this. But you can see me, can’t you?’ For all the decadent veneer, David was obviously the same singer Slaven had seen at Decca in 1967, spreading out gravel on the studio floor, revelling in the attention. If he’d ever worried that his sanity could fracture for ever, like Terry’s, then this experiment with his own psyche suggested his mind remained intact, behind the cracked facade. Glenn Hughes, too, recalls that despite all the drugs on display, David was ‘running the show. I was blown away by that. My mind would be all over the place when I was doing drugs, but he had total command of the sound – and this understanding of the musicians, it was like watching the greatest football manager in action.’

  There were other crucial, perhaps surprising, influences. Carlos Alomar had been back working in New York when he got the call. His lifestyle was essentially wholesome and straight during the recording. Told that the keyword was ‘experimentation’ with no time limits, one of his key motivations on the self-consciously epic title track was his session-man’s knowledge that ‘If a song is over three minutes you make double the royalty – Glory Glory!’ As he and the rhythm section experimented with the opening section of ‘Station to Station’, messing around and adding muso tricks (‘I was listening to Jethro Tull at the time,’ says Alomar), Bowie instantly seized on a disquieting turnaround in the rhythm, with a bar of 3/4 and then 5/4 to disorientate the listener, a prog-rock technique which rendered the introduction jarring and disturbing, preparing the listener for lyrics which are similarly grandiose – but sinister.

  The song’s mention of ‘White Stains’ invokes one of Crowley’s most obscure works, a collection of pornographic poems he’d written under the pseudonym George Archibald Bishop. ‘One magical movement, from Kether to Malkuth’ is a reference to the kabbalistic tree of life: Kether is the sphere of Godhead, Malkuth the sphere of the physical world. Some commentators, notably writer Ian MacDonald, believe Bowie’s understanding of the kabbalistic system drew on works like The Tree of Life, by Crowley’s pupil Israel Regardie, and see something of the dark in Bowie’s mindset – a plausible interpretation, given Bowie’s enduring interest in the Thule Society – a German occultist group – and other esoteric Nazi philosophies. Yet ‘Station to Station’ is capable of wonderfully diverse interpretations. It could represent absolute megalomania; that Bowie is a God who has chosen to embra
ce the physical world. The kabbala reference could equally signify that Bowie has renounced the high of chemically derived nirvana in order to savour everyday existence. The song is also capable of being read as a song of sensual love, in which case ‘the European canon’ becomes a bad pun.

  Yet despite the train sounds that open the record, ‘Station to Station’ also featured Christian imagery at its core, for its title alluded, David would later confirm, to the Stations of the Cross. A similar yearning for salvation pervades ‘Word on a Wing’; almost conventionally Christian, it was written at a time when David started wearing a crucifix, given to him by Michael Lippman. Later he would wear one his father had given him in his teens. They weren’t just empty symbols; over time he would describe himself as ‘not religious – I’m a spiritual person. I believe a man develops a relationship with his own God.’

  Glenn Hughes, who has never previously spoken in detail of his deep, but troubled friendship with Bowie, believes that David had sent himself on a journey deep into the cocaine mindset in order to create new territory for his art. Bowie had never really suffered for his music before; not like Iggy, or Vince Taylor – mocked and vilified by the masses. But in LA, he had staked out his soul under the unrelenting California sun. ‘His period of hell,’ as Hughes puts it. ‘Because that stuff did have its way with him. It twisted and turned him inside out.’

  Some songs were cooked up in the simplest of fashions: early in the sessions David bashed out the simplest two-chord progression on the piano and told Carlos it was a new song; only then did they realise the simple F sharp–E riff and melody was uncomfortably close to George Benson’s version of ‘On Broadway’. Alomar transformed the rhythm with a springy, funky riff based on Cliff Noble’s classic Philly-soul instrumental, ‘The Horse’, while David’s lyrics and optimistic doo-wop vibe came straight from The Diamonds’ ‘Happy Years’. Bowie’s pitch-perfect, multitracked vocals were added in a quick sequence of mostly first takes, aided by Geoff MacCormack, and that, with the brief addition of a breathy melodica here, and a chirruping vibra-slap there, was that. Beautifully simple, ‘Golden Years’ transcended its influences, another perfect example of how talent borrows, and genius steals.