by Paul Trynka
Over the following months, David Bowie was often be seen in the corridors of EMI, cutting such a refined, elegantly suited-and-booted figure that on first glance the record company execs thought he was a wealthy investor. Although he had financial advisers, he negotiated the deal himself; the story within EMI was that he persuaded the aggressive new American arm of the company to pay a huge advance purely on the basis of hearing the backing tracks. The amount David secured for his services on signing of his contact with EMI America, on 27 January, 1983, was publicised as just under $17 million.
‘You know how deals are constructed,’ says Gary Gersh, the A&R who, with US chairman Rupert Perry, signed Bowie to EMI. ‘That figure would depend on a lot of clauses. But it was a superstar deal – when maybe David’s sales so far wouldn’t warrant it.’ Many other EMI staff agreed it was ‘a huge risk’, in the words of David’s A&R man, Hugh Stanley Clarke; there was debate as to whether EMI would ever make their money back. Even at the time, Gersh agrees, all the company management had their doubts. But today, he points out, ‘If you were to say to any record company they could have that deal again – you would have a line of people around the block.’
19
On the Other Side
I got the spider built and only saw the first few shows. That was enough.
Chip Monck
It was spring in the northern hemisphere, but there was a streak of autumnal gold to the light in Sydney and Carinda, as David Bowie brandished a guitar in the outback, or bared his backside as the surf spilled over him and his China Girl. Back in Manhattan, Carlos Alomar was assembling the musicians for what would be the biggest world tour of 1983. With a typically consummate grasp of the priorities of the modern pop industry, David was filming videos on the beach.
According to Nile Rodgers, David had been happy to sit in the lounge at the Power Station while many of Let’s Dance’s tracks were laid down, but when it came to the video, David kept a close eye on every aspect of David Mallett’s production. ‘Let’s Dance’ was filmed in an Australian outback village, a transplanted Mississippi Delta. David mimed the song in a shack, with two kids from the Aboriginal-Islanders Dance Theatre acting out a storyline based on the message, Bowie explained, that ‘it’s wrong to be racist!’ For ‘China Girl’, the song inspired by Iggy’s affair with Kuelan Nguyen, Bowie and Mallett cast a student and model, Geeling Ng, who marched around Sydney’s Chinatown in a Chairman Mao outfit and re-enacted From Here to Eternity on the beach, frolicking with David in the surf. In this idyllic interlude, the two became lovers, hanging out together in David’s apartment in Elizabeth Bay.
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Back in 1967, friends like Tony Visconti had ridiculed Ken Pitt’s efforts to mould David as an all-round entertainer. In 1983, the all-round potential offered by the new medium of music video was an intrinsic part of his pitch to EMI. The British company’s new American arm was expanding fast, its success bolstered by Brit acts who had been making videos to screen on Top of the Pops for decades, and were cleaning up at the newly dominant MTV.
The few American outfits who caught on – principally Michael Jackson, whose ‘Billie Jean’ video was screened on the lily-white network in March 1983 – would dominate the eighties, and as Bowie’s video drove ‘Let’s Dance’, his debut EMI single, to his first simultaneous UK and US number one, in May, the smart money was on him to dominate this decade. In the seventies he’d re-branded himself as the world’s first bisexual rock star; now his niche brand was being relaunched as an international multimedia product. His star status was highlighted by a sensational appearance alongside Nagima Oshima and Ryuichi Sakomoto at the Cannes Festival in May to promote Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence: tanned, his hair a mass of blond candyfloss, he joked casually with the admiring press, switching effortlessly from self-deprecation to intellectual earnestness. European critics in particular loved the movie, a strong contender for the Grand Prize – although it was ultimately pipped at the post by Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life.
Far away from the glitz of Cannes, the rehearsals for David’s biggest tour to date had moved to Dallas, overseen by Carlos Alomar, much like David’s 1978 tour. The musicians were based around the ‘Let’s Dance’ crew, plus a three-piece horn section and Dave Lebolt (later a senior figure at Apple Computer) on keyboards.
