Bowie's Piano Man - The Biography of Mike Garson

by Clifford Slapper

  The only part of the following years which was extremely difficult for her was their moving away from New York, first to England, later to California, because it meant leaving her family and friends behind. In particular, she lost her support system and was then alone a lot of the time with two children in a strange place. She says that this took her a long time to recover from. She ‘had to make a choice and I am glad, in retrospect, that I chose to keep my family together and move. But I missed our family and friends in New York, it took a toll on me.’ Garson is deeply apologetic to her over this. If her love for him needed any further confirmation, she adds that her ‘only regret, after almost fifty years, is that my marriage will never, ever be long enough for me’.

  In the autumn of 1972, she and their daughter Jennifer joined the Bowie tour at various locations, including a stay at the Beverly Hills Hotel: ‘That was fantastic. It seemed unreal at times. But what fun and luxury we got to experience.’ They were staying in one of the hotel’s bungalows. Baby Jennifer crawled into the neighbouring bungalow, which happened to be occupied by none other than Perry Como, and proffered him in her little hand a cassette tape of her Daddy’s music.

  In later years Susan worked in the music industry herself, managing jazz stars Chick Corea, Billy Childs and the band Fattburger, as well as Garson himself. As for Garson’s own music, she has seen it steadily improve. She says that he works as hard at it now as he did in his teens when they first met, never resting on his past accomplishments. She sees a maturity emerging in his compositions in recent years, and more warmth. She says that he has also mellowed as a man over the years. Whereas in his younger days he could be more self-absorbed or at least self-involved, he is now more giving to those around him. He has become ‘better as a husband, father and grandfather’. She says that his priorities in life are always family, followed by music and then ‘changing lives and healing’.

  Garson has many fond and amusing memories from those early gigs. There was a one-off gig in one of the bungalow colonies in the Catskills. These were amongst the lower end of accommodation there, in stark contrast to some of the swankier hotels such as the Grossingers or the Concord, which he had also enjoyed playing at. A far cry from the bungalows of the Beverly Hills Hotel a few years later, this was ‘no better than a mess-hall or dorm’ with just an old upright piano, which was out of tune. Dave Liebman was on sax, Bob Moses on drums, Larry Coryell on guitar, all in their youth then but big jazz names since; and they were mischievous. Garson hated the grind of playing to ‘people who were eating, maybe dancing or wandering around, but not really there for the music’. He now characterises the live music performance at this kind of gig as ‘supporting their eating’ rather than for people to actually listen to and appreciate the music in itself. Trying to relieve the boredom of the gig, Garson actually ended up playing with a yo-yo (all the tricks, ‘round the world’ and so on) with his right hand, whilst continuing to hold down the beat on the piano with his left hand, quite a feat of coordination.

  He once played at a wedding with his long-term friend and great drummer, Billy Mintz. He hated doing this, sometimes playing six hours straight with just five minutes off each hour, having to carry on playing solo piano even when the rest of the band took a break, but it was a way to earn some money. On this occasion he was playing the bassline on a little Farfisa organ, with Mintz on drums squeezed right beside him. The singer/bandleader always wanted to separate them as they would mess about. This time he turned mid-song to see Garson’s left hand ‘playing’ the organ bassline up Mintz’s arms and down his legs, whilst Mintz tried not to be distracted and to carry on playing. The singer never booked them again, but it must have made a good comedy routine for anyone who noticed it.

  These comic moments from his teens are fond memories. The years since are replete with musical gravitas and accomplishment through which he has earned his place in the fabric of modern culture. He does, however, tell numerous anecdotes of the more bizarre side of his life as a musician through later years too. There was the time he was asked whether he would play his introduction to ‘Lady Grinning Soul’ for (what else?) a commercial for eggs. In ten minutes he earned $1,000, which would normally have taken him twenty long nights of jazz gigs to earn. It often seemed that the perverse priorities of commerce rewarded his least creative or artistic endeavours the most, and vice versa.

