Bowie's Piano Man - The Biography of Mike Garson

by Clifford Slapper

  One example he gives of his own inner critic in action will ring painfully true with great numbers of serious musicians:

  When I was playing in Radio City with David Bowie, I heard two notes that I played wrong. Now, nobody has told me they heard those two notes, but I know where they were – they were in the arpeggio at the end when I was playing across the keyboard. He had asked me to transpose the piece right before we did the song, so I was in an unfamiliar key, and I heard these mistakes, and it really messed me up. But, when I listened to it on television I barely could hear it. And nobody mentioned it to me, and I asked David if he heard it, and others; but it messed with me, is what I’m trying to say. Now, that’s not the sign of a rational, sane person. And yet, that’s how I grew up, so I try to take the plus of that, which is it pushed my envelope, I didn’t get complacent. But, as for the downside of it, well… you just have to talk to my wife for a few hours, you know!

  12 - Nine Inch Pumpkins

  ‘My latest thing I’m hot to do is collaborate with some other people. Probably at the top of my list this second is Mike Garson from Bowie’s band… I don’t understand how that sound’s coming out of his instrument…’ – Trent Reznor, Nine Inch Nails

  GARSON HAS A GODSON CHRISTENED Sebastian Bach, who is now in his thirties. He used to stay with the Garsons as a young teen in the 1990s, and went through the normal passions of early adolescence. At eleven it was Michael Jordan and basketball, but at twelve or thirteen he became an aficionado of Billy Corgan and the Smashing Pumpkins. Garson told him that he was more of a jazz and classical musician but that he had played a lot with David Bowie, to which his godson replied, ‘That’s nothing, you have to hear Billy Corgan!’ with all the certainty of youth.

  In December 1995 Garson travelled to Paris, France for one of Bowie’s appearances on the Nulle part ailleurs television series on Canal+, filmed at Taratata Studio, on which various major bands were featured. On this occasion the Smashing Pumpkins were included, so Garson came out of his dressing room to listen. Sure enough, he saw what his godson had meant. They were extremely striking, with an amazing drummer and the vocalist ‘just screaming so loudly this wild song “The World is a Vampire”, with such a big and powerful sound!’ A little later Bowie’s bodyguard came to get Garson from his dressing room, saying that Bowie was discussing with Corgan about the idea of God, and wanted Garson to be a part of the conversation. In this way Garson met Corgan. Footage exists of this show and when Corgan and Bowie are interviewed together, Bowie indeed mentions how they had been discussing, before coming on to perform, about the existence of God. The context, Bowie goes on to explain, was that he was pleased at the time to see a lot of new artists returning to the eternal questions of why are we here, where are we going, and where do we come from, and that a renaissance in the quality of popular music would be predicated on such a return to the fundamental issues, in contrast to the relative superficiality and frivolity of popular culture in the 1980s. He says there may have been exceptions to this lack of quality in the 1980s but he struggles to find any, ‘… including myself!’ He relates this gradual return of eternal questions to fin de siècle anxieties, amplified by millennial angst.

  On 9 January 1997 Garson was playing at Bowie’s 50th birthday concert at Madison Square Garden and Billy Corgan was featured as one of many special guests that night, so this would have been the first time that he and Garson had played together on stage. Early in 1998 Garson was touring with his jazz group, Free Flight, and heard that Billy Corgan was auditioning piano or keyboard players as his previous keyboard player, Jonathan Melvoin, had died of an overdose. Garson knew Nancy Berry at Virgin Records so called her and asked about this. She asked Corgan and came back with the message that if Garson wanted to join him and the Smashing Pumpkins there was no audition necessary.

  The Adore tour for which he then joined Corgan was, Garson says, a change of direction for the band. Drummer Jimmy Chamberlin, who had been with Melvoin when he overdosed, was no longer part of the band, and had been replaced by a hugely powerful rhythm section with drummer Kenny Aronoff and percussionists Dan Morris and Stephen Hodges. James Iha was still on board, however, as was bassist D’arcy Wretzky. A lot of the live dates were recorded by Corgan on DAT tape and may be released at some point. Garson found Corgan to be a great singer, musician, songwriter and person to work with, and thoroughly enjoyed touring with him.

