Bowie: A Biography (22 page)

This shift was observed by others who knew him then. “I remember when David’s father died he was very solemn, as anybody would be when their father dies, and he took the responsibility of looking after his mother very seriously,” Visconti has said. “David automatically assumed the role of his father in matters of domestic finance. He appeared to grow up instantly …” Within a year, he would be a husband. Within two, a father. And in three, the biggest rock star in England. Angie had been right on. Things were changing fast.

10.

T

HE GREATEST CONCENTRATION
of “space fever” was, of course, in America, and Bowie’s new single seemed a perfect way to finally introduce him to the biggest pop music market in the world. Shortly after the final recording and mixing of “Space Oddity,” and in the midst of preparation for Bowie’s full-length debut, Mercury Records’
American publicist Ron Oberman, a former college music journalist, was brought to London to meet Bowie. While Mercury’s UK partner Phillips would release
Man of Words/Man of Music
in England, Bowie remained a Mercury artist, his career, at that time, handled by people an ocean away. Oberman, who worked out of the label’s spacious Chicago offices, was surprised to find how inconsequential Mercury’s London headquarters were.

“It was almost like an apartment,” he says. “I came out and said hello to David. He was sitting there cross-legged, like Indian style, on this big overstuffed chair. And we hit it off right away. We had a great conversation. We spoke about publicity and getting some materials together, press materials, bio and photos. So I went back to Chicago; I was very excited about David Bowie and really tried to talk him up among all the executives there. I’ve always had great ears for singles, and to my mind there was no question that ‘Space Oddity’ should have been a number one single. I was Bowie’s biggest supporter at the company. And other people in the promotion department seemed to like the record. At that time back in the sixties, if you really wanted to get a record on the air there were certainly ways to do it. But Mercury never really pushed it that hard. It wasn’t a hit initially because Mercury really didn’t get behind it the way they should have gotten behind it.”

The Phillips and Mercury marriage was a relatively new one and there was still infighting going on between people who were reluctant to cede any power to one side or another. Bowie’s fate seemed to rest on the possibility of a tenuous harmony being achieved. Rather than reaping the huge publicity benefits of the
Apollo 11
landing, “Space Oddity” languished in the outer reaches of the British Top 40 for most of the summer and barely registered in America. If NASA couldn’t help get him a hit, what hope did he have? Bowie would see his first stroke of real professional luck with the arrival of Olav Wyper at Phillips.

Wyper was a former journalist who had happened into a career as a copywriter in the ad department of the massive EMI Corporation, which distributed the Beatles and the Beach Boys’ records. He had managed to move laterally into a different department (a feat still difficult today in the eternally compartmentalized record business) and by the late sixties he was the marketing manager at CBS Records. Wyper increased the marketing staff at CBS from three people to seventy-six people and
transformed the entire department, gaining the attention of every other troubled label at the time.

“I was headhunted to go and take over the Phillips company,” he remembers. “And before I left I was aware that Phillips had released this extraordinarily brilliant single, ‘Space Oddity’ by David Bowie. I heard it because it was played on the radio. It was reviewed in the papers but we didn’t have a hit. At the time, Phillips was a very run-down, depressed, dreary place.”

Despite its early sixties success with its Fontana imprint, which had enjoyed major hits, including the Troggs’ immortal “Wild Thing,” by the end of the decade, Phillips was in the midst of a dry period. Wyper found Bowie in person to be charismatic and the song to have limitless potential for Phillips. He made selling David Bowie the label’s first and only priority. The sole order of business under his new rule: make “Space Oddity” go.

“I didn’t know a hell of a lot about David at that time but he was clearly an interesting young man who had a completely different take on things, and he had a unique sound and it was a unique record,” Wyper recalls. “And it may have been that the record would in the normal course of events not have been a hit and then not been taken out and dusted off and tried all over again. But it was because we as a company had nothing else in the immediate future and in the immediate past that was worth working on. It was already a hit in my view, it just hadn’t been a hit.”

“Space Oddity” enjoyed a second ride up the charts, eventually reaching number 5 and landing Bowie his first
Top of the Pops
appearance in October. He spent the waning months of 1969 finishing up his Phillips/Mercury debut with Tony Visconti. The new songs were complicated, reflections of the twenty-two-year-old’s darkening vision. While not iconic, as his seventies albums would become,
Space Oddity
is first-rate as trippy rock records go. After some R & B singles and pop kitsch forays, this was David Bowie’s first “heavy” offering.

