The performances that March in New York – recorded for a possible live album – were almost a send-up of The Kinks’ glorious past and the album they had just made; as if Ray realized he had inadvertently laid himself bare. As Phil McNeill smartly concluded: ‘The balance [now] tilted away from desperation and into jovial resignation.’ The shows only reinforced the suspicion voiced in some reviews that Muswell Hillbillies was essentially a satirical work as opposed to a deadly serious one. As a result, when the next breakdown came, no one outside the band had seen the writing on the fold-out inner sleeve.
Compounding Davies’ sense of disillusionment was his foundering relationship with his new record label: ‘When we signed with RCA they thought they were buying Kodak films, “Don’t change the name, just put the Kodak out and it’ll be an instant hit.” . . . But it wasn’t.’ When he wanted some help financing the costs of filming their two March Carnegie Hall shows, the label informed him, ‘We’re not in the talent business, we’re in the record business.’ They had bigger fish to fry.
*
It was not a phrase that ever crossed their lips when Tony Defries came a-knocking. He was most certainly in ‘the talent business’, and nothing was going to stop him making David Bowie the biggest star of the 1970s. Nor did he let RCA in on a little secret when he allowed them to sign Bowie to an exclusive deal covering the next three LPs for the minimal advance of $37,500 per record they would be underwriting most of the costs of the outlandish campaign Defries had already mapped out in his head.
In cahoots with both Bowies, Defries was determined to fulfil the prophecy contained in ‘Star’, one of the many new songs Bowie had penned in the months leading up to his becoming an RCA artist on 9 September 1971 – ‘just watch me now!’ That song would serve almost as a blueprint for Bowie’s first year as the Seventies’ first important pop artist; but it was one largely superimposed on an earlier outline, that of his friend Marc Bolan, who by the time Bowie signed to RCA was proclaiming himself to be the biggest British pop star since The Beatles. Bowie agreed, even if he implicitly called his buddy a whore to a Creem reporter who was in New York for the RCA signing:
David Bowie: The most important person in Europe and England today is Marc Bolan, not because of what he says but because he is the first person who has latched onto the energy of the young once again . . . Rock should tart itself up a bit more, you know. People are scared of prostitution. There should be some real unabashed prostitution in this business. [1971]
The notion of artist as prostitute was not new to Bowie (or Jean Genet). He had told Rolling Stone something similar nine months earlier, just as he was electing to portray himself as a beckoning courtesan on the British cover of The Man Who Sold the World. He was already gearing up to pastiche the entire rock creed while insisting to the increasingly self-important US periodical: ‘What [rock] music says may be serious, but as a medium it should not be questioned, analysed, or taken so seriously I think it should be tarted up, made into a prostitute, a parody of itself.’
And Bolan was showing him the way, harnessing all the energy of TMWSTW (and co-opting producer Tony Visconti into the bargain) for his definitive statement, Electric Warrior, issued in October 1971 and shooting straight to number one in the UK (and a respectable thirty-two in the US). Bolan’s ambition burned brighter but briefer than Bowie’s because to him becoming the quintessential star was an end unto itself. Bowie had always been more ambivalent about the ‘curse’ of fame. Hence Bolan’s astute assessment, offered only a few months before his demise: ‘I never got the feeling from David that he was ambitious . . . David got his drive to be successful once I’d done it with the T. Rex thing.’ (By 1977, Bowie had long eclipsed Bolan‘s fading star.)
What seems to have changed Bowie’s mind was seeing becoming a star as a project in itself, not merely a by-product. As Ken Pitt, still his manager (at least in name) in the spring of 1971, told Johnny Rogan: ‘David had bouts of laziness and I would get a little sharp with him from time to time. Yet the moment he got interested in a particular scheme he outran everybody else. But he had to be turned on and fired with enthusiasm.’ By now it was Tony Defries who was pulling the strings, though their relationship was not formalized until August. Defries would be the Grossman to Bowie’s Dylan, the man who kept him focused on a single goal – stardom.
