Starman

by Paul Trynka

  With just six songs, Station to Station was both sprawling and coherent; it would stand alone in his work, the perfect gateway between American and European music. The turnaround it represented with the David Bowie of Ziggy Stardust – the man who arrived in the studio with a dozen songs, written and fully rehearsed – was complete. This was not an exercise in songwriting: this was a sculpture, carved out of sound. In less than three years, David had not just changed genres; he had completely changed his working methods, from start to finish. This was the embodiment of the advice he’d given to Glenn Hughes, earlier that year. ‘Do the contrary action – do something you’re not used to. Let’s not make it comfortable – let’s make it uncomfortable.’ Station to Station’s chart performance was perhaps the ultimate vindication of this advice, peaking at number three after its release in January 1976: the critical reception, too, was respectful, recognising the bravery with which Bowie had staked out new territory.

  Yet the fate of David’s next recording showed the downside of his high-risk approach. Since signing up for The Man Who Fell to Earth, David had seen the challenge of composing its soundtrack as an intrinsic part of the project’s appeal. Around November, he started work on the project, partnered by Paul Buckmaster, who’d arranged the strings on ‘Space Oddity’. Alomar, Dennis Davis and George Murray were called in for some of the recording, augmented by J. Peter Robinson on piano. Roughly six pieces were recorded, two of them funky-ish rock instrumentals, a ballad instrumental, later named ‘Subterraneans’, and ‘Wheels’, ‘which had a gentle sort of melancholy mood to it’, says Buckmaster. The recording, however, stretched on. Assembling a soundtrack required focus and discipline. Both were lacking and, according to Buckmaster, ‘it just wasn’t up to the standard needed’.

  According to Buckmaster, Bowie’s soundtrack never approached a finished state. Yet Roeg and producer Si Litvinoff considered what they heard ‘brilliant’, says the latter, ‘but [producer Michael] Deeley tried to get David to accept a lesser deal and was told to take a walk. To me this was a large disappointment.’ Litvinoff believes the movie would have been a much hotter commercial proposition with David’s music and considered the replacement, by John Phillips, only ‘adequate’. Bowie, meanwhile, was humiliated and blamed Michael Lippman for the fiasco. Lippman had also made the mistake of building himself an impressive new house that autumn, partly financed with an (agreed) loan from David.

  By Christmas, Lippman was out. Most of those who knew him considered him diligent and kind; he lacked the killer instinct of Tony Defries, but would go on to have a more long-term career in management, managing both George Michael and Matchbox Twenty’s Rob Thomas. Guitarist Earl Slick, also managed by Lippman, fell foul of the messy split, and was left behind when David left for Ochos Rios in Jamaica to rehearse for Station to Station’s upcoming tour.

  The preparations provided another reminder, if one were needed, that for all his Third Reich fetishes and pharmaceutical peculiarities, David Bowie remained the consummate pro. Geoff MacCormack saw his friend in January: he’d put on weight, had a personal trainer and a suntan. He was ‘not perfect’, but he was ‘better’. Later that year, in Paris, he would meet Bob Grace, a key architect of his Hunky Dory breakthrough. ‘I’d missed him, so we had a nice dinner and caught up,’ says Grace. ‘He told me, “I’ve got over all my cocaine stuff now.” And I said, “How’s that?” And he said, “I took that image off. I put it in a wardrobe in an LA hotel room and locked the door.”’

  Grace saw a man who’d simply decided to abandon his wicked ways, then had done so. Such transformations are rare, and indeed David’s second interview with Cameron Crowe, conducted in February 1976, was riddled with megalomaniac statements, such as, ‘I’d adore to be prime minister. And, I believe very strongly in fascism … I dream of buying companies and TV stations, owning and controlling them.’ Complete with approving namechecks for Nietzsche and Hitler, it made for great press to launch his tour. Yet Ben Edmonds, the one-time editor of Creem, met the singer in the same week as Crowe, and observed he was ‘not fucked up at all, not in the slightest – if anything, he was like a businessman in drag’. The two spent much of their conversation talking about their mutual friend, Iggy Pop. For a few moments, Bowie’s professional veneer softened as he discussed his one-time protégé, a man who is ‘not so hard and all-knowing and cynical. Every artist always knows the answers of the world. It’s nice to see someone who hasn’t a clue – but has insights.’

