Read Bowie: A Biography Online
Authors: Marc Spitz
Bowie: A Biography (55 page)
It was a brave film for its time, and Bowie confused many of his longtime gay fans by giving an interview to
Rolling Stone’s
Kurt Loder early in the year where he dismissed his liberating early-seventies revolution as “youthful experimentation.” If there was one real contention that came with the massive success of the new Straight Bowie, this was it. With homosexual men just starting to die of “the gay cancer,” some felt this was an act of betrayal. Now that he was a mainstream pop star on the cover
of Time
, he was turning his back on the very community that supported him all along.
“That’s about the time he was being very coy about not really being bisexual … that appealed to me because I was hoping that my sexuality, that I would outgrow it too,” says performer Justin Bond, a Bowie fan since the mid-seventies. “A couple of years later though, I was really turned off by him. I didn’t like him at all. Because of that bullshit. ‘Experimentation.’ By then I was a politicized queer radical and I was like, ‘Fuck him and fuck that.’ I didn’t feel betrayed, I just felt like he was a product. But then he lost his touch, didn’t he? For many people it was a betrayal. You can’t take that back. ‘Oh, no, I really am cool. I really am on your side.’ At a time when Reagan was in office and AIDS was rearing its head he decided he was going to cash in on his white, male privilege and put a distance between him and his stigmatized fans, and by doing that, he basically said, ‘Okay, I am the dick that you love hating. I am Rod Stewart.’ And that’s what he’s like now.” Professor Paglia offers a counter-theory. “Throughout the eighties, because of AIDS, a lot of punitive stuff was
coming from gay activists. It was a period of censoriousness. If so and so does not fulfill the agenda for the socially approved message du jour then they’re a traitor. I hated that about gay activism. I follow the Oscar Wilde theory here, that the artist has no obligation to any social cause. The artist has an obligation only to art. This business of reading artists the riot act is what the Nazis did and what the Stalinists did. You’re asking art to serve a propagandistic purpose. Art is not a branch of sociology. It’s not a branch of social improvement. Not a branch of the health sciences. Bowie, in my view, had no obligation to say ‘I’m gay.’ His obligation is only to his imagination. It’s the extreme view but I think, quite frankly, it’s the authentically gay view. The other view is from people who have driven a wedge between gay culture and the arts. It’s the same attitude Gloria Steinem has about Picasso. Picasso was a bad man and therefore a bad artist?”
I
remember seeing the “Let’s Dance” video world premiere on MTV. I would spend full days laying on the cool, white-tiled floor in my grandparents’ house, which was situated on the eighteenth hole of the Woodlands Country Club in Fort Lauderdale. Between 1981 and 1988, I watched MTV seven hours a day. I wanted my MTV. It showed me how to live, or at least how to look. I bought a pair of army pants with ties at the ankles and lots of pockets for the storage of ammunition (I put Jolly Ranchers in them) after seeing Joe Strummer in the “Rock the Casbah” video. Pants weren’t much of a commitment, of course. You could take them off and put on another pair, maybe some Guess or Girbaud jeans. Bowie’s new videos made me commit. I had not been motivated by Billy Idol, Dale Bozzio, Nick Rhodes, Terri Nunn or any of the other great blondes of the day to dye my own hair, but when I saw Bowie tapping his toe while strumming his guitar against the wall in that sweaty café, something clicked over in my brain and I found myself standing for the first time in hours. I got a ride to the Eckerd drugstore in my grandfather’s car and endured the full blast of the air conditioner and the Mantovani cassettes, which made the molecules slow and the ride feel three times as long. I found the ladies’ hair products aisle and bought a bottle of something called Sun-In, because the poster in the display featured a woman whose hair resembled Bowie’s as he
danced the blues. When we got back, I emptied an entire bottle, soaking my rabbity brown hair. I pulled off my shirt and walked out to the golf course and found the lemon tree that sometimes kept long drives from braining us as we lay out on the chaise lounge, and I baked my head. Every fifteen minutes or so, I’d walk inside and see if I was starting to change. Frustrated by the delay, I bit into the lemons, puncturing them with my teeth, and squeezed them onto my head like it was a fillet of sole. The lemon juice stung my eyes and dried on my cheeks as I reclined and let the chemical reaction take place. I was convinced that by the time I opened my eyes, I would have hair the hue of a baby chick’s ass. Just like David Bowie’s. Instead, my hair looked brown … with blotches of sickly orange scattered across my injured and blistering skull. “Maybe you have to wash it?” I reasoned to myself as I inspected myself in the laundry room mirror. Something about the chlorine in the water must certainly function as some kind of activator. But the heat of the shower spray and, later, the hair dryer only seemed to set the Cheez Doodle–dust orange. Defeated, I padded back into the kitchen, grabbed a Cel-Ray soda and turned on the TV. Nina Blackwood was announcing a video by the Tubes. I looked more like her than I did before, which was no relief. Her hair was terrible. MTV played “Let’s Dance” constantly in the summer of ’83, as they would “Modern Love” and “China Girl” later in the year. Each time, I was reminded of the fact that I was not and could not be David Bowie. By the time he released his next album
, Tonight,
Bowie’s hair was brown, and so was mine. I had already decided that I wanted to be Morrissey and Michael Stipe and Paul Westerberg instead, but who knows what would have happened if I’d achieved that bright, beautiful yellow the first time? Maybe indie rock only exists because of the thousands of kids who realized that they could never, ever look like David Bowie
.
