Bowie: A Biography (39 page)

In London early in the new year, Burroughs was invited to Bowie’s Chelsea home for dinner. Bowie, who’d been an avid reader of Burroughs since his teens, spent much of the interview discussing writing technique and the future of media. Burroughs and his partner the British modernist writer Brion Gyson had famously developed a “cut and paste” style of writing where words were randomly chosen from a hat or basket and strung together toward the end of achieving an alternate, spontaneous and truthful form of communication—randomness as its own medium, in a sense. Bowie would employ the cut-and-paste technique, as he informed Burroughs, not as a means to write lyrics, but as a means to create the actual story. He would write forty full scenes, put them in a (very large) hat (maybe a chef’s hat?) and randomly select the content and order of the production. “I get bored very quickly and that would give it some new energy,” he said. Bowie also volunteered that he would like to bring an actual black hole onstage. Burroughs, with typical dark wit, warns him that black holes can be very expensive.

Pork
director and MainMan artist Tony Ingrassia was flown to London to help develop the theatrical production, a musical adaptation of Orwell’s
1984
, but the project soon fell through when MainMan failed to secure the permission to adapt the book from Orwell’s widow, Sonia Blair. “I did a fast about-face and recobbled the idea into
Diamond Dogs:
teen punks on rusty skates living on the roofs of the dystopian Hunger City; a post-apocalyptic landscape,” Bowie told the
Daily Mail
in ’08.

Bowie decided that he would tell his own paranoid, politicized dystopian story, transposing his creation
Hunger City
for Orwell’s London, and a “real cool cat” named Halloween Jack for Winston Smith. “1984” and the Orwell-quoting “We Are the Dead” would remain in the production, and Bowie would write the rest of the score around them. Paranoid, dystopian fantasy was all the rage in the Watergate era, just check Woody Allen’s Orwellian slapstick
Sleeper
, released in December of ’73.

Meanwhile MainMan was in credit free fall. Bills were coming due for limousines, studio time, expense accounts, rent, mostly for projects that tanked. Product from their only reliably successful artist was crucial. They lacked the time to plot a full stage production, so the master plan shifted slightly. Bowie would record an album, and the tour itself would be the production, a brilliant bit of making a virtue of necessity. Why couldn’t the rock ’n’ roll tour be the stage show, after all? Inspired, Bowie dedicated himself to crafting his own record in a way that he hadn’t displayed before. Without Visconti or Ken Scott or Mick Ronson and the Spiders, the music’s quality all fell to him and he was determined to meet the challenge. Drummer Dunbar, bassist Herbie Flowers, guitarists Alan Parker and Tony Newman, as well as Garson, the lone holdout from the Spiders purging, convened in December at Olympic Studios, with engineer Keith Harwood (who produced “All the Young Dudes” for Mott the Hoople and was then fresh from work on Led Zeppelin’s
Houses of the Holy)
assisting with the production. Work was quick and disciplined. Everything was laid down smoothly until MainMan failed to pay the Olympic Studios bill and the album work relocated temporarily to Ludolf Studios in Norway.

“We did
Diamond Dogs
very fast indeed,” Flowers said, “doing basic tracks in three days in the little studio at Olympic. Bowie was writing a lot of the stuff as we were going. I think it was a semi–rescue attempt from
his proposed George Orwell musical. The music was weird. I have to say I found it mildly unattractive at the time.”

Diamond Dogs
was Bowie’s most brutal and hopeless statement since
The Man Who Sold the World
. The warmth of
Hunky Dory
was almost completely gone, save the stomping first single “Rebel Rebel,” which was rush-released that February (with the two-year-old “Queen Bitch” hastily slapped on as B side) to provide the company some much needed fiscal plasma.

Diamond Dogs
opens with a sucking, electronic hound’s bay, played on an electric guitar. Bowie’s voice melts over the creepy soundscape, as does a muted version of the Rodgers and Hart standard “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered”: “And in the death / As the last few corpses lay rotting on the slimy thoroughfare …” In a sort of proto–
Star Wars
“crawl,” a monologue (entitled “Future Legend”) tells the story of packs of marauding dogs with “red mutant eyes” patrolling the wasted streets of Hunger City. The party is over. It’s the year of Diamond Dogs. It’s also not rock ’n’ roll, we are informed as “Diamond Dogs” begins, it’s “genocide.”

