Bowie: A Biography (11 page)

Marc Bolan was slightly younger but much less introverted than David, giving him the influence of an
older
sibling. Until David blazed past him forever, circa 1973, Marc, it can be argued, held the upper hand in the relationship. He would suggest the use of the signature Stylophone on David Bowie’s first hit single, “Space Oddity,” in ’69. It would be Bolan who would first flirt with electric volume, glitter and gender-bending while David was still a folkie.

“David idolized Marc for a while,” Bowie’s future manager Ken Pitt, who for a time considered but ultimately passed on managing Bolan, observed. “He was going around to his flat night after night, playing songs, listening to songs, talking about music, and then he’d come back here and we’d talk about our own projects and David would say, ‘Well, Marc says this,’ or, ‘Marc says that …’ Bolan had a tremendous influence on him at that time, and David considered him an authority.”

In the history of rock ’n’ roll, few ascended so high and fell so far in so small a period of time as Bolan did. Like JFK’s, Bolan’s glory period would last about a thousand days. He appeared on another chat show,
Pop
Quest
, in 1975, bloated and uncomfortably shifting in his chair. He looks like Liz Taylor at fifty. He is only twenty-eight. Two years later, he would be dead. A string of failed releases had left him vulnerable. The British music press was referring to him routinely as “the Porky Pixie.”

“He lost it,” Charles Shaar Murray says. “He had his shining hour from [1970’s] ‘Ride a White Swan’ up to ‘Children of the Revolution’ [in 1974]. After a while, it became apparent that he wasn’t doing very much more than recycling the riffs of his childhood with hippie nursery rhymes and a lot of echo. Got lazy and got complacent. He got fat literally and metaphorically. He basically believed that he could sing the phone book and kids would adore him and buy it. Then he did start singing the fucking phone book and they didn’t buy it. He turned into this sulky rock ’n’ roll Norma Desmond figure.”

In the early morning hours of September 16, 1977, just as he was enjoying a comeback of sorts, hosting a show for the Granada TV network and touring with respectable punk acts like the Damned, he and his companion Gloria Jones (the Northern Soul star who released the original version of the Soft Cell electro-pop classic “Tainted Love”) were driving to their home in the Maida Vale section of London when the car hit a tree. Bolan died, according to the report, of “shock and hemmorhage.” Jones was hospitalized but survived. The death was ruled accidental.

The crash site is commemorated with a black marble marker:
IN RESPECTFUL MEMORY OF MARC BOLAN, MUSICIAN, WRITER, POET
. There’s a message board by the tree and a bronze bust that makes him look a little too much like Jim Morrison. Bolan was, if nothing else, a hero all his own.

By the time David and Marc were assaulting each other with braggadoccio, David’s backing band the King Bees had packed it in, a response to the indifference of the failed “Liza Jane” single. Conn stayed on as David’s manager and quickly recommended another act he had begun working with called the Manish Boys, named after the title of a Bo Diddley song (which spelled it with two n’s). After his tenure as a bona fide London-based front man, David was not thrilled to learn that they were based in Maidstone, over thirty miles away. Conn convinced him that the Manish Boys (guitarist Jon Edward, bassist John Watson, drummer John Whitehead and keyboardist Bob Solly) were a hot combo, worth the commute. Likewise, the Manish Boys were not thrilled at the
prospect of taking on David. They felt like they’d gotten their act down and were not even auditioning for new members. They already had two sax players playing in the outfit (Wolf Byrne on baritone and Paul Rodriquez on tenor) but Conn hustled them, implying that American concert promoters were interested in a tour, but only if they welcomed Davie Jones as a member.

“Without that I don’t think we’d have taken him. We were happy enough as we were,” band member Paul Rodriquez said, adding that David’s pallor was also bit disconcerting. Still, both parties needed a break and decided to make the best of it. After some hours rehearsing, they acknowledged that they could at least make a good, loud racket together. David’s voice impressed them, as did his horn playing.

