The Man Who Sold the World (20 page)

As he rose to the challenge of matching their hysteria, his voice changed from the urgent intimacy of the opening lines, through the metallic screech he'd used on his 1970 album, into a throat-scarring roar, way beyond his vocal range. A song that had begun with an unadorned acoustic guitar was now a tumultuous wash of sound, with strings and brass trying to contain the frenzy, until Ronson's guitar seized the moment of release and caringly guided the track down to a calming D
b
chord. It was echoed an octave lower by the string quartet—the final sound to be heard on this quintessential rock album.

As early as the second line of the song Bowie substituted a major chord where the key strictly required a minor, as a warning of imminent danger. When the cigarette
*
reached the mouth, the E major introduced a haunting moment of doubt, quickly defused by the more predictable changes that made up the verse. By the end of the third verse, when things were so confused that an American car (“Chev brakes”) was joined by a British utility vehicle (“the milk float”), the prevailing key was starting to crack under the strain, and the song veered into Gb for six bars, and finally into Db for twelve bars of desperate reassurance. In the final two bars, the arrangement incorporated all three of the song's key chords, in the order in which they had originally appeared—as elegant a landing from a space fantasy as it would be possible to conceive.

THE MAKING OF A STAR #3:
The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars
LP

O
n July 15, 1972, David Bowie and his band performed at Friars, a club held inside the assembly hall in the Buckinghamshire town of Aylesbury, for the third time in less than a year. On his previous visits, Bowie had been an amiable, approachable figure, happy to chat to audience members after the show as a friend rather than an icon. Now Bowie was accompanied by a busload of journalists flown in by MainMan from America; flanked by security guards; preceded onto the stage by strobe lights and Walter Carlos's theme from the movie
Clockwork Orange
; and then kept safely apart from the same fans whom he'd greeted warmly a few months earlier. They wrote distressed letters to the pop press: what has happened to David Bowie?

It was not Bowie who appeared at Friars that night, however, but Ziggy Stardust: the conceptual art project who had become a rock'n'roll star. “I'm continually aware that I'm an actor portraying stories,” Bowie admitted the following day, “and that's the way I wish to take my performance.” Ziggy was the guise he had chosen to adopt, “for a couple of months.” In an unguarded moment, he could confess that impersonating Ziggy had imposed a bizarre sense of dissociation from his “real” self: “It's a continual fantasy. . . . I'm very rarely David Jones any more. I think I've forgotten who David Jones is.”

Seven weeks earlier, when
The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars
LP was released, David Jones/Bowie was not a star—not in the way that Marc Bolan was, or Alice Cooper. MainMan hyped the record as if he had already achieved that status, boasting that his previous album,
Hunky Dory
, was “now high in the US charts”—which was true, as long as you regarded a placing of No. 185 as “high.” Bowie and his management had effectively decided to let
Hunky Dory
succeed or fail by itself, and to focus their energy on the
Ziggy
concept. But six weeks after its release, the “Starman” single, which was intended to stir up anticipation for the album, had still not charted. The success of
Ziggy
, and with it Bowie's entire credibility as a pop performer, was in the balance.

The initial response to the album was lukewarm. Nick Kent in Oz magazine complained that Bowie was attempting to “hype himself as something he isn't.” The rock paper
Sounds
noted that the record “could have been the work of a competent plagiarist . . . a lot of it sounds as if he didn't work on the ideas as much as he could have done.” This was the verdict of reviewers who had raved over the dense, philosophical songs on Bowie's earlier albums, and could not relate to the apparently simplistic rock mythology of
Ziggy Stardust
. By contrast, Michael Watts of
Melody Maker
—to whom Bowie had made his “I'm gay” boast earlier in the year—immediately understood the singer's intentions: the album, he wrote, “suggests the ascent and decline of a big rock figure, but leaves the listener to fill in his own details, and in the process he's also referring obliquely to his own role as a rock star and sending it up.”

The challenge for journalists who believed passionately in the authenticity of their idols was to accept that distance, irony, and fiction could be acceptable methods of confronting the star-making machinery of rock. They had balked at Columbia Records' publicity campaign for “The Rock Revolutionaries,” in which a multinational media corporation attempted to use the symbolism of “revolution”—the radical touchstone of the age for Western youth—as a means of selling plastic product. Now Bowie was expecting them to deal with an artist who was quite blatantly using rock iconography to sell himself, and the illusion of stardom, as commodities. (“I'm very much a conglomerate figure,” Bowie admitted in 1972. “It's a visual exercise in being a parasite.” He could not be accused of covering his tracks.)

