Uncommon People: The Rise and Fall of the Rock Stars 1955-1994

by David Hepworth

  By the time the record was ready in April 1973 its title would be all too apposite. The experience of the contemporary rock and roll tour, with its seductive combination of alienation and indulgence, made even the people who weren’t actually driven mad by it behave as though they were. Bowie’s manager Tony DeFries, who had promised he would make his client famous but didn’t specify whose money he would spend doing it, drove them on during the US leg of the tour with no thought for the collateral damage. Spending was out of control. They did everything big style, staying in the best hotels and swishing in and out of town like the stars they hoped they would one day be. They booked venues they couldn’t fill and swallowed the shortfall. At one stage there were no fewer than fifty people in the tour’s caravanserai, charging all their personal expenses to Bowie as though he were a cash-generating operation rather than a massive punt on black, underwritten by RCA’s profits from all those Elvis Presley discs.

  But, happily, everyone wanted a shake of his glitter dust. In 1973 Bowie was having a moment when he seemed magically able to help not only himself but others as well. Mott the Hoople did his ‘All The Young Dudes’ better than he could have done it himself. If there was any irony in the lyrics Ian Hunter went right past it and sent the song humming to the sentimental heart of England young and old, enjoying the rare thrill of seeing it sung back to him by all those enraptured up-tilted adolescent faces half-illuminated in the footlights. With Bowie’s help Lou Reed had the hit record that previously he had only been able to theorize about. Bowie was even dusting off his old songs, like ‘The Man Who Sold The World’ for his pal Lulu. He was suddenly the junction through which the majority of British pop music seemed to be routed. Anything Bowie showed any interest in was swept under the MainMan umbrella as though it were an established empire. The Stooges, of all people, were actually put in a MainMan house in the Hollywood Hills to await Bowie’s benediction. All this largesse was scattered in haste. It was subsequently withdrawn just as abruptly.

  Another form of currency on the 1972 tour was flesh. In Los Angeles the tour party were entertained by the girls from Rodney Bingenheimer’s English disco, many of whom were perilously close to the age of consent. During this tour Bowie was reported as having slept with Lulu, Cyrinda Foxe, Lori Maddox, Ava Cherry, sundry others whose names were not recorded and even, on occasion, his wife Angie. There was a great deal of retaliatory fornication going on. During this time Angie Bowie also had affairs with Ron Asheton and James Williamson of the Stooges. She and the star’s young son Joe were eventually ‘let go’ from the tour like any other troublesome component. Bowie wielded power every bit as ruthlessly as any star. He travelled with more minders than stars of far greater magnitude. His affect may have been other-worldly, alienated and wan, but there didn’t appear to be a great deal wrong with his libido. They say the only touring musician who doesn’t want sex is the touring musician who’s just had some; in this respect Bowie behaved like the standard touring musician. Here his public musing about his bisexuality may have brought him the small dividend of making some women even more determined to stamp his card.

  Bowie returned from the tour of the United States in December 1972 to find himself being hailed as a superstar – a sure sign of the hip establishment hyping itself. The enthusiasm was certainly running well ahead of the receipts. Bowie’s manager was more than happy to paper the houses on the US tour just to increase the noise around his boy because it was the noise he planned to monetize. During this time he even had talks with a company that proposed to manufacture David Bowie dolls. This giddy sensation of something happening fed on itself. In an end-of-the-year piece in NME, Charles Shaar Murray raised an eyebrow at the fact that the kids were starting to scream at David Bowie. Was it David they were screaming at or Ziggy, the character he’d made up as a vehicle for his fantasies of being a rock star? Could they recognize any difference? Did it matter?

  Even when he came back to the Hammersmith Odeon in London in July as the conquering hero the show wasn’t actually sold out. There were enough tickets for schoolboys Malcolm Green and his friends from Wembley to turn up in the afternoon and buy some from a tout. The art students may have taken him up but his heartland fans were kids like Malcolm for whom he was the ideal worldly older-brother figure.

