by Pat Gilbert
Also auditioning for the job was Carlos Alomar, a young New York session musician who, to Bowie’s delight, had worked with James Brown and Chuck Berry. Alomar was firmly in the frame until Defries made it clear that he could only pay him $400 a week—half of what he was earning as a studio musician—so Alomar’s future as one of Bowie’s closest collaborators would have to wait. For a production of the scale he imagined, Bowie needed a musical director, whom he found when he attended a ballet production based on the life of the artist Auguste Rodin. Michael Kamen was a gifted composer who’d studied at the Juilliard School and, perhaps more relevantly, fused classical music and rock in a group called the New York Rock and Roll Ensemble. Kamen recommended a young guitar whiz, Earl Slick, who joined Mike Garson, Herbie Flowers, and drummer Tony Newman (who’d played on several Diamond Dogs tracks) to form the core of the touring band. The addition of two sax players, a percussionist, and a second backing vocalist made it the biggest group Bowie had fronted so far.
To die, to sleep… Bowie channels his best Hamlet at the Universal Amphitheatre in Los Angeles, October 1974.
The band rehearsed for four weeks at RCA’s studios, while Diamond Dogs, with its challenging mix of doomy synthesizer rock, Stones-y grooves, and nightmarish science-fiction imagery climbed to the Top 10 on both sides of the Atlantic. The omens seemed good—though the physical risk involved in staging the show were rammed home when the singer narrowly avoided injury after one of the walkways collapsed in the final dress rehearsals at Port Chester’s Capitol Theatre. The extravaganza, unveiled to the paying public in Montreal on June 14, sent shockwaves rippling through the audience. First, Bowie no longer resembled the red-maned late-era Ziggy mutation of the Diamond Dogs sleeve; instead, his hair was cut into a fringe and he was kitted out in a dashing two-piece blue suit designed by Freddie Burretti. His new image owed a debt to the jazz musicians of the 1940s and had been influenced by Ava Cherry’s description of her musician father’s look as a young man in Chicago, when a broad silk tie and “gouster pants”—pegged trousers held up with suspenders—were all the rage. In fact, some of the items in Bowie’s stage wardrobe were borrowed from Cherry’s father.
The David Live LP, recorded during Bowie’s run of shows at the Tower Theater on the outskirts of Philadelphia during the second week of July 1974.
But if Bowie’s new image was a surprise, then the stage show was a seismic shock. Mock skyscrapers towered thirty feet high, gantries swung back and forth, and platforms rose and fell. Some of the technical aspects of the show were breathtaking and completely alien at that time to rock audiences. A cherry-picker floated Bowie above the audience for the ”liftoff” sequence of “Space Oddity.” During “Sweet Thing,” the singer posed in a moodily lit street scene while dancers writhed as the Dogs; in “Cracked Actor,” Bowie, suitably dressed in a Shakespearean doublet, addressed a skull. For “Panic in Detroit,” Bowie sparred in a boxing ring with an invisible partner in time to the song’s shuffling beat. After “Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide,” the show closed without an encore, only the dramatic announcement, “David Bowie has already left the building.”
The reaction from the critics—and fans—was one of awe, with a local journalist frothing that it was “the most spectacular rock show I’ve ever seen.” Melody Maker concluded the performance was “a combination of contemporary music and theatre that is several years ahead of its time,” a view that few would have challenged. But the astonishing spectacle came at a price, and the thirty-two hours it took to erect the set using fifteen full-time roadies and twenty auxiliary stagehands meant that the production was subsequently scaled down. As the tour crossed North America, there were other difficulties, most comically Bowie being stranded high up on his cherry-picker for six songs after it malfunctioned and a truck containing the stage set ending up in swamp outside Tampa, Florida. But the biggest dramas related to Bowie’s new backing group, who, much to their annoyance, performed throughout the tour behind black drape curtains so as not to detract from the dramatic scenery and intricately choreographed routines. There were also gripes about Bowie’s drug-influenced mood swings, which resulted in sudden freezes and withdrawals. But the most spectacular fallout was over money.