If there was a perfect way to do a modern tour, this was it. Spanning sixteen countries, ninety-six performances, and selling over two-anda-half million tickets, the Serious Moonlight tour would become the definitive stadium event. Every decision in its progress was closely scrutinised by a triumvirate of David (or an Isolar representative), accountant Bill Zysblat and agent Will Forte, each keeping a close eye on the logistics, the money and each other. Its only rival over the early eighties was the Stones’ 1981 Tattoo You tour, which grossed more in ticket sales, but was confined to the USA and Europe. The Stones outing was a reminder of past glories, promoting a collection of tracks dating back a decade. In contrast, Serious Moonlight captured Bowie at his peak.
Guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughan was, at first, thrilled about the tour, and believed that he’d extracted a promise from David that his own band, Double Trouble, would play support. Once rehearsals shifted from Manhattan to Dallas, Vaughan’s hometown, he started hanging out with his band again. Only two or three nights in, they’d have to sit and hear his complaints: ‘There was a point in the set where he was supposed to come down this ramp doing these [dance] steps,’ says bassist Tommy Shannon, ‘and that just wasn’t in his nature. He’d been pushed into it anyway by management. He was having a hard time adjusting.’
Vaughan was, says Shannon, focused and hard-working over this spring, but the guitarist was becoming increasingly isolated in the Bowie camp. The suggestion that Double Trouble could support was dropped. Then Vaughan saw the ‘Let’s Dance’ video, which showed David, atop a mountain, miming Stevie’s guitar solo on a Fender Strat. Anyone used to the ways of showbiz would have accepted such a harmless deception. For a Texas bluesman, it was an outrage: ‘The video showed David faking it – and Stevie was furious,’ says Shannon. For Stevie, the videos, the staging and the glitz were a distraction, a sign of fakery. Relations soured quickly. Lenny Vaughan – a pushy rock wife, says Shannon – interrupted rehearsals to brandish a newspaper which showed Stevie’s photo as a full page, David a mere single column. Bowie, who remained unruffled for most of the tour, was enraged. ‘Don’t you ever break up my rehearsal!’ backing singer Frank Simms heard him shout. ‘If you were a man I’d kick your ass.’ Lenny was barred from rehearsals and then Vaughan, says Simms, ‘disappeared for five days without telling anyone’ to attend the funeral of Muddy Waters. Vaughan’s manager Chesley Milligan – a good ol’ boy who was in over his head – demanded an extra $500 per week for Stevie and a place on the plane for himself or his client would walk. Stevie walked.
David, who wasn’t actually present, would later describe Vaughan standing disconsolately by the roadside as the band boarded their coach and left town. But Stevie cheered up quickly, says Shannon. ‘He got in the car with us and said, “Well, I’m not going.” And he was really relieved. When it comes down to it, Steve wanted to stay with his band.’ Vaughan started his own ninety-date tour that June, racking up 500,000 sales of his debut album by word of mouth. He and David would never meet again, according to Shannon.
As one guitarist passed out of David’s orbit for ever, another returned. Earl Slick had fallen out with David after Station to Station, thanks to disputes involving Michael Lippman, Pat Gibbons and, says Slick, ‘the fact my head was up my ass’. After calling Slick in for the last two days of rehearsals, David did what he hadn’t done last time around and spoke to the guitarist face-to-face: ‘I showed up and David is going, “Where’s the Earl?”’ says Slick. ‘I said, “Come on!” He goes, “Alright!” Which he wouldn’t have done earlier – but we were both different then. So we went out and had lunch and cleared the air because there were a lot of bad feelings. So everythin
g was cool.’
When Slick had joined the Diamond Dogs tour, his induction had consisted of having his long hair cropped, like Samson: he was livid, but realised later it was part of a process of being taken out of his comfort zone. For Serious Moonlight, Slick had to endure a series of suit fittings, as clothes designed for a lanky Texas cowboy were shortened and taken in to fit his wiry Italian frame. Then Slick sat one-one-on with Carlos and learned the entire set over forty-eight hours, fuelled by coffee after coffee, before setting out on a tour that made his last venture with David seem like amateur hour. ‘David was totally on it – the good days, the bad days, it doesn’t matter. There was a lot to think about and that made it easy.’
