Bowie: A Biography (6 page)

“The mystery of James Dean lies not in his abrupt end, but in his origins,” David Dalton writes in the classic Dean biography
James Dean: The Mutant King
, which Bowie is busy reading while spending time with journalist Cameron Crowe during their classic ’76
Playboy
interview. “Dean was probably very much like me,” Bowie tells Crowe in the interview. “Elizabeth Taylor told me that once. Dean was calculating. He wasn’t careless. He was not the rebel he portrayed so successfully. He didn’t want to die. But he did believe in the premise of taking yourself to extremes, just to add a deeper cut to one’s personality.”

“He was an actor,” Bast told me. “An actor prepares by watching. Seeing. Trying to live the part. Studying other people. [Russian acting
innovator Constantin] Stanislavski wrote that. [Dean] was very much aware of all that and took the opportunity to avail himself of things like that. The end result … to become an actor. You can live other roles. He’s not going to go around talking like an Indiana farm boy unless there was a certain charm. Then he’d turn it on.”

Dean’s death made him an even more perfect model. As he sat in the cinema, watching Dean, brooding about the Griffith Park Observatory in
Rebel Without a Cause
or covered in black gold in the following year’s
Giant
(his final film), David knew that this was someone who no longer existed in any terrestrial way. He was somewhere else, “beyond the air,” as Quatermass would say.

Equally out-there, and next in the crucial succession of formative Bowie heroes, was Richard Wayne Penniman, a.k.a. “Little Richard.” In the autumn of 1956, several weeks short of his tenth birthday, John gave David a copy of Little Richard’s Specialty Records single “Tutti Frutti.”

“My father brought home a plastic American record with no center,” Bowie recalled. “An American GI had sent a bunch of singles to Dr. Barnardo’s and he brought me half a dozen home to listen to. Our record player only played at seventy-eight so I used to put the needle on it and try to turn it at the right speed using my finger. So I got this very weird perception of what rock ’n’ roll sounded like at a very early age. That could explain a lot.”

This was no Danny Kaye.

“A wop bop a loo bop a wop bam boom,” the gritty caterwaul declared—words that meant everything and nothing at once. The band fell in with the piano, sax, bass and drums and David Jones felt his entire body rise and shake. It was an electrifying moment. “My heart nearly burst with excitement,” he said. “It filled the room with energy and color and outrageous defiance.”

Rooted in gospel and gruff like a blues singer, but also pliant, flexible and light like an opera singer, with the winking, naughty wit of a cabaret star, Richard’s voice is still unique in its twisted, somewhat insane timbre and phrasing. He sang like a man who could never sing any other way. It possesses urgency, confidence, bravado and deep, almost biblical need. “I tried to take voice lessons but I found I couldn’t because the way I sing, a voice teacher can’t deal with it,” Richard has said of his phrasing. “I’m out of control.”

As epochal as it was, Richard’s “Tutti Frutti” was
not
a number one hit in America. A watered-down cover version by Pat Boone had topped the charts instead. Richard was an African American and androgynous. He was a double threat to many parents at the time.

“I had heard God. Now I wanted to see him,” David recalled. And he finally did, in hit films like
Don’t Knock the Rock
and
The Girl Can’t Help It
, both from 1956. In
Don’t Knock the Rock
, featuring seminal and soon to be scandalized Cleveland disc jockey Alan Freed (who has a great face for radio), Richard is all cheekbones and sex, flipping a sharkskin leg up on the piano lid and thrusting it into the keys and rolling his eyeballs with extreme camp as his band runs through “Long Tall Sally.” “Rock and roll is for morons!,” one of the disapproving local officials declares later in the film, “It’s outrageous! Depraved.” In
The Girl Can’t Help It
, the better film of the two thanks to genuinely funny dialogue (“Rome wasn’t built in a day.” “She ain’t Rome and she’s already built!”) and a prescient plotline (Tom Ewell’s agent attempts to turn Jayne Mansfield’s sexpot into a star inside of six weeks at the behest of a gangster) that will reflect David’s own rise to super-stardom in the early seventies. In
Girl
, Richard performs the title track, “Reddy Teddy,” and “She’s Got It,” in a nightclub before an all-white crowd. The film begins in dull black and white as Ewell boasts about the “gorgeous lifelike color by Deluxe.” Suddenly (with further comic prompting by Ewell, a master of the deadpan delivery) the widescreen transforms into a vivid, burning color scape. A better metaphor for Richard’s impact on the young David Jones and by extension, polite, white popular culture, does not exist. To David, Richard was the pinnacle, a consummate weirdo but no outcast; rather an artist with killer power over all who gazed upon him. Even at ten the boy wanted to be …
this
, whatever this was.