  Bowie’s comments were more perceptive than anyone could imagine, because at that precise moment Iggy indeed did not have a clue. Since walking out on Bowie, he had deteriorated from being a figure of ridicule on the strip, to a twilight existence, sharing an abandoned garage with a male hustler called Bruce, sleeping on a stolen lounger mattress. Thrown in jail after shoplifting some cheese and apples, Iggy found he’d run out of all his friends but one – Freddy Sessler. And the man who’d helped bring Bowie down, raised Iggy up. Sessler stood bail for the singer, and hired him for a telephone scam he’d cooked up. Then, when Iggy proved a lousy telemarketer, Sessler suggested a solution. ‘Look, you better call David. I know he likes you and wants to work with you.’

  ‘But I had too much pride,’ says Iggy today. ‘Then a few days later Freddy tells me, “I’m going to see David, I told him I was with you – and he said, Bring Iggy along.”’

  The pair met up in San Diego. David was kind – genuinely so, for there was no hint of condescension in his offer to make an album with Iggy in Europe. In future months, many would comment on the amazing turnaround in Iggy’s fortunes. Fewer people would realise that their friendship would mark just as profound a change in Bowie’s life. In tending to Iggy, David would heal himself, too.

  15

  Ghosts in the Echo Chambers

  The guy has a lot of psychic stamina – he was perfectly able to go out and do the gigs, drive the entire continent by car, then go out to a club after almost every one until four in the morning, and do all the other things. And he never showed bad form, even once.

  Iggy Pop

  For all the icy grandiosity of the Station to Station tour – undoubtedly the most intense performances David had put on since Spiders days – there was something cosy, almost domestic about the small retinue’s daily routine. The tiny group revolved around David and his new best friend, ‘Jimmy’, as he always called Iggy Pop. Usually, on the long drives between shows, the pair would sit in the back of David’s car, the faithful Tony Mascia at the wheel, as David cued up his current musical obsessions on cassette, and the two of them exchanged their reactions and insights. Often they’d talk late into the night; at other times, they’d sit silently, sipping espressos and reading without feeling obliged to chat, like old men who’d been friends for decades.

  The two were figureheads of a cosy travelling household. Barbara Dewitt – sister of photographer Bruce Weber, and one-time head of publicity at United Artists – looked after David’s press, while Andrew Kent, who’d shot an amazing portfolio of Iggy during his grandiose self-immolation with The Stooges, was in-house photographer. Corinne, and Pat Gibbons, previously with MainMan, looked after most of the administration. This tiny crew would ultimately form the basis of Bowie’s management organisation, Isolar. David’s focus and attention to detail were simply phenomenal, Iggy observed. ‘The guy has a lot of psychic stamina – he was perfectly able to go out and do the gigs, drive the entire continent by car, then go out to a club after almost every one until four in the morning, and do all the other things. And he never showed bad form, even once.’

  Asked if David was psychically damaged, Iggy replies, ‘Of course he was – but he wasn’t gonna show it. There were certain quirky, odd, theatrical, slightly megalomanic ways of, er, relating – but I was used to that, ‘cos I got some of that myself.’ It was not until a short break in the tour in May that David mentioned any of his troubles. In the meantime, he was relentlessly professional: always enthusiastic, efficiently chec
king through transparencies to be released to the press, and above all fired up by music, playing his friend pioneering records by Tom Waits, Kraftwerk and even The Ramones – the latter, he told Iggy, was a sign that the world had not forgotten The Stooges. Carlos Alomar saw the two talking and noticed their joint explorations ‘somehow had a calming effect’. They were similar, but different, ‘just like when you split an atom and it’s twins’.

  There was something marvellously instantaneous about Iggy and David’s new, deep friendship. In some respects it was completely bizarre. ‘I really didn’t have a reference for why they were friends,’ says Carlos Alomar. ‘Nor were they musical friends.’ Both men were enormously narcissistic, and had proved irredeemably selfish over the previous year, yet each was supportive and kind to the other. Iggy didn’t make special claims on David, nor did he abase himself. ‘There was no kow-towing, or humbling,’ says Alomar. If others complained about David’s behaviour, and Iggy could do something, he would. But when necessary, he’d be brutally honest with those who asked for his intercession. ‘That’s how it is,’ he’d tell complainers, ‘just deal with it.’

