Bowie: A Biography (62 page)

Suede, a quartet who had been going for about four years with varying lineups (at one point including Justine Frischmann, who would go on to form the excellent British power-pop act Elastica), finally made it big in 1993. Their self-titled debut claimed the prestigious Mercury Music Prize, topping the English charts and selling faster than any record since the days of T. Rextasy. They sounded nothing like Pearl Jam and probably didn’t so much as sleep in flannel even on cold, rainy London nights. Fronted by slinky-hipped, floppy-haired androgyne Brett Anderson and classically sullen guitar hero Bernard Butler, they were Wildean in their celebration of intelligent pleasure, but their music and lyrics were pure Bowie: fearlessly sexual, with often homoerotic lyrics that were emotional but tough. The guitars were Mick Ronson–muscular with a nod to the shimmery best of the new shoegazers. As with the Spiders from Mars, the riffs on songs like “The Drowners,” “Animal Nitrate” and “Metal Mickey” were loud, fast and chunky enough to inspire the punters to look the other way at lyrics like “We kiss in his room to a popular tune.” The British weeklies went ape for Suede, as if they’d all been locked in a sinking sub and someone had just found a hidden scuba tank. The ardor with which the debut was met betrayed a certain measure of shame too, as the British press seemed to realize, en masse, that they’d ceded the pages of their holy music weeklies to a bunch of greasy-haired junkie complaint-rockers. In April of 1993 Anderson appeared on the cover
of Select
, a great and late music monthly in the mold of
Uncut, Mojo
and
Q
, with his midriff bare, the Union Jack as a backdrop and the unequivocal headline
YANKS GO HOME!
The now iconic cover put an entire youth movement on alert.

By the end of Bowie’s tour with Nine Inch Nails in 1995, Blur, Oasis, Pulp, Supergrass and the aforementioned Elastica were hugely influential and fashionable. Bowie, who lived in America at the time, held a good deal of affection for all of them and was treated largely with respect by them. However, his personal tastes seemed to lean toward the more electronic, dance floor–friendly strain of Britpop, groups like Massive Attack, Tricky, Portishead, Underworld, the Prodigy, and a metal-toothed, barechested turntablist named Goldie. He was also impressed that Britpop, like swinging London of the sixties, had its own artists (Damien Hirst, profiled for
Modern Painters
by Bowie), models (Kate Moss), designers (Alexander McQueen), writers (Will Self, Irvine Welsh) and filmmakers (Danny Boyle, whose
Trainspotting
, an adaptation of Welsh’s junkie novel, was the movement’s quintessential flick). Although recorded in Man hat tan, Bowie’s next album,
Earthling
, would be Britpop to the core and it would feature his most “English” singing since his Anthony Newley–besotted youth.

“That’s the reason for the Union Jack on his coat on the cover of
Earthling,”
Gabrels says. “He was aligning himself with that. We’d been away on tour but when we went through London, I was thrilled to finally get to see the kind of England that I had only read about. Hanging out with artists like Hirst and McQueen.” McQueen designed the long Union Jack coat, which Bowie would wear during the sleeve photo shoot and in concert. “David’s wardrobe mistress distressed it,” Gabrels says. “It showed up brand-new. I remember them spilling tea on it to stain it. Loosening the threads with razor blades. Putting it on and rolling down this hill in it.”

And yet, as the “London” he’d helped invent raged with smashed pint glasses and paparazzi lenses fueled by mega-piles of “Charlie,” Bowie enjoyed a quiet, functional domesticity across the Atlantic. After breakfast with Iman, Bowie would leave their new loft at the north end of Soho and walk the few blocks to Looking Glass Studios, composer Philip Glass’s recording space, to begin tinkering with a new studio album with Gabrels, Dorsey, Zachary Alford and producer Mark Plati, a master of the new digital recording technology that excited him. Bowie had discovered the British club music known as jungle (or “drum and bass”) and could
not get enough of the rapid-fire rhythms (embraced more often than not by squirrelly white college kids clutching glow sticks) and liquid washes of sound, entire epics that could be made quickly and on the very laptop he would carry around with him in his bag.

“Those were heady times,” Plati says today. “You felt like you were in the middle of a major change as far as how music was being captured and then manipulated. We were excited about the technology as far as the ability to move things about in a freer manner than we had been accustomed to. It was early on as far as making records inside of computers, and we used that to a great degree on
Earthling.”