It was with the Manish Boys that David Jones first started to get “out there.” The London mod scene was changing. The speedy tempos were slowing down as marijuana and the heady poetry of American singer-songwriters like Simon & Garfunkel, Roger McGuinn of the Byrds, Scott Walker of former teen idols the Walker Brothers, and, of course, Bob Dylan influenced the scene—Dylan toured England in ’65, as captured in future Bowie documentarian D. A. Pennebaker’s film
Don’t Look Back
, and briefly plunged the then impressionable David into a black-clad “Dylan” phase. The Beatles released
Rubber Soul
late in the year, marking a sea change in their own sound. Even the formerly clean-cut Beach Boys, as big if not bigger in England than they were in America, became gleefully expansive with the lush, symphonic
Pet Sounds
album and the staggeringly inventive, Theremin-tinged “Good Vibrations” single the following year.

Young London professionals now embraced a louche, jaded pose, exemplified by actor/filmmaker David Hemmings (another future Bowie tour documentarian) in Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 film
Blow Up
. In that film Hemmings, a photographer based on premier London fashion lensman David Bailey, receives a giant, polished wooden propeller for his loft space, simply, one assumes, because it is something unusual to look at. Anything to remain interested. Sensing this zeitgeist, David knew instinctively that the Manish Boys, who were quite happy playing the blues, gulping speed and cheap wine and chasing girls, were not going to make it as is. David encouraged the band to grow their hair even longer than the by then socially acceptable mop tops of the Beatles and Rolling Stones.

Inspired by his competitive friendship with Bolan, David pursued success with a brand-new sense of ostentation. During the group’s live shows at the Marquee and other Soho blues clubs he would often lapse into lengthy and (to his band) somewhat distressingly campy monologues by way of in troducing the still tough-edged blues numbers that made up their repertoire.

With Conn’s help, the Manish Boys were soon booked as a support act on a full British tour with the Kinks, who had made it in England and America with a string of hits like “You Really Got Me” and “Tired of Waiting for You.” Even better, the Kinks’ stellar producer Shel Talmy had agreed to produce the Manish Boys. Talmy had also made hits with the Creation and Manfred Mann and the Easybeats (whose “Friday on My Mind” David Bowie would cover on his 1973 covers record
Pin Ups)
. He knew how to harness the power of a touring rock band by compressing the volume and verve into a pent-up sexiness that would appeal to both boys and the girls they lusted after. Even better, for the Yank-workshipping David, he was an American. Talmy was born in Chicago and found early fame as a child actor in Los Angeles. In the early sixties, he settled in London to work for Decca. When he saw David with the Manish Boys, he knew he’d found another great talent.

According to Talmy, the still-teenage David stood out as the potential star along the lines of the leaders of the Who and the Kinks. “I can’t tell you what it was exactly,” Talmy says. “If I could, I would have bottled it long ago and made billions. I’m not trying to be facetious, but you can’t explain instinct. I instinctively thought David was one of the brightest kids I’d ever met. He was cocky in a nice way and I had no doubt he’d be a star. Unfortunately it didn’t happen on my watch.”

Talmy chose Bobby Bland’s 1961 R & B smash “I Pity the Fool” for the Manish Boys’ debut single, confident that it fit their sound perfectly. He recorded the band on February 8, 1965, at IBC studios in Portland Place with his usual session musicians helping to achieve the classic Talmy sound. The track is a slow blues song with crunchy horns and a great wiggly solo in the second verse, played by Jimmy Page, who was then a Talmy session man. “Take My Tip,” the B side, is jazzier and more sax driven, with David doing a solid Roger Daltrey homage. There’s a bit of Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames in there as well, a nightclub bounce and some hipster poetry, courtesy of David Jones, the composer: “You’re
scared to walk beside her / ’Cause you’re playing with a tiger who possesses the sky.” Sonically speaking, derivative as it was, both sides of the single were worlds away from the King Bees’ “Liza Jane.”

The Manish Boys promoted the single with a May 8 appearance on a new television program on BBC2 entitled
Gadzooks! It’s All Happening
, an offshoot of a popular teen show called
The Beat Room
. When the producers saw the band’s hair, however, they reportedly demanded that the Manish Boys get it trimmed preshow. The band refused and was bumped from the broadcast. What seemed like bad luck turned into a minisensation once Conn and Jones realized that they could exploit the incident. They went to the local papers the
Daily Mirror, Daily Telegraph
and
Daily Mail
with the “BBC discriminates against long-haired combo” angle and succeeded in getting both blurbs and photos in each one. For about a half a day, the Manish Boys were big.

