Bowie: A Biography (53 page)

Another fan had come to see the show as well. Mark David Chapman, in New York with an evil mission to assassinate John Lennon on December 8, caught Bowie in the show just days before. “The day after John was shot, I offered to restage the show so that David could leave the stage periodically when he wasn’t needed to keep his time onstage to a minimum,” Hofsiss has said. “He absolutely refused. We increased the security at the theater, but he made no demands.”

If anything, Bowie must have felt grateful to have a few hours of distraction each night. The murder of Lennon, as it did to any fan of rock ’n’ roll music, shook him to his core. Lennon had been a sort of substitute Terry figure, the older brother he could genuinely look up to and admire. Marc Bolan, whom he’d lost in ’77, had also played that role early on; while technically younger, he’d been the alpha personality to the shy and searching David Jones. The horrible suddenness and violence forced Bowie to reevaluate. After completing his run in
The Elephant Man
, Bowie flew back to Switzerland and spent the next three years out of the public eye, raising his son and resuming the semihabitual low profile that had always enabled him to cook up projects that meant something to him and eventually to his fans.

A second best-of,
ChangesTwoBowie
, marked the end of his contract with RCA. Anything Bowie recorded for another year and a half he would have to share with Tony Defries, per their severance agreement, so he found other ways to record and create.

Bowie was in Switzerland in July of 1981 when he got word that Queen was in town recording
Hot Space
, the follow-up to their worldwide smash
The Game
, in Montreux. Bowie dropped in. A jam session and John Deacon’s bass line led to “Under Pressure.” The entire song was written, recorded and mixed in one day. Its legacy was once in question, thanks to Vanilla Ice’s sampling of it for his “Ice Ice Baby,” but the song has in the intervening years seen its dignity restored. Roller-disco-friendly bass line aside, it’s one of the more complex singles in either Bowie or Queen’s discography, a suite of sorts, complete with scatting, finger snaps, “Young Americans”–style falsetto and “Heroes”-worthy emoting. Bowie and Queen’s Freddie Mercury might have been tempted to engage in a
camp-off (as Bowie would do with Mick Jagger mid-decade on their much less enduring duet, “Dancing in the Streets”), but both men, especially Mercury, are uncharacteristically restrained. Next he collaborated with Euro-disco king Giorgio Moroder on the song “Cat People (Putting Out Fire)” (with gasoline, no less), the theme from Paul Schrader’s kinky remake
of Cat People
starring Nastassja Kinski and Malcolm McDowell. It was recently revived by Quentin Tarantino for a New Wave inspired set piece in his World War II epic
Inglourious Basterds
. French actress Mélanie Laurent stands in a blood-red cocktail dress as she applies makeup and prepares to meet her fate. It looks like a Berlin music video.

Bowie continued to act as well. There was talk of him playing Abraham Lincoln in avant-garde theater person Robert Wilson’s opera
The Civil War
. He played the title character in the BBC production of Bertolt Brecht’s
Baal
, with stained teeth, filthy clothes and fingerless gloves. “Bowie is dressed down, and looks sufficiently debilitated, but one fault of the production is that we don’t get a really convincing impression of either his bodily deterioration or his supposed intellectual brilliance,” the
NME
griped in its review. “But the point is more Baal’s unceremonious way with spectators, the violence he inflicts upon the social habits of upper and lower classes alike; he is a free-traveling germ, and the only tension in Brecht’s narrative is over the question of Baal’s ruthless misanthropy—
can
he discard
everyone.”

In 1982, Bowie appeared as Catherine Deneuve’s mysteriously aging vampire lover in Tony Scott’s horror film
The Hunger
. That year Bauhaus, yet another Bowie-mad act from Steve Strange’s generation, cracked the British Top 20 with a cover version of “Ziggy Stardust.” Bauhaus was not post-punk or New Romantic, but rather the alpha band of a subgenre of both: Goth rock. They appear in the killer opening sequence of
The Hunger
performing the genre’s most iconic song, “Bela Lugosi’s Dead.” Siouxsie Sioux had also transitioned out of punk and post-punk into a more Gothic realm, as had the Cure. In America, bands like L.A.’s Christian Death adopted the slim, elegant-Nosferatu pose of Bowie’s Thin White Duke, as well as the more strangled end of his druggy croon, and made it a touchstone of the movement.

“Again, almost without exception, the Goth performers were glam fans who briefly got caught up in punk and then reverted to type,” Simon
Reynolds says. “Bauhaus were totally about that. Their cover of ‘Ziggy Stardust,’ it’s almost like karaoke. It shows the circularity of glam, where fans grow up to be idols, having learned the art of posing from their idols.”