The sound of a concert crowd is heard, then a cowbell and finally a Stax-style groove from the underworld. Bowie’s
Diamond Dogs
band was a funkier crew than the Spiders from Mars ever were, and they work it out as Bowie spits non sequiturs in the jaded commentator’s voice he’d honed on
Aladdin Sane
(“As they pulled you out of the oxygen tent / You asked for the latest party”).

“Sweet Thing” and “Candidate,” a mini-suite (whose lyrics were among those completely written, according to Bowie, with the Burroughs cut-and-paste technique) broken by an extended saxophone solo, introduces a new Bowie voice to the palette, the crooning coke-lizard basso profundo. Bowie would employ this one on virtually every album that would follow. It’s not quite English, vaguely American, slippery with coke nasal drip but certainly no less beguiling than any of his other voices. It will appear later in both “Rock and Roll with Me” (which actually mentions “lizards lying in the heat”) and “We Are the Dead” (which contains the cut-and-paste-derived phrase “defecating ecstasy,” perhaps an argument against the technique?). “Rebel Rebel” is heralded by a strange, scratchy loop, until that magnificent riff blasts through. It’s Bowie’s last great glitter anthem, one for the road for the English Disco kids on Sunset
(where it was played every ten minutes by the house DJ). It revisits familiar Bowie territory: a “hot” young “tramp” worrying his/her parents with his/her sexy nihilism (“You got a few lines and a handful of ’ludes”). The world is ending, but who cares, “Rebel” suggests; “we like dancing and we look divine.” “1984” is slotted in and segues into the equally Orwellian “Big Brother,” which is one of those songs where the verses and choruses are okay but the bridge is a must-hear: “I know you think you’re awful square / But you’ve made everyone and you’ve been everywhere,” Bowie sings. (Did the end of jaded glitter have a better lyrical summation? If so, I can’t come up with one.) “Don’t live for last year’s capers,” Bowie warns on the track, and it’s clear that he has officially ceased to do so himself.
Diamond Dogs
was no fun. But it was Bowie’s best-sounding, most complex record to date, and it still pulls you into its romantic and doomed world three and a half decades on.

The recording was completed at Ludolf at the suggestion of the Rolling Stones (who had just finished their own 1974 release
It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll
there). Bowie and Jagger’s friendship, begun the previous year when Jagger attended Ziggy’s retirement show, was still in full bloom, with the elder, more famous icon often sharing advice or recommendations with the younger star … that is, until he realized that Bowie would steal all the best ones.

Local artist Guy Peellaert was commissioned to do the cover art for
Diamond Dogs
. His book
Rock Dreams
(a collaboration with English rock journalist Nik Cohn) sat on every suburban hipster’s coffee table. Like a gatefold album, it was glossy and ideal for the de-seeding of weed. In dreamy, color-saturated Edward Hopper–style portraits, Peellaert would depict, say, Elvis and John Lennon chatting in a malt shop. Peellaert had just completed the sleeve for
It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll
when Bowie commissioned the cover for
Diamond Dogs
, which would beat the Stones to the shops and mark the end of career tips and raves coming from Jagger’s famous lips whenever Bowie was within earshot. The
Diamond Dogs
cover depicted Bowie’s head (still with full Ziggy flaming-rooster haircut) atop the body of a reclining greyhound in a carnival freak show setting, with the dog’s bollocks on full display. When RCA saw the cover, they balked and insisted that the pooch genitals be airbrushed out.

Diamond Dogs
was always conceived to be performed live. On the track “Candidate,” Bowie sings, “My set is amazing, it even smells like the street,” so by the time a returning Tony Visconti was brought in to assist with strings and final mixes (this after falling out with the increasingly ego-maniacal and now culturally irrelevant Marc Bolan), Bowie set about planning how to present the tracks live.

Toni Basil, the actress and choreographer who had appeared in
Easy Rider
and would go on to create David Byrne’s iconic hand gestures for the Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime” video (and of course have one chart-topping hit of her own with the immortal “Mickey”), was hired to put together dance numbers for a set list that would include tracks from all of Bowie’s RCA albums as well as
The Man Who Sold the World
and the “Space Oddity” single. Nothing would simply be sung and played this time around. In fact, the
Diamond Dogs
“event” would be so theatrical that the lighting designer hired, Jules Fisher, was a Tony Award winner. Furthermore, Fisher suggested that Bowie hire an actual theatrical director for the tour.