The album opens, of course, with “Space Oddity” but shifts quickly into the extensive hard-rock jam “Unwashed and Somewhat Slightly Dazed.” “I’m a phallus in pigtails / And there’s blood on my nose,” Bowie declares, and the deciphering begins. “This is a rather weird little song I wrote because one day when I was very scruffy I got a lot of funny stares from people in the street,” Bowie said at the time. “The lyrics are what you
hear—about a boy whose girlfriend thinks he is socially inferior. I thought it was rather funny really.”

“Don’t Sit Down” is more or less an interlude, something Bowie would continue to employ during this period. “Eight Line Poem” on
Hunky Dory
is another of this kind. The verse of “Don’t Sit down” is “Yeah yeah baby yeah.” It’s repeated several times. The chorus is the title. It is an excellent song.

“Letter to Hermione,” based on a lovesick letter never sent, is next; it’s an acoustic lament with a literal title that is rare as far as Bowie songs go. At nine minutes and thirty seconds, “Cygnet Committee” returns us to the expansive realm of the post-psychedelic freak-out. “Well it is a bit long I suppose,” Bowie said. “It’s basically three separate points of view about the more militant section of the hippy movement. The movement was a great idea but something’s gone wrong with it now. I’m not really attacking it but pointing out that the militants have still got to be helped as people—human beings—even if they are going about things all the wrong way.”

“Cygnet Committee” meanders in typical late-sixties fashion, but certain changes are interesting to a trainspotting Bowie-ist, as quotes from it will later show up in tracks like “Time,” on 1973’s
Aladdin Sane
, and “Rock and Roll with Me,” on ’74’s
Diamond Dogs
. The lyrical shout-out to the MC5 “Kick out the jams / Kick out your mother” is also, someone should formally point out, very cool.

Occasionally the pressure would get to Bowie and Visconti. They knew, in light of the “Space Oddity” single’s success, that the album needed to soar as well. While recording the relatively simple acoustic track “God Knows I’m Good” (“Surely God won’t look the other way,” he sings), Bowie, in a rare show of vulnerability, lost control of his emotions.

“He broke down during that,” recalls guitarist Keith Christmas, who plays on the record. “I mean I think if he hadn’t had ‘Space Oddity’ on that album it would have just died the same as the first one died. They all came out, got a few nice reviews, and then just disappeared back into the sort of wash of albums that were around then. But that one single sort of pulled it up by its bootstraps.”

In their fervor to be big and attention grabbing, Bowie and Visconti made use of the facilities and recording budget by punching up some of the
more cinematic songs, like “Space Oddity”’s B side, “Wild Eyed Boy from Freecloud,” with full orchestration. “Freecloud” recounts the last moments of a condemned man. As far as “about to be executed” songs, it’s no Nick Cave’s “The Mercy Seat” or Johnny Cash’s “Joe Bean,” or even Led Zeppelin’s “Gallows Pole,” but it is arresting, as Bowie, for the first time, manages to wed a sprawling rock number with his die-hard penchant for Anthony Newley/Richard Harris–style melodrama.

“I remember inside they had this great big studio which would have been used for thirty-piece string orchestras,” Keith Christmas says. “This was obviously one of the things it was used for was orchestral recordings. You had to go up some stairs to the control room, which had a sort of window looking down on this space. And then you had to go up some more to where the tapes were running. They were on a different floor. And it wasn’t that long before I was reading that the engineers used to wear white coats. They were considered like engineers, lab technicians almost. And as I recall they had an intercom and they had to call up to get a rewind on the tape. Laughable when you think of making thirty-two, sixty-four tracks on a computer now.”

Angie functioned as the cheerleader and de facto caterer, running errands, making lunch and generally coordinating the vibes. The excitement surrounding the record, which was indeed David’s finest music to date, carried over into the planned promotional events, but the bad luck that had dogged him through the 1960s initially seemed difficult to shake off.