Defries, never one plagued by self-doubt, believed he could see through Bowie’s many personae. He was also never convinced that Bowie really feared for his sanity. As one ex-Main Man employee witness to the Defries-Bowie dynamic recalled: ‘Defries [once] observed that Terry’s [mental] illness was one of a horde of things that obsessed David for the minute. Like a fickle child, he was always finding something new to preoccupy him. The only thing about Terry’s madness that seemed to be a constant was David’s ability to use it as a public-relations ploy something he would refer to when he wanted to capture someone’s attention or impress a reporter with “truths” about the pain of his existence.’
Not so coincidentally, it was at just the time when Defries was starting to make his presence felt that Bowie quietly subsumed this side of his family history allowing the star in him to take over; until Defries really began to believe this ch-ch-change was for real. This shift was reflected in the songs Bowie now earmarked for his second album of the decade, Hunky Dory, on which he seemed determined to banish those demons previously summoned on TMWSTW. In this sense, Hunky Dory fits neatly with his later description of it as an album that ‘got a lot out of my system, a lot of the schizophrenia’.
A poignant part of that process involved renunciating his brother not only in song but in person; something he now decided was painful but necessary. Bowie’s previous claim that Terry quite liked the Cane Hill asylum was shown to be the purest poppycock when his mad brother did a John Clare, and simply walked out of the place one afternoon in late winter/ early spring 1971. He spent a fortnight sleeping rough before finally turning to his aunt Pat (she found him on her Finchley doorstep, in a highly agitated state). Unable to look after him herself, and remembering how supportive the Bowies had been the previous spring, she took Terry to Haddon Hall. When Angie answered the door, Pat asked if they would mind if he stayed the night, and hopefully they could take him to the doctor’s in Beckenham the following morning. As Angie hesitated, David apparently appeared and said, ‘I’m sorry, we’re busy.’ And that was that. He did not even go out to speak to Terry, who sat in the car throughout the confrontation. It would be two decades before they spoke again. Bowie’s wife could only look on in despair, tinged with a little anger.
It is not clear when exactly Bowie dispensed this crushing rebuff to the brother ‘he idolized’, but it was very probably after he had returned from his February promotional trip to the US, when Terry’s name had been repeatedly invoked to ‘impress a reporter [or two] with “truths” about the pain of his existence’. He had also spent some time with his cousin Kristina, now based in New York, where he again brought up the subject of why Terry was cursed and he himself was left untouched. Whatever the date of Terry’s expulsion from Haddon Hall, the experience seems to have inspired one of Bowie’s most brilliant, if misunderstood, songs, ‘The Bewlay Brothers’, with which he would conclude Hunky Dory, his final offering before putting Defries’ scheme into operation.
‘The Bewlay Brothers’ was the antidote to ‘All the Madmen’, the distance between the two songs being the width of a now-closed circle. The ending even mirrored the babbling coda to the Man Who Sold . . . track, with its schizophrenic double-tracked vocal resembling a cackling gnome. The jointly sung nursery rhyme at song’s end (an overtly Barrettian touch) may well be alluding to Terry’s flight from Cane Hall: ‘Leave my shoes and door unlocked / I might just slip away / Just for the day.’ Other allusions to Terry herein cast him as the more Promethean figure championed in earlier songs and conversation:
Now my brother lays upon the Rocks,
He could be dead, he could be not, he could be
You.
He’s chameleon, comedian, Corinthian and caricature.
But although Bowie had happily trailblazed ‘All the Madmen’ as a song inspired by his brother’s predicament, he was considerably more reluctant to own up to a similar biographical component to this cryptic production. Indeed, he was guarded enough to claim to new producer, Ken Scott, at the album sessions that the song was written ‘specifically for the American market’. When Scott asked him what he meant, he apparently rejoined, ‘Well, the lyrics make absolutely no sense, but the Americans always like to read things into things, so let them read into it what they will.’ He was equally unforthcoming in the (unused) handwritten song-notes intended for the album sleeve, depicting the track as just ‘another in the series of David Bowie confessions’. In fact, it was the last in a series of confessions-in-song written during the extraordinarily fruitful period that preceded his starry guise.