  Garson created a long piano solo, ‘Le Deux Machina’, which can be heard only on the bootleg tape Friends & Enemies of Modern Music. This was a cassette-tape collection of various demos and live tracks from that period and is not to be confused with the album Machina II/Friends & Enemies of Modern Music. The latter album contains a much shorter version of the same theme, played on a synth, which was created by Corgan first, who then asked Garson to take this as a starting point to expand into his piano version on the bootleg. This piano solo by Garson also appears, chopped into segments, in the middle section of ‘Glass and the Ghost Children’ on the Machina/The Machines of God album. He also played on this latter album’s ‘With Every Light’.

  This piano track lasting nearly six minutes had never been heard by Garson since he recorded it in 2000, but when I play it to him now he recalls that Corgan wanted him to record it on an old upright piano, as he loved the sound of this particular piano.56 Garson did not like the sound of it at all and found the old piano a nightmare to play, but respected Corgan’s wishes as it was his song, and they were pleased with the results. Listening back now to his own work on it Garson finds it ‘a little heady, but certainly interesting. It’s a complicated kind of a harmonic piece that he wrote, with that progression, and certainly more enjoyable than the synth version!’

  Garson and Corgan went on to collaborate on composing the soundtrack for the film Stigmata, released in August 1999, which also included a Bowie song, as well as ‘Identify’ by Natalie Imbruglia which was co-written by Garson and Corgan and produced by Nigel Godrich. Garson also played on the Smashing Pumpkins’ VH1 Storytellers television show recorded on 24 August 2000. Later that year he rejoined the band on their Machina tour, and was with them in Chicago on 2 December 2000 for the emotional last show before the band broke up for the first time. There were a host of special guests brought on with whom Garson also played that night. They had chosen to play in the same small venue which they had started in as a band twelve years earlier in Chicago, The Metro. Garson was on incredible form. At the end of the night, when the audience were showing their appreciation, Corgan whispered into Garson’s ear in a heartfelt way, ‘I couldn’t have done it without you,’ which, Garson says, was the warmest moment, and adds with a chuckle, ‘and that’s the last time I saw him, I think.’57 He did, however, work again with James Iha, playing on the track ‘Appetite’ for Iha’s 2012 second solo album, Look to the Sky.

  On his way to Chicago to rehearse for the Smashing Pumpkins Adore tour, he got a call from Trent Reznor asking him to play on three tracks for the Nine Inch Nails album, The Fragile, which was then in production. Corgan let Garson miss three days of rehearsals in Chicago in order to fly to New Orleans to record with Trent Reznor. Garson is modest about having been in such demand, reflecting that like any musician he just felt he should make the most of a busy period in his career.

  It is a mark of the respect which Garson has earned from his fellow musicians that, when he heard in 2014 that I was writing a biography of Garson, Trent Reznor took the time to call me at home in London whilst on his way to sound-check with Nine Inch Nails for a show in Virginia, to recount his experiences of working with Garson from 1995 onwards.

  In 1995 Nine Inch Nails were rehearsing with David Bowie and his band for their joint tour of North America which began on 14 September 1995. Reznor was already flattered to have been invited to tour with Bowie and felt slightly intimidated, which was reinforced when he got to rehearsals and saw ‘this imposing figure behind a keyboard’ looking over. The rehearsal studio was full of ‘this unbeli
evable piano playing… but you couldn’t see his hands, he was looking straight ahead… I remember thinking, where the hell is this coming from? Incredibly complex and beautiful music, which… he was improvising.’

  That tour was artistically experimental on many levels. At the end of NIN’s set, Bowie would come on stage and sing with them. Then his band came out, and the bands played together for a song or two, after which NIN left the stage. Reznor stayed on with Bowie’s band for a song, then finally left the stage, whilst Bowie and his band continued. Sometimes Bowie and Reznor duetted on Reznor’s song ‘Hurt’. Bowie had made it clear that this tour would not be a showcase for past hits. This was a continuation of the artistic experimentation of the 1. Outside album. The night was ‘two and a half hours of musical evolution’, recalls Reznor, who, like Bowie, hand-picks his musicians to challenge and inspire the audience, and carefully curates stage shows rather than just performing at them. On 11 July 2012 a Rolling Stone magazine readers’ poll put this tour in the ‘top 10 opening acts in rock history’ even though both artists here had equal billing.