  In part, each one’s frank admiration for the other was driven by the fact they were almost polar opposites: ‘They each want what the other one has,’ says a mutual friend, Eric Schermerhorn. Yet each of their characters was widely misunderstood. Bowie was the supposed middle-class intellectual; yet it was Iggy – in the guise of Jimmy Osterberg, school debate champion – who’d been voted ‘Most Likely to Succeed’ by his Junior High School classmates, and made it to university. And Iggy was the wild man: yet it was Bowie who’d push himself, and others, well outside their comfort zones.

  There was a simple reason, beyond the cosy family atmosphere, for the air of relative tranquillity that was evident throughout the thirty-nine arena shows of the US leg, which ran through to 26 March, 1976. That reason was illustrated by the fourth date on the tour, in San Francisco. When David had played the city back in October 1972, amid all of MainMan’s hype and bluster, the Winterland had been embarrassingly empty. Now, the same city’s Cow Palace was filled with 14,000 adoring fans. Speaking to Melody Maker’s Robert Hillburn, David described himself as ‘at peace’, drawing a simple satisfaction from a job well done, rather than the ‘false gaiety’ of the Ziggy days. In its place was a genuine gaiety, a delight at the after-show-party presence of celebrities like David Hockney and Christopher Isherwood, who came, says Andrew Kent, ‘to pay homage’ after the LA show. David’s conversation with Isherwood inspired a plan for David to base himself in Berlin; he’d already thought about working in Germany, studying the recordings of engineers like Konrad ‘Connie’ Plank, as well as his current musical obsession, Kraftwerk. Before the tour started, he had agreed to the suggestion of Angie, and his lawyer, to move to Switzerland for tax reasons. By the time the tour reached New York in March, he had confided to all his friends that he was planning to live in Germany, and record there with Iggy. Only Angie was kept in the dark about the scheme.

  On the 26 March, the US leg of the Station to Station tour concluded with a masterful performance at Madison Square Garden, followed by a star-packed party at the Penn Plaza Club. David and Iggy spent most of the evening huddled together, both of them graciously greeting old friends like John Cale. The pair positively glowed with health – Jimmy wearing a suit which he’d just bought for a court appearance with Bowie the previous day in Rochester, New York, to answer charges following a marijuana bust at the Flagship American hotel. A mug shot of Bowie survives in the Rochester Police Department files, and is a classic of its genre: David impeccably suited, gazing at the camera with clear-eyed sang-froid. Perhaps his serenity reflected the irony of the fact that one of the music industry’s best-known cocaine-abusers had been ‘caught’ with a soft drug that rarely figured on his own esoteric menu. The charges were later dropped.

  Both Iggy and David had, by this time, agreed that they’d both leave their drug habits behind in LA; the agreement was never formal, and they’d both lapse at various times, but a measure of their success came when Iggy stayed on in New York for a couple of days after David and Coco Schwab sailed for Cannes on 27 March. For the first time, he realised The Stooges’ legacy had influenced a new generation of New York bands; and for the first time, he turned down a sniff of heroin, offered to him by ex-New York Doll, Johnny Thunders.

  When the party reunited in early April, David had hatched a rationale for a move to Berlin, in the form of a movie to be scripted by Christopher Isherwood. ‘I’m supposed to be living in Switzerland – but I don’t know how long that will last,’ he told Radio One’s Stuart Grundy. ‘I’ve got to come back to Berlin.’ Later that same evening, on 10 April, nightclub entertainer Romy Haag turned up for his show at Berlin’s Deutschlandhalle.

  Nearly six feet tall and drop-dead gorgeous, Romy’s deliciously indefinable sexuality embodied the vibrant, fragile glamour of pre-war Berlin that Christopher Isherwood had so compellingly recorded in the books that David had been reading in the last few weeks. Born Edouard Frans Verbaarsschott in The Hague, Romy had opened her own nightclub, Chez Romy Haag, just two years earlier, and established herself as Berlin’s most glamorous woman, despite the accident of having been born a man. Romy brought a posse of her dancers and entertainers to the show; they made a dazzling spectacle, and according to Haag, ‘We looked at each other and that was that. The next day he had a concert in Hamburg and he was four hours late because he didn’t want to leave.’ Thereafter, Romy became one of the many friends with whom David would spend hours chatting on the phone late into the night.

