Bowie's Piano Man - The Biography of Mike Garson

by Clifford Slapper

  That trip in 1991 was Garson’s first to the Paris area since recording for Pin Ups in 1973 at the legendary Château d’Hérouville. Soligny recalls Garson’s formidably tall and broad frame squeezed into the passenger seat of the little car in which he went to pick him up from his hotel. His elbow was protruding from the side window and he seemed a little nervous of the French traffic in these narrow cobbled lanes, worlds apart from the wide freeways of California. He reassured Soligny, however, that it was okay, as he remembered this from his trip of 1973, and having been scared then too.

  Garson was modest but not falsely so, and appreciative of Soligny’s hospitality, with the unaffected humility and gratitude of one who is rebuilding himself. At their recording sessions, he took pleasure in playing a lot of takes and then discovering what had made it to the final mix, sometimes surprised by how good his own playing sounded and modestly acknowledging, ‘That’s not bad!’ Later that year, Soligny completed an album with BMG, his first and last with a major label, and this time Garson joined him to record in Brussels. From that time their friendship flourished.

  Between those two projects Soligny was sent by Virgin Music France to take part in a Los Angeles gathering of songwriters. During the conference downtime, whilst other participants continued to mingle at the Sunset Marquis, he took the opportunity to spend some time with Garson, who had been living in the Los Angeles area for some years by then. Soligny felt at the time that Garson came across as someone who was working on himself, taking stock of his direction in life, in a way which he has since experienced himself, since he is now roughly the age that Garson was when they first met:

  That’s the good thing with age, that obviously you’re not young any more, but you’re young in another way – you discover things in yourself which you never saw before… I think he also was discovering things in himself that he didn’t see before, and he was in a situation where he said, maybe I’m like a new me, and I’ve got this music that’s pouring out of my very skin, and people love it, and I should do something good with it.

  The BMG recording sessions went well, and Soligny noted Garson’s willingness to again provide numerous optional takes and also his apparent lack of concern for the lyrics, finding meaning far more in the notes than in the words, and not professing to be able to understand a lot of the verbal content of the lyricists with whom he has worked.

  The fascinating thing about Garson’s perceptions of others is that he describes so many others as quirky, because he is comfortable enough in his own skin to feel that he resides in his own normality, his own steady boat from which he observes the waves around him. Yet ironically, many others looking at that vessel can themselves see a craft of charming eccentricity which, whilst seaworthy, nevertheless has some quite alien and exquisite embellishments.

  Soligny describes Garson as blissfully unaware of many of the narratives around him. He was never fully cognisant with the Ziggy Stardust character, its creation or demise. When Bowie ‘killed off’ Ziggy, it would have meant little to him as he had hardly been aware of the presence of such a character in the first place. Soligny adds, ‘He’s been playing his way through all this, tickling ebony and ivory… that’s why he jokes that we know more about his music than he does!’

  He found that it pays to record all that Garson does from the very first take onwards, as ‘he starts to play and create as soon as he first discovers the song’. Their latest work together at the time of writing is for Soligny’s 2015 album The Win Column, which also features string arrangements by Tony Visconti. There is a remarkable song called ‘She’s Ocean’ for which Garson created a long piano part which forms a spellbinding coda at the end of the song, and which sets a high future benchmark for any such musical metaphor, since his arpeggiated stylings are more than evocative of the undulating and crashing waves of the sea.

  As a prolific writer for the major French music magazine Rock&Folk, Soligny first interviewed David Bowie in 1991, with the arrival of Bowie’s band, Tin Machine, in Paris. After the interview, Soligny ventured to mention that Mike Garson ‘sends his best wishes’. Bowie was understandably perplexed by this. It turned out that he and Reeves Gabrels had been speaking about Garson just the day before. Until this point they had not even been aware of Soligny’s own work as a musician. Bowie asked about how Garson was, and how he had been in the studio. Soligny confirmed that his performance was superb as always.

  This additional reminder about Garson, with its implied prompt about his availability, may possibly have played some part in helping to bring about the invitation which Garson received soon afterwards to contribute to Bowie’s next album, Black Tie White Noise, after such a long hiatus in his work with Bowie. Certainly, Soligny says that this was essentially his hope and intention in mentioning Garson to Bowie at this first interview and meeting with him, and Garson gives credit to Soligny for that.

  In a 1997 article in Q Magazine David Bowie mentioned that in the 1970s Scientology had caused ‘one or two problems. I was thinking about having him back in the band and the thing that really clinched it was hearing that he was no longer a Scientologist.’ In fact Garson had left Scientology as early as 1982. Film and music writer Hans Morgenstern, who has published an extensive and excellent series of interviews with Garson on his Independent Ethos blog, makes a subtle but important distinction about this, that ‘one should not confuse these facts as factors in the collaboration of Bowie and Garson as musicians’.31 Bowie’s reasons for wanting to use Garson in the early 1990s were, as ever, musical and artistic, and any other issue would have been secondary to that, a case of ensuring that there were no obstacles or impediments to that creative choice. This is clear from the rest of the Q magazine interview, in which Bowie went on to say:

  He really has a gift. I wanted his particular, rather eccentric playing on a couple of tracks. One is called ‘Looking for Lester’, the other ‘Bring Me the Disco King’. He kind of pops those jewels in the track and they’re quite, as I say, extraordinary, eccentric pieces of piano-playing.