Only in retrospect
*
would the audacity of Bowie's maneuvers be appreciated and understood. In June 1972, several emblematic TV appearances (notably on
Top of the Pops
) combined with the undeniable commercial appeal of “Starman” [60] to create exactly the degree of stardom for Ziggy Stardust that Bowie had envisaged. The audience for these records had not graduated through the dense lyrical explorations of Bowie's beliefs and fantasies that made up the
David Bowie
[1969 edition],
The Man Who Sold the World
, and
Hunky Dory
LPs. If they knew Bowie at all, it was as the avowed bisexual who had written “Oh! You Pretty Things” [30]. Analysis of the shifting viewpoints and incomplete narrative of the
Ziggy Stardust
album could come later. Before then, the British pop audience—and especially those among them who were confused about their own identities, sexual or otherwise—welcomed the arrival of a homegrown performer as daring and provocative as Alice Cooper, as tuneful as the Beatles, and more mysterious than Marc Bolan could ever hope to be.

By the time of his Rainbow concerts in August, where he presented a theatrical concept featuring a mime troupe (the Astronettes) led by his onetime mentor Lindsay Kemp, Bowie was stardom personified, his concept brought to ecstatic, multicolored life. But the intensity of his personification was already beginning to show. When he arrived in America the following month, he told
Newsweek
magazine that “I'm not what I'm supposed to be. What are people buying? I adopted Ziggy onstage, and now I feel more and more like this monster and less and less like David Bowie.” His star had become a straitjacket, one that he would struggle to slough off for the next year and beyond.

 

[62] ALL THE YOUNG DUDES

(Bowie)

Recorded by Mott The Hoople, May 1972. Recorded by Bowie, December 1972;
RarestOneBowie
CD

A derivation, first of all: in classic Hollywood westerns, “dudes” had blown in from the city, and didn't fit. Folk/blues pioneer Lead Belly sang about “The 25-Cent Dude” in the 1940s. The Hollywood Argyles, the studio collective who recorded the much-loved (by Bowie) “Alley-Oop,” had a 1965 single titled “Long Hair, Unsquare Dude Called Jack,” though it's unlikely that Bowie would ever have heard it. More likely he found his dudes in African-American (and lesbian) slang, where a “dude” was simply a man. After Bowie gave this song to Mott The Hoople,
dudes
entered the rock vocabulary as a synonym for “the kids,” though it was so linked to the seventies that it has only been used ironically since then. And even in 1972, the “boogaloo” was a dance craze that was strictly passé. If the boogaloo dudes did indeed carry the news, they may have been reading yesterday's papers, to quote another band.

Though Bowie wrote the song, and co-produced it (and its subsequent album) with Mick Ronson, it was Mott The Hoople who
owned
it. They invented two of the record's chief attractions: the opening guitar motif by Mick Ralphs, and the quite terrifying valedictory monologue from Ian Hunter. Bowie never came close to matching it, when he either laid down a guide vocal in 1972, recut the song insipidly during the
Aladdin Sane
sessions in 1973 (though it was left unreleased), or included it on
David Live
in 1974. The last of those three efforts was the most beguiling, as Bowie held back the tempo and returned the song to Mott's key (D), though that (and certain chemical strains on his voice) left him unable to hit, or ultimately even attempt, any of the high notes.

But Bowie did write the song, which was greeted as the teen anthem of the era (alongside Alice Cooper's “School's Out”) and, ironically, outsold his own “Starman” in Britain and America. It was a melodic return to the territory of
Hunky Dory
, with its diatonic major descent, and the slow glide of his left hand down the bass keys of his piano.
*
Verse and chorus followed essentially the same path, though the verse offered a variation that used an unscheduled E major chord in the same way as “Rock 'n' Roll Suicide” (announcing the delinquent), and the chorus detoured from C into B
b
for two bars, requiring an interlude of three chords in 3/4 time to regain the predominant key.

If the music revisited the familiar moves of “Changes” [48] and “Oh! You Pretty Things” [30], the lyrics updated the lives that Bowie had chronicled in “The London Boys” [A21]. Life was over at twenty-five, he had one of his characters suggest, having just celebrated his own twenty-fifth birthday. The song doubled as an incisive piece of rock criticism: it was an elder brother, not a dude, who was still fixated on the Beatles and the Stones. A new generation required new idols, and Bowie was prepared to provide them.