  On another occasion, in 1981, he was asked to cover a recording session for then keyboardist David Foster, who would later go on to produce for Christina Aguilera, The Bee Gees, Mariah Carey, Janet Jackson, Michael Jackson, Prince and many others. It was for a commercial going out in China to hundreds of millions of people the next day. The producer insisted on every note being separately programmed, they spent nearly twelve hours to produce less than half a minute, but the very next day it was broadcast in China.

  May 1974 saw the release of David Bowie’s Diamond Dogs with Garson’s piano a key feature on several tracks. Many Bowie fans have an especially enthusiastic liking for the album, which combines an eerie take on musical theatre with a dark and delicate beauty, particularly on ‘Sweet Thing’/‘Candidate’ with its interplay between Bowie’s soaring vocals and Garson’s sweeping piano runs.

  Garson looks back now on that whole period with a kind of retrospective fascination, enjoying it more now with hindsight:

  I’m starting to appreciate my life from thirty years ago, thirty years too late! I thought Bowie was great, I thought his bands were great, but to me, it was just like, ‘I’m playing the best I can for the guy,’ but I’d be on the stage daydreaming about playing in a jazz club for fifty people!

  He is now appalled at the way he worked through many stadium-scale gigs feeling that he was doing this as a paid job but that he would rather be playing jazz, wishing he was somewhere else. He had a sudden epiphany finally on one occasion in 1995, in which he looked out at the audience and realised how many people he was reaching, how this was musical expression combined with the unique opportunity to communicate. He saw that until then he was:

  … being this stupid, ridiculous jazz élitist asshole that had something better to do somewhere else… I can’t tell you how many gigs that I wasn’t a ‘happy camper’… that’s showing lack of gratitude!

  He has since worked out that the reason for this frustration was that he did not have as much to do, for example, at a Bowie show, compared with a jazz concert. In a two-hour show he had maybe ten minutes of intensity whereas with a jazz trio he felt more engaged and stretched for longer periods. ‘Bring Me the Disco King’ was the longest piano part for him on a live Bowie song, but that did not come until 2003. However, he now sees that being part of the band helping to create one of those two-hour Bowie shows was a collective expression, and therefore the waits of twenty minutes to be called on to solo or play an especially intricate or demanding piano part were also part of the overall performance.

  On the question of musicians playing in environments which are not primarily about the music, such as lengthy background gigs in restaurants, clubs, or hotels, Garson has a keen memory for the detail of what he went through for several years, before his profile was raised by the association with Bowie. He estimates he must have played well in excess of a thousand gigs, all badly paid at between 50 to 150 dollars. ‘They’re eating, I’m playing… they want you to be a machine.’ He felt that ninety per cent of what he was doing, musically, he hated. He vowed to turn that around so that he would ‘love ninety per cent of the gigs and only hate ten per cent’. This is what he did achieve and has enjoyed now for many years.

  He made a decision – and, significantly, this was shortly before he got that call from Bowie’s manager – that he would no longer play whilst people were eating, that they would have to ‘come, pay, see me play… even if that sounds a little harsh’. He vowed that as far as audiences were concerned, in bars or clubs, ‘they were going to watch me instead of me watching them… I was setting the record straight that I’m not there to su
pport their eating, I’m there to perform and raise their aesthetic and spiritual level, with a tinge of entertainment.’

  He started to get his first taste of this process whilst playing in the army band in his early twenties. People started to put their knives and forks down, so to speak, and he started to realise the effect he could really have on an audience. We have seen how musicians can be spurred on by enjoying the adulation of the audience, even to the point of addiction to it. Garson, however, is very specific about which aspect of the audience reaction always fired him on the most, and that is the idea of inspiring people.

  A further role he is often happy to play is the cathartic one of facilitating the release of emotions which may have been repressed. He has moved many a tear, whether of joy, regret or loss, through the power of his music on audiences, and he sees this therapeutic function as also being one of his responsibilities as a musician. After the release of such pent-up emotions through the gateway of musical communication, people actually feel physically better, due to chemical processes in the brain which are stimulated by the relief of shedding the burden of old emotional processes.20 The level of seriousness with which he approaches his vocation almost elevates the job of entertainer into a civic duty. He may have given up the idea of becoming a rabbi in his early teens, but he did not give up the idea of playing a pastoral and caring role within the community.