The tour opened in Brussels, and NME journalist Charles Shaar Murray – who’d followed Bowie since 1971 – was flown over to the opening show by Bowie’s management company, Isolar. In a signpost to the changing times, he’d been commissioned to write the copy for the glossy tour booklet. The ‘huge’ production he saw was a potent reminder of how the stakes had been raised for live shows, and how they’d continue to rise with Prince and Madonna – but in Brussels and London, says Murray, there was no hint of the flabbiness with which eighties stadium tours later became associated. ‘When Tony Thompson nailed a groove down, it stayed nailed down – it was right on the money. Alomar was playing rhythm, and he’d been in the pit at the Apollo, that was all the credentials you needed.’
For those earlier shows, David’s voice was superb. ‘In a moment of euphoria I described him as the best white singer alive,’ says Murray. ‘Which I possibly overstated, but he was good enough to be rated against the best. And I’d give him the highest marks for stage-craft, charisma and the dancing, too.’
All those involved in the tour felt they were breaking new ground. ‘There was a sense of the magnitude from literally the first day – I thought it would be enormous, and it was,’ says Frank Simms. It wasn’t merely the size of the venues, or the luxury of the hotels. Simms later played an arena tour to 40,000-strong crowds with Billy Joel: ‘They would cheer and clap – but it wasn’t the same magnitude, and didn’t have the same magic. With Serious Moonlight, in the larger cities, you’d have the biggest stars: in England the royal family, in Thailand the King, Queen and Prince, in Australia the Prime Minister, then in LA you’d have movie stars, Michael Jackson – they were all there.’
For a couple of weeks, when Geeling Ng joined the tour in France and Germany, there was a blissful, easy happiness around the organisation. The band loved her – she was unaffected, calm, ‘normal as apple pie’, says George Simms, who double-dated David and Geeling with his wife. ‘It was sweet, as normal as can be, and we managed to find some places where not too many fans would bother us.’ George got the sense that Geeling was overwhelmed by the experience and realised ‘it was just a short-term thing’. After accompanying David for a fortnight, she caught a plane back to New Zealand and a normal life, just as David and band flew over to San Bernadino to play a one-off show at the US festival for the widely publicised fee of $1 million.
Headlining on an evening that included U2, The Pretenders and Stevie Nicks to a 300,000-strong crowd, they walked out onto a stage that had been completely cleared, at eleven o’clock to a stunned, rapturous reception: ‘like Jesus walking on water’, says Simms. The festival was a disaster for its sponsor, Apple’s Steve Wozniak; losing over $7 million according to the New York Times, with one audience member murdered in a drug deal, another dead of an overdose. But for David it was a triumph; the date hugely raised his commercial profile, and helped bring more US promoters on board. But with stories of the $1-million price tag came reports that David considered the tour his ‘pension plan’ – a sentiment guaranteed to inflame his detractors, who started to speculate that the tour was more about money than music.
David, meanwhile, dealt with the constant buzz of attention and adrenalin calmly and efficiently. He had his little strategies to retain a degree of normality: often, he’d hang with the Simms brothers, enjoying their humorous skits. He had the gift of instantly flipping from such japes, to coming over all regal and refined if, say, Susan Sarandon was in town. He was a ‘good boy’ throughout; occasionally he’d have the odd social toot of cocaine, but generally showed exemplary self-control. During the eight-month tour, he went on the rampage just once, in London, during a party in Frank Simms’ room. There was a glint to his expression, and the sense he’d had a couple of drinks too many, before he hit on one of the girls. ‘Then he’d leave the room with her and come back fifteen or twenty minutes later – and hit on another girl. And then it would happen again. And this went on several times.’ Finally, one of the party-goers turned him down, complaining to Simms, ‘How dare he? Who does he think he is?’ But this was an out-of-character lapse in ‘a very light tour, as far as drugs and other behaviour. He knew his limits,’ says Simms, ‘he was under a superior degree of control.’
The dizzy heights to which David’s fortunes had risen were in stark contrast to his friend Iggy, who over the same period was touring himself into oblivion. By the spring of 1983, he had lawyers pursuing him after an incident when he’d stamped on a girl’s head at a gig in Poughkeepsie. Though this period was worse than his humiliation with The Stooges – for the music was lousy, too – he’d stayed in touch with David. On 20 June, he met fan and future wife Suchi Asano, who’d gone back to retrieve her umbrella after his show in Tokyo; exactly one week later, ‘China Girl’ hit number two in the UK, promising him the royalties that had eluded him for so long. Iggy abandoned his tour and flew back with Suchi to LA, where they met up with David when the tour reached the Forum on 14 August.