GLAM, GLITTER, AND FAG ROCK

ONE OF THE GREAT STRENGTHS OF THE EARLY 70S WAS ITS SENSE OF IRONY. . . . THERE WAS A VERY STRONG SENSE OF HUMOUR THAT RAN THROUGH THE EARLY BRITISH BANDS: MYSELF, ROXY MUSIC, MARC. . . . WHATEVER CAME OUT OF EARLY 70S MUSIC THAT HAD ANY LONGEVITY TO IT GENERALLY HAD A SENSE OF HUMOUR UNDERLYING IT.

 

—David Bowie, 1991

I
n Britain, it was glitter rock; in America, fag rock or drag rock. “I don't know anything about fag rock at all,” Bowie insisted in September 1972. “I think glam rock is a lovely way to categorise me, and it's even nicer to be one of the leaders of it.” Given his unwillingness to fit into anyone else's straitjackets, his polite acquiescence to this US interviewer was presumably an early example of that sense of irony he boasted about twenty years later.

Three months earlier,
Sounds
journalist Steve Peacock had been able to survey what he dubbed “glitterbiz” without mentioning Bowie's name. Then “Starman” became a hit single, and the perceived pioneers of “glitter rock,” Alice Cooper and Marc Bolan, had a serious rival. But not that serious: looking back almost forty years later, what's most striking about Bowie's career-establishing appearance on
Top of the Pops
in July 1972 is not the casual way in which he draped his arm around Mick Ronson's shoulder as they leaned in together for the chorus of “Starman,” but the beaming smile that rarely leaves Bowie's lips. It's the hallmark of confidence, no doubt, and the knowledge that he is about to stun British reserve out of its lethargy. But it's also the brand of a man who is not taking any of this remotely seriously: who knows, in fact, that there are few things more ridiculous than posing as a red-haired spaceman on prime-time BBC television, apart from the fact that it is about to make him irreversibly famous.

In the brief period between the coining of “glam rock” and Bowie's realizing that it was important not to be typecast, he claimed that he had actually invented the genre by posing in a dress on the cover of
The Man Who Sold the World
. That was a blatant attempt to steal the limelight from his rival Marc Bolan, who had sprinkled his face with glitter before his own
Top of the Pops
debut with T. Rex a few weeks before Bowie's album was released. He would have had more credibility had he staked his “glam” reputation on his February 1970 appearance at the Roundhouse, where he had masqueraded as a glittery “Rainbowman.” That aside, he knew that it was Bolan who had introduced British teenagers to the possibilities of gentle reinvention with a packet of glitter; and Alice Cooper who had taken on the responsibility, like Mick Jagger a decade earlier, of outraging parents and press with his shocking antics onstage.

Steve Peacock's account of the visual hedonism in British pop circa June 1972 concluded: “If you look at what's happened in ten years, we'll see that it's the music that's lasted, and the glittering gimmicks have come and gone.” That was both true and wildly mistaken. So potent was the appeal of glam, with its triumphantly banal anthems, outrageous sense of camp, and deliberately amateurish presentation, that after the initial enthusiasm had ebbed away, to be followed by a suitably embarrassed pause from all involved, it was reborn as the definitive sound of the seventies. Even today, the caricatured sexuality
*
of Gary Glitter and the flagrant bandwagon-jumping of Sweet offer instantaneous memories of the era of power cuts and strikes, all the more potent for the fact that neither act (then) demanded to be taken remotely seriously.

Anyone who watched
Top of the Pops
could reproduce Bolan's glitter or Sweet's mock-Cherokee makeup after a visit to Woolworth's. (Bowie once described the Ziggy Stardust look as being “Nijinsky meets Woolworth's,” as effective a summary of glam's clumsy genius as any.) Glam's essence was entertainment, and that was both its appeal and, for many of its protagonists, its curse. By June 1973, Marc Bolan was declaring: “I don't want to go on the road now for fear of being involved in the dying embers of glam rock. I don't feel involved in it, even if I started it. It's not my department any more, and personally I find it very embarrassing.” But he was too closely tied in to the glam aesthetic to be accepted outside it, and he died without registering another Top 10 single or album. Around the same time, Bowie expressed his concern that “The Jean Genie” had (on some charts) reached No. 1, in case it meant that he had become a pop star, rather than an enigmatic icon. But the pretensions he carried—and the sense of mystery that was his trademark—ensured that he was never in danger of becoming trapped by a single image, as Bolan was. He alone was able to complain that he actually wasn't very interested in rock, while maintaining all the trappings of a rock superstar.

Bowie's skill was being able to live out the dictum of rock critic Simon Frith: “Rock is entertainment that suggests—by its energy, self-consciousness, cultural references—something more.” He achieved this almost instinctively, whereas Roxy Music, his most cogent rivals as intelligent seventies pop stars, deliberately used their art-school background as a resource. They were a