  Garson is happy with one major realisation of recent years. Despite gaining the adulation of audiences since his youth, he remained for most of his life preoccupied with the process of getting things right, tightening up his performance and attaining technical and even expressive virtuosity, whereas all along the really important thing was the forming of an emotional bond with these audience members. What matters is the beneficial effect on people of this special form of communication, and for him this now transcends the technical. As part of this he also realises that his own joy in playing is paramount. It is as if he only now, retrospectively, sees fully what an ecstatic and central part of these past fifty years has been occupied by those spine-tingling moments of live performance where something really happens between player and audience, and everything else is there to facilitate such moments. Even his solitary practice sessions of several hours bring him joy, provided he knows there will also be concerts to play.

  Garson recalls times when he has held back from dazzling as much as he knew he could, for fear of outshining others, but now sees this as a kind of false humility:

  You don’t want to make others feel bad, so you actually hold back. I think there is also something psychotic and irrational about it, but I could see why I had done it, I’ve talked to other people who’d done it, and you also said you had an experience like that… it’s actually committing a sin on yourself, or transgression, because I think people want the best of who you are, and when you’re playing at your greatest it’s like the Olympics. Someone wins this gold thing, if he’s not egocentric, it’s everybody’s win, and it’s a patriotic thing for a whole country or a planet. It shows the best of mankind. Someone who’s a Chopin or a Bach or a Bowie or a John Lennon, or Dylan or Mozart or Duke Ellington or Louis Armstrong – I’m not trying to take away from any of those people’s genius, but they are a representation of what’s best in us, in humankind…

  By reaching for the highest achievement possible, you lift other people up with you, and it becomes a collective experience. And in any case, it is only rarely that others would genuinely be hurt by being outshone, so it is a false fear which holds us back. One specific example of this occurred at a surprise performance by Garson in the early 1990s.

  Garson was at Catalina Bar & Grill in Hollywood on 23 August 1991, enjoying a Caesar Salad and looking forward to hearing a jazz trio featuring Michel Petrucciani (who had brittle bone disease), whom Garson explains ‘would be carried in, he was a diminutive French jazz pianist, very, very short and would even have a special extension to the pedals, and a high seat… although, his hands, disproportionately, were full size! He was a great bebop player…’ On that occasion, Petrucciani’s flight into Los Angeles was delayed, and Garson was spotted and pressed into service mid-salad, being asked to step up and entertain the audience until Petrucciani arrived.

  Garson knew that, unlike most of his fellow jazz musicians, he tended to seduce audiences with showmanship alongside his technical brio. It was perhaps no coincidence that he was once cast as the hands of Liberace in a biopic of that dazzling pianist (a full account of which appears in Chapter 8, ‘From Lulu to Liberace’). Anxious that this was not his gig, he looked for a way to acquit himself well and yet not make this his show. He says he filtered his performance through an imaginary ‘compressor’ or limiter, and stopped himself at a certain point when he was going into his ‘magic zone’. Petrucciani finally arrived and played the second half of the show, and the reviews were equally good for them both, so that Garson achieved his aim. However, he now feels strongly that the zenith of excellence in art should constantly be challenged and stretched, under all circumstances. There is no ceiling. You must challenge yourself at all times, for your sake as well as that of the audience:

  Because people should experience the fact that you can play at your greatest and this can make them inspired to think there’s something in them that is that great too, be it as a journalist, a poet, a singer, composer, any other role or job, at the maximum ability you have. Your comparison should not be another musician, but it should be yourself… nobody could play better Oscar Peterson than Oscar Peterson, and no one can write better Chopin than Chopin, and no one can write better Mozart than Mozart, and no one can be a better Bowie, no matter how many imitators there are, than Bowie… So, you may as well be the best you can be, because certainly you can only be second or third or fourth best to anyone who’s your idol. But you can use them for inspiration.