  Of Garson, he now says that: ‘Being in the same room as him every day for soundcheck, it’s hard not to get drawn into his world, because it’s amazing.’ He had heard him play on the Bowie albums but did not know what to expect on a personal level. He found him ‘approachable, nice, warm… thoughtful and cerebral’. It amused him when Garson told him that in the seventies he had ‘toured’, in the eighties he had ‘practised’ – as if each decade were merely an afternoon.

  Perhaps this reflects Garson’s very long-view perspective on his own evolution as a pianist, as well as that of society. For his part, Garson had been recommended just earlier that year to listen out for Nine Inch Nails by a young opera singer he was working with, fourteen-year-old Jessica Tivens, just as his young godson Sebastian Bach had put him on to the Smashing Pumpkins. He was still not generally an aficionado of rock music. Garson gives his own parallel description of that first encounter with the NIN sound, during the rehearsals for their joint tour:

  We would nod to each other in the hall when we passed through in soundchecks and rehearsals, and there was a warmth between us. Then I hear these guys playing and I thought, these guys are out there. And the music was so loud, and literally screaming at the audience, songs like ‘Starfuckers’ and ‘I Want to Fuck You Like an Animal’, things just like flying out, and guitars flying on stage, wild words… Again, I knew they were great, it just wasn’t my cup of tea, but I couldn’t refute the brilliance there.

  After the tour, Garson was reading Keyboard magazine and saw Reznor quoted as saying that one of the people he would most like to work with was him:

  My latest thing I’m hot to do is collaborate with some other people. Probably at the top of my list this second is Mike Garson from Bowie’s band. He’s a phenomenal pianist/keyboardist. We’ve been messing around at the soundchecks, just playing stuff, and I don’t understand how that sound’s coming out of his instrument. He’s coming from a place that’s far removed from me, but kind of how I used Adrian Belew on the last record, I’d love to feed him some of the things like that.

  A further couple of years passed before Garson got the call to play on The Fragile and he appreciates that ‘these guys make a mental note and when the time is right they call you… there was something about him as a visionary and Bowie as a visionary, there was a big connection; David respected Trent a lot and vice versa’. This latest turn in Garson’s career was again completely unexpected. None of the classical, jazz or even pop or rock that he had moved between in earlier years had made an invitation to play for Nine Inch Nails seem a logical or likely step, but as passionate and distinctive creative artists neither Reznor nor Garson was willing to let such artificial boundaries or demarcations between genres or styles matter one iota. NIN recognised something in him which he could add to their music, which he says he did not even see himself until they proposed it.

  Interviewed once again in Keyboard magazine after having worked with Garson on The Fragile, Reznor updated his report: ‘Mike has been a huge inspiration to me; he’s such a monster player, he never disappoints’; and on the prevalence of real piano sounds on the album, ‘Especially in what’s already this harsh, alien environment of distorted guitars and violent drums, there’s something beautiful and honest about an unadorned piano anchoring it all.’

  Reznor explains to me that from The Downward Spiral (1994) onwards, he has always tried to bring in musicians to play on each album who will approach the music from a different perspective from his. In the case of The Fragile (1999) he thought Garson might lend an interesting dimension to the music and invited him to do whatever he felt inspired to, and not to be limited by what was there. This clearly paid off.

  In 2009 Garson guested on several songs at a very emotional gig at the Wiltern in Los Angeles on 10 September at which Reznor retired NIN from any future live work. The show lasted more than three hours with almost forty songs and various guests including Dave Navarro, The Dillinger Escape Plan and others, and ended dramatically with each of Reznor’s bandmates leaving the stage with a wave, one by one, finally leaving him at the keyboard singing under a single spotlight:

  ‘You know none of this is real,

  You will find a better place,

  In This Twilight.’

  In the summer of 2014 Reznor was completing work with Atticus Ross on scoring David Fincher’s film Gone Girl and needed some piano for a scene. It needed to evolve out of a synth sound cue which was already in place. After just a short briefing Garson instinctively knew what was needed, and quickly sent him four variations all done in real time. When he heard it, Reznor ‘got goosebumps, it was a thousand times better than how in my head I thought it might sound’. Fincher, who had also directed Seven, which used ‘The Hearts Filthy Lesson’ in its closing credits, was equally delighted – it had ‘just the right aesthetic, the heart’ that he wanted.