“I had long been wanting to bring theater and rock ’n’ roll closer,” Fisher says today. “Even at this juncture, I suggested we hire a director. So I introduced him to Michael Bennett, who was a rising star at the time.”

The New York–born Bennett, a dancer and choreographer himself, had worked with Stephen Sondheim on
Company
and would direct the original production of
A Chorus Line
two years later. Bowie and Bennett took in productions of ongoing shows in midtown and hit it off socially, but ultimately Bowie decided not to hire the future legend.

“David thought, ‘Well, I’ll do this myself,’” Fisher says. “I’ve created my own persona. I built everything I am. Why do I need another person to do this? I tried to explain that Michael wouldn’t make him do something that he didn’t want to do, like dance steps. That he’d build the show around what David could already do. But he wasn’t interested.”

Defries convinced RCA to bankroll the Diamond Dogs tour by insisting that it would put Bowie in and even beyond the realm of the Rolling Stones. With peerless sound and unprecedented sets and presentation, it was designed to make Bowie. The groundwork had been laid in America with the “cancellation” of the never-actually-scheduled U.S. tour number three following Ziggy’s retirement.

U.S. fans who were convinced that they would never see Bowie again would not only be able to see him; they would be treated to the grandest, deepest, loudest rock spectacle ever mounted. Hunger City would be constructed onstage, an actual urban landscape built up, then torn down and transported to the next city after the final encore. “He was very clear in his vision for the set,” Fisher says. “He wanted something that referenced German expressionism. [Robert Weine’s 1920 silent film]
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
and [Fritz Lang’s 1927 masterwork]
Metropolis
, were two films that he was fascinated by.” Fisher flew out to London to meet with Bowie, who would watch these films in his high-tech screening room on a virtual loop. “We had a very casual tea, which I drank and relaxed. He said, ‘This is the world that I want. This is what I’m interested in now and this is what I want to show.’ He was dealing with nihilism, the emptiness of the world. I think that fit in with
Metropolis
. The lonely man, the lonely figure in the big world. So a lot of our images onstage fit that.”

Fisher hired New York–based scenic designer Mark Ravitz, who studied under Fisher at NYU and had recently begun working with Kiss (he’d go on to create their famous lit-up logo). “The three words that were relayed to me were: power, Nuremburg and Fritz Lang’s
Metropolis,”
Ravitz tells me. “I drew up a whole Chinese menu of ideas. Columns A, B and C. Different sketches. Roughs and different looks. He came to New York and I put them all out in front of him and his whole entourage. They’d pick like you’d pick from a menu. ‘I like this. I like that.’ Nobody said anything to me about a budget. It was pretty much the sky’s the limit.”

The set would include a bridge that would rise and fall with the aid of brakes designed by the Porsche motor company. The backdrop would be a series of silk-screened paper skyscrapers, each one dripping blood. At the climax of each show, Bowie would tear them down, as if to lay waste to a dying city and, as was becoming a recurring theme, start again. “It was creative destruction,” Ravitz suggests. “Urban decay.”

The set was built in New Jersey and shipped up to Toronto, where tour rehearsals began in the late winter of 1974. There, spectacular new devices like the bridge (which would rise and fall hydraulically, seemingly at Bowie’s whim) and a crane that would place Bowie high above the audience during “Space Oddity” were tested.

“It looked real,” Fisher says. “You saw a bridge with streetlamps held up by two buildings. And it was actually held up by steel cable and was an elevator and could lower onstage. So this bridge lowered while he was on it, under a streetlamp; he was wearing a trench coat, on a rainy night. Like
Casablanca
. One night in rehearsal, the bridge fell very rapidly while he was on it. It was very scary. It was frightening. It was a tech rehearsal in Toronto, where we put the show together. It went very fast and he jumped off at the bottom and we all ran to him and he was okay. He said he was okay and he didn’t break anything. It was a drop of maybe fifteen feet. It wasn’t a free fall, but it was high speed. It really crashed to the ground with him on it, very fast and very, very scary for all of us.”

That spring MainMan issued a press release formally announcing the tour. The touring band, Flowers, Garson, drummer Tony Newman, guitarist Earl Slick, and keyboardist Michael Kamen (with backing vocals and dancing from Guy Andrisio and Bowie’s childhood friend Geoff MacCormack, who performed as “Warren Peace”), seemed to further liberate Bowie from his past. Leading this new crew through untested material during rehearsals at the Capitol Theater in Port Chester, New York, that June, he found himself playing with his vocals, singing the material any way he liked.