The Rainbow show was a spectacular triumph. The most powerful moment of all came at the start of the evening, when Bolan’s visage was projected on to the back of the stage as Bowie walked to the piano and began to sing, solo, ‘Lady Stardust’, the song for Marc that had led him to this place. But that night was also the death of Bowie’s original theatrical dream. As he later wrote:
At appropriate moments [photographic] stills of rock icons – Presley, Little Richard, Bolan, etc. – were projected to give a semblance of continuity to the Ziggy theme, as though he was already one of them . . . [Yet] ironically enough, this would be the first and last time I would ever stage the Ziggy show on such a scale. We simply couldn’t afford it. For the rest of his existence . . . the Ziggy shows themselves were just great music and rather smart costume changes, the emphasis . . . being on the actor and not the plot.
By this time, Bowie was no longer acting. Ziggy was taking him over. When the American media was invited to the Dorchester in mid-July – after being taken to Friar’s, in Aylesbury, to see a real Ziggy show – the Bowie they met was not entirely in control. Although he assured the reporters, ‘I’m still . . . involved with Ziggy. I probably will be for a few months, getting it entirely out of my system . . . ’ he inadvertently betrayed his divided self by then suggesting, ‘ . . . and then we’ll don another mask’. The mask and the man were slowly fusing into one just as he was learning the truth of Oscar Wilde’s aphorism, ‘Give a man a mask, and he’ll tell you the truth.’ Having created his first ‘extraordinary monster of rock’, Bowie had forgotten that Ziggy’s downfall had been the result of his own messianic fantasies:
David Bowie: When I first wrote Ziggy it was just an experiment; an exercise for me and he really grew out of proportion . . . Ziggy overshadowed everything . . . His own personality [was] unable to cope with the circumstance he found himself in, which was being an almighty prophet-like superstar rocker, who found he didn’t know what to do with it once he got it. It’s an archetype . . . it often happens. [1974]
Now it was all happening to Bowie himself. And he wasn’t sure he had the willpower to resist. As he later confessed: ‘I felt very, very puny as a human. I thought, “Fuck that, I want to be a superman.” I took a look at my thoughts, my appearance, my expressions, my mannerisms and idiosyncrasies, and didn’t like them. So I stripped myself down, chucked things out and replaced them with a completely new personality.’ That ‘new’ personality, entirely created in his own image, began feeding on an inner self as messianic as his brother’s: ‘Everybody started to treat me as they treated Ziggy: as though I were the Next Big Thing, as though I moved masses of people. I became convinced I was a messiah. Very scary.’
And just as he was becoming subsumed by his androgynous alter ego, Bowie learnt that he would at last be taking the show to America for his first US tour. However uptight the UK mass media had proven, it was as nothing to its cousins in the land founded by Puritans. Describing his 1972 arrival four years on, Bowie expressed his amazement that, in America, ‘Sex was still shocking. [So] everybody wanted to see the freak . . . Unwittingly, I really brought that whole thing over [here] . . . Nobody understood the European way of dressing and adopting the asexual, androgynous everyman pose. People all went screaming, “He’s got make-up on and he’s wearing stuff that looks like dresses!”’ (His own record label, RCA, decided not to release the non-album follow-up to ‘Starman’, ‘John, I’m Only Dancing’, because they considered it too risqué to generate radioplay.) At the time, though, he couldn’t wait to introduce the glamorous Ziggy to the colonials.
And so, in September 1972 two English acts who had been flitting around the US charts for the past couple of years without ever setting them alight, brought radical new stage acts to the other side of the pond. It is highly unlikely that either Bowie or the Floyd saw the other as ploughing a furrow akin to the one dug by the now-spectral Syd (though each had a song called ‘Time’). But after five years of English rock tours, with proper powerhouse P.A. systems, Americans were ripe for a little more musical repatriation, though Pink Floyd had barely begun recording the album they were now debuting, and David Bowie was still chasing his first US hit 45.
