All the Madmen

by Clinton Heylin

  David Bowie: [By then] my drug addiction [had] really started . . . You could pin it down to the very last months of the Ziggy Stardust period . . . [It was] enough to have probably worried some of the people around me. And after that . . . we got into Diamond Dogs, that’s when it was out of control. From that period onwards I was a real casualty. [1999]

  It would take Bowie a good while to see the trap he had sprung for himself. By 1978, when he had again reverted to the persona of the detached observer (and was, as such, generally unengaging), he finally felt ready to admit that constructing such personae ‘mixed me up quite a lot. I began to think I was Ziggy. And then, of course, Ziggy began to merge with the others, and I wasn’t quite sure whether I’d completely dropped the last one or not. Bits and pieces would keep creeping through.’

  Even the metaphorical killing of an alter ego requires a steady hand and an iron will. And Bowie was still not quite ready to debrief his audience about this future that would ‘have very little to do with rock and pop’, appealing as the whole idea sounded in the immediate aftermath of his Hammersmith farewell. The final Ziggy show merely meant the end of The Spiders from Mars, who back in April had been cruelly but prophetically described by NME’s Nick Kent as ‘just a useful appendage to the current fantasy’.

  By October, Bowie had been persuaded to make one ‘final commitment to Ziggy as a performance character’, an American TV show called The Midnight Special. The producer, Burt Sugarman, approached Bowie ‘about doing something which personified my theatre shows but . . . I had “retired” Ziggy earlier that year’. The 1980 Floor Show, as it was billed, was a curious melange of Aladdin Sane, the more narcissistic parts of Pin Ups, and one song from the concept album he now planned to do around George Orwell’s 1984, ‘Dodo (You Didn’t Hear It from Me)’. Only ever broadcast in the States, the hour-long special left this US TV audience mystified, converted and/or appalled in roughly equal measures. But it seemed like he was having fun, displaying that abiding penchant for deviant visual imagery by dressing up Marianne Faithfull as a nun as they dueted on ‘I Got You, Babe’, while a series of fake hands clasped the naughty bits of his own outlandish stage outfit. Despite this primetime push, though, year’s end brought no sign of either Pin Ups nor Aladdin Sane replicating Ziggy’s moderately solid sales Stateside, let alone their UK position, where both comfortably topped the album charts.

  And still Bowie refused to close the circle on Ziggy. As his English fans mourned Ziggy’s demise, and American fans wondered what came next in the masterplan for world domination, he began work on the conceptual successor to Aladdin Sane, Diamond Dogs. Once again, he had in mind ‘a quasi-Orwellian concept album about a future world where the clockwork orang-utans skulk like dogs in the streets while the politicians etc, and blah blah blah’, to quote Lester Bangs’ sarcastic swipe at the album as released. But even as Bowie was hard at work turning his ‘quasi-Orwellian’ remake of 1984 into something original, if only rock & roll, he still found that ‘every time I got close to defining [Ziggy] more, he seemed to become less than what he was before’.

  At the turn of the year, in conversation with William Burroughs – the arch-exponent of the ‘cut-up’ technique to which Bowie disingenuously attributed much of his lyric writing – he again resumed talking about plans to turn Ziggy Stardust into a theatrical production. Determined to impress a sceptical Burroughs, the story he now built around the ‘Ziggy’ songs confirmed that the further he got away from his original self-conscious aspirations, and gave in to paranoia, the more eccentric his ideas became:

  The [proposed] production of Ziggy will have to exceed people’s expectations of what they thought Ziggy was . . . The time is five years to go before the end of the earth. It has been announced that the world will end because of lack of natural resources. Ziggy is in a position where all the kids have access to things that they thought they wanted. The older people have lost all touch with reality and the kids are left on their own to plunder anything. Ziggy was in a rock & roll band and the kids no longer want rock & roll. There’s no electricity to play it. Ziggy’s adviser tells him to collect news and sing it, ’cause there is no news. So Ziggy does this and there is terrible news. ‘All the Young Dudes’ is a song about the news. It is no hymn to the youth as people thought. It is completely the opposite . . . [So] Ziggy is advised in a dream by ‘The Infinites’ . . . who are black-hole jumpers . . . to write the coming of a starman, so he writes ‘Starman’, which is the first news of hope that the people have heard. So they latch on to it immediately . . . Ziggy has been talking about this amazing spaceman who will be coming down to save the earth . . . Now Ziggy starts to believe in all this himself and thinks himself a prophet of the future starman. He takes himself up to incredible spiritual heights and is kept alive by his disciples. When the Infinites arrive, they take bits of Ziggy to make themselves real because in their original state they are anti-matter and cannot exist in our world. And they tear him to pieces on stage during the song ‘Rock & Roll Suicide’. As soon as Ziggy dies on stage the Infinites take his elements and make themselves visible.