A record release party dubbed “An Evening with David Bowie” was scheduled for November 30, 1969, at London’s Purcell Room, a small venue in the basement of the larger Queen Elizabeth Hall, on the south bank of the Thames river. David would be backed by a local band named Copus as he debuted the strong new tracks from the album as well as the hit single “Space Oddity.”

According to Kenneth Pitt, Calvin Mark Lee was put in charge of coordinating the press for “An Evening with David Bowie.” On the night of the show, however, attendance was good but the industry and media presence was almost nonexistent. Bowie and Copus, unaware, turned in a high-energy, sweaty set. Afterward, Bowie excitedly ran backstage to inquire about the VIPs in attendance, who, he assumed, had just witnessed one of the best
shows he’d ever done. Lee sheepishly told him that there was nobody there. Bowie was furious and, in an act that would also emerge as a pattern, banished Lee, placing him well outside the inner circle. Their friendship did not survive the Purcell Room debacle. “His name was never again mentioned,” according to a secretly relieved Pitt.

Speaking of the incident today, Lee plays down the outrage and insists that he did, in fact, coordinate an important review. “The
Observer
gave it a good review,” he tells me. “That’s a
Sunday
paper. Sundays are high-class papers. That irritated me. But what could I say?”

Angie, meanwhile, was now “vagabonding” between London and Mary Finnegan’s house in Beckenham or David’s mother’s home in Bromley, with her clean and dirty clothes in the same bag. She was in the process of locating, securing and establishing a home in which Bowie would feel not only like a rock star but also, crucially, like someone with a family and an infrastructure to cushion some of these ego blows in the future as he made yet another attempt to break out. “Angie was determined to find someplace where they could live together, and she was quite right,” says Mary Finnegan. “They couldn’t stay holed up in the single bed in the small room in my flat. I didn’t want it to go on either. I wanted my life back basically.”

They found the perfect location in Haddon Hall. Haddon Hall is important to the Bowie myth. In essence, this suburban mansion was the hive or nest where so many of his indelible early songs were first written and demoed. It was a salon where key allies and collaborators would exchange ideas, create costumes and fine tune concepts that would define the new decade. David and Angela spent Christmas 1969 together and early in the new year moved their belongings into the once grand, now dilapidated three-story, red brick Victorian building, a former candle manufacturing factory, nestled at 42 Southend Road, Beckenham, amid a vast English garden and a clutch of looming, barren trees. Behind it lay an eighteen-hole golf course.

The downstairs neighbors, a couple named Sue and Tony Frost, were young and accustomed to taking advantage of the abandoned space by blasting reggae at top volume. They did not object to a young would-be rocker moving in.

Bowie was impressed by the sheer size of Haddon Hall. The long, circular driveway that led up to the residence seemed palatial, especially
when their new purchase, a used Jaguar, was parked out in the shade. The living room was massive, as was the hallway, which led to the staircase and a stained glass window that was some forty feet wide. With its many rooms, great winding staircase that led to nowhere (the top floor was boarded off and rented out to another tenant) and ornate stained glass window, Haddon Hall possessed a regal feel.

“Unfortunately, prior to our moving in, twenty-seven cats had lived there with a professor of history and his wife, who were a little eccentric,” Angie recalled. “There were a lot of plants and the cats felt they were in a jungle of their own in the hall. You can imagine the smell.”

They painted the walls and ceilings hunter green in the living room and a light blue in the bedroom and scrubbed the tile in the fireplace. Bowie began a series of collages on the bathroom walls by pasting up magazine and book clippings. Angie also insisted that they install a telephone so that they could stay on top of business affairs. She soon regretted the decision, as many of the calls were not from Kenneth Pitt reporting increasing sales and bookings, but rather from Bowie’s mother, who made no secret of the fact that she felt abandoned as soon as her son officially moved out of Plaistow Grove. Angie would take Peggy shopping and lend an ear to her self-pitying declarations that her life had lost meaning—this while taking care of the extensive maintenance of Haddon Hall, as well as helping roadie the small gigs Bowie managed to get in local cabarets and workingman clubs. Seeing this end of his career firsthand, and how he went over, Angie fully realized the extent to which her boyfriend was being, in her opinion, mismanaged. Soon she was loudly complaining about Pitt, and Bowie felt even more supported and understood. It was a problem.