For Pink Floyd, the September tour, running from the ninth to the thirtieth without ever touching the East Coast, was their second Stateside sortie of the year. The night of their greatest triumph this time around was unquestionably the show at the Hollywood Bowl, when employees of their US label, Capitol, came out in force, and searchlights strafed the L.A. sky during the finale of the now definitively titled, ecstatically received Dark Side of the Moon. (Their US record company chairman enthused, ‘It was like watching [a] great Verdi opera for the first time.’)
A week later, on a different coast, David Bowie took Manhattan for the first time, and almost as a reminder to himself played his own mortality sequence, in the form of a song first introduced at The Rainbow, an acoustic version of Jacques Brel’s ‘My Death’ that served as the prelude to the symbolic summoning of Ziggy that was ‘The Width of a Circle’. By now – as Bowie admitted to a BBC documentary crew shortly after extracting himself from Ziggy’s maws – ‘I was so lost in Ziggy. It was all that schizophrenia.’ Being wholly ‘lost in Ziggy’, Bowie was starting to believe he should give Ziggy a whole album of his own and, who knows, this time he might manage to sustain the basic concept all the way through. That was, if he didn’t go crazy in the process.
6. 1972–73: The Reclaiming of America
I went through a stage of trying to analyse what I was doing and play it by their game . . . and the music became pretentious, and I did. Not me, but ‘I’ through my work – because my work was me.
– Ray Davies, 1989
It became easier and easier for me to blur the lines between reality and the blessed creature that I’d created – my doppelganger. I wasn’t getting rid of him at all; in fact, I was joining forces with him. The doppelganger and myself were starting to become one and the same person. Then you start on this trail of psychological destruction and you become . . . a drug casualty at the end of it.
– David Bowie, to Paul Gambaccini, 1983
Dark Side of the Moon . . . though it was largely about him . . . was the record where they escaped from Syd.
– Peter Jenner
The story [of Quadrophenia] begins with the kid sitting on a rock. He’s gone out to this rock in a boat and he’s completely out of his brain . . . This whole thing explains how he got there . . . The whole point of it [all] is that the geezer’s completely mixed up.
– Pete Townshend, 1973
Seven months before Bowie brought Ziggy to New York’s Carnegie Hall, The Kinks were selling out two nights at the same esteemed enclave of the arts. It was less than four months since these London lads had last passed through these plush corridors, but the shows in November 1971 and March 1972 were as different as chalk and Camembert. For some time now Ray Davies had been bleating about how he would ‘like to develop a more professional stage act – not slick, but a complete act that’s entertaining. And not just a string of our best-known songs.’ He now seized his chance.
Before the resumption of shows in the new year, Davies had decided it was time for a wholesale overhaul of The Kinks’ set. After four concept albums they had never really toured with, he was suggesting he’d ‘like to do a presentation based around our 1969 [sic] Village Green album and take it around small-sized halls . . . like a village theatre type of thing’, but save for the reintroduction of the title track in the year’s set, this was another idea destined to be put on hold. When it came time to unveil the new set at The Rainbow (for a BBC broadcast) at the end of January, he again hedged his bets, sandwiching a couple of cuts each from Arthur and Muswell Hillbillies between the usual hits of yesteryear.
But he was still determined to break the shackles of the band’s history – to draw a line beneath the Sixties and start afresh, and Carnegie Hall seemed as good a place to start as any. So it was
that on 2 March at Carnegie, he unveiled a show the central ballast of which was the last two Kinks albums, which was as close as Davies had yet come to renouncing his prolific past. Opening the show with a burst of songs from Lola Versus Powerman, he played just ‘Sunny Afternoon’ and a crowd-pleasing encore of ‘You Really Got Me’/ All Day and All of the Night’ from the band’s so-called classic era31. The core of the night’s ‘entertainment’ was a selection of songs from Muswell Hillbillies, eight of them, to the accompaniment of the Mike Cotton Brass Band, intermittently interspersed with brief, ersatz renditions of the kind of music-hall favourites the characters who peopled Muswell Hillbillies might have sung themselves (‘Banana Boat Song’, ‘Mammy’, ‘Baby Face’). For those moments, he was back home at one of the family singalongs. The audience and critics, though, were left largely mystified.