  The night before our first discussions, in the summer of 2009, Garson had played a jazz trio concert in Los Angeles with drummer Joe LaBarbera, who was Bill Evans’ last drummer. Garson observes that every jazz pianist would love to play with LaBarbera, as he can play softly with brushes, or step up and be exciting, and develops an almost telepathic rapport with other musicians. He speaks with reverential respect for this ‘conversation’ between the fellow interpreters in a trio: ‘There’s something magical about three, and the whole is certainly greater than the sum of its parts.’ It does not remain a ‘straight-ahead’ jazz trio throughout, however, as Garson often experiments with the addition of a synthesiser on top of his grand piano, improvising on it for example, during an extended jam of Miles Davis’ ‘All Blues’:

  There’s a certain abandonment that I have when I play it. I sort of throw away all my touch and technique and become a different player because, you know, I’m using the three wheels on the synthesiser as well as the little strip to modulate tone, and we have these three wheels which each do different things, sometimes I don’t even know what they’re going to do… but I like the freedom that it allows me. It’s almost like ‘throw it all away!’ take off your clothes, and just like ‘go for it!’ It was fun for me, and I get a good response from the audience when I play the synths actually.

  Once inspiration strikes, he feels himself to be an avenue through which the music can flow, and at such times is resistant to over-direction from producers or directors. His friend, award-winning Argentinian film composer Emilio Kauderer, refers to this phenomenon as ‘the cable company’. Garson is humble in this sense about his own individual role, referring to such a flow as ‘a synonym for consciousness or universal energy or God’:

  So, the ‘cable company’ sends these notes down, let’s say – it’s coming down the stream, coming down the pipe. Now, someone comes over to me as the flow’s coming and says: ‘Can you do this, make that chord an F#, can you play it slow, can you play it like Trent Reznor, can you sound like Oscar Peterson here?’ They cut the flow from the ‘cable’, they’re interrupting the message!21

  Kauderer firs
t went to Garson for a jazz piano lesson which, typically, turned into a six-hour meeting which, he says, ‘marked the future of my career in an invaluable way’. He found Garson to be ‘an inspirational force’.

  These days, when playing with his jazz trios, the warm smile of satisfaction spreads from time to time over Garson’s face; and not just when he is himself playing – it happens equally when one of the others is soloing and he hears that same flow inhabiting one of his bass players or drummers, since for him there is no separation between the individuals involved, once this process of group creativity begins. In contrast, when he is over-directed against the flow of what feels instinctively right, his playing suffers badly.

  In the early 1990s, he was hired by a very well-known producer. On this occasion Garson was literally instructed to ‘do a solo like those on Aladdin Sane’. This was inappropriate for the type of song, it did not make sense at all, and he felt like he was ‘dying inside’ as his ‘cable company’ flow was not only interrupted, ‘it exploded!’ Failing to understand the moment in time which was represented by those original recordings of 1972-73, such production values are anathema to true creativity. By saying ‘just stick one of those on here!’ as if they were repapering the walls of a house, or perversely splashing some older paint on to a new building, such producers show a disregard for their own creative process in the present, as well as for the earlier process which they are attempting to pillage.

  He continued to play this studio session and is once again amusing in describing the outcome:

  So, like an idiot – I’m trying to be a nice guy, and I’m playing these styles over this ballad. Each track was more obnoxious than the other – I hated my playing, because it was so wrong, but I was being paid as a studio musician. This goes on for two hours… we didn’t get any of it, so we sit down, I sit down at the piano, and the producer’s talking to me – every bar he stopped me, and told me what to play. Every bar – it had about ninety bars, so we stopped about ninety times, every two or three seconds. ‘Play this little triad here, play less there.’ This is a nightmare, right? We ended up with a track. I was ready to throw up and never play the piano again [laughs]. We ended up with this piano part, it sounded okay. I might have even played it myself in the first place if they had shut up, and not said a word! And I, out of the side of my mouth said: ‘You know, that sounds like Nicky Hopkins.’ You know what the producer said? ‘Oh! That’s the guy I meant to hire! He played with the Rolling Stones?… You played with Bowie? I had your names confused!’… And I had, during the session, found Nicky’s way of playing because Nicky, when he was alive, was a student of mine.