  Reznor tells me that he has always found Garson to be of even temperament, attentive and sharp at taking direction. If he has sometimes had to direct that something was too avant-garde or in the modern jazz idiom for his music then he finds that Garson is swiftly able to be guided how far to reel it in, to the shape or space needed. Generally, however, he just leaves Garson to do his own thing.

  Yet again, like so many others, Reznor identifies Garson’s distinguishing feature as the combination of virtuoso technique with an ability to be spontaneously expressive – in other words with emotional literacy. Reznor had himself in his youth been encouraged to train as a concert pianist, but had decided that such a life was not for him. He saw how the devotion to technique over many years left some virtuosos relatively devoid of spirit or spontaneous emotive fire. He followed the path instead of becoming a composer, multi-instrumentalist and producer, and expressing himself through a variety of channels. In Garson, however, he sees someone who did specialise in one instrument and who applied himself single-mindedly to the discipline of mastering it, yet without having lost his multi-dimensional expressive personality.

  Reznor says that singing his 1994 song ‘Hurt’ live with David Bowie and Mike Garson on piano on tour in 1995, together with hearing (in 2002) that Johnny Cash wanted to cover it, have been two of the proudest moments of his career so far.

  I ask Trent Reznor to sum up his perceptions of Garson overall:

  Mike reminds me of what’s possible… He plays and speaks from the heart and is able to maintain humanity and compassion. You can feel it behind the notes that he plays and in his approach to music. He’s generous, inspiring, accommodating. I feel like when I’m around him I step my game up. He really has it together. I think I work pretty hard but when I see him I see the results of focus, and what seems to be a real commitment to excellence, and I find that very impressive.

  On 7 November 1997 Garson was in Buenos Aires, Argentina, again touring with David Bowie, this time on the Earthling tour, with Reeves Gabrels on guitar, Gail Ann Dorse
y on bass and Zachary Alford on drums. It was the last date of the tour and the support band were No Doubt. He had not known them previously but had been watching them on stage and was impressed. Gwen Stefani would be ‘climbing up scaffolding on stage, singing and spitting into the audience, the drummer would be playing naked, the audience always loved it, and they were just characters’. Their keyboard player/trombonist Gabrial McNair and Garson became friends; Garson even gave McNair a piano lesson. Two years later No Doubt were recording ‘Too Late’, a track for their Return of Saturn album, with string orchestration by Paul Buckmaster, who had worked as an arranger on David Bowie’s song ‘Space Oddity’ in 1969 as well as on many of Elton John’s albums.

  No Doubt were finding the arrangement too crowded so they decided to hold it back, and a much more rock style version, with vocals, appears on the album. But they still had the beautiful orchestration of the other version, and decided to put it on the end of the album as a bonus track, with Garson on piano. It was produced by Glen Ballard, who wrote ‘Man in the Mirror’ for Michael Jackson, and appears as a hidden track about five minutes after the end of the album. Garson describes it as ‘just movie theme stuff but gorgeous’ and says that he had a wonderful time working with Gwen Stefani and the band. Stefani was sobbing as she stood in the studio and heard this piano version for the first time, as she felt it brought an aspect of her music to life in a special way which she had not heard before, and this cemented an enduring bond of friendship between her and Garson.

  In 2005, Gwen Stefani was playing a solo show in Las Vegas as part of her Harajuku Girls tour. She arranged with Garson that she might bring him up on stage to join them to play on ‘Long Way to Go’. He was in the front row with his family. Zachary Alford was on drums, Gail Ann Dorsey on bass. Stefani’s keyboard player and musical director, Kris Pooley, had sent Garson the song just three days before. There were 7,000 people in the audience. There was an M-Audio keyboard on stage but with a piano sample, using Reason software. It was ‘as if some of the young crowd in the audience were not used to hearing even the sound of a piano’, recalls Garson. He played an extended introduction and a long piano solo at the end, and felt he was really able to ‘stretch out quite a bit’, adding that it was ‘a total joy’ for him. He comments that she is one of the few successful artists who has retained her humanity, dignity, sweetness and humility through all of the fame.