For those who didn’t get the joke, Davies proceeded to issue the bulk of the Hillbillies portion of the Carnegie show – and a smattering of those oddball music-hall covers – as the second volume in The Kinks’ first two-disc set, Everybody’s in Showbiz, hastily constructed over the summer and rush-released in August. As NME’s Phil McNeill duly observed, it was ‘a curious choice of material, as the renditions were not so different from what had come out just the previous year, except with the balance tilted away from desperation and into jovial resignation. Music hall ruled OK.’ Band-members were nonplussed by the thinking behind the live element of this extravagant gesture on RCA’s part.
John Gosling: I don’t know if Ray was trying to make a statement [on Everybody’s in Showbiz] but he put the worst tracks on the live side; they were rubbish. Old music-hall songs, all the camp stuff at the expense of the decent hits. At the time you wonder what the hell he’s doing, but in hindsight he was obviously making a statement about the band. It wasn’t just about hits for him.
That Davies felt ‘it wasn’t just about [the] hits’ had long been obvious. What he was going to do about it was less clear. While The Who cleared their own decks later that year with a definitive reminder of their days as a singles band, Meaty, Beaty, Big and Bouncy, The Kinks’ former US label, Reprise, ‘retaliated’ for their defection to RCA by issuing a rarities-heavy double album, The Kink Kronikles, which, to Davies’ immense annoyance, charted higher than Muswell Hillbillies. But in order to escape a glorious past, he needed songs that had an equivalent resonance with his audience – and perhaps telling them to count the blessings of an obscure existence was not the best way to reach them.
The songs on the studio part of Everybody’s in Showbiz – which included The Kinks’ last UK hit single, ‘Supersonic Rocket Ship’ – were largely reflections on the curse of rock stardom, but at a time when Davies was no longer England’s champion songsmith and maybe not even a contender. Thankfully, two songs put him in with a chance of reclaiming his crown. ‘Celluloid Heroes’, which gave the album its title, turned the mirror around on ‘Oklahoma USA’, showing the reality underlying that twinkling image up on the screen: ‘People who worked and suffered and struggled for fame.’ Meanwhile, the heart-rending ‘Sitting in My Hotel’ updated the concerns of ‘All of My Friends Were There’, that song about his 1966 breakdown, as the evidence suggested he was heading that way again:
If my friends could see me now . . .
They would tell me that I’m just being used
They would ask me what I’m trying to prove.
They would see me in my hotel . . .
Writing songs for old-time vaudeville revues,
All my friends would ask me what it’s all leading to.
If Davies’ response offstage was to write more songs of self-doubt, onstage he made the Muswell Hillbillies songs ever more indicative of a man on the brink. The introduction to the live ‘Acute Schizophrenia Paranoia Blues’ – ‘Now I warn you it’s a really, really heavy number; if you can’t take it, leave the building’ – made it clear he didn’t think the pastiche of musical styles was serving to obscure its underlying sensibility.
The highlight of those 1972 shows was, in fact, a full-blown brass-band version of Alcohol’, which by allowing Ray to act as the souse in the song was becoming an excuse for him to imbibe enough to find release from being himself. The song was always a cautionary tale, but now it was one he did not always choose to heed: ‘I’ve got this drink in my hand, and again I’ve got a character . . . and I have to become that character, so I start drinking. One night I nearly finished a bottle of tequila during that song.’ Sure enough, the inevitable occurred: ‘All of a sudden you become what you’re pretending to be. You play the role you’ve written for yourself, and a bit of it rubs off . . . And if you play that show night after night, you start to think, “Hang on, how much of me is there in this?”’
Once again it was brother David who was the first to express real concern, knowing he would bear the brunt of any encroaching breakdown. Having been around a crazed Ray for such a long time, he was of the opinion that, for his brother, any schizophrenia was an intrinsic part of his creativity: ‘The whole [creative] process is schizophrenic. Look at . . . the imaginary characters [he creates].’ Perhaps David had been around his brother a little too long (he would later claim: ‘Schizophrenia is quite normal, I think . . . I feel that it’s a necessary part of the mind’).