The crunch occurred midway through a six-night stop at Philadelphia’s Tower Theater—a Bowie hotspot if ever there was one—when it became apparent that the show was being recorded for a live album. When confronted, Defries offered each member the union rate of $70, sparking yet another mutiny among one of Bowie’s bands. Flowers, acting as shop steward, informed Bowie that the group was going on strike and would not perform unless the fee was increased to an acceptable level—in this case, $5,000 per musician. With no other option than to pull the show, Defries acquiesced, though, typically, the group would not see the money for several years, and only then after taking legal action.
The resulting double-album, David Live, showed Bowie in transition between his glam-rock phase and his forthcoming infatuation with soul music, played by musicians fearing recriminations if they strayed from the script (a necessity of such a strictly choreographed show). New arrangements of some songs were not to everyone’s taste, such as the supper-club treatments of “All the Young Dudes” and “The Jean Genie” and the ultra-melodramatic chanson rendition of “Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide.” When the first leg of the tour concluded with two nights at New York’s Madison Square Garden on July 19 and 20, the touring party felt a sense of relief. So did Bowie, who already seemed to be tired of the constricting format and was restless to record a different genre of music that he’d become closer to via his relationship with Ava Cherry—soul.
CHAPTER 5
1975–1976
Cracked Actor
In August 1974, a twenty-seven-year-old filmmaker named Alan Yentob was granted rare access to David Bowie to shoot a television documentary for the BBC. Screened five months later, Cracked Actor captured Bowie in the darkest days of his cocaine and amphetamine addiction. With skeletal features and translucent skin, Bowie looked desperately ill, though it was his distracted, twitchy behavior that was the clearest indicator of his enslavement to white powders. In later years, he would reiterate how painful he found the film to watch. But in Yentob’s footage was a sequence where the singer looked surprisingly beaming, happy, and totally in control: in the studio, recording what would become the Young Americans album at Philadelphia’s Sigma Sound Studios.
During a summer break in the Diamond Dogs tour at the end of July, Bowie traveled to Philadelphia to oversee a recording session by Ava Cherry. The location, Sigma Sound, was already a legend in soul circles; in the early 1970s, it was the preferred workplace for producers Gamble and Huff and their Philadelphia International label, whose stars included the O’Jays, Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes, and Billy Paul. Ever since Cherry had taken Bowie to the Harlem Apollo a few months earlier, the singer had become fascinated with contemporary black soul music and Afro-American culture. “Like most English who come over to America,” he told Q magazine in 1990, “I was totally blown away by the fact blacks in America had their own culture, and it was positive and they were proud of it.”
Bowie was particularly taken with Sigma Sound’s house band, the MFSB, and declared his intention to work with them on his next album. As they were busy, except for their percussionist Larry Washington, Bowie instead called up Carlos Alomar and asked him to pull together a group of red-hot soul session players. The first recruit was Main Ingredient’s drummer Andy Newmark, followed by Isley Brothers bassist Willie Weeks. The backing vocalists included Cherry, a then virtually unknown talent named Luther Vandross, and Alomar’s wife, Robin Clark. The last key team member was Tony Visconti, who, though he’d mixed Diamond Dogs and David Live, hadn’t produced a Bowie session since The Man Who Sold the World back in 1970. When Visconti arrived in Philadelphia in early August, the sessions were already underway, and the band and Bowie were in a groove. On the first evening with Visconti present, the extraordinary “Young
Americans” was taped. The song was a perfect encapsulation of the joyous, sophisticated soul sound Bowie was chasing, complete with rousing gospel backing vocals, falsetto notes, and a jazzy sax riff. The lyrics, meanwhile, left the dark visions of Diamond Dogs behind for a bizarre and fractured story about lust, peppered with references to contemporary Americana—President Nixon, Soul Train, and cars such as the Mustang and Cadillac.
The Gouster strikes a pose during the sixth of seven shows at Radio City Music Hall, November 2, 1974.
A poster advertising Bowie’s weeklong stint at Radio City Music Hall as part of his “all new specular show.”