N
INETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR
, the year that Bowie had sung about so worriedly a decade earlier on
Diamond Dogs
, wasn’t exactly the end of free society, but it was certainly a bad year for the artist.
Bowie’s heretofore perfect creative choices slowly veered toward either the apathetic or the desperate over the next four years, up until about ’88 (when most agree, he made a valiant effort to recover his mojo).
There’s probably no better metaphor for the decline in the quality of David Bowie’s recorded work in the mid-eighties than the life, work and death of pop artist Patrick Nagel. Nagel, an L.A.-based commercial and fine artist, would sieze on a photo image, usually of slyly grinning female fashion model, and blow out all realistic facial detail with a saturated and usually fairly gaudy color scheme. The end result would call to mind Warhol’s silk-screened portraits without any of the New York–bred street wisdom and wit, but rather a feel-good, West Coast, sun, sex and fitness aesthetic (probably why Nagel rip-offs still grace the walls of strip clubs all around the world). His most famous works include a portrait of
Dynasty
star Joan Collins and the sleeve for Duran Duran’s second album,
Rio
, which broke through the same year as
Let’s Dance
. “Health” was the rage in ’84. Within a year John Travolta and a lyrca-clad Jamie Lee Curtis would appear on the cover in promotion of the film
Perfect
, in which Travolta’s cynical reporter uncovers what most everybody already knew about these fitness clubs: they’re social networks, places to party and pick up sex partners who are already sweaty. But like being a drug-crazed miscreant, being a health nut requires some commitment. If your passion isn’t really there, participating in either world, dark or light, can prove fatal, as it was in Nagel’s case. On February 4, 1984, Nagel died of a heart attack after participating in a celebrity “Aerobothon” to benefit the American Heart Association. According to the
Los Angeles Times
, the artist was “out of shape from too many martinis and frozen Snickers.”
In Bowie’s case the only thing that died from his new, golden image was his stature. This was the period where some fans got off the bus, griping, “He stopped being good once he stopped doing blow.” I can remember hearing this as it pertained to Bowie in my own school cafeteria. Bowie was truly healthy. He had stopped doing drugs. He wasn’t even drinking, a device he’d used to wean himself off coke in the late seventies. There is nothing wrong, of course, with such physical fitness for Bowie the person, but for Bowie the artist, who still chain-smoked cigarettes and loved good, strong coffee and English breakfasts, embracing the Nagel-propelled, neon-lit, ocean-breeze-blown “fitness” trend was a means to an
end, and it would bite him back. Bowie was, after all, still intoxicated, only in the wake of the Serious Moonlight world tour and platinum sales of
Let’s Dance
, it was unprecedented mainstream appeal that made him weave off course. Unsure where to navigate now that there was virtually no trace of the fringe about him, Bowie opted to pursue material success again; the pendulum swung toward commerce, but this time around it got stuck there, rusted, perhaps, by a shower of cash and acclaim.
