Bowie: A Biography (61 page)

It was conceived as a seamless shift, and it was, when Bowie’s arrival didn’t trigger a mass exodus from the venue. It didn’t help that Bowie’s set only featured a handful of older hits. The bulk of the material was from
Outside
, and no amount of rubber T-shirts or black eyeliner was going to make a depressed fifteen-year-old kid sit through that. Bowie, to his credit, fully acknowledged this and seemed to relish the challenge of having to win them over. What living legend ever gets the opportunity to do that, after all?

“I slip onstage after a set by the most aggressive band ever to conquer the Top 40,” Bowie said at the time. “I do not do hits, I perform lots of songs from an album that hasn’t been released, and the older songs I perform are probably obscure even to my oldest fans. I use no theatrics, no videos and often no costumes. It’s a dirty job but I think I’m just the man for it.”

“We had to front-load our set with harder music, industrial music, like ‘Hallo Spaceboy,’” Gabrels said. “We had to blow that song early just to come off the peak of Nine Inch Nails ’cause they had built their set to a climax.”

“Oh, it was definitely harder to win over their audience,” Bowie’s drummer Zachary Alford says today, “but I think that is what made it seem real for David. He felt empty just playing the hits again for the umpteenth time. It was like painting by numbers for him. Having to get out there and put your neck on the chopping block, not knowing what the audience would do at the end of the song, that was exciting for him, not to mention for us! I mean, it really made us play our hearts out and probably gave him some of the feeling of the early days. And the material was amazing. There were critics who kept throwing the term ‘difficult’ around. I mean, come on. You gonna tell me
Low
is not difficult?
Lodger
is not difficult? These guys were just idiots who wanted to hear the Sound and Vision tour all over again and David wasn’t having it.”

When the Outside tour hit Europe in November, Morrissey was booked as the support act. Like Bowie, the former Smiths singer had his own die-hard fans who would have been perfectly happy to see a full-length set by their own hero, not an abbreviated support set. What began as an honor on the part of the opener soon turned into a war of egos. Morrissey was a major David Bowie fan, just like Reznor had been, but he was not ready to do anything akin to performing a segue number (possibly singing “I Know It’s Gonna Happen Someday” and a shared Bowie or T. Rex song). Morrissey’s refusal to alter his set or cede some independence to the older star created an air of tension from the start.

“He got on the bus after sound check and told the bus driver to take him to London,” Gabrels says. “He left his band there looking all worried ten minutes before they were supposed to go on. He left the tour manager and everybody. He just did a runner. I’d thought it was going great. Maybe he wasn’t getting the level of adoration that he required. Not as many flowers as he expected.” Unaccustomed to being treated like support, Morrissey was apparently further irritated by the closet-sized dressing rooms and took to baiting the crowd at earlier performances with “Don’t worry, David will be on soon.” He would later explain, “I left because Bowie put me under a lot of pressure, and I found it too exhausting. You have to worship at the temple of Bowie when you become involved.”

During a break in the tour, eighties art star turned film director Julian Schnabel was in New York, finishing a biopic on eighties art star turned cautionary tale Jean-Michel Basquiat. When he conceived of the film, a movie “about an artist by artists,” as he told Charlie Rose, Schnabel reached out to his famous friends and acquaintances to cast it. Making seemingly an odd choice, Schnabel asked Bowie if he would be interested in playing Andy Warhol, Basquiat’s mentor. “He’s a very known person,” Schnabel said. “I need a pop icon to play a pop icon.” Bowie’s Warhol is not an impression so much as an abstracted interpretation. He doesn’t try to mask his English accent but still manages to affect Warhol’s speech with tone and rhythm. He wears the black turtlenecks associated with the art star but reminds us, with his garish leather coat, that this is the eighties Warhol. Crispin Glover in
The Doors
and most recently Guy
Pearce in
Factory Girl
have brought the world-shaking sixties Warhol to life on-screen, but only Bowie, using perhaps his own memories of eighties inertia, tapped into the searching, fatigued energy of sixties and seventies icons in the go-go era. “I don’t even know what’s good anymore,” he whines to Jeffrey Wright’s Jean-Michel as they collaborate on a massive mural. Take away the “gee” and grimaces and the fey hand-on-hip posture, and it could easily be Bowie talking about his own career at the same point. The film stars many people who actually knew Warhol, including Dennis Hopper, who was amused if not a little freaked out by Bowie’s costuming. “David was wearing Andy’s wig,” Hopper says. As he had with his role in
The Elephant Man
, Bowie did the research. “He was a great actor. Great to work with.”

