Bowie: A Biography (7 page)

“I first met David Robert Jones at St. Mary’s church hall in 1956,” Underwood, a successful painter and illustrator, says today. “We were both about to enroll into the eighteenth Bromley Cub Scouts group. We started talking about music almost immediately, about skiffle and rock ’n’ roll, and that was it. I had found someone who was passionate about the same things I was. David was in and out of things so fast—one week it was Little Richard, then it was the Kingston Trio, the Everly Brothers, Lonnie Donegan. He was difficult to pin down. But I was the same—Charlie Gracie, Tommy Steele, Gene Vincent and Buddy Holly. In fact I went to see Buddy Holly and the Crickets when I was eleven. Twice! I remember David being quite jealous of the fact that I managed to get Buddy Holly’s signature. Fame was what fascinated him. All we were into besides music was pussy. We became best friends, walking up and down Bromley High Street, dressed identically, pulling birds—talking all sorts of shit to them, pretending to be American and sometimes scoring.”

While art was studied in practice, it was not a bohemian-style art school where theory and philosophy were celebrated as well. Good jobs in
design advertising and technology were the goal, not fame or creative expression.

“The dream was to be employed and to own a house,” Hanif Kureishi, who also attended Bromley Tech in the late sixties, would later confirm to me. “My parents had lived through the war. The war was really recent. But we were different [from our parents] because of pop basically. For most kids, yeah, you want a good job. But then you got caught up in pop.”

“The notion of making a living as a musician was far-fetched,” Peter Frampton, who grew up in Bromley and attended Bromley Tech (where his father, Owen Frampton, was the art professor), tells me. “What you’re talking about is the difference between the outlook in people in general coming from America with the American dream: ‘You can do anything, my son.’ To us in England it was ‘Don’t think you’re ever gonna make anything of yourself, because this is your lot.’ We were just after the war. Just off rationing. In England they were still in shock, I think, and the kids, the baby boomers, had not a clue of what their parents had just been through. My parents and my next-door neighbor’s parents were just so glad to be alive. We were the first generation that didn’t have to serve. Didn’t have to do anything. Seeing rock ’n’ roll on TV, what was powerful in addition to the music was the implicit ambition. That was the common ground between David, George and myself at school. I wanted to learn Buddy Holly numbers and they knew them.”

Jones and Underwood would spend entire weekends in the aisles at Furlong’s, the local record shop, where David first took a part-time job. “He was always a bit of a dreamer in that I’d give him a job to do, come back in about an hour and he was still chatting, the job unfinished, so that he had to go,” the shop’s owner Vic Furlong said.

Jones and Underwood soon formed a group, George and the Dragons, with a small, revolving gang of like-minded classmates, allowing David a chance to test his musical ability and begin to learn rudimentary guitar strumming on an inexpensive guitar that John had purchased for him along with a tape recorder. “David and I were pretty good at Everly Brothers–style harmonies and he definitely had a gift or a talent which at that time was difficult to put your finger on. We would sit for hours working out numbers and recording them on his little Grundig [tape recorder].” As with the sax lessons he would soon begin with horn player Ronnie Ross, these sessions inform his later approach to songwriting—
natural, born of conversation and improvisation as opposed to any formal training; call it personal discipline.

“We’d all bring our guitars to school and slip them in my dad’s office before assembly,” says Frampton, who formed his own group, the Little Ravens, at the time. “And then at lunchtime he’d leave the door unlocked so we could go get the guitars and sit on the art block concrete stairs, which for guitar sound and vocal echo was perfect. George, myself and David would sit there and play all afternoon. They were the rebels with thin ties and rocker haircuts. I was twelve … I had the bowl cut.”

Turned away by John Jones and his mother, and rejoining the workforce himself at a printing company, Terry found solace in frequent trips into London and David would frequently accompany his brother on weekends. During this period, Terry seemed especially enthusiastic about ideas, whether they were found in books, in political treatises or on record. Ironically, like his stepfather, John, Terry was overjoyed that his little brother was becoming a rock ’n’ roller, telling all who might listen, “My brother’s got a guitar!”