This is not to judge Bowie or take him to task for an uninspired release or two. He was probably sincerely exhausted, having toured all points east and west and turned in high-energy performances at each venue. A longer spell of rest and salubrious recovery time and he might not have been so easily pressured by those who suggested that he rush out the follow-up to
Let’s Dance
. Bowie was, after all, new to EMI, and it’s natural to want to maintain a certain stock standard. And so
Tonight
, released in September of ’84, arrived less than nine months after he ended the Serious Moonlight tour in Japan. The album contained just two new Bowie originals, both of which are its high points, the infectious fluff of a lead single “Blue Jean” (another Top 10 hit in England and America) and the moody, jazzy “Loving the Alien.” “This Is Not America,” another bit of dark jazz in collaboration with guitarist Pat Metheny, does not appear on the album but was also released that year on the soundtrack to the Timothy Hutton/Sean Penn spy thriller
The Falcon and the Snowman
. Also very strong, it suggests what the sound of a follow-up to
Let’s Dance
might have been if the art/commerce balance had some time to restore itself and Bowie decided to spend more time on a follow-up record. The remainder was comprised of ill-advised covers. Does anyone really need to futz with the Beach Boys’ “God Only Knows”? Other tracks were written in the late seventies with Iggy Pop and Carlos Alomar and already recorded by Iggy, including “Neighborhood Threat” and the title track. An all-star team of eighties producers, engineers and studio men welded it all together, including Hugh Padgham, a veteran of Phil Collins’s solo albums, and Derek Bramble, a veteran of the excellent but monumentally slick disco act Heatwave.
Coming off the juggernaut of
Let’s Dance, Tonight
sold strongly until most people realized that it was not very good. The same year saw debut full-lengths from Lloyd Cole and the Commotions
(Rattlesnakes)
and the Smiths’ self-titled release. These bands appealed to the smart college kids who used to live and die for Bowie. New releases from R.E.M.
(Reckoning)
and Prince
(Purple Rain)
more than delivered and often improved on triumphs of the previous year. And let’s not even get into Run-DMC’s debut album, which was the warning shot that hip-hop was no longer going to be about shouting out one’s zodiac sign or giving one for the treble and two for the bass. The field was a fast one, and Bowie was winded and weighted with subpar material. “It was rushed,” Bowie admitted years later. “There wasn’t much of my writing on it, ’cause I can’t write on tour and I hadn’t assembled anything to put out. I didn’t have any concept behind it. It was just a collection of songs.”
“The album contains an awful lot of classy filler,” Charles Shaar Murray says. “There’s no center. I think that ‘Loving the Alien,’ for example, is a really flawed attempt by Bowie to create a genuine Bowie epic.” Worse, Bowie tried to hang opulent, leaden and often overlong music videos on the whole lazy affair. As this was the era of Paul McCartney’s
Give My Regards to Broad Street
, Mick Jagger’s
Running out of Luck
(co-starring Rae Dawn Chong!) and Dylan’s
Hearts of Fire
, when all sixties megastars decided it was time to “act,” Bowie, easily the most gifted of the lot, appeared in a twenty-two-minute music video entitled
Jazzin’ for Blue Jean
, directed by Julien Temple. Temple, a quintessential “big eighties” director who, oddly, can create low-key, captivating documentaries like
The Filth and the Fury
and
The Future Is Unwritten
(on the late Joe Strummer), would also bring Bowie into a similarly distended big-screen musical version
of Absolute Beginners
, also starring Patsy Kensit, not yet the chic queen of Britpop but rather the chipmunk-cheeked lead singer of the band Eighth Wonder. I’m not sure if
Jazzin’ for Blue Jean
intends to seriously address Bowie’s family history of schizophrenia (I’m thinking, er, not), but David is cast in dual roles: the superego (a nebbish named Vic who stalks girls in pubs and has difficulty maneuvering his hair dryer) and id (Screamin’ Lord Byron, a campy rock star who enters the video on a stretcher, an oxygen mask over his face as if he’s just walked out of a “Diamond Dogs” lyric). A nod, of course, to Romantic poet Lord Byron and proto–shock rocker Screaming Lord Sutch, he sort of qualifies as a new Bowie “character” and certainly has his own dance (hold your arms, point your palms at your face, let your wrists go slack, shake them both to the beat). It’s fun watching Bowie, notorious for
his entourages, try to blag his way past the black doorman with lines like “Great Jesse Jackson speech,” but the only real payoff comes when “Mr. Screamin’” takes the stage to sing the hit.