  The article also noted: ‘Garson is steeped in classical and jazz music (he’s made ten solo albums) and tends to stay out of the jungle area on Bowie’s new songs. At soundchecks he executes astonishing flourishes of concert piano without even looking at the keyboard. He is enjoying working with his old boss again.’ 32

  It had been about eighteen years since they had last met, and in that time David Bowie had himself released nearly a dozen different albums and evolved through a bewildering array of shifting styles. Their shared commitment to artistic integrity and musical experimentation meant, however, that once they were back in the studio, it was business as usual. The session was at The Hit Factory in New York. Garson says it was great to see Bowie again, and that he told Garson that he had not changed much. To Garson, Bowie ‘always looked great’, and within minutes it was back to work:

  He introduced me to Nile Rodgers, who was sort of a fan of my playing and we got along great, and the next thing I know we’re recording, and I loved it… I loved playing ‘Bring Me the Disco King’ (though the version we did then was not used and the song not released until 2003). It was just fun to be back in the studio and playing. We’ve always had that kind of relationship between us where there’s really no sense of passing time, and I guess music is maybe the only form that allows for that phenomenon.

  Black Tie White Noise was a return for Bowie to solo work after Tin Machine and Garson played a great solo towards the end of ‘Looking for Lester’, a track which Bowie co-wrote with Nile Rodgers and which also featured the trumpet of Bowie’s namesake, Lester Bowie (1941-1999). Mick Ronson also got the call and played on ‘I Feel Free’, although he was already ill and sadly he died soon afterwards, just after this album appeared.

  Garson was then also asked by Bowie to play on his The Buddha of Suburbia album, loosely based around his soundtrack for the television drama adapted from Hanif Kureishi’s first novel, and so the early 1990s saw the beginning of Garson’
s second, longer period of work with Bowie. In contrast to his good friend Soligny’s solicitous concern, Garson himself had never doubted that if and when the time was right, Bowie would contact him again, whether it had been one year or twenty years since the last call, and in 1992 cheerfully adopted his place again upon the piano stool he had last occupied for David Bowie in 1974. Garson expressly recognises that Bowie has always been a consummate creative director, as well as a uniquely inspired and driven artist. Hence the dramatis personae he builds at each point is itself a work of art and meets the needs of that moment. He compares this sensibility of Bowie’s to that of Miles Davis in jazz. He also often stresses Bowie’s ability to ‘pull’ great performances out of him in the studio. For his part in the process, he suggests that his special ability in this context is to play the piano ‘as Bowie might if he were the pianist’, to be ‘kind of inside his head’. He finds an irony in the fact that, despite being so different from one another in so many ways, he and Bowie do have a very strong connection artistically:

  While we were totally different individuals, we still creatively were on the same page, even though we never talked about it. I may come across like more straight-ahead, the normal nine-to-five guy, but when you look at the reality… we both like to be spontaneous and trust what comes out of us.

  Garson was becoming something of an elder statesman amongst the line-up for the Bowie albums of the 1990s and early 2000s, capable where necessary of mentoring younger, though immensely capable, recruits such as Gail Ann Dorsey. Garson also showed he possessed the humility and generosity of spirit necessary to take his place again as part of a wider group, and to be directed when required; not just by Bowie himself, but on the Reality tour of 2003 and 2004 by newly appointed musical director, guitarist Gerry Leonard.

  It is perhaps Garson’s fundamental versatility which helps to explain the durability of his working relationship with Bowie, as well as the extensive trajectory of his musical career in general. Other musicians who played with Bowie in the early 1970s would simply not have fitted with some of the genres and styles later adopted by him. Garson’s technical wizardry and essential musicality have proved able to operate in a very wide range of musical languages.

  For The Buddha of Suburbia, Bowie had created the soundtrack for the television drama series but was also developing the material further for an album of the same name (from which only the title track corresponds to the music he wrote for actual use on the series). He called Garson at short notice, saying that he had the album almost ready but wanted Garson to play on two of the tracks; he was on his way to join Garson in Los Angeles, and would have just three hours, by which time it had to be completed. In the absence of any charts or time to prepare, Garson simply added piano arrangements spontaneously and drew on the improvisational ability which is his trademark, and the results are astounding on these two tracks, the instrumental ‘South Horizon’, and ‘Bleed Like a Craze, Dad’. The piano parts which Garson laid on in this extremely tight timespan were left very high in the mix. As a result they serve as a great masterclass for any musician in the art of creating piano parts sensitively and responsively, to be added to a given piece of music. Unusually, David Bowie himself penned sleeve notes for the album, which throw fascinating light on some of the experimental techniques employed – as well as providing yet another positive review of our subject’s contribution:

  On my favourite piece, South Horizon, all elements, from the lead instrumentation to texture, were played both forwards and backwards. The resulting extracts were then intercut arbitrarily giving Mike Garson a splendid eccentric backdrop upon which to improvise. I personally think Mike gives one of his best-ever performances on this piece and it thrills on every listening, confirming to me at least, that he is still one of the most extraordinary pianists playing today.33