The Hunger
is a cult hit among Bowie’s Goth fans today, but it was not the acting triumph that
The Elephant Man
was. There are moments of great, MTV-informed style (lots of gauzy light, neon and doves) and impressive makeup effects (Bowie ages seventy-five years), and who can fault a lesbian sex scene between Susan Sarandon and Deneuve? But by the third act it plunges into the standard blood-and-gore horror film it had initially been, according to director Tony Scott. “The original script was like a B horror movie,” Scott says of the film today. “My focus was to make it esoteric, and, um … strange and sexy. I was fighting what was on the page. We were one step away from giving them teeth. You know, vampire teeth. And I fought that to the death. I got criticized. I got slammed. It’s a Goth rock touchstone, yeah, but at the time, people hated it. It took me four more years to get another movie.” (That movie, by the way, was
Top Gun.)

Viewing these smaller pursuits, from
The Elephant Man
to his Queen and Moroder recordings, to
Baal
and
The Hunger
, one could wonder, especially with a pop chart now ruled by Bowie clones and drones, whether he was done trying to compete on a larger scale and becoming a more selective and less commercially ambitious artiste, à la Brian Eno. One would certainly be dead wrong. The Bowie that was to emerge from semi-exile and resume recording and touring would be yet another reinvention. He would again successfully remove all competition, old (the Stones) and new (Duran Duran and Spandau Ballet), from his path. The eighties, however, with their greedy lust for everything big, loud and tacky, would inform Bowie and not vice versa. The culture of the decade would inflate him to a stardom even bigger and more unwieldy than Ziggy had been. The new Bowie—let’s call him “Straight Bowie”—would no longer be able to handle it. Straight Bowie would never be truly, authentically, crucially and comfortingly freaky again.

“I said, ‘End up in a suit,’” Kim Fowley says, recalling a conversation he had with Bowie in 1972 when Bowie asked, jokingly, “How should I end up?” “After all of the masquerades. All the masks and the costumes, at the very end of it, end up in a suit,” Fowley answered. “Like Sinatra. He had a sixty-year career. The guys who have long careers always ended up
in a suit. When I saw the suit in the ‘Let’s Dance’ video, years later, that guy actually listened and observed everything. Maybe he was gonna end up in a suit anyway, but he certainly ended up in a suit. You can only be Liberace so long.”

23.

T

HE FORCE WITH WHICH
MTV took over the culture between 1981 and 1984 and changed the way we process entertainment (essentially in rapidly edited bits) has been well documented, but MTV also changed rock stars themselves, officially transforming them from marketable images to genuine corporate brands. What is David Bowie of the early eighties but a logo or mascot for his own corporation as well as MTV’s? His yellow hair, Cyndi Lauper’s bright red hair, Ric Ocasek of the Cars’ inky helmet head, Tina Turner’s frosty wig, Mark Knopfler’s stupid headband—they all became icons of the age, selling their own product and the lifestyle and ethos of the “MTV generation.” “Too much is never enough” was the slogan, recited by Bowie, and Lauper, Billy Idol, and the Police, in one of the channel’s promo bumpers from this era. Not since the post-Beatles sixties had Bowie invested so heavily in such a preprogrammed zeitgeist, and while the rewards were considerable in terms of record and concert ticket sales, the participant in such synergy ran the risk of becoming indistinguishable from the other brands and icons that flashed across the sixteen-inch screens in millions and millions of homes. What is a David Bowie if he is indistinguishable anyway? No different than Huey Lewis or Pat Benatar or Men at Work?

“Bowie seemed like the veteran of the business,” says original MTV VJ Alan Hunter (who appears as a dancer in the video for “Fashion”). “I was worried about his direction at the time. I would pine for these artists from the seventies that I loved. People like Bowie and Yes. Are they going to have to take that Kajagoogoo approach to continued success?”

What does the early-eighties David Bowie stand for? In a word: positivity. This is why the Straight Bowie of
Let’s Dance
was such an easy sell to
the masses. Gone was any trace of the nihilism and decadence of the early seventies.
Let’s Dance
put forth as feel-good an ethos as the Cars’ “Shake It Up” or Prince’s “Let’s Go Crazy.” That the motivation for this existential hedonism was Cold War–era mutually assured nuclear destruction—was only a formality. Choosing worry-free happiness or, as Wham’s T-shirts read, “life,” was self-empowerment. Around this time, Bowie sat down for an interview with his
Hunger
costar Susan Sarandon and explained, “When you’re young and you’re determined to crack the big dream of ‘I have a big statement and the world needs to hear my statement,’ there’s something a bit irresponsible about your attitude to the future. A nonrecognition that the future exists. I think it’s important for youth to have that. My son keeps me remembering that there is a tomorrow. That never really occurred to me before. ‘Tomorrow? This is it. This is now. This is what’s important. Everything’s impermanent, therefore I will just live for the second.’” “Do you worry about the world he is inheriting?” Sarandon asks. “Yes, naturally one has to start taking very positive stands on things. It’s much easier to be nihilistic.” This was the very man who wrote, in the single “1984,” a decade earlier: “You’ll be shooting up on anything, tomorrow’s never there,” and sang those lyrics with a perverse air of encouragement, as though he tacitly approved.