It was a poignant example of how lives can turn around. Iggy – or rather Jimmy, his avuncular alter-ego – was all sparkly-eyed and boyish, with a side-parting that made him look like Bing Crosby. Healthy and, soon, drug-free, he was teaching English to Suchi, which seemed to calm him down. They made a sweet couple. With David and George Simms, they sat around reminiscing about Berlin, before David started enthusing about life in Lausanne: he explained the Swiss legal system, the government, the culture and the citizen militia, as Jimmy nodded attentively. Then David described the twenty-four-seat jet in which they were flying, mapping out its lounge area and seating arrangements on a carpet with the same excitement he might have shared over a Heckel painting, seven years before. David suggested they join the tour, which would soon be heading out to the Far East. ‘I’ve got too much to sort out right now,’ Jimmy told him, before they agreed to meet up in December. David’s other celebrity visitor at the Forum was Michael Jackson; the two chatted together, so quietly that bystanders could not make out the conversation.
Three weeks later, on 3 September, another old friend showed up. Since Mick Ronson’s short, disastrous solo career under the auspices of MainMain, he had retreated to his comfort zone, contributing his tasteful guitar to work by Ian Hunter and Bob Dylan, and building up a solid, unflashy reputation as a producer, most recently for A&M Canada. Mick arrived at David’s hotel with Canadian singer Lisa Dalbello, whose career he was helping relaunch; David asked him to return the next night and play. Dalbello remembers Ronson being ‘OK, whatever’ about the prospect, but the guitarist returned the next night and met the band. ‘He was kind of drunk, and I think he was intimidated,’ says Frank Simms. Ronson walked on stage after the encore with Earl Slick’s blue Stratocaster to a tumultuous welcome: the band launched into a rocking version of ‘The Jean Genie’ – at one point the strap slipped off Earl’s blue guitar and Ronson waved it around his head: ‘I thought, That’s not necessary! But he was nervous,’ says Simms, who was standing nearby.
The Japanese and Australian legs of the tour, over October and November, were again huge events, unrivalled as spectacles until Michael Jackson’s Bad tour in 1987, and the Stones’ Steel Wheels in 1989. But by the time they hit the Far East, a sense of being divorced from reality had overtaken all the participants. The tour helped kick off the e
ighties obsession with size and statistics, but the sheer scale and repetitive drudgery meant that, for David more than anyone, the experience would become routine. Charles Shaar Murray recalls, ‘I saw the footage of Bowie in Singapore. And I suddenly thought, He’s turned into a rock ‘n’ roll version of Prince Charles. In a suit, with an old-fashioned haircut like a lemon meringue on his head, talking in this posh accent, and it’s very, “Oh, what do you do?”’
For the band the unending spectacle was numbing. ‘Night after night, you start to lose touch,’ says Frank Simms. ‘By the time we got to Australia we would have these tremendous parties every single night – actresses and models, buffets and drinking, then a yacht, with its own caterer. I would go for two weeks without calling home. My wife said, “I wish you’d call, you may be having fun but we miss you.” I would apologise and say, “You have no idea … it’s like they’re feeding you the sun, the moon, and the stars.” I don’t know how David lived with it.’
The closing night of the tour, in Hong Kong, was John Lennon’s birthday, 8 December. During the show, David sat down at one point, talking about John, almost as if in prayer or meditation. And then David and band walked backstage, as if in a daze, hugging each other gently, before the final encore. ‘So we ended on this very sombre note,’ says Frank Simms. ‘We memorialised Lennon, and we memorialised the fact we had been together for this wonderful experience.’
Most of the band went home, feeling subdued. David and Coco – who, as ever, was there to keep him company once his love affairs fizzled out – stayed out in the Far East, meeting up with Iggy and Suchi before disappearing for an extended holiday in Bali and Java. The sights they witnessed, notably the ostentatious villas of oil magnates, each with its own open drain carrying a stream of sewage down the hill into the jungle, would be documented in Iggy’s lyrics to ‘Tumble and Twirl’, one of the few new songs recorded for David’s next album, which he started recording in Marin Heights, Canada, just a few months later, in May, 1984.