  The European tour dates were a sensation; the set itself, opening with a grinding, thrilling version of ‘Station to Station’, was sprawling but tough, seemingly anticipating the musical changes that were in the air in 1976. Yet it was David’s emergence from nearly two years in American limbo that was the main attraction.

  His arresting, glamorous, ‘Thin White Duke’ persona was an intrinsic part of his appeal, especially because this was the first time he’d hit the stage in Britain since Ziggy’s farewell. The contrast between Ziggy’s femininity and the Duke’s masculine, 1930s neatness and fetching Weimar haircut could not have been more pronounced. The hint of depravity behind the neat, crisp white shirt and waistcoats was erotic, reminiscent of the thinking woman’s forbidden crumpet, Amon Göth in Schindler’s List. Perhaps his most drop-dead glamorous look to date, Bowie’s European superman persona was carefully judged; it signalled his focus over the coming years, which was to build up a fanbase on the continent. David Bowie’s previous tours had, incredibly, overlooked the European market; now the string of shows at huge arenas showed the pent-up demand, all spread by word of mouth.

  As the tour moved on from Germany to Bern, Switzerland, on 17 April, there was a short layover in Zurich. Intent on building on his Ziggy-era experiences on the Trans Siberian Express he announced a move into travel writing, yet another project floated and abandoned – David asked photographer Andy Kent to sort out the paperwork for a trip to Moscow, before their next date in Helsinki on 24 April.

  The journey was packed with unforgettable moments. On the 21st, there was a little party to celebrate Iggy’s twenty-ninth birthday; David presented him with a Polaroid camera to record their three-day trip. Once the small party – David, Iggy, Kent, Corinne and Pat Gibbons – reached Poland, the train clattered more slowly through an increasingly bleak landscape, and the five voyagers spent hours gazing at buildings pock-marked by machine-gun bullets, or the gaunt remains of towns still shattered by bomb damage. The train stopped every now and then to pick up bottles of brown beer, or the soup and peas that were the only food on offer. Pulling up alongside a goods train in Warsaw, they witnessed a grey-clad worker throwing lumps of coal up from a flatcar, piece by piece, while sleet rattled against the windows of their own train. An unforgettably dreary image, it would later be evoked in the haunting instrumental ‘Warszawa’.

  For most of the tri
p, the small party managed to evade official scrutiny by travelling as conventional tourists, but when the passengers transferred to a wide-gauge train at Brest, on the Russian border, they were met by the KGB and ordered to pick up two suitcases each and follow the officer to the huge interrogation room. ‘Then a guy who spoke English came up and said, and it was bone chilling, “We weren’t expecting you,”’ says Kent.

  Kent had a copy of Playboy confiscated; Iggy attracted special suspicion for attempted bribery, because he’d impulsively given away the flowers that decorated their cabin. David had a large trunk full of books which the KGB rifled through, taking ‘one, maybe two’ away, says Kent. The offending volumes were on ‘that subject’ – the Third Reich – but their removal did not cause any specific concern; instead, their worries centred on the travel documents that the border guards studied intently – then reluctantly conceded were in order.

  The small party breathed a sigh of relief as their passports and forms were handed back to them. Then, ominously, one burly, blond-haired official, who they took to be KGB, closed their encounter with the words, ‘Someone will be there to meet you in Moscow.’

  They spent the next few hours chatting nervously, wondering what the KGB had in store for them. But, incredibly, once they pulled into Moscow’s opulent, marble-lined Belorusskaya station, the platform was empty: Big Brother, as so often, was not as efficient as claimed, and they were free to explore. After dropping their luggage off at the Metropol – a sumptuous, historic Art Nouveau building which was the setting of several key Lenin speeches, as well as Bulgakov’s sinister novel The Master and Margarita – they wandered across Red Square, posing like happy schoolkids alongside Russian conscripts, then on to a shopping trip at the huge, glass-roofed GUM department store for tourist trinkets, and dinner back at the Metropol.