John Jones, with his music hall background, brief as it was, also understood the appeal of Little Richard and rock ’n’ roll. Given his own unexpressed lust for color and noise in his own adolescence, John was likely touched by David’s interest in music and was evidently more than happy to supply the boy with 45s.

“Hound Dog” by Elvis Presley, who shared David’s birthday-twelve years his senior—was next. David played the 45 one day for his cousin Kristina and couldn’t help but observe the effect Presley’s voice had on her. The little girl began to sweat as she shook her hips to the
mutant hillbilly beat. Puberty had not fully set in but even at age ten, it was clear that this music had a kind of power that his mom and dad’s 78s did not. Rock ’n’ roll meant sex, something never spoken of in society but always present, hanging in the air like a primal mist. And now, uncontained, an entire generation of English kids seemed to go mad at once.

With rock ’n’ roll and pop culture, America liberated Western Europe a second time. Only this time it focused only on the teenagers. David, in many ways, was no longer an English kid and would never be one again. His heart like most English teens, was on the other side of the Atlantic.

“We started to get into various things I have to call ‘American,’” music publicist Greg Tesser recalls. “Until about 1954 or -five, it was all a bit bleak and very dark and very austere. My father was in the printing business and he printed posters for Davy Crockett, and that had a huge boom in England. England in the early fifties was just like it’d been in the thirties and the forties because of the war and subsequent deprivation.”

For a short time, David had even forsaken British soccer for “Yank football,” which he found he could pick up on John’s shortwave radio. He would sit and listen to the simulcasts on American Armed Forces Radio out of Germany. Transfixed, he wrote a letter to the American embassy in London requesting information on scores and players and received a uniform, helmet and pad in return, not to mention his first bit of press ink:
LIMEY KID LOVES YANK FOOTBALL
, in the
Bromley and Kentish Times
. The photo shows an elated David kitted out in his new pads and a tightly pulled necktie. “It is a safe bet that the people of Bromley may soon be scratching their heads, too, when David introduces ‘sandlot football’ to the youngsters in one of the parks,” the article stated.

Along with these new, American-style freedoms and indulgent desires came an unavoidable generation gap. Those who had fought for king and country in World War I and II were outraged by the apparently ungrateful nature of these kids, who only seemed to want to dance and fornicate. There’s a famous scene in
A Hard Day’s Night
where John Lennon takes the piss out of an older train commuter in a bowler hat. “I fought a war for your sort,” he sneers at Lennon with disgust. “I bet you’re sorry you won,” Lennon snipes back. There’s another in
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
, in which Albert Finney takes a break from pulling factory machine levers, lights up a smoke and scans a row of hardworking
industrialized drones, ten years his elder and still there. “They got ground down before the war and never got over it,” he sneers. “I’d like to see someone grind me down.” Postwork, Finney dons a sharp suit and heads to a nightclub to listen to American jazz.

Even some British youth quietly puzzled at the Americanization of their country and embodied a of inferiority as though they were being shown how to live. This was best articulated by Jimmy Porter, the angry young chain-smoking hero of John Osborne’s classic stage play
Look Back in Anger
. Inert and impotent, with nothing he could point to and say, “That is me,” Jimmy rages from his chair. “I must be getting sentimental … But I must say it’s pretty dreary living in the American Age—unless you’re an American of course. Perhaps all our children will be Americans. That’s a thought isn’t it?”