  Before he completely cracked, Bowie took elements of this still-born fantasy and fused them with the ‘quasi-Orwellian’ to form Diamond Dogs, while simultaneously putting the finishing touches to a new stage show which, to use his own grandiose description, would be ‘Metropolis meets Caligari, but on stage, in colour and [with] a rock ’n’ roll soundtrack’. So much for introducing a series of ‘activities that have very little to do with rock and pop’. The album he finally finished by February 1974 he was almost apologetic about, describing it as another from the ‘usual basket of apocalyptic visions, isolation, being terribly miserable . . . I’m saying the same thing a lot, which is about this sense of self-destruction . . . There’s a real nagging anxiety in there somewhere.’

  Only when he was halfway through another hugely expensive attempt to wow the colonials with the stage show to end all stage shows, did Bowie realize that Ziggy, starved of attention, had finally died of his own accord. It was time to replace soul love with plastic soul. Even as he continued to wonder what he could do to win over the American mainstream, Ziggy Stardust was selling steadily and relentlessly. For all his graft, all it took was time for the rest of America to catch up with their cousins on the coasts, who had got Ziggy straight away. By the end of 1974 Ziggy Stardust had sold close to half a million copies, well in excess of its three Xeroxed successors. And by the time he returned to the US stage again, in 1976, it had become the benchmark for all future Bowie incarnations.

  Part of the explanation is that the Ziggy shows themselves quickly became the stuff of legend, a fact well attested by the fortunate few with a local bootleg outlet from whence they could obtain either or both of the professional-sounding audio documents that those nice men at TMQ and TAKRL had considerately released without obtaining RCA’s okay. Live at Santa Monica, a double album of an October 1972 KSAN broadcast from Bowie’s first-ever LA show, and/or Ziggy’s Last Stand, a single disc of the final Hammersmith show, taken from Pennebaker’s one-hour cinéma vérité version of this historic gig, targeted those very fans on each coast who caught the wave just in time. They were soon essential additions to any self-respecting rock fan’s record collection.

  *

  Equally collectible, and desirable, were the steady trickle of Pink Floyd bootlegs that at the same time served to whet the appetite of fans who had caught the US Dark Side of the Moon shows, and wanted to know – and hear – more. If the English Tour ’72 album took its time making its way over the pond, there was no shortage of live FM ‘in concerts’ of the band from 1970–71 ripe for unofficial release. Meanwhile, the band continued to take its own sweet time coming up with an official version of the show they had been playing now for over a year, still blithely unconcerned at the prospect of being, in Gilmour’s words, ‘bootlegged out of existence’.

  Indeed, such was their belief that the world, or at least their target audience,
would still be waiting patiently by the checkout till when they got around to putting out the ‘real’ album, that they recorded another of their ‘soundtrack’ albums in the interim. The surprisingly cogent Obscured by Clouds – composed for the French film, La Vallée – was recorded between the English and Japanese legs of the Dark Side tour. It included at least one Waters lyric, which really should have been holding hands with the lunatic on the grass, ‘Childhood’s End’: ‘You set sail across the sea of long past thoughts and memories / Childhood’s end, your fantasies merge with harsh realities.’

  Yet the ongoing delays to Dark Side only furthered its momentum both within the record label, and out in the racks. Bhaskar Menon, the US Capitol chairman, thinks ‘the fact that they had played this music in concert was very important [because] I, and a lot of the people who worked at Capitol, knew about it long before the record came out’. Even the fact that Floyd had already informed Capitol they were leaving the label after Dark Side of the Moon didn’t forestall the label’s lavish plans for the album when it was finally ready in the winter of 1973.