In Yentob’s footage of Bowie conducting the backing vocalists through “Right”—viewable in an extended form in the 2016 BBC documentary Five Years—he’s animated, confident, and knows precisely what he wants, his instructions punctuated by an endearing, slightly nervous laugh. Visconti later described the two weeks at Sigma as “an extended jam,” but nevertheless the foundation of Young Americans was laid down in this short period. The impressive work rate was aided by Bowie’s coke-driven insomnia and reluctance to leave the studio when he did succumb to sleep. But while cocaine kept him working, it also made his voice hoarse, which would become a growing problem in the months ahead. Another difficulty was his relationship with Cherry, which made Angie’s visit to Sigma a tempestuous event.
Bowie’s change of style was a hit with the fans who gathered outside the studio each day—dubbed “the Sigma Kids”—but others weren’t so taken with his change of direction. Defries was chief among them, but that wasn’t the only reason that manager and client clashed that summer. With his new soul-man vibe, Bowie’s extravagant, German expressionist–inspired Hunger City stage set suddenly seemed old hat. When the tour resumed with a residency at L.A.’s Universal Amphitheatre, it was reportedly only the presence of Alan Yentob’s film crew that swayed Bowie to retain the expensive backdrop. Frustratingly, footage of the live performances in Cracked Actor reveal little of the set—though there’s a sense of the show’s grandeur in the footage of Bowie singing into a telephone receiver on “Space Oddity,” high atop the moving cherry-picker.
The Los Angeles shows saw Bowie further embrace his “gouster” image, stunningly captured in the portraits that Terry O’Neill took of Bowie and actress Elizabeth Taylor around that time. The two icons had been guests at a party thrown for Dean Martin’s son Ricci, attended by John Lennon, whom Bowie turned his back on—either in a coke-addled state, or in trepidation, or both—before retiring to another room. Meanwhile, the numerous music celebrities came along to see his performances, including Diana Ross and the Jackson Five, plus one of Bowie’s oldest friends whose star he’d now sensationally eclipsed: Marc Bolan. Also invited was Iggy Pop, who a year after falling out with Bowie over the mix of Raw Power—which had stiffed on its release in February 1973—was no longer signed with MainMan and didn’t have a record deal. Beaten up in the parking lot, he never made the show.
An edgy Bowie plays with his cane during his appearance on The Dick Cavett Show, broadcast on December 5, 1974.
Yentob shadowed Bowie during a ride into the desert in car driven by the singer’s new security man, Tony Mascia, a former sparring partner of Rocky Marciano. With his fedora, emaciated frame, and croaky old-fashioned London accent, the singer did indeed resemble a cracked actor, a dissolute thespian from Hollywood’s golden age cocooned from, and not comprehending, the real world beyond his car’s window. Yet Bowie had found a connection to the United States he saw passing by outside, which he reiterated to Yentob: soul music. As the tour progressed, Bowie gradually scaled down the Hunger City set and adapted the set list into what one critic described in November as a “soul revue.” These autumn dates subsequently acquired the name the “Philly Dogs” tour, as Bowie’s Halloween Jack character gave way to Bowie the soul man. Backstage, the peculiar collision of different cultures, drugs, and spiritual leanings created a strange atmosphere among the band. Meanwhile, Bowie was in parlous physical and mental shape, which his management’s business dealings were making even worse. It had come to his attention that not only did he not own 50 percent of MainMan, as he had believed, but also the huge cost of touring Diamond Dogs was being deducted from his personal earnings. Any notion that he was a rich rock star was illusionary: the reality was that Bowie was fast heading toward bankruptcy.
The Gouster, the original version of what became Young Americans. Shelved in 1974, it finally saw release in 2016 as part of the Who Can I Be Now? box set.
Bowie’s troubled state was communicated to the American public when he appeared on Dick Cavett’s TV chat show “out of his gourd,” as he later termed it, on cocaine. Dressed in a brown suit with padded shoulders, his orange hair slicked back from his forehead, he spent the interview stabbing insistently at the floor with a cane, clearly wired. There was no attempt, either, to disguise his continual sniffing. Cavett described the singer’s backstage persona as that of “a working actor,” to which Bowie smiled and commented, “Very good!” “I’m a person of diverse interests,” he added. “I’m not very academic, but I glit [sic] from one thing to another a lot.” (Asked by Cavett what “glit” meant, Bowie laughed that it was “like flit, but a ’70s version”.) Yet although he was stoned and his voice hoarse, the live versions he performed with his band of “1984” and “Young Americans” were polished and spirited.
