by Pat Gilbert
Bowie performs at a party for deejay Rodney Bingenheimer in Los Angeles, January 1971.
The Bowies at home with three-week-old Zowie, now better known as Duncan Jones, in June 1971.
The promotional tour, organized by Mercury’s new PR agent Ron Oberman—a fervent Bowie apostle—moved on from the US capital to Philadelphia, New York, Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, and Houston before winding up in San Francisco and Los Angeles. In New York, Bowie was introduced to the eccentric musician-poet Moondog and was thrilled to watch his heroes the Velvet Underground perform at the Electric Circus, cornering its ice-cool frontman afterward to explain what a huge fan he was. Only later would he learn that he’d been talking to Doug Yule and not Lou Reed, who had left the group a few months before. For the West Coast leg of his trip, Bowie was shadowed by Rolling Stone writer John Mendelsohn, who was intrigued to discover that the obscure British “folk singer” he’d been dispatched to meet at San Francisco International Airport wore a dress and carried a purse. Interviewing Bowie in a hotel room, Mendelsohn was enchanted by Bowie’s humor, roving intellect, and gift for self-promotion. He also admitted to developing a crush on him, though that night he would lose out to Bowie in a competition to bed a female groupie.
“He referred to pop music as the ‘Pierrot medium,’” Mendelsohn later noted in a Q magazine Bowie special. “I hadn’t a clue what he was on about. He seemed to have an extensive agenda and was happy to pose his own questions. He said something about being caught in bed with Raquel Welch’s husband.… I suspect he thought it would make it into print and get him some attention. It made it into print—in Rolling Stone.” It was while journalist and singer were visiting a radio station in San Jose that, according to Mendelsohn, Bowie first heard “I Wanna Be Your Dog” by Iggy Pop’s group the Stooges. The song had a profound effect on Bowie, his radar ever attuned to the hip and unusual. By the time he returned to the UK a few days later, he’d already completed three new songs with heavy shades of both the Stooges and the Velvet Underground that would, in time, ensure his immortality: “Moonage Daydream,” “Ziggy Stardust,” and “Hang On to Yourself,” the latter loosely demoed in Los Angeles with rocker Gene Vincent on backing vocals.
The original single release of “Moonage Daydream,” credited to the Arnold Corns.
Back in London, the poor sales of “Holy Holy,” issued as a single in January, provided further evidence that Bowie’s career as a solo artist was all but dead in the water and that he should indeed concentrate on the role of backroom songwriter. For this purpose, he planned to create a fictitious group called Arnold Corns (after the Pink Floyd song “Arnold Layne”), to be fronted by Freddie Burretti, his flamboyant friend from El Sombrero. Arnold Corns—in reality a youthful trio called Rungk—set to work recording “Moonage Daydream” and “Hang On to Yourself” but encountered a major stumbling block: Burretti couldn’t sing a note. This meant Bowie had to step in to record the vocals, but lame backing tracks did the songs few favors, and the resulting single barely registered on its release in May.
Meanwhile, Chrysalis, understandably eager for a return on their £5,000 investment, punted another new Bowie song to Herman’s Hermits singer Peter Noone, then launching his solo career. His almost comically cheesy version of the future Bowie touchstone, “Oh! You Pretty Things,” featuring Bowie on piano, reached No. 15 in May, at last vindicating Bob Grace’s faith in Bowie’s talent. Amid this flurry of activity, Philips finally released The Man Who Sold the World in Britain, with a different cover showing Bowie, resplendent in his favorite Mr. Fish man-dress, reclining like a wilting fin-de-siècle aesthete on the chaise longue at Haddon Hall. Bowie did virtually nothing to promote the year-old album except perform at a BBC live session in June. By then, with his Mercury contract due to expire, the game plan had dramatically changed. Recognizing the exceptional quality of his recent material, he decided to piece together a brand-new band to work on a new solo album. The group, soon to known as the Spiders from Mars, featured two familiar faces, Mick Ronson and Woody Woodmansey, plus yet another of their friends from Hull, bassist Trevor Bolder. All three moved into Haddon Hall, where Bowie and Angie were coping with another new occupant—their baby, Zowie Duncan Haywood Jones, born on May 30.
With this unusual domestic setup, the scene was set for the creation of two of the greatest and most influential albums in rock history—and the evocation of a fictional musical character who would become almost as famous as his creator.
The space oddity in his “space shirt,” December 1969.
CHAPTER 3
1971–1972
Leper Messiah
Before there was Ziggy Stardust, the flame-haired high priest of glam rock, there was “Ziggy Stardust” the song. When it was written, Bowie’s Ziggy persona had yet to be created, as had the fictional band of the song’s story, the Spiders from Mars. The Bowie who wrote “Ziggy Stardust” in the early months of 1971 still had long blond hair and favored Mr. Fish–designed man-dresses. But somewhere in Bowie’s mind, the idea of blending his own personality with that of a fantastical rock star had taken root.
The formation of what would become Ziggy’s backing group, the Spiders from Mars, occurred in early June 1971 as Bowie readied himself for a BBC Radio in-concert recording for John Peel’s Sunday Show. A couple of days before the session, Bowie had phoned his estranged guitarist Mick Ronson at home in Hull and asked him to corral drummer Woody Woodmansey and a bassist—another veteran of the Hull rock scene, Trevor Bolder—and bring them down to Haddon Hall to rehearse. Ronson, licking his wounds after the failure of his group Ronno, jumped at the chance. So the three musicians, complemented by Bowie’s old school friend George Underwood and former lover Dana Gillespie, assembled at London’s Paris Cinema Studio to perform a set including several songs destined for Bowie’s next album, Hunky Dory. These included “Kooks,” an enchanting acoustic number inspired by the arrival of his new baby boy, Zowie (and written after a day spent listening to Neil Young’s After the Goldrush), “Andy Warhol,” and the hit he’d provided for Herman’s Hermits’ Peter Noone, “Oh! You Pretty Things.”
Bowie and drummer Woody Woodmansey (background), the fourth Spider, during the early Ziggy period.
In the pub afterward, Bowie—who hadn’t performed with a band since the last Hype show a year earlier—was convinced the recording had been a disaster and that his career was over. But within days, he and the group were working at Trident in Soho on a new album with former Beatles engineer Ken Scott producing and Mick Ronson directing the musical arrangements. At a meeting at Scott’s home, Bowie and his publisher Bob Grace had decided on a track listing that favored acoustic- and piano-based songs over the singer’s more rock-y numbers, which meant that the glam anthems “Ziggy Stardust,” “Hang On to Yourself,” “Star,” and “Moonage Daydream” were set aside for future use. The plan was that Hunky Dory’s key tracks would be “Changes,” “Oh! You Pretty Things,” “Quicksand,” and a remarkable song that had come into Bowie’s head one afternoon while shoe shopping in Lewisham titled “Life on Mars?.”
Bowie and the Spiders from Mars give the first televised performance of “Starman” on the appropriately named Lift-Off with Ayshea. Bowie is flanked by bassist Trevor Bolder and guitarist Mick Ronson at ITV Studios, London, June 15, 1972.
The notion that Bowie’s stockpile of new material was strong enough to stretch over more than one album suggested a supreme new confidence in the singer’s abilities, and indeed Bowie and manager Tony Defries were suddenly dreaming up grand schemes for Bowie’s resurrected solo career, chief among them launching him in the United States. This wasn’t as fanciful as it seemed: Defries was already scheduling a three-week US tour for Marc Bolan, who’d spent most of the year in the highest reaches of the UK charts with T. Rex. With Bowie’s former record label, Philips, strong-armed out of the picture, Defries and his business partner Laurence Myers were funding the Trident sessions (and therefore owning the tapes) via their compan
y Gem. By the end of July, there was enough material in the bag for Defries to fly to New York with a five-song acetate to court RCA Records, the American label that in the 1960s had grown into one of the world’s biggest imprints thanks to Elvis Presley.
Andy Warhol and one of his leading ladies attend a press conference to announce his new play, Pork, which premiered in the summer of 1971. Bowie’s first meetings with the art icon were inauspicious, at best.
Two weeks into the Hunky Dory sessions, on June 23, Bowie appeared on his own at the Glastonbury Fayre, the precursor to today’s Glastonbury Festival. Because of a curfew imposed the night before, Bowie’s slot had been pushed to the next day, when he appeared at sunrise to play to a field of mainly sleeping hippies. His set, performed on keyboards and twelve-string acoustic, included “Kooks,” which he introduced by explaining he was married to an American lady (“round of applause, please”) who’d recently presented him with a son (already “three feet taller than I am”). He also previewed “Quicksand,” “Changes,” “Song for Bob Dylan,” and “Oh! You Pretty Things,” the latter hampered by a stage-invading Scandinavian girl tripping on acid, to whom Bowie quipped, “This is about the homo superior, love—you’re letting the lyrics down badly.” The set ended with a rousing rendition of “Memory of a Free Festival,” by which time many of the sleeping revelers had stirred and were rewarding Bowie’s efforts with a dawn chorus of rapturous applause. Moved by the ovation, he confided to his audience that he didn’t do gigs anymore: “I got so pissed off with working and dying a death every time I worked… it’s really nice to have somebody appreciate me for a change.”
Bowie would soon discover he was appreciated in places he was completely unaware of. On August 2, the first UK production of the outrageous off-Broadway play Pork was staged at the Roundhouse. Inspired by Brigid Polk, one of Andy Warhol’s starlets, it featured nudity, masturbation, transsexuality, and a wonderfully blank portrayal of Warhol by actor Tony Zanetta. The play was tailor-made for Angie and Bowie’s outré tastes, though in a curious twist, several principal members of the American cast were already Bowie fans, having been impressed by John Mendelsohn’s account in Rolling Stone magazine of the dress-wearing singer’s visit to the States earlier in the year.
Bowie at the piano, Haddon Hall, spring 1971.
Eager to meet him, three of Pork’s stars—Leee Childers, Kathy Dorritie, and Wayne County—cornered their quarry at a gig Bowie and Ronson were playing at the Country Club on Haverstock Hill, just up the road from the Roundhouse. At first, they found Bowie shy and unassuming and his gregarious wife far better company. But when invited back for a party at Haddon Hall, the charismatic David Bowie character they’d read about came to life, and they quickly fell under his spell—particularly Tony Zanetta, whose ability to bewitch those around him matched Bowie’s own. Soon, the two men were fast friends, much to the bemusement of Ronson, who would remain uncomfortable with the attentions he received from the sexually unconventional American visitors. Bowie and Angie, however, were in their element, and the Pork cast’s outlandish personalities excited Bowie’s interest in creating a more outrageous persona for himself.
Bowie with his former girlfriend, Dana Gillespie, the actress and singer, around the time she recorded vocals for the Ziggy Stardust LP.
A print ad for Bowie’s fourth album, Hunky Dory, recorded in the summer of 1971 but not released until the week before Christmas.
After the final touches were added to Hunky Dory, including Rick Wakeman’s rococo piano parts, played on Trident’s Bechstein piano (the very same one that Paul McCartney had used on “Hey Jude”), Defries flew back to New York in September for further meetings with RCA, this time with Bowie, Angie, and Ronson in tow. Defries’s pitch to RCA was simple: Elvis, its biggest star, was no longer selling millions of records, and now, just as the Beatles had reshaped the 1960s, so David Bowie was poised to become the greatest artist of the 1970s. The proof may not have been evident in his record sales, but it was clearly apparent in the songs on Hunky Dory and in the man himself. David Katz, RCA’s head of A&R, may not have entirely bought Defries’s line, but he recognized Bowie’s potential and signed him for a multi-album deal, with an immediate payment of $37,500 to secure the Hunky Dory tapes, and half that amount again as an advance against the next album Bowie delivered. RCA also paid for the right to re-release Bowie’s two Philips long-players, which Defries had acquired from the singer’s former label. According to Bowie biographers Peter and Leni Gillman, the deal resulted in a direct payment of £4,000 to Bowie, with a monthly salary of £400. Ronson, meanwhile, was to receive a wage of £30 a week, Bolder £20, and Woodmansey a mere £15.
The cover artwork for Hunky Dory, designed by Bowie’s friend George Underwood.
While terms were finalized, Bowie was introduced to New York’s cultural elite, beginning with Andy Warhol. The meeting was brokered by Tony Zanetta and took place at the Factory, then in the Decker Building at 33 Union Square West. Warhol frequently filmed his visitors, and footage exists of Bowie dressed in a Pierrot costume performing a mime routine for the artist. The famously poker-faced Warhol seemed unimpressed, however, though not to the degree he did when Bowie played him an acetate of “Andy Warhol,” a song that gently satirized the mystique surrounding the icon and ended with a sleeping Warhol being sent away on a ship. Warhol responded by leaving the room. “He absolutely hated it,” Bowie recalled in a BBC Radio interview in 1997. “He was cringing with embarrassment. I think he thought I really put him down in that song, and it really wasn’t meant to be that.” Warhol did, however, pay Bowie a compliment—on his bright yellow stack-heeled shoes, a present from Marc Bolan. But that was about it. “He had nothing to say,” Bowie said. “Nothing at all.”
A pair of picture-disc editions of “Life on Mars?” which was released as a single at the peak of Bowie mania in 1973.
As if to further connect the real world of Warhol’s New York with the one he imagined, Bowie arranged to have lunch with Lou Reed at a restaurant called the Ginger Man near Lincoln Park. Reed had, of course, been a hero of Bowie’s since he’d heard a pre-release disc of The Velvet Underground & Nico way back in 1967, and Hunky Dory’s “Queen Bitch” was a brazen homage to Reed with its dirty guitars, neon-lit street poetry, and half-spoken vocals. Both men were cult artists destined for international success on the same record label, RCA, but in terms of their musical achievements, Reed was already a star and let Bowie know it. That same night Bowie, Defries, and Ronson—Angie was visiting her parents in Connecticut—went to the Factory set’s favorite hangout, Max’s Kansas City, where Bowie was introduced to another of his American inspirations: Jim Osterberg, alias Iggy of the Stooges.
Guitarist Mick Ronson was Bowie’s key musical foil during the Ziggy era. He was photographed here at the Music Hall in Cleveland, Ohio, on September 22, 1972.
The first night of Ziggy Stardust tour, January 29, 1972.
After hearing the Stooges on his trip to the United States earlier in the year, Bowie had been smitten, and the band’s dark metallic rock was a key ingredient in several songs that took their final shape on his return to Britain in February, including “Moonage Daydream,” “Hang On to Yourself,” and “Ziggy Stardust.” By the summer of 1971, the Stooges had disbanded and Iggy was a heroin addict, lodging at his former manager Danny Fields’s apartment in Manhattan. When news came that an unknown skinny white English dude wanted to meet him, Iggy initially couldn’t be bothered to drag himself away from the James Stewart movie he was a watching on TV. Eventually he did rouse himself, so Bowie was able at last to encounter in person the mythical rock ’n’ roll miscreant he’d heard so much about. Though Iggy was in poor shape, his radiant charm remained undimmed, and Bowie invited him to take breakfast with him and Defries at the Warwick Hotel the following morning. By the time the coffee pots were empty and the plates cleared away, Defries was informing a dumbstruck Iggy that he would be signing him to his Gem production company, and that,
once the singer had cleaned up, he would land him a new record deal (which he did, with Columbia).
According to some reports, amid all the madness, Bowie also managed to see his half-sister Kristina, who was living in New York after a spell in Canada. A late addition to Hunky Dory had been “The Bewlay Brothers,” a haunting song with a strange baroque vocal section and opaque lyrics in which Bowie again appeared to allude to his half-brother Terry, and his debilitating psychotic episodes. This he apparently played to Kristina as they discussed their upbringing and the schizophrenia that recurred in Bowie’s mother’s bloodline.
When Bowie’s entourage returned to London, it took a while to take stock of what had happened. In their short time in New York, they’d landed a big advance from RCA, befriended Andy Warhol and Lou Reed, and brought Iggy into their fold. Defries’s self-image as the ultimate cigar-chomping hustler was becoming a reality, while Bowie’s confidence in himself as an artist was reaching an all-time high. Bedazzled by his own achievements, Defries took the step of appointing Tony Zanetta as his special representative in New York and employed former journalist Dai Davies as Bowie’s publicist. With an ambitious business structure forming around him, Bowie unveiled his new band—featuring Ronson, Bolder, and Woodmansey—on September 25 at a gig at Friars, a venue in a market town of Aylesbury an hour or so outside London. For the past year, Bowie had submerged himself in the role of a stay-at-home songwriter, but Friars would mark—in his own mind, more than anything—the beginning of his transformation into a rock star. After extensive local promotion, around four hundred music fans paid 50 pence each to witness what was, to most of them, simply a show by a struggling artist who hadn’t had a chart hit for two years or played live with a proper group for fifteen months. “We’re going to start slowly till we get the hang of it,” he told the audience, as he launched into a cover of American songwriter Biff Rose’s “Fill Your Heart,” the song which would open the second side of the yet-to-be-released Hunky Dory. By the end of the set (also featuring “Changes” and “Queen Bitch” and topped off with a rendition of the Velvet Underground’s “Waiting for the Man”), the crowd was ecstatic.