Alarmingly, Terry could not de-enthuse at the time. A harbinger of his incipient mental illness, Terry’s energy seemed boundless and he’d rave about records or French philosophical texts by Sartre and Camus, which his impressionable little brother would dutifully attempt to absorb.

It was through Terry that David would discover London, which was slowly becoming an exciting city for the young again. Terry and David would take the forty-five-minute train ride into Victoria Station, disembark through that widemouth exit and emerge into the instant urban bustle.

“While I was still at school, I would go up to town every Saturday evening to listen to jazz at different clubs, and this was all happening to him when I was at a very impressionable age,” David recalled. “He was growing his hair long and rebelling in his own way while I was still dressed up in school uniform every day. It all had a big impact on me.”

David had an instinctive feel and appreciation for jazz. It was a language that he could share with his brother. They engaged in rapid-fire discussion on the styles of Jimmy Smith, Zoot Sims, Wes Montgomery, John Coltrane. It was likely the American baritone sax player Gerry Mulligan, who arranged for Miles Davis in the late forties and formed an iconic combo with trumpeter Chet Baker in the fifties, that led David to
actually want to pick up a horn himself. Mulligan was a progenitor of “cool jazz.” He wore his hair close cropped, wore tight, expensive suits and generally cut a high-style figure.

“David was influenced by what his half brother, Terry, was listening to,” Underwood confirms. “He introduced him to certain jazz records like Gerry Mulligan, who David modeled himself on for a couple of weeks. I am sure when the careers officer came to our school and asked us all what we wanted to do when we left that David was thinking of Gerry Mulligan when he said he wanted to be a saxophonist in a modern jazz quartet.”

John Jones next purchased a white, plastic baritone sax for his son from Furlong’s after a typically small amount of persistence. Once equipped with an instrument, David decided, also typically, to fast-track his path toward jazz mastery. Poring over the classified ads in the local paper, he found an address for Ross, a renowned baritone player who performed with a combo known as the Jazzmakers. Ross, who passed away in 1991, had slicked-back hair and wore sharp suits just like Mulligan. He was the next best thing. Ross didn’t give many lessons but the teenage enthusiast convinced him to take him on as a pupil.

“I didn’t mind teaching if the pupil was really interested,” Ross said. “I was teaching him about music in general—how scales were formed, about harmony, how to blow and breathe and a little about how to read music … I told him that playing the sax was like trying to get the sounds you hear in your head out through a horn and into a room. It wasn’t just reproducing notes you saw on paper. It was creating a new language. Communicating your visions without speaking them.”

Ross found his young study to have an odd combination of shyness and hyperenthusiasm on a level that could never really last. Sure enough, after about four months, David decided that he’d learned enough and ended his sessions with Ross. Ross would resurface in the early seventies, when he was hired to perform the now iconic sax solo at the close of the Bowie and Mick Ronson–produced “Walk on the Wild Side,” Lou Reed’s biggest hit.

Terry was picking up his most explicit and exciting cues on how to really live from the new wave of literature by the Beats. He devoured William S. Burroughs, the poems of Gregory Corso and Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac and distilled their messages of freedom for David.

“My writing is a teaching,” Kerouac once noted in his journal. Terry Burns and, by extension, David Jones were avid students.

Through the Beats, David was also opened up to the concept of Buddhism and was soon reading up on meditation. He wrote a paper for his history class on Tibet and, around this time, saw a film on television about Chairman Mao Tse-tung’s invasion of the country in 1951 and the subsequent oppression of Buddhist monks in an attempt to erase their culture and ancient practices. “That made me interested in Tibet as a country and I started studying its history and its religion,” David has said, “and while I was still at school, I wrote a thesis on it.” He saw a line from James Dean to Kerouac to Elvis Presley to the Tibetan monks in resistance to the Chinese: they were all rebels. None of the other students at Bromley spent the weekend at London jazz clubs or researching Buddhist monasteries in Scotland. While others were preparing for their inevitable induction into the nation’s cramped and airless offices, David Jones was becoming another species entirely: a genuine rebel himself.