  Quite why the band spent so long putting the album together – it was recorded in just thirty-eight days, but the sessions were spread across seven months and did not start until late May 1972 – has never been adequately explained. Certainly by the time Floyd played the Hollywood Bowl in September the album was a fully realized piece. If, as Dave Gilmour told Capital Radio’s Tommy Vance, ‘When we first got [Dark Side] together, took it out and did it in shows, it changed all the time’, by the time they reached the West Coast they had ‘cemented it into being’.

  Fittingly, ‘Speak to Me’ had made its first live appearance at the 28 June show at the Brighton Dome, hastily scheduled to make amends for the ‘abandoned’ performance back in January, when Eclipse was supposed to have been debuted in all its then-glory before the backing tapes broke down. And ‘The Great Gig in the Sky’, musically recognizable, though missing the orgasmic wailing of Clare Torry, had replaced ‘The Mortality Sequence’ by the time of the Hollywood Bowl performance.

  But still the album was not finished, and wouldn’t be until 19 February 1973, a mere two weeks before the Floyd began their third US tour in a year, and just four weeks before they followed Bowie into Radio City Music Hall, willing New Yorkers to pass judgement on their own testament to the capacity of English rock musicians for internalizing some of their more dysfunctional traits. Only at the end of March did EMI (and Capitol) ‘rush-release’ the album, ahead of Bowie’s near-certain chart-topper (to no avail – though Dark Side of the Moon went on to spend a record-breaking 292 weeks in the UK album charts, it never made number one!).

  The show at Radio City really marks the end of Dark Side’s journey – not only was there now a spectacular light show, but the two songs that did not find their berth until they were cut in the studio, ‘The Great Gig in the Sky’ and ‘Time’, at last received form and structure, courtesy of two external partners in the recording process, engineer Alan Parsons and singer Clare Torry; the latter having been brought in at Parsons’ suggestion to improvise vocal sounds that would fit Floyd’s concept for the new ‘mortality sequence’. Neither would receive a share of the great riches that the album would bring, at least not until 2005, when Torry’s threats to bring suit forced a settlement from the band.

  As Torry recalls: ‘They [just] explained the album was about birth, and all the shit you go through in your life and then death. I did think it was rather pretentious [but] of course, I didn’t tell them that.’ Instead, she just let herself go, and although in Gilmour’s opinion, ‘she wasn’t too quick at finessing what we wanted, . . . out came that orgasmic sound we know and love’. No one hearing the album (or indeed the live performances where three girl-singers attempted, and patently failed, to emulate the passion in Torry’s original vocal) can doubt her entitlement to a share of the credit (or cash) her great gig generated.

  Parsons’ own contribution came from a more prosaic place, but it gave ‘Time’ that explosive opening it had lacked to date. As the former EMI engineer himself says, ‘I had recorded [the clocks] previously in a watchmaker’s shop for a quadraphonic sound demonstration record. I went in with a mobile and recorded each one separately, ticking, then chiming.’ Already, Floyd’s new album had been earmarked as a likely candidate for a quadraphonic release, and the band quickly realized that getting the clocks to go around the speakers fit perfectly with the kind of 360-degree sound they had been using in their live set-up for years, until a crescendo of chimes exploded from every corner of the room. Parsons, as an EMI employee, had no recourse to reimbursement for this creative contribution, so contented himself with mentioning his ‘major’ input at every opportunity.

  ‘On the Run’ had also been given an altogether punchier ending. So, rather than drifting into ‘Time’, it ended with ‘some kind of crash’, to co-opt Roger Waters’ chosen phrase. Inevitably, it was the bullish Waters who pushed Gilmour to come up with something more than just another noodling guitar-link. (As Gilmour has openly admitted, ‘[At the time] we were all very, very happy to have a driving force like Roger who wanted to push for these concepts . . . Jointly and severally, we wanted each piece of music to have its own magic.’) The beguiling end result – and its almost universal acceptance – still took everyone aback:

  Dave Gilmour: Until the very last day we’d never heard them as the continuous piece we’d been imagining for more than a year. We had to literally snip bits of tape, cut in the linking passages and stick the ends back together. Finally, you sit back and listen all the way through at enormous volume. [1998]