  One of the attractive features of this new generation of rock stars for a new generation of fans was that if they were allowed to dress up as rock stars, then so were you. You might not be able to afford the same finery but with cheap hair colour, artfully applied cosmetics and well-chosen jewellery the desired alien effect could be achieved and taken out on your local high street. Starting with Bowie, the attraction of arraying yourself in the feathers of your favourite added another dimension to the relationship between a rock star and his people. It was a way you could participate in their fabulousness.

  Malcolm and his friends were gathering in the alley round the side of the Odeon when a large Bentley drew up. One security man appeared to hold the crowd back while Bowie got out, wearing a pair of dungarees without a shirt, a cigarette jammed, as it always was, between his teeth. (This picture is on the jacket of this book.) He stopped and addressed the crowd in a voice that, Malcolm remembers, sounded quaintly like it had come from a post-war British movie. ‘He seemed very down to earth.’

  After saying goodbye, David Bowie entered the theatre and prepared to meet his public. This was now a time-consuming business. He had to make ready a number of costumes. His make-up took hours. As it was being prepared, his wife Angie turned up and loudly enthused about the limos and Rolls-Royces which were disgorging their fabulous cargo outside. Bowie was being filmed at the time by D. A. Pennebaker, who had created Bob Dylan’s myth in his film Dont Look Back. What Angie evidently liked about it, what everybody in his circle liked about it, was the fuss, the hoopla, the minders, the opportunities to extend or withdraw favours, the trappings of being a rock star. They loved the trappings.

  Bowie did the standard show that evening. He started with ‘Hang On To Yourself’. Significantly, this was the first Ziggy song he had come up with. He flung in some songs from the new album and some from his old ones. He did ‘Let’s Spend The Night Together’ by the Rolling Stones and then, after ‘White Light/White Heat’, the increasingly obligatory Velvet Underground tune, he approached the microphone and made his announcement. Tony DeFries was prepared for it but none of his team were; Mick Ronson knew what to expect but the other Spiders from Mars were taken by surprise. ‘This show will stay with us the longest,’ Bowie said, ‘because not only is it the last show of the tour it’s the last show we’ll ever do.’

  The crowd were shocked. Even these fans, who had only been fans for a few months, felt they had been promised an open-ended commitment – a standard fan reaction. Malcolm and his friends took it that this would be not just the end of Ziggy Stardust but the end of David Bowie as a live performer. Showing the showman’s weakness for the ripple of shock he is capable of producing, Bowie had included the word ‘ever’, thereby allowing fans and press alike to overheat in speculation after the show.

  Bowie needed a rest, either to pick up what remained of his old life or to adapt to this new one. He also knew what Tony DeFries knew, that this tour was starting to bleed money and he could no longer be certain that anyone would underwrite it. They played ‘Rock And Roll Suicide’ and then the Ziggy Stardust episode was theoretically over, just about a year after it had begun.

  After the show Malcolm and his friends got on the train back to Wembley. Bowie and his wife got dressed in the last outfit of the evening to make a grand entrance at a special end-of-tour ‘retirement’ party that had been organized at the Café Royal, erstwhile haunt of Oscar Wilde. They played the part of the happy couple and mingled with guests including Mick and Bianca Jagger, Ringo Starr, Elliott Gould and Barbra Streisand, Tony Curtis, Paul and Linda McCartney, Keith Moon and Sonny Bono. The music was provided by Doctor John, then celebrating the release of his album In The Right Pl
ace.

  There was much photographic evidence of this occasion, which was useful because Bowie himself didn’t remember anything about the party. Two days later he felt better and began to regret his announcement. It was too late.