Listening to songs like the Barbarians’ 1965 novelty hit “Are You a Boy or Are You a Girl” (“You’re always wearing skintight pants / And boys wear pants …”) today, you can’t help but giggle. When I think of the sixties, I just assume that everybody let their hair grow. Sideburns got bushier. Flares wider. Skin greasier. I think I got this impression when the shows I grew up watching in reruns after school switched from black and white to lurid, orange-hued color. In doing research on the era, I realized that this was just a show business thing. The people making these programs and the bands taking their cues from the Beatles’ and the Stones’ tonsorial manifest destiny were all entertainers. Even in the mid-sixties, a time associated with lengthening hair, nearly all men of a certain generation still had buzz cuts or even short, oiled and neatly groomed hair. The skinny boys who grew theirs out like a girl remained, in most places, the object of fear and ridicule.

Having too-long tresses amounted to an easy way to cast yourself against modern society, and in the spring of ’65 David Jones realized that in the absence of an undeniable single, the kind Ray Davies, Pete Townshend, Jagger and Richards and Lennon and McCartney seemed to whip up between toast and jam breaks, he needed to exploit this outrage while he still could. It would be the first time his self-fabricated sensation got more attention than the actual song it was cooked up to promote, but certainly not the last.

“It’s really for the protection of pop musicians and those who wear their hair long,” David explained in a talk show appearance designed to promote his pop society, the International League for the Preservation of Animal Filament. “Anyone who has the courage to wear hair down to his shoulders has to go through hell. It’s time we united and stood up for our curls.” The Manish Boys netted a booking on another big package tour opening up for Gerry and the Pacemakers, along with Marianne Faithfull and Gene Pitney. After the tour, and back in London, they quickly realized that without a radio hit, there was no way to ride the publicity wave very far. This is something David Bowie would later realize; the stunts had to be fabulous but the music needed to be equally remarkable.

The band still had no real money and no luck, and David remained desperate to transcend his suburban smallness and be a star. When he wasn’t home in Bromley, he’d spend his days in Soho, idling in the Café Giaconda on busy Denmark Street, reading the classified section of the weekly
Melody Maker
music newspaper and wondering what it took to make the cover … or even page two. Even his ex-bandmate and school friend George Underwood had scored a five-year recording contract with the hot producer Mickey Most, the impresario who handled Herman’s Hermits and the Yardbirds. “He was furious,” Underwood says today. “Music was his life now and he thought that because I could paint, that I wasn’t dedicated enough and it all looked too fuckin’ easy! He was working his bollocks off every night with the Manish Boys. I really thought our friendship was at an end.”

The sixties, the decade during which London seemed to take over the world, were not half-over and he still seemed to be playing catch-up with it, wondering where his piece of the glory might be. Even little Peter Frampton was better connected among the London pop scenemakers, having been taken under the wing of the Stones’ bassist Bill Wyman. He would have three hits with both the Herd and Humble Pie before David would ever have his first. David did not want to go back to Bromley. Surely the hair wasn’t the answer, even though it still got him some attention that carried him through doubtful times.

“My first memory of him was meeting him in the Marquee Club; I suppose I was about fifteen maybe,” says singer Dana Gillespie, a longtime friend from the sixties through the mid-seventies, when she was an artist
with Bowie’s management company MainMan (she would later appear in bed with Art Garfunkel in future Bowie director Nicholas Roeg’s 1980 film
Bad Timing)
. “I had waist-length peroxide-blond hair then, and I was brushing my hair outside the dressing room in the long mirror there and somebody came up and took the brush out of my hand and carried on brushing and said, ‘Can I take you home?’ And that was him. So I smuggled him past my parents’ bedroom into the house where I lived, which was about twenty minutes away from the Marquee Club. And then we spent the night together, but I mean, I was still at school. And I introduced him to my parents the next morning. And they hadn’t realized it was a boy until I said the word ‘David.’ Because nobody had sort of Veronica Lake–style hair. You know, primrose-yellow blond.”

Unlike most Marquee habitues, Gillespie had an aristocratic background. She was the well-traveled daughter of a wealthy Austrian baron. Still, with all her cosmopolitan polish, she’d never met anyone like David Jones.