Bowie: A Biography (34 page)

Being transplanted to a strange country, surrounded by Bowie’s people and strongly advised on what to do and essentially how to “be himself,” was disorienting for Iggy Pop. Under pressure, he had recently altered the core lineup of the Stooges, transferring Ron Asheton to bass and appointing James Williamson, who was deemed more marketable, to lead guitar. Lou Reed, not a MainMan artist, was just as shaken up but far less malleable. “My first impression of him was of a man honor-bound to act as fey and inhuman as he could,” Angie writes of Reed at this period. Mick Rock, a huge fan of the Velvet Underground, was fortunately around at this time and provided a warm, bonding energy, acting as Reed’s UK emissary.

Early sessions for Reed’s album at Trident Studios that summer were tense. It became obvious that the new material was very strong. Perhaps because of the pressure on Bowie as his Ziggy persona ascended, or the fact that Reed was older and nastier and out of his element, the spark and tension sometimes blew up. There was not a surplus of clean communication.

“There’s only one person with a viler temper than mine, and that’s Bowie,” Reed is quoted as saying. Bowie counters with, “When he’s not
being troubled by things around him, Lou’s a very generous person, with time and conversation.”

Angie recalls in
Backstage Passes
, “Though Lou and David managed to create a brilliant mix, they attempted to outdo each other in performing the roles of tortured creative artists.” She describes seeing David curled up in a “fetal ball” beneath the toilet at one point.

Ronson, solid, good-natured and even, held the project together. “We are concentrating on the feeling rather than the technical side of the music,” he said at the time. “He is an interesting person but I never know what he is thinking. However as long as we can reach him musically it’s alright.” Ronson helped Reed flesh out his musical ideas and Bowie prompted him to delve into tales of New York City that so fascinated him. From “I’m So Free,” to “New York Telephone Conversation,” to of course “Walk on the Wild Side,” it’s one of the essential Big Apple records. Fortunately the edginess and unease of Reed’s London stay worked well with the tone of the record. The sneering phrasing, the world-weariness, the lost sighs that bleed, almost reflexively, into “Perfect Day” and “Make Up” works on
Transformer;
fatigue and desperation become sexy. It’s Reed’s most famous album but it’s also his best. There have been musically more interesting and lyrically more poetic or wittier songs on other Reed records (“The Power of Positive Drinking” from
Growing Up in Public
, and “Romeo Had Juliette,” which opens
New York
, come to mind) but
Transformer
, even more than its follow-up, the bona fide concept album
Berlin
, is its own desolate sonic planet. “Mick was very proud of the
Transformer
album,” says Suzi Ronson today. “He knew the songs were fabulous and was given a free hand. When you’re a musician, that’s what you want. You don’t think about ‘When am I going to get paid?’” Ronson was paid under his MainMan contract and has no points on the record, which has sold consistently over the last four decades. Nobody really expected
Transformer
to be a smash anyway, but early in the new year, it became Reed’s first recording to chart, cracking the American Top 30, and remained on the charts for most of ’73. “Walk on the Wild Side” was all over the radio.

“When you think about it, it was one of the quote-unquote unlikeliest hits in the world,” Reed once mused to me in an interview. “As far as my abilities in that direction, you don’t notice ‘son of “Wild Side.”’ There hasn’t been a sequel. These really simple things are really hard. As far as
I’m concerned, there’s this thing you managed to grab hold of for a second and then it’s gone. You can’t do it again ’cause it’s not there to do. Very strange process. I don’t for a minute understand it. I’ve given up a long time ago any explanation for anything.”

The cover photo, shot by Mick Rock, shows the former black-clad downtown bohemian Reed fully immersed in glitter rock androgyny, something he would later, somewhat sheepishly, trade back for his downtown tough black leathers.

“The year started out with David Bowie fast gaining recognition as one of Lou Reed’s trendy disciples,”
Billboard
wrote; “the year will end with the tables neatly turned.”

On tour, Bowie got his wish by vicariously introducing fans of “Wild Side” to the music of the Velvets. Reed’s set was full of VU classics. “I decided maybe some time has passed,” Reed told me in his iconic sneering style. “Maybe they’ll get it this time around.”