  Richard Wright: [Dark Side of the Moon] was not a deliberate attempt to make a commercial album. It just happened that way. [But] we knew we had a lot more melody than previous Floyd albums and there was a concept that ran all the way through it. The music was [that much] easier to absorb. [1996]

  Thankfully throughout the tortuous recording process the band’s unity had remained fully intact. As Nick Mason recalled: ‘The recording [of Dark Side . . .] was lengthy but not fraught, not agonised over at all. We were working really well as a band.’ Gilmour, too, remembers ‘massive rows about the way it should be – but they were about passionate beliefs in what we were doing’. However, the shift in direction after the consummation of massive commercial success would ensure that from now on it would be Waters’ way or the highway.

  And Waters liked his song-cycles. As Let It Rock’s John Hoyland highlighted a few months after the album’s appearance: ‘Roger Waters seems to need to apply himself to themes in order to produce really good songs . . . [Although Pink Floyd] have achieved the sombre intensity of feeling that pervades this record before, here it is linked up with an examination of the social causes of madness.’ As it was in this new beginning, so it would be for ever more. For all of Waters’ fears about going insane during the making of Dark Side of the Moon, it would be the album’s epoch-defining success that would actually send him teetering into a form of musical megalomania that would define Floyd’s future direction for the foreseeable.

  *

  Another Sixties pop figure would also have the ‘M’ word thrown at him by his long-standing musical collaborators long before he had completed the project that would occupy him for the last half of 1972 and the whole of 1973. In Pete Townshend’s case, the madness would pass soon enough, though not before he had been rendered unconscious by a well-timed punch from Roger Daltrey or trashed most of The Who’s stage equipment when the same thing that happened to Pink Floyd when first performing Eclipse laid The Who low, early on in a brief UK tour presenting their rock opera, Quadrophenia.

  For the Floyd, it was a mere hiccup; for The Who, it proved a presentiment to the mounting problems a live production of Quadrophenia presented. But then, Townshend’s determination to deliver a rock opera that would knock Tommy into a cocked hat had been fuelling his workaholic ways for three years now. And Quadrophenia was the third rock opera the band had set
out to record in that time, albeit the first to make it to the shops.

  If the autumn 1971 release of Who’s Next proved that Townshend’s songwriting skills remained undiminished, the ideas underlying Lifehouse lingered well into 1972. When The Who assembled at Olympic studios to start work on its successor, the songs Townshend brought to the sessions – tracks such as ‘Put the Money Down’, ‘Relay’, ‘Join Together’ and ‘Long Live Rock’ – did rather seem like vestiges of either Lifehouse or Rock is Dead, two conceits mentioned to the press the previous year (the inclusion of the first three as demos on the 2000 Lifehouse boxed-set confirms such a suspicion).

  At the time, Townshend insisted the intention was ‘to have one side of the [next] album just good tracks, and the other side a mini-opera’, presumably the already trailered Rock is Dead: Long Live Rock. But these weren’t the only tracks he had in a form The Who could record. Aside from the likes of ‘Riot in a Female Jail’ and ‘Can’t You See I’m Easy’, which would stay as demos, there were two songs of a quite different hue, the self-doubting ‘Is It In My Head?’ and the life-affirming ‘Love, Reign O’er Me’. As the band worked with Who’s Next producer Glyn Johns on these two tracks in June 1972, Townshend turned to Johns and said, ‘Look Glyn, I don’t think I can stand this another moment longer – I’ve got to write another opera.’ And this time he would not be dissuaded by Johns’ usual scepticism:

  Pete Townshend: So I went off and started working on that, and [having] got really excited about an idea I had, put about fourteen or fifteen songs together, and went rushing back [to the band] and said, ‘Listen, I’m not gonna play this stuff, but I can tell you . . . [it] knocks shit out of what we have already done, so let’s . . . put a couple [of tracks] out as singles, and I’ll incorporate some [of the] others and do a new opera.’ . . . You know, we couldn’t keep treading water and I [had] had this idea for a project for a long time. It really came out of The Who [having] been going for ten years, and lots of backward looking, and I thought it would be nice to have an album that encapsulated everything The Who had ever done. [1972]