For those outside the Davies family circle, proof that Ray was spiralling downwards came when he began to talk about, and in the voice of, his alter ego. It would not be ‘his’ first or last appearance. Early on in X-Ray, his 1994 autobiography, Davies wrote (in the third person!) about this constant ‘war with some alter ego whom he felt was trying to suppress him all his life . . . This mysterious dark figure . . . was always looming in his subconscious, looking for an opportunity to knock him from his pedestal.’ By then, this alter ego (who at some point acquired the moniker ‘Max’) had become a familiar figure in Ray Davies interviews.
Alluding to ‘him’ in an interview three months after his July 1973 White City collapse, Davies claimed: ‘He’s gone now and maybe I can [finally] come out.’ But the voice had only been temporarily stilled. Throughout the summer of 1973, Davies continued feeling decidedly boxed in. Describing his then-mindset some time later, the litany of why he had come to feel like such a loser was a lengthy one: ‘I felt bad about playing my hits, I felt bad about writing new stuff; people felt it wasn’t as good. I didn’t really want to hang on to anything. I just wanted to get out. I felt trapped by the job I was doing.’
He had become his very own ‘20th Century Man’, who no longer wanted to be here. On 15 July he found his band booked beneath the equally troubled Sly and the Family Stone at an all-day bash at White City Stadium, playing to a crowd of around 30,000, most of whom knew The Kinks only by their hit singles. Davies decided if he couldn’t blow himself up, he could at least make a very public proclamation that he ‘wanted out’. It was just after a four-song Muswell Hillbillies suite ended with a particularly besozzled ‘Alcohol’ and just as the band segued into the ubiquitous medley of earlier hits that still served as a Kinks finale, Davies placed a can of beer on his head and announced, ‘I quit’:
John Gosling: Nobody knew that he was going to announce his retirement onstage; certainly nobody knew he was going to do it with a can of beer balanced on his head! He used to put across this persona of being a bit of a lad and a drinker but he wasn’t really that. But at White City I think he was really out of it for once, and shortly after that he tried to commit suicide.
There was a good reason why Ray was so out of it. He had been mixing up his medicine, self-medicating himself into oblivion. His wife had just told him their marriage was over, and with a future stretching out ahead which that to comprise writing and performing ‘songs for old-time vaudeville revues’, he reached for the bottle of pills his doctor had given him, telling him, ‘Take one of those when you feel a bit down, it’ll make you feel better.’ As Davies says, ‘I felt down every ten seconds, so I just kept taking them. The next thing I knew I was
in a hospital.’ Only when he collapsed backstage at White City, and was rushed to Whittington Hospital, did the medics realize how close the singer had come to concocting a lethal combination of booze ’n’ pills:
Ray Davies: I did try to kill myself that day. I took what must have been uppers, the whole bottle. I went to Whittington Hospital and I said, ‘My name is Ray Davies and I am dying.’ And they laughed. I had my stage make-up on and a clown’s outfit, and they said, ‘Oh, we believe you. Why don’t you write down the names of two people who are next of kin?’ I wrote the first one. The second one I couldn’t see. I fell over and they knew they had a real case. They dragged me into the ward, got the stomach pump and made me throw up. I remember [feeling] such terrible guilt . . . [and] sending Dave out for some records . . . I put one on – it was Mahler’s ninth, his last symphony, his version of the end of civilization. I could relate to that. I decided I was going to leave the music business completely. [1984]
It was 1966 all over again. And just as in 1966, The Kinks’ management was on the phone to journalists the following day, trying to make light of Ray’s ‘retirement’. Meanwhile, Ray took two weeks off, staying at his brother’s house in Southgate, and listening to anything other than the kind of music that still provided the brothers with their bread and butter. By the start of August, the band were back recording again, though, as John Gosling recalls: ‘We all had to pretend like nothing had happened, so there was this strange atmosphere in the studio all the time. Ray was doing weird things like walking around with glasses with no lenses in and nobody was supposed to say anything. No one did until one of our roadies went up to Ray and said, “What are those glasses for – reading or long distance?” and we fell about.’
All the Madmen Page 23