With England fully conquered, Bowie began to truly plan out the American invasion. The cult of Bowie was taking root in the major cities but there was nothing about the
Ziggy
album to warrant the grandiosity with which they were about to tour across the States. In the fall of ’72, with both Reed and Pop in tow, David, Angela, Tony Defries and the MainMan entourage hosted a press event at London’s posh Dorchester Hotel for American journalists flown in at RCA’s expense and select members of the British press. The event was conceived as a preview for the fall tour of America, and journalists from
Playboy
and
Rolling Stone
were put up and treated to cocktails, hors d’oeuvres and quips. The event has passed into Bowie legend, largely because of a photo of Bowie, Iggy and Lou that Mick Rock snapped. Iggy is in the center holding a pack of Lucky Strike cigarettes in his mouth, like a dog holding a chew toy. He appears elated to be there. His posture is loosey-goosey, his hair platinum blond. Reed, in dark aviator glasses, is the exact opposite. His posture is rigid and he is smirking. Bowie looks determined and proud. Defries lurks in the background, grinning at the spectacle of it all. Marc Bolan is represented by proxy on Iggy’s T. Rex T-shirt.

It is the modern-rock equivalent of the famous Million-Dollar Quartet shot of Elvis, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis over a piano in Memphis’s Sun Studios. “It was just a hotel suite,” Charles Shaar Murray says. “The whole project was staged in the media … as
much as Ronson was Bowie’s chief collaborator on the music, Defries was the main collaborator on the media event: Ziggy Stardust the event.”

The press event was akin to improv theater, with Angie swanning in as if on cue to deliver a bon mot into the ear of a journo, who took up a pen to quickly scribble. Then she’d exit and Cherry Vanilla would appear. The whole thing seemed both painstakingly staged and anarchic at the same time. “I’ve wondered about how staged it all was in retrospect,” Shaar Murray says. “I was twenty years old, not that sophisticated. Before I fell in with the Bowie crew, I only ever met one out gay man in my life. I was ragged, I was naïve, it was a heaven. I was a reasonably smart but provincial young man with, you know, comparatively little sophistication in terms of polymorphous perversity. Very likely to accept a lot of what was staged for my benefit and the benefit of those around me at face value. I won’t say I got taken for a ride, because I gleefully signed up for it. I loved it. It was fabulous. It was really exciting and I enjoyed every moment of it. Let’s say, you know, they took full advantage of me and I did my best to take full advantage of them.”

The press was treated to a Ziggy show at the Friar’s Club in Aylesbury and returned to America raving. Ziggy was coming. “David had security. One of the first people who had security,” Suzi Ronson says. “They’d rehearse running David offstage into the car and driving off. Three vans outside, jumping in the car. Speed off. Before anyone even wanted to touch him, they’d do that. Within six months, they really needed to know how. It all got so successful so quickly.”

15.

I

T’S HARD TO BELIEVE NOW
, with satellite radio and the Internet seriously diminishing the power of AM and FM radio to break new artists, but in the early 1970s a handful of disc jockeys and station managers at free-form terrestrial radio stations like KMET in Los Angeles, WNEW in New York and perhaps the most famous free-form station of the era, WMMS in Cleveland had the ability to turn a cult artist into a worldwide star. Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty and Rush are just a few of
the arena-filling career artists who benefited from early free-form radio support. The
Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars
album’s American buzz was due largely to a handful of devoted jocks who responded to the tough and punchy rock songs full of emotional complexity and progressive ideas. Bowie, who listened to pirate stations throughout the fifties and sixties, knew the power of radio to bewitch a young listener. (In England, he’d already found a strong supporter in disc jockey John Peel, who recorded Bowie and the Spiders at the BBC. Sessions with Peel—who died in 2004—were collected and released in 2000 on the excellent
Bowie at the Beeb.)

On Bowie’s first trip to America in ’71, he’d met the disc jockeys and program directors at stations like KSAN in San Francisco. He and Defries knew that American radio was his way in, and blue-collar Cleveland was isolated as the somewhat improbable beachhead. “Changes” and “Life on Mars?” from the previous year’s
Hunky Dory
were WMMS staples already. “Suffragette City” and the title track of
Ziggy Stardust
were in heavy rotation. U.S. tour number one would launch from Ohio.

“In Cleveland we were early,” says Denny Sanders, then a DJ at WMMS. “So as soon as
Ziggy
was released, man, that audience was ready and they were familiar with Bowie and they were accepting of his style. And it just exploded. It was only natural that it’d be done in Cleveland. They were barely playing it in Boston. Boston is a hip city but it was late when it came to David Bowie. You don’t want to play to a half a house in a market where he’s barely being played.”