He was granted access to other items belonging to the deceased artist that were stored in the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. “This little handbag that he took into hospital with him, a very sad little bag with all these contents: a check torn in half, an address and a phone number and this putty-colored pancake that he obviously used to touch himself up with before he went in public anywhere, loads of herb pills too,” Bowie told Charlie Rose.

When Schnabel didn’t need Bowie on set, he’d walk into Soho in full costume just to test how people would react, relishing the double shock this would certainly elicit when they discovered that it was not a dead artist but rather a live rock legend looking a scream.

Bowie will always be an innovator because of his pure love for the shape, the feel and the power of a raw idea. He doesn’t always come up with the nut of a great notion himself, and certainly as he became more rich and famous, he turned into something of a curator and a champion of other people’s visions. Sometimes, in following each idea through to its realization, he will fail, but he remains a great cultural innovator because he sees these failures as part of the whole process. If one out of five hundred endeavors changes the world, who’s to say that it wasn’t worth it? A half dozen times easily, over five decades, Bowie’s faith in the sheer beauty of some thought changed the world. In the fall of 1996, a thirty-four-year-old Wharton-educated Wall Street trader and investment banker named David Pullman had an idea: why couldn’t someone invest in securitized intellectual property? Anything that accrues royalties has
value. Why can’t you issue a bond against the future earnings of a book or a film or a song, as you would a painting or a classic car? “John Steinbeck is ideal,” says Pullman. “Every seventh-grader in America is reading it.”

At the time, Bowie’s business managers were looking into their options as far as generating money off of Bowie’s back catalog. Bowie owned his master tapes and his publishing and had the option of buying out Tony Defries’s share of the generated royalties, provided he could get a large infusion of cash. “The business manager was trying to sell David’s catalog,” says Pullman today. “He mentioned it to me. ‘You’re on Wall Street. What can you do for this?’ They realized David wasn’t going to sell his catalog. His songs were his babies. So they said, ‘Can you help him?’ I asked them what they were earning. They were earning millions of dollars a year. A significant number. Sounded good to me. I asked him if the numbers were audited. They said yes. Are they audited by a big six accounting firm? And he said yes. I asked him if he had three years’ worth of history. He had five years’ worth of history. To which I said, ‘I can securitize that.’ He said, ‘What’s securitization?’”

Pullman explained that he could offer future royalties from Bowie’s back catalog and a fixed interest rate to an investment firm, generating Bowie a considerable advance. There would be no personal risk to Bowie or his family, and with the right stimulation via licensing, there was much money to be made. “He’d written a lot of iconic songs ideal for commercial film and TV,” says Pullman. “‘Heroes,’ ‘Golden Years,’ Young Americans.’ Not a lot of catalogs have those type of songs.” There was no indication at the time that every cell phone would have a popular song ringtone or that CDs would ever be replaced as a medium for listening to music. Bowie got it. “They went to David with the idea and David’s reaction was ‘Well, why haven’t you started already?’” says Pullman. “He picks things up very quickly. Very creative, innovative. He likes new. But not stupid new.”

Structuring the deal was done in super-secret fashion. “Akin to making a movie,” Pullman says. “The idea of producing something from so many different disciplines involved things like estate issues. Taxes. Divorce issues. Child-support issues. Wills, trusts. Bankruptcy issues. We had to consolidate all those disciplines of law into one deal. They said it was impossible. From beginning to end, we closed and funded it by
January 1997. Delivered it fait accompli, beginning to end, and the whole world was shocked. It was the cover of the
Wall Street Journal.”

All the bonds had been bought preannouncement by the Prudential Insurance company, but that did not stop private investors from clamoring for a piece of Bowie in the ensuing media frenzy. “After the story broke, real investors were like, it’s hot. Big players. Pension funds.” Echoing the MainMan strategy of the seventies, the fact that the bonds were not available only made people want them more. Bowie threw every interview to Pullman, his silence only adding to the mystique as the plan rocked the business world.