Bowie was for the most part free from the drug addiction that nearly cost him his health and sanity in the mid-and late seventies. He was a single parent with a son on the edge of his teens whom he adored. To try to fake the angst that fueled his late-seventies work (as well as 1980’s
Scary Monsters)
would be hard in the new age. He was thirty-five years old, rich and beloved by millions. He spent his days skiing the Alps and his nights with his loving son in a gorgeous house. It seemed a good time to explore this positivity rather than cast around for a superficial edge.

“In the history of the arts one is a rebel when one is young. The high romance dies. Wordsworth was a radical revolutionary in his youth but oh, over time the artist always matures, becomes automatically more conservative,” says Camille Paglia. “Anyone who is still a rebel in middle age or in old age is a fraud! Rebellion is a youthful mode. How can you continue to be a rebel when you’re a millionaire? People who demand that a maturing artist remain a rebel are stuck in adolescent crisis. They want to mummify the pose of rebellion in a major artist of Bowie’s rank. I completely and
totally reject that. Bowie, my goodness, broke through so many boundaries. Then he would have been a lesser artist than he is if he had continued like that. Major artists evolve. You can’t have the audience tyrannizing the artist. ‘No, no, stay the same.’”

“It’s hard to say ‘Hey, you can be a nice guy without being a wimp.’ It’s hard to make people believe you don’t have to be a tooth-gnashing, vampiric drug creature of the night to say something important,” Bowie said in ’83. “That same attitude, that same image, has been coming from one particular area of rock for the last fifteen years but it hasn’t done anything except produce casualties.” As he prepared to reenter the pop arena, he had the notion that if one could transform the great futurescapes of 1974’s Hunger City setting for
Diamond Dogs
and template for its groundbreaking tour or the Los Angeles of
Blade Runner
(released in ’82 and directed by
The Hunger
director Tony Scott’s brother Ridley) into something uplifting, it would be quite impossible to resist: a disorienting spectacle of preconceived good feeling.

“I wanted to put the stage environment into a place one couldn’t actually pin down,” Bowie told an interviewer that year. “With high-tech columns against a fifties Singapore look. I’d seen
Blade Runner
and was intrigued the way Ridley Scott did that. There was a huge element of Chinatown in his twenty-first-century city.”
Blade Runner
offers a double-edged metaphor for his new career path as well. “A new life awaits you in the Off-World Colonies,” a creepy, emotionless voice intones at the start of that film, as the camera pans across the rainy, corrupted, neon Hellscape that is Los Angeles, 2019, patrolled by hovercrafts and lousy with Replicants. “A chance to begin again in a golden land of opportunity and ad venture.” Ironically, the soundtrack, by Vangelis, owes much to side two of Bowie’s
Low
, that hallmark of gloriously negative angst rock.

Nile Rodgers, who’d signed on to produce
Let’s Dance
after meeting Bowie in a New York City nightclub, was expecting to produce a catchy but typically suspicious and unsettled David Bowie record (as all of his albums of the seventies as well as
Scary Monsters
had been, with the exception of
Young Americans)
. “I was expecting
Scary Monsters 2,”
Rodgers has said. Bowie shocked him by confessing, “I just want to make a good groove record.” Rodgers, with a then unbroken string of number one records with both his own band, Chic (“Good Times”), as well as
Diana Ross (“Upside Down”) and Sister Sledge (“We Are Family”), was the go-to man for such an affair. He and his partners, bassist Bernard Edwards and drummer Tony Thompson, knew R & B, obviously, but they were also fans of the old and new waves of rock ’n’ roll. In 1982, four full years before hip-hop integrated rock, only a handful of artists in America—Rodgers, Michael Jackson, Blondie and Prince among them—were chipping away at that wall that Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler would smash through with a mic stand in the video for their Run-DMC duet “Walk This Way.” All of them had enjoyed crossover success except Rodgers. Jackson had drafted Eddie Van Halen to loan his signature guitar sound to “Beat It,” creating a crossover smash in the process. Blondie topped the charts with “Rapture.” Prince and his racially mixed band relied on angular New Wave riffs and angsty, staccato synth grooves as much as they did roller-disco funk or sexy slow jams. It had angered Rodgers, a onetime member of the Black Panthers, that Chic’s music was only played on pop and R & B radio despite its New Wave sensibility and futuristic production. The Clash’s dance hit “The Magnificent Seven” was in heavy rotation on New York City R & B and disco bastions like WBLS and WKTU. There seemed to be a double standard at work, and for Rodgers, whose stepfather was white (his teenage mother had had an affair with a conga player), it was especially vexing.