Unfortunately the one organic British subculture of this period, the Teddy Boys, were tied up in sensationalized violence. Teddy Boys, or Teds, were dandies, “Ted” being a shortening of “Edwardian.” A precursor to the more famous mods in that one had to be sharply dressed, Ted culture was an odd hybrid of English tailoring and American small-town style. Teds wore thick-soled creepers or pointy “winklepicker” shoes, loose collars, tight dark trousers, bright Lurex socks and large waistcoats but coiffed and greased their hair like American rock ’n’ rollers. The Teddy Girls wore hoop skirts, drape jackets and ponytails. In an effort, it seems, to prove you can look sharp and still be a badass, the Teds roamed London in gangs, vandalizing and tormenting straights but mostly fighting each other like the American juvenile delinquent gangs who were rapidly becoming a cottage industry, both in terms of selling to them and selling cautionary tales about them. The best among these cautionary tales was the film
Blackboard Jungle
.

Released in 1955,
Blackboard Jungle
purports to be a cautionary tale but is really the godfather of all exploitation “teachers vs. students” movies, from
Rock ’n’ Roll High School
to
Heathers
to
Dangerous Minds
. Glenn Ford plays an open-minded English teacher. Sidney Poitier is the smartest of the troubled teens. They form an unlikely bond that helps them both deal with the surly, hopeless, chain-smoking teens around them. The language is pulpy (“You ever try to fight thirty-five guys at once, teach?”). Librarians are sexually ravaged, jazz records are violently critiqued and the
generation gap between World War II veterans and their increasingly existentially hopeless offspring has its first black and white document.

Blackboard Jungle
, most important, blasts wide open with “Rock Around the Clock” by Bill Haley and the Comets. The song, already a few years old, quickly became a Teddy Boy anthem and the first rock ’n’ roll single to sell one million copies on both sides of the Atlantic.
Blackboard Jungle
and its soundtrack caused a few incidents of violence in and around the actual cinemas where it screened, and soon the British newspapers got in on the act, realizing that outrage sold papers. (Haley, also appears in
Don’t Knock the Rock
but can’t stand up next to Little Richard.)

David Jones was too young to be a Teddy Boy, but he began styling his hair in a rock ’n’ roll fashion and adding pointy winklepickers to his school uniform. And he continued to collect rock ’n’ roll 45s, which his parents happily provided, by the likes of Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly and the Crickets, Eddie Cochran, Jerry Lee Lewis, the Everly Brothers, Fats Domino, and Gene Vincent and His Blue Caps.

The cultural sea change is most famously lamented in the book
Absolute Beginners
by Colin MacInnes. David Bowie would star in the 1984 film adaptation, an ill-fated musical directed by Julien Temple.
Absolute Beginners
is about, if nothing else, the power of the teenage dollar. Once teens were seen as a target audience, largely because of rock ’n’ roll, they had both buying and spending power. With that power came a sense of entitlement, and eventually the social changes that took place, from the repealing of mandatory military service to kids attending art college as opposed to going right into the workforce, would lead to the culture revolution of the following decade.

“Absolute Beginners
was a posey literary book for adults and literati,” says pop manager and author Simon Napier-Bell. “Nobody gave a toss what anyone else read. Books were for adults or eggheads. People were far too busy fucking and dancing and fighting.” Oral contraception, approved in ’57, helped with all the “fucking.” Rock ’n’ roll (stereos could now be purchased on credit for the first time) assisted with the rest.

England was lacking in stars and, with the exception of the Teds, lacking in style, but a new era was emerging. The 1950s were over and in the 1960s England’s role as trend follower and America’s role as trendsetter would be reversed almost completely.

David Jones became an official teenager himself on January 8, 1960. In England children take a precursory version of America’s SATs at age eleven called the eleven-plus. These standardized exams were designed to determine what line of education a student will be best suited for upon graduation at sixteen: the idea was to keep an eye on career making and focus on the preservation of the strength of the workforce. David was, of course, extremely focused. The only problem was that the objects of his focus—girls and rock ’n’ roll—were not part of the eleven-Plus. When he didn’t ace it, it became clear to his parents that action was needed. They knew he was an extremely bright and clever child. He simply needed the right environment. David interviewed at and was accepted as a student of Bromley Technical High School, or “Brom Tech.”

A Bromley boy with a strong chin and a strong rugby player’s physique, George Underwood, soon to become David’s very best mate, knew the boy from their Cub Scouts troop. The most ardent rock ’n’ roll enthusiasts at Brom Tech, at one time George and David were so close that they would often try to test out their assumed ESP. One would think of a word and then inquire with the other. Occasionally they succeeded in reading each other’s minds.