If ‘The Bewlay Brothers’ was intended to serve as a reminder, it quickly became one he would rather forget. It went unperformed with The Spiders from Mars, and even in 1993, when Bowie did address some aspects of his history honestly for a BBC radio retrospective, he still asserted: ‘I saw so little of [Terry] . . . I think I unconsciously exaggerated his importance. I invented this hero-worship to discharge my guilt and failure, and to set myself free from my own hangups.’ It would take another seven years for him to finally address the song’s subject matter directly: ‘[That was] another vaguely anecdotal piece about my feelings about myself and my brother, or my other doppelganger. I was never quite sure what real position Terry had in my life, whether Terry was a real person or whether I was actually referring to another part of me. I think Bewlay Brothers was really about that.’
Back in 1971 he was more worried about any possible lingering legacy from the family’s fucked-up gene pool. And that concern came out in everything he wrote, even in what seemed like a whimsical ‘filler’ song such as ‘Kooks’, written for his newborn son, Zowie. What seemed, on the surface, like little more than a lighthearted exposition on life with ‘a couple of kooks’, voiced a greater concern, one he shared in the album notes: ‘The baby was born and it looked like me and it looked like Angie and the song came out [saying something] like, If you’re gonna stay with us, you’re gonna grow up bananas.’ The song’s debut on a BBC In Concert in early June suggested the father hadn’t quite got ‘All the Madmen’ out of his system as he offered to ‘take the car downtown / And we’ll watch the crazy people race around’, a couplet he wisely expunged from the album version.
And there was another song Bowie specifically cited when he admitted in 1976 that ‘a lot of the [Hunky Dory] songs do . . . deal with . . . schizophrenia.’ That honour he bestowed on ‘Oh! You Pretty Things’, because apparently, ‘according to Jung, to see cracks in the sky is not really quite on23 . . . I hadn’t been to an analyst my parents went, my brothers and sisters and my aunts and uncles and cousins, they did that, they ended up in a much worse state – so I stayed away. I thought I’d write my problems out [instead].’
‘Oh! You Pretty Things’ – which had just become Bowie’s biggest hit since ‘Space Oddity’, albeit with the vocal cords of ex-Herman’s Hermit Peter Noone attached – also flirted with the end of the world, as did the explosive ‘Bombers’, which predicted, ‘We’re in for a big surprise / right between the eyes’, after a nuclear bomb test results in ‘a crack in the world’. But it was not yet time to tell the world the end was nigh, and the latter song was hastily replaced with the vastly inferior ‘Fill Your Heart’ (penned by ‘Biff’ Rose), a Deram-esque return to Anthony Newley territory.
Allowing the old self-doubts to rear up again, Bowie remained unsure what kind of album he wanted Hunky Dory to be. A riveting cover of Jacques Brel’s ‘Port of Amsterdam’ was overlooked entirely (it would not appear for another two years, when it fittingly appeared as the B-side to ‘Sorrow’); as was a cover of Ron Davis’ ‘It Ain’t Easy’, which was put on an eight-track pre-release promo (along with ‘Bombers’ and an alternative ‘Eight Line Poem’), yet three months later failed to make the final cut. Instead, it became the closing track on side one of Ziggy Stardust, where it stuck out like a thore sumb.
Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised to find that for all its attempts to ‘deal with . . . schizophrenia’, Hunky Dory came out pretty schizophrenic itself. Half of it, in Bowie’s mind, ‘reflected my new-found enthusiasm for this new continent that had been opened up to me. It all came together because I’d [just] been to the States.’ ‘Quicksand’ was one such item, an ‘epic of confusion’ which, according to the hastily scribbled notes of Chairman Bowie, was something ‘the calamity of America produced’. With its references to ‘living in a silent film . . . of dream reality’; being ‘drawn between the light and dark’; and repeatedly, ‘sinking in the quicksand of my thought[s]’; it suggested he hadn’t quite mastered the lad insane who still resided inside.