  When Chuck Berry sang of Johnny B. Goode getting his name in lights, that seemed a benign daydream such as we all might share. Twenty years later in David Bowie’s vision the rock star was a tragic figure, doomed to enact his own suicide on stage as the only way to placate the ravening hordes. The subtleties of such long-form ideas soon get lost in a telegrammatic medium like rock. His true text was stardom, which suddenly became fascinating to everyone. Within the next year it had all but replaced teen romance as a primary subject for pop, in David Essex’s ‘Gonna Make You A Star’, the Raspberries’ ‘Overnight Sensation (Hit Record)’, the Kinks’ Everybody’s In Show-Biz – Everybody’s A Star and even the Rolling Stones’ ‘Starfucker’. The up-and-coming Bruce Springsteen also had his mock-boastful line about the record company giving him a big advance in ‘Rosalita’. Suddenly rock was a legitimate subject for rock and stardom was something stars sang about.

  The Ziggy Stardust project seeded the idea that it might be possible to invent a rock star. This rock star wouldn’t have to be the person who did the inventing. He or she could be as distinct from their creator as a novel from the novelist. This kind of figure would be a vehicle for ideas and fancies that no right mind could entertain and no human frame could sustain. It was an idea that appealed to the growing number of musicians who had read a handful of books and wanted to feel that they could indulge themselves in the world of limelight while still retaining some intellectual standing. It ought to be possible for anyone to play the part of the rock star for a while and then walk away without a scratch on them.

  Many rock stars would find that this was increasingly unlikely to be the case. No matter how many costumes David Bowie may have adopted, no matter how painstakingly he had pointed out the parentheses around the pop star persona, the audience out there in the dark was, and remains, essentially a simple soul. It wants its pound of flesh and is apt to get it. The Ziggy project had started with its most prescient song. Hang on to yourself. That would be the hardest thing for any rock star to do.

  1973 PLAYLIST

  David Bowie, Aladdin Sane

  Bruce Springsteen, Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J.

  Pink Floyd, The Dark Side Of The Moon

  Elton John, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road

  Roxy Music, For Your Pleasure

  Paul McCartney and Wings, Band On The Run

  The Who, Quadrophenia

  Allman Brothers Band, Brothers and Sisters

  Mike Oldfield, Tubular Bells

  Paul Simon, There Goes Rhymin’ Simon

  6 AUGUST 1974

  914 STUDIOS, BLAUVELT, NEW YORK STATE

  Rock in a complicated world

  GREAT RECORDS ARE often made very quickly. Little Richard’s ‘Tutti Frutti’ was bashed out against the clock at the end of a long day. The Rolling Stones’ ‘Satisfaction’ was at the top of the charts all over the world within a few weeks of Keith Richards being woken in the middle of the night with its riff going through his head. The first Black Sabbath album was recorded on one day, mixed on the next, and on the third day it was pretty much in the shops. If popular music history has one thing to teach, it is that time spent polishing records is usually time spent ruining them.

  By the time twenty-four-year-old Bruce Springsteen got round to making the third and, unless something miraculous was to come to pass, final album under the terms of his contract with Columbia Records, his world no longer looked quite as simple as it had looked to his heroes of the fifties and sixties. It seemed he was now operating in an era when the sheer amount of competition was intimidating and the people who regulated access to wider acceptance were at best blasé and at worst openly hostile. Whichever direction he took he was reminded that somebody had gone before. The wordiness of the songs on his first album meant that he had recently been included on the long list of potential new Bob Dylans, alongside John Prine, Loudon Wainwright and Elliott Murphy. By the age of twenty-four his heroes the Beatles, the Stones, Bob Dylan and Elvis Presley had already done their best work, and here he was, yet to begin. Maybe he’d left it too late to be unique.

  Though the record-buying public had been underwhelmed by his efforts, he was still in demand as a live performer. His band, which at the time comprised Danny Federici, Garry Tallent, Clarence Clemons, David Sancious and, on the drums, Ernest ‘Boom’ Carter, had, thanks to its instrumental line-up, more colours and textures at its disposal than the average outfit; its line-up was also multi-racial, which was noteworthy; of even greater importance was the fact that the singer was a frontman in the soul tradition, every bit as engaged with the audience as he was with the songs. It was Springsteen’s ability to rock whatever house he was put in front of that kept his date book full. This much was gratifying, but it would never be quite enough for a young man possessed by such a lust for glory.