This spirit soon found another mentor in the form of Peter Frampton’s father, Bromley Tech’s unorthodox but august art instructor. Owen Frampton had been a successful graphic designer before he was hired at Bromley and knew both sides of the culture, the liberating and the confining energies that went along with the technical arts. By the time he met David, he had long since made the choice as far as what energy he wanted to pursue and impart. Frampton took David and his group of would-be artists and musicians under his wing. Like Terry Burns, the senior Frampton was a “mad one,” as Kerouac wrote in
On the Road
. “Mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time.” He would not be limited by any curriculum or dress code, and his overjoyed young pupils followed suit.

“He became our mentor,” says Underwood. “Owen was the best thing about Bromley Tech for me. He encouraged me and we were more like friends than teacher and pupil. If a pet student of Owen Frampton’s got into trouble with one of Bromley Tech’s other faculty members, Frampton would run interference.”

“He was the only teacher there who spoke to you as a human being,” says Kureishi. “It was pretty crude, the teaching. It was pretty rough. In those days they still used to hit you with sticks.”

“He was always his own man,” Peter Frampton says. “He didn’t toe the line at all and it got him into trouble occasionally. Basically he had an idea of what he wanted to do and he did it. He made his own syllabus. If you were up for it, he’d take you all the way. You’d do a year and a half of what you were normally doing in college. He was a great artist himself but his joy was teaching. What he got back from what he was giving. I think his enthusiasm was something that people like David just latched on to. They saw a good thing. They couldn’t believe that this guy was actually for them.” Owen Frampton was vociferous where John Jones was taciturn, and there was none of the Terry-related domestic drama in the art room. It was a safe space in which to create and scheme and feel strong and valuable.

“I believe he had an estranged father,” says Peter Frampton. “Remote. For David being not only talented on the musical side but also very arty, he loved my dad and saw this man would push him and was open. He became some sort of a father figure, yes.”

Under Owen Frampton, David learned to be both disciplined and an insurgent at the same time. He was and remains unusually professional in his approach to his rule breaking. If his classmates were wearing pointy-toed shoes, David would wear round-toed creepers. If their ties were tight, his tie would be loose. Peggy would taper his trousers and jackets to his specific details. He had an image in his mind of how he wanted to look, derived, mainly, from films and the album sleeves that lined the bins at Furlong’s, and scrounged whatever he could from the local department store and, whenever possible, the shops in London.

“Clothes were a really big deal,” Kureishi says, alluding to some communal Bromley-ite mind-set. “In the suburbs it was about originality and not being like other people. Being slightly different, sophisticated. You could get good clothes in Bromley but it helped if you wanted to be ahead of the other kids to get something amazing in London.”

Owen Frampton also encouraged Jones and Underwood to take their campus band as far as they could. He allowed them to keep their instruments in his classroom and even encouraged his young son to fraternize with them. Young Frampton was already an accomplished guitarist and was soon a friend of both boys. Twenty years later, he’d come alive, of course, but at the time, he was simply Professor Frampton’s child. His
group the Little Ravens performed alongside George and the Dragons at campus fetes and once at a school-wide talent competition.

Although Peter Frampton and David would remain friends and move in and out of each other’s lives as both became pop stars (Frampton, ironically, would beat David Bowie to stardom as a guitarist with the Herd and Humble Pie in the late sixties), Frampton would not stay long at Bromley Tech. Owen Frampton’s charisma and approach to education cast a long shadow for his son.

“I was only there a year because I found it difficult being at the same school as my father,” Frampton has said. “A few kids, shall we say the one half percent who didn’t get on too well with my father, made my life rather like a living hell.” Frampton would soon transfer out of Bromley.

The newly Beat David Jones was a magnet for the young girls from local Bromley High School and Bromley Grammar, and even some fellow students at the all-boys Bromley Tech. It was around this time, he claimed to have lost both his hetero and homosexual virginity.

“When I was fourteen, sex suddenly became all-important to me,” he told Cameron Crowe in their
Playboy
interview in ’76. “It didn’t really matter who or what it was with, as long as it was a sexual experience. So it was some very pretty boy in class in some school or other that I took home and neatly fucked on my bed upstairs. And that was it.”