His future direction, though, was more accurately indicated by a trio of intentionally connected songs on side two – ‘Andy Warhol’, ‘Song for Bob Dylan’ and ‘Queen Bitch’. Indeed, when he debuted the three tracks in strict album order at a show in Aylesbury in late September, he broke off between songs to explain to the crowd that he had written ‘a spate of people songs. I got hung up on writing about people – just kinda well-known figures and what they stood for. I believe very much in the media of the streets, street messages.’ ‘Queen Bitch’ was his attempt to emulate The Velvet Underground, having finally got to meet Lou Reed – thanks to Mercury’s A&R man Paul Nelson on a temporary sabbatical from rock criticism. ‘Song for Bob Dylan’ was another song containing sentiments he wasn’t quite ready to take responsibility for. Only in 1976 did he own up to the fact that the track clearly ‘laid out what I wanted to do in rock. It was at that period that I said, OK, if you don’t want to do it, I will.’ In that sense, it was a sister-song to the already-written ‘Star’, which he was holding back for his own second coming.
To his mind, Hunky Dory was just the aperitif. Magnificent a collection as it was, – a votive offering to the RCA A&R department to prove he could write a tune, and craft a radio-friendly album – it was a mere taster. (The album was already being dangled in the label’s faces when Katz was locked in contractual negotiations with Defries.) What they didn’t yet know was that Bowie had already stockpiled another album’s worth of songs – many of which pre-dated those on Hunky Dory – which had a quite different message, and targeted a wholly different audience. In fact he had already hinted at said stockpile of songs to the English music press back in March, boasting to Melody Maker that the just-issued TMWSTW ‘is actually a year-and-a-half old. But I’ve got my next one in the can [sic], and another half completed . . . My writing was schizoid, but it’s much more simple now.’ Saying something similar to Penny Valentine, an early press advocate, he revealed that in the intervening ‘twelve months I’ve already written enough stuff to do another two albums.’
Some songs didn’t make it to either Hunky Dory or Ziggy Stardust. At least one suggested he was not as free of the influence of his ‘alternating Id’ (his expression) as he liked to claim. ‘The Man’, a.k.a. ‘Shadow Man’, was one song that survived all the way from Haddon Hall to the Ziggy sessions, but not to the album itself. Again, Bowie found himself fearfully tap-dancing with another doppelganger, perhaps the future self who could still fulfil the family curse: ‘Look in his eyes and see your reflection . . . the Shadow Man is really you . . . Your eyes are drawn to the road ahead / And the Shadow Man is waiting round the bend.’ (An atmospheric 2000 studio recording, for the aborted Toy album, suggests he may have finally gleaned the Shadow Man’s identity.) Meanwhile, Bowie spent the months leading up to the Hunky Dory sessions demoing the likes of ‘Lady Stardust (Song for Marc)’, ‘Hang On to Yourself’, ‘Ziggy Stardust’, ‘Star’, ‘Moonage Daydream’, ‘Right On Mother’, ‘How Lucky You Are’ and ‘Looking for a Friend’ at a cheap London demo studio leas
ed from Radio Luxembourg.
Every demo seemed to show someone more than a little starstruck. But he still wasn’t sure it was for him, and throughout 1971 he anxiously farmed out a number of these demos to would-be ciphers also seeking chart success, even releasing the Luxembourg prototypes of ‘Moonage Daydream’ and ‘Hang On to Yourself’ under the pseudonym of Arnold Corns (and then shamelessly concocting a story that claimed a gay dresser of his acquaintance was the voice of Corns). But once Defries came on board, he was quickly disabused of these Warholian notions of stardom by proxy. Bowie later dated his decision to get ‘down to serious writing and trying not to diversify too much’ to Hunky Dory’s completion, admitting that previously he ‘would try and get involved in anything that I felt was a useful tool for an artistic medium, from writing songs to putting on art shows and street theatre . . . [I was] trying to be a one-man revolution.’
What he didn’t do, certainly not at the time, was credit either Defries or his wife Angie with key roles in the process (and even in 1976, when embroiled in a protracted dispute with his now ex-manager, he was only half-prepared to come clean, crediting Defries ‘and the [other] crazies who were running around at that time’, but not the wife). But then, as Angie points out in one memoir: ‘My husband . . . possessed the unfortunate character defect of needing everything he did to be his own idea, even when most of his ideas really came from other people.’ Another former confidant saw only too clearly that David was initially living out Angie’s fantasy, not his own:
All the Madmen Page 18