  In the spring of 1974 Springsteen had two sorts of supporters. There were rock critics, who were aching for him to be as good as he looked as if he ought to be. The enthusiastic support of rock critics is not always a good thing. It’s often a sign that an artist’s potential appeal is restricted to ill-coordinated white males who stayed at home committing B-sides to memory when they could’ve been out kissing real live girls. In 1973 and 1974 the alternative and local press was studded with features about Springsteen, all trying to describe the combination of rock energy, vernacular lyricism and All-American get-up-and-go of his shows. These pieces also expressed their fervent hope that he might be able to put all that promise together into something fit to take its place in what was increasingly being seen as a rock tradition. The crowning example of this strand of music journalism appeared in Boston’s Real Paper on 22 May 1974. It got more attention than most because it was written by Jon Landau, well-known for his reviews in Rolling Stone and also his dabbling in record production with the MC5 and Livingston Taylor. Landau was reviewing a Springsteen show that had taken place earlier in the month at the Harvard Square Theater. His review was unusually personal. The first half of it was taken up with a description of what music had meant to him when he was a teenager and about how nowadays he tended to appreciate it in a more detached way, as befits somebody who has to listen to it for work. This had changed, he said, in the course of Bruce Springsteen’s show at the Harvard Square Theater. On that night, he wrote, he saw his rock and roll past flash before his eyes. ‘And I saw something else. I saw rock and roll future and its name is Bruce Springsteen.’

  Not surprisingly, the record company seized upon this and, displaying their usual scant regard for subtleties, turned it into the slightly more user-friendly ‘I have seen the future of rock ’n’ roll and his name is Bruce Springsteen’. It didn’t make much difference. With that article the die was cast and now Landau was on Springsteen’s team. The two began spending time together. Springsteen had a difficult relationship with his own father – both his parents had left to start a new life on the West Coast – and Landau was that important couple of years older and university-educated enough to be able to act as his mentor. For his part Landau looked at Springsteen and saw the true clay of a real rock star, the kind of person he would never be no matter how much he practised.

  The second group of people whose support held out hope that Springsteen might graduate from the ranks of the also-rans were the women who came to his shows. They devoured his tough but tender act with a spoon, seeing at last a way they could stay invested in rock into adulthood. One of the few journalists to notice this was Paul Williams, who teased the singer, ‘I got word from New York that you’re a real sex star now.’ He went on to quote a friend of his who was twenty-six. ‘I guess twenty-six-year-old women haven’t found anything for years they can get off on. A friend of mine said, “He knows that you know that he knows what he’s doing.”’ Springs
teen tried to get off the point by saying that there were ‘a lot of different energies’ on stage but the fact was he knew exactly what Williams was talking about. Like the vaudeville entertainer Bert Lahr who had devoted most of his early years in the trade to simply watching the audience, Springsteen learned from every interaction with an audience. One of his most profound insights was if you get the women on side the men will very quickly follow. He was already projecting a slightly bruised maleness which was all the more powerful for not being talked about. Like the mainly male rock critics the women in the audience gazed upon him and hoped he could rekindle the way they had once felt. The headline of Landau’s piece had been ‘Growing young with rock & roll’. The women felt the same.

  In 1974 Springsteen was living on his own in a shabby two-bedroom cottage at 7½ West End Court in Long Branch, New Jersey, just along the shore from Asbury Park. The place had few home comforts. There was an old sofa that had been rescued from the alley. There was an old Aeolian piano in the room looking out on to the street. There was a bed, and on a table beside it was an old-fashioned record player. Every night he would drift off to sleep listening to masterpieces by the likes of Roy Orbison, Phil Spector and Duane Eddy, hoping he might wake to find himself capable of writing the one song that could define him the way ‘Running Scared’ had defined Roy, ‘Be My Baby’ had defined Phil and ‘Rebel Rouser’ had defined Duane.