Most consider
Earthling
Bowie’s “drum and bass” album in the same way they view Joni Mitchell’s
Hejira
to be her “jazz fusion” record or
Trans
as Neil Young’s “New Wave” album or Morrissey’s
Kill Uncle
as his “rockabilly” album. It’s simply another case of a veteran artist pursuing a sound with which he or she has fallen in love. “David was the first person to play me jungle and drum and bass in about 1992,” says Gabrels. The genre’s hallmarks (rapid-fire bass, hailstorm percussion, flashes of distorted guitar, sampling, sudden dramatic pauses) dominate
Earthling’s
tracks, like “Little Wonder,” “Battle for Britain (The Letter),” “Telling Lies” and “Dead Man Walking.” All of these were farmed out to club DJs and producers to be remixed.

A Trent Reznor remix of the album’s first single, the typically prescient “I’m Afraid of Americans,” gave Bowie his first major radio hit of the nineties. It was well deserved. “Americans,” a funny, crunching indictment of his gun-and-gas-guzzler-happy adopted home, may have been Bowie’s finest single since “Loving the Alien” a decade earlier. Musically essentially an attempt, largely successful, to create a Pixies-style loud/quiet/loud anthem, lyrically it uses absurdist, vulgar wit, à la early Dylan, to speak larger truths (“Johnny looks up at the stars … Johnny wants pussy and cars”) before concluding with ironic jingoism, “God is an American.” With Kurt Cobain dead, grunge over and England dictating American culture, the timing of the track helps deepen the irony in no small fashion.

The video features a malevolent Reznor (ostensibly “Johnny”) pursuing a terrified and goateed Bowie through the streets of New York City. Directed by the then hip team Dom and Nic, it got Bowie back in heavy
rotation on MTV for the first time in a decade as well. Despite strong sales (relative to the nineties) and generally good reviews, there were critics, and many fans, who did not take to the new technology. “To this day I occasionally see
Earthling
derided in the press as David’s ‘jungle’ record or ‘drum and bass experiment,’” Plati says. “People are entitled to their opinions, but I do disagree. It’s a Bowie record. The drum and bass sound just went through the Bowie filter, like any other Bowie album. When he coopted soul in the seventies, he didn’t get that sort of grief—he was rightfully called an innovator,” Plati continues, unaware, of course, that there were thousands of fans who were aghast that Bowie had “gone disco.” Bowie, on the other hand, knew perfectly well that he would get a similar level of flak from some. Post-ambition, however, he didn’t care.

The melodies on
Earthling
are so strong, one simply gets the sense now, over a decade after the sonic craze for jungle peaked, that they don’t need the digital adornment. It would be interesting to hear them revisited acoustically today. “The songs are better than the treatment,” agrees Moby, who knows a thing or two about techno. “It
feels
like 1997. He wanted to make a contemporary electronic record.”

With
Earthling
being readied for release later in the month, Bowie was nearing another milestone. On January 8, 1997, he would be turning fifty. He decided not to duck the event but to harness its poignancy and deliver a celebration concert at Madison Square Garden, where John F. Kennedy had his forty-fifth birthday and was famously serenaded by Marilyn Monroe. Billed as “A Very Special Birthday Celebration,” the event would feature Bowie and his band, along with walk-on guests like Foo Fighters (on “Hallo Spaceboy”), Brian Molko of Placebo, Robert Smith of the Cure (on “Quicksand”), Frank Black (on “Fashion”), Sonic Youth (on “I’m Afraid of Americans”), Lou Reed (on “I’m Waitng for the Man” and a great version of “Dirty Blvd.” off the
New York
record) and Billy Corgan of Smashing Pumpkins joining Bowie for “All the Young Dudes” (you know it’s a nineties thing when Corgan headlines over Reed as final guest).

With large computer screens embedded in the stage (showing inverted, grimacing faces) and Bowie’s odd new look (pale orange brush cut, goatee, brocade coat, mess o’ eyeliner), footage of the event is charmingly dated today, but at the time, the atmosphere constituted a love fest, with the host in genuinely good humor. Not much morbid reflection here. “Good
evening, we’re your rock band for tonight,” Bowie announced as he took the stage. “You’re going to get party vibes.”