  Bowie goes on to denounce the ‘redundant narrative form’, confirming his spurning of linearity in his work. This manifesto lays a fertile ground for the musical improvisation which was at the heart of Garson’s playing, and would be developed further in the recording of 1. Outside. Bowie continues, ‘My own personal ambition is to create a music form that captures a mixture of sadness and grandeur on the one hand, expectancy and the organisation of chaos on the other…’34

  Chris O’Leary provides a very rich discussion and cultural context for all of Bowie’s albums on his strikingly well written and researched website ‘Pushing Ahead of the Dame’. He makes an interesting contrast between Garson’s playing on The Buddha of Suburbia and his better-known work on Aladdin Sane. In doing so, he also manages the difficult task of writing about the latter in a way which does not merely echo the huge and often clichéd supply of commentaries which have already been written about Aladdin Sane and Garson’s work on it:

  Garson, on his ‘Aladdin’ solo, sounded like someone who had managed to soak up every speck of music that he’d ever heard, and who was able to reproduce it at will, like God’s player-piano. His work on ‘Horizon’ is nothing as outrageous: it’s more concise, more conciliatory, still crafty. Knowing he could play anything, he often chooses here to keep silent, or just give a hint of some greater pattern.35

  Garson says that on this project he felt at home because of what he recognised as the jazz-influenced elements of the music:

  It was such a comfort zone for me to hear that music because it was kind of jazz, ride beats coming from the drums, jazz trumpet, you know… but I thought, I can’t just do any lick and stick to my comfort zone, that’s not what Bowie has ever wanted from me, if I just did that it would be musical cheating!

  He decided instead to create a less easy response by ‘listening to the spaces’ between his notes. By focusing on these gaps between the sounds we create, we realise that they are equally a part of the music and that a space between two staccato notes rising from D to A, for example, is a very different space from that between the repeatedly slow murmur or throb of a low B-flat. These interstices between the musical sounds we create are what could, for example, either generate a pulse via the ostinato recurrence of a pedal note, or alternatively provide the melancholy of a halting or hesitant melody line. It is precisely the laying down of those gaps, like flag stones along a path, which carries the intent of musical expression. With intent comes the suggestion that you have a destination that you are heading for, and this is what makes it exciting for the listener.

  During this period, tracks on which Garson played started to be featured on film soundtracks. For example his performance on Bowie’s ‘The Hearts Filthy Lesson’ from 1. Outside can be heard on the final credits of Seven starring Brad Pitt (1995) and was also featured in the 1997 television movie, House of Frankenstein. Bowie and Eno engendered this piece from improvised material, at Mountain Studios, Montreux, Switzerland during the 1994 sessions for the album: they landed on an F-sharp minor groove, Garson established a hook (with some E major inversions over the F-sharp minor), and they jammed for an hour over that until the song emerged. In 1997 the soundtrack for the David Lynch film Lost Highway was produced by Trent Reznor and made particular use of Garson’s playing on ‘I’m Deranged’ from 1. Outside.

  Although Garson had not played on Bowie’s 1999 album ‘hours…’, he was on the subsequent tour. Already accustomed to the challenge of finding subtle, suitable piano parts for the live performance of songs which had none on record, such as ‘Little Wonder’ from Earthling, he devised an especially striking piano line for ‘Something in the Air’ at that time. When that song was used for the opening sequence of the film American Psycho, Bowie sent it to Garson in California for him to record an additional piano part on it within one day, for the version to be used in the film. The result was spectacular, though Garson points out that producer Mark Plati had to use a MIDI piano sound rather than Garson’s preferred real grand piano because at that time, even at the turn of the century, it was still not yet possible to send the large files that we take for granted as sendable now.

  From i
ts conception, Bowie’s 1995 album 1. Outside was more an experimental work of art than an ordinary album. Before work began on the 1994 sessions in Switzerland, David Bowie and Brian Eno visited the former Gugging psychiatric clinic just outside Vienna and spoke to some of the patients there about their renowned art. This was the art brut (‘raw’ art) referred to by French painter and sculptor Jean Dubuffet, who was influenced by Hans Prinzhorn’s 1922 book Artistry of the Mentally Ill, and which would later be referred to within the broader idea of Outsider Art. Bowie and Eno’s project was to generate a modern avant-garde opera, originally called Leon, through a range of improvisational methods. The album which was released is merely a fragment of the material which was created as a result. Musicians were brought in as artistic resources, making on this occasion even more real the metaphor of Bowie selecting his band as a palette with which to produce art. The album was completed with some additional recording in New York early in 1995.36

  For the improvisational sessions which generated most of the material for the album, Brian Eno introduced a fascinating though eccentric method of injecting more interest into the interaction between the musicians. Each participant was given a simple prompt card (a series of these ‘Oblique Strategies’ cards produced by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt are still available on eBay), giving them a role or identity to play out fully throughout the day. The cards were on their seats, face down, before they arrived, so that each person would only see their own instruction.