Pullman dealt with both Bowie and Defries separately because of the still lingering resentment between the two parties. “He’s stuck with him,” Pullman says. “It’s like a marriage. The flipside is Tony is very savvy. I didn’t realize he’s an attorney, not just a manager. Tony didn’t have anything to say about David. They helped each other early on. Tony taught him some of the things he learned along the way about owning things. People don’t pick it up right away. Didn’t do things the right way to begin with; as he learned he corrected everything.”

Many investors are still holding Bowie Bonds a dozen or so years on, and Pullman, who trademarked “Bowie Bonds” and “Pullman Bonds,” has done similar deals for the catalogs of James Brown, songwriters Holland-Dozier-Holland of Motown fame, and the Isley Brothers, among others. “You can never listen to music the same way again,” he says. “You hop into a cab and you hear a song on the radio and you’re thinking, ‘They’re generating royalties.’ A lot of people think music is for free. Nobody thought of this. Then they said it would never work. Never pay off. David is someone who grasped it instantly.”

In 2005, a full decade after their touring fiasco, Morrissey still fuming perhaps from the Outside tour debacle, told British
GQ
, “[He is] not the person he was. He is no longer David Bowie at all. Now he gives people what he thinks will make them happy, and they’re yawning their heads off. And by doing that, he is not relevant. He was only relevant by accident.” By this time, however, relevance was no longer the point. Trying to hold whatever percentage of Trent Reznor’s audience he could manage night after night seemed to be David Bowie’s final bid for reaching a younger audience. He never stuck his neck out there to that end in the same way
again, as the Rolling Stones and U2 continue to do, always in pursuit of a hit single or an acknowledgment of pop supremacy and competition-worthiness. Bowie would bury himself once again in his fifties, as he had in Thomas Jerome Newton and Berlin in his thirties and Tin Machine in his fifties, but this time he’d retreat inside the World Wide Web, a new technology that he would turn into a sort of command center before anyone else. The Web helped Bowie the Buddhist sustain a sort of post-ambition state of bliss, where he could remain constantly amused, entertained and engaged. If anything, pop stardom was limiting. From the close of the Outside tour, he pursued whims and entertained offers such as Bowie Bonds with his grace, taste and an organic bravery fully returned, and was rewarded as he had been post-Berlin, with the respect of yet another full decade’s worth of younger artists (from Moby and Goldie all the way up to TV on the Radio and the Arcade Fire). His pop stock would never again be vulnerable to the kind of fluctuation too common to rock ’n’ roll stars. Freak Bowie had become Straight Bowie and was now Post-Ambition Bowie, turned on, more so than ever before, as he surfed and clicked and edited (he’d joined the staff of
Modern Painters
magazine around this time as well, writing about or querying Balthus, Jeff Koons and Schnabel, among others). He had more to say but nothing to prove.

27.

L

IKE THE MOD MOVEMENT
following the first wave of late-fifties rock ’n’ roll, early and mid-nineties “Britpop” was a bold reclamation of sharp Englishness after a prolonged era of Americanization. Bands like Manchester’s Happy Mondays and Stone Roses released brilliant, danceable rock albums at the end of the eighties, but by the first few years of the following decade, both bands had blown themselves out with the pressures of fast fame and, in the case of the Mondays, enough E, crack and smack to stun a charging herd of megafauna. The Smiths and Echo and the Bunnymen had split. DJ culture and acid house beats ruled the clubs, and what young rock bands existed were so
uncharismatic and passive when onstage (despite some genuine inventiveness, especially with regard to My Bloody Valentine) that they were lumped into a subgenre semi affectionately known as “shoegaze.” The grunge rock bands of the American northwest—Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Sound garden, Alice in Chains—were given cover stories in English music weeklies like
NME
and
Melody Maker
. So pervasive was the thick, brooding, whining grunge idiom that British rock acts like London-formed Bush achieved platinum sales by aping it expertly. Bush released a half dozen fine singles (especially the power ballad “Glycerine”) but they were about as English as Stone Temple Pilots. This was a low for British culture, one not seen since the pre-Beatles sixties.