“We just sort of sat down and he blasted the track to us,” says Thurston Moore of how each selected performer was broken in preshow. The band went to Bowie’s studio to hear tracks from the then unreleased
Earthling
record. “And it was this big drum and bass thing with, like, him singing. And I remember thinking how the whole drum and bass underground had kind of been a little played out and I was a little wary of it. Listening to David sing like David sings on top of this drum and bass … [it was] extremely energized and proficient, but I felt scared it was gonna be this genre music that gets dated really quickly. He told me, ‘I think I’ve really found my ultimate musical bed … in jungle!’” Rehearsals took place in an empty sports arena in Hartford, Connecticut. “They were pre-creating the show,” Moore says. “Who the fuck rents out a fucking arena? People with his kind of revenue … they have airplanes … they rent out arenas.”

Bowie’s band and Sonic Youth jammed on “I’m Afraid of Americans,” and live, without the digital brushstrokes, the strength of the track (one of Bowie’s best late-era singles, especially after an NIN remix) began to come through. “It would have been really cool if we were all on the same volume but I realized his band was the predominant thing you were hearing,” Moore says. “We were flavoring it … and I thought, ‘I don’t really want to flavor the song. I want to be the kind of thing that threatens it in a way.’” This was a Bowie tribute, however, and nobody dared try to upstage him. If anything guest vocalists like Black and Smith, modern rock icons themselves, seemed a bit intimidated. This was, after all, the guy they listened to as teenagers. Thrown together in the midst of finishing a new album, there were a million things that could have fallen through, but the concert was a great success, and the atmosphere backstage was universally upbeat (complete with a towering, white frosted cake).

“The mood was up, positive, but intense,” says Plati. “A lot of work had to be done in a very short time. I’d never really been on that side of such an intense live production—I’d been in the studio for the past decade, where you can take your time to some degree. Work started on it when we were mixing
Earthling
, so we basically never stopped. The logistics of it all—so many musical guests, filming and recording—were just staggering to me. ‘Hallo Spaceboy’ had three drummers! Still, once the
ducks were all in a row, the concert was so, so great. Wonderful atmosphere. It went off without a technical hitch. All the guests were so happy to have been a part of it.” To be asked by the man himself, a childhood hero in the case of Robert Smith, Billy Corgan, Placebo’s Molko and Frank Black, surely stood as a high point in one’s career and personal life. It was the kind of seal of approval that Bowie would soon distribute to yet another new wave of bands (the Strokes, the Killers, TV on the Radio, the aforementioned Arcade Fire), like the queen handing out medals in velvet boxes. These later bands were influenced by bands influenced by bands influenced by David Bowie.

The after-party was held in Julian Schnabel’s Greenwich Village apartment, with a beaming Bowie greeting and thanking the performers and being completely in his element as the center of all attention. Shortly after his fifth birthday, Bowie embarked on a tour of large theaters, intent on building an interest in his new sound from more modest-sized venues up. If he arrived at the drum and bass party a bit late (and with the enthusiasm of a fan rather than a maverick), it should be pointed out that he was dead right about the technology, as well as the rapidly developing delivery system for music and information. It’s almost impossible to imagine just how radical David Bowie’s website was when it was first launched in the late summer of 1998. There had been Bowie-devoted websites up and running. Teenage Wildlife, for one, launched as early as 1994. But Bowienet, which was launched on September 1, 1998, would be the first time an artist of Bowie’s stature welcomed fans into his virtual home.
Earthling’s
“Telling Lies” would be the first digitally downloadable song offered by a major artist.

Bowie had been using a personal computer and a scanner since 1993, loading his hard drive with software designed for rapid lyric writing or electronically painting or altering his drawings once they’d been uploaded.
Bowieart.com
was an outlet to share these works as well as the work of painters and artists who inspired him. Bowienet at
davidbowie.com
would be a more all-purpose site. In ’93, the “Jump They Say” single was one of the first released as a CD-ROM that enabled fans to remix the track themselves on their desktop. The possibilities of personal computing had already been exciting him for a half decade by the time he launched his landmark website. “He wasn’t computer savvy
at first,” Gabrels says. “Andy, my guitar tech, would have to turn it on for him. He very quickly became extremely savvy, however; but before that he was already using the jargon or the vernacular of the day to describe something that he really hadn’t experienced without a guide. It’s one of his many charms.”