Bowie and Angie sailed to New York City on September 10, 1972, aboard the cruise ship
Queen Elizabeth II
. They arrived one week later and this time, like Oscar Wilde, the press was there to greet him, along with assorted RCA executives; MainMan staff, including road manager Leee Black Childers; and a handful of hipper New York music fans. Between his first American promotional tour and this one, Bowie had developed a fear of air travel. While morbid, it was yet another opportunity, according to Defries, to exploit his grandeur and uniqueness. The Bowies, it had been announced, would “sail” to the New World in style, creating an air of great anticipation.

While in New York and checked into the Sherry-Netherland hotel off Central Park, Bowie and Ronson auditioned a keyboard player for the
American dates. Given the elemental rock that the Spiders had been playing throughout England, it may have seemed superfluous, but according to the MainMan philosophy, superfluity was a virtue. Recommended by a mutual friend, Mike Garson, nearing thirty, had been playing bread gigs in jazz lounges in Greenwich Village.

“I worked a few nights with Elvin Jones, who was John Coltrane’s drummer, a year after John died [in 1967],” Garson recalls. “And the way I got that gig was the piano player fell off the bandstand drunk and they dragged him out onto the streets, and Elvin said, ‘Is there anyone who plays piano in the house?’ And I walked up and played.”

At the time that he joined the Spiders, Garson was growing tired of playing tiny jazz clubs to three or four tourists and was starting to wonder about his career path. He auditioned for Bowie and Ronson with “Changes.” “I played eight bars; it took about twelve seconds, or eight seconds. And as soon as he heard what I played, he said, ‘You got the gig.’”

Given how dominant Garson’s playing would be on the next record, 1973’s
Aladdin Sane
, it’s clear that Bowie was already taking the Spiders’ sound somewhere in his head.
Aladdin
would be written along the whistle-stop tour.

“He was looking for another sound,” the pianist would tell me, “so these mixtures of jazz and classical and rock started coming together. Here I was superimposing that on his music, but it worked with his belief systems, his mind, his philosophy and his aesthetic. I just was playing how I felt. I really didn’t know his music.”

With the lineup complete and the tour about to launch, Defries began writing audacious clauses into the venue contracts. The largest grand piano in each city would have to be provided by the promoter at every venue. If it wasn’t at least nine feet in diameter, the show would be canceled. While the Bowies traveled to Cleveland via a private Greyhound bus, the Cleveland Music Hall promoters scrambled to meet Defries’s demand.

“They couldn’t find one that was a certain number of inches,” Childers tells me. “Tony told me, ‘Well, then cancel the show.’ I said, ‘They can’t get a bigger piano. It’s not like they won’t give it to us, they don’t have it.’ He said, ‘Cancel the show. That’s our rules. Cancel the show; they should have had that piano.’ And I refused to cancel the show
because first of all I wanted there to be a show, but second of all I didn’t know what was coming but I knew this show was sold out and I talked to the DJs and people and I knew they were very enthusiastic. So the sound was great, the audience was up for it, it was packed.”

David Bowie played his first proper American concert date at the 3, 500-capacity Cleveland Music Hall on September 22, 1972. With Lindsay Kemp and his dancers left behind in London, Bowie and his Spiders were a leaner, fiercer rock ’n’ roll combo. It was a loud, brash, bourbon-and-domestic-beer-chaser-style show, as rough and tumble as the Stones’ tour of the same year, with both Garson’s piano and Bowie’s lyrics and complex sexual allure adding a crucial emotional depth.

On September 27, 1972, the MainMan entourage checked back into the Sherry-Netherland to prepare for what was, at the time, Bowie’s most important concert yet: a sold-out engagement at Carnegie Hall. The marquee at the venue, possibly the most famous concert hall in the world and host to performances by Tchaikovsky, Judy Garland, Leonard Bernstein, Harry Belafonte and the Beatles, read, simply,
FALL IN LOVE WITH DAVID BOWIE.
Before a crowd of celebrities (Andy Warhol, socialite Lee Radziwill, actor Tony Perkins, Bob Dylan’s manager Albert Grossman), journalists and fans, David presented Ziggy in full, taking the stage to the Walter Carlos version of the “Ode to Joy” from
A Clockwork Orange
as strobe lights blinded the fabulous and powerful tastemakers in the crowd. From there Bowie played the equally prestigious Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, and traveled on to Boston, Indianapolis, St. Louis, Kansas City and Salt Lake City. Throughout the tour, Childers acted as the “advance man,” getting to town early and making sure things were together.