When the tour returned to Philadelphia in late November, Bowie took the opportunity to record more tracks at Sigma, including a cover of Bruce Springsteen’s “It’s Hard to Be a Saint in the City.” The Boss popped into the studio to say hello, completely freaking out Bowie, who, in his deranged state, found it impossible to make conversation with the songwriter. Following the final tour date in early December in Atlanta, after which police raided the wrap party at the Hyatt Regency Hotel, work on the new record continued at New York’s Record Plant. These sessions produced the final versions of “Win” and “Fascination,” which with “Somebody Up There Likes Me” and a new, funky version of “John, I’m Only Dancing,” were added to the track listing for the album.
But The Gouster, as the album was titled, would soon be shelved, thanks to a string of events that followed a fateful and no less strange second meeting between Bowie and John Lennon. (The Gouster would eventually be reconstructed on the box set Who Can I Be Now? (1974–1976), released in September 2016.) In his Bowie biography David Bowie: Starman, Paul Trynka reveals that Bowie invited Lennon and his girlfriend, May Pang, to hear a tape of the new album at his New York hotel room, but instead of just one former Beatle turning up, two arrived, as Paul McCartney was hanging out with Lennon at the time. Both ex-Beatles were impressed by what they heard but rather bemused that Bowie didn’t play them any music other than his own. Not long afterward, in mid-January 1975, Lennon discovered that Bowie was recording a version of his Beatles song “Across the Universe” at Electric Lady. Intrigued, he paid the studio a visit, duly adding guitar and vocals to the track.
Then something momentous happened: Carlos Alomar was fiddling around with the riff to the Flares’ “Foot Stompin’,” which Lennon joined in with, singing “aaame,” or something similar, at the beginning of every second bar. Accounts differ as to what precisely occurred, but within minutes Bowie had a new song called “Fame,” skillfully layered onto tape that same day with drummer Dennis Davis and bassist Emir Ksasan. Much to his irritation, Visconti was in London that week, mixing the rest of the album and adding strings to “Who Can I Be Now?” and the incredible, imploring excursion into deep soul, “It’s Gonna Be Me.” When he returned to New York, Bowie explained that he wanted to drop “Who Can I Be Now?” and “It’s Gonna Be Me” in favor of the two new tracks featuring John Lennon. Unsurprisingly, RCA didn’t have any objections to the changes, aware of the benefits that a guest appearance by an ex-Beatle would bring to the project, though Visconti felt “sick” that the two orchestrated soul tracks had been discarded, especially for the styli
stically ill-fitting “Across the Universe.”
Bowie’s ninth studio album, Young Americans, features a moody cover shot by Eric Stephen Jacobs.
The producer’s grumbles were the least of Bowie’s worries; by now, Bowie’s relationship with Defries was all but over, and with the help of the ever-protective Coco Schwab, he’d commenced legal proceedings against MainMan via the L.A. lawyer Michael Lippman. Defries’s reaction was to block the release of Young Americans (as the album was now called) until a settlement was reached. Bowie responded to the crisis by taking even more cocaine and hiding away in his first New York apartment, a brownstone on West 20th Street. Here his mood darkened further, and drug paranoia took hold, his blitzed imagination fizzing with UFOs, Nazis, ghosts, and the occult. Ava Cherry remembers strange happenings at the house, such as a glass mysteriously exploding in the singer’s hand while discussing malevolent spirits.
With Young Americans’ title track released as a single in February, RCA desperately needed the dispute between Bowie and Defries to be resolved. Such was the label’s worry that Bowie’s new music might never see the light of day that they arrived at Electric Lady to secure the tapes with a cash payment. The settlement, when it came, was brutal: MainMan would receive 16 percent of Bowie’s royalties on everything he recorded for the next eight years and 50 percent from his existing back catalog. But at least his destiny was now his own; writing in MOJO in 2002, he was able to joke, “I left MainMan to it around 1975. Thank goodness somebody looked after [my money]. I’m sure I would have spent it on slap [makeup]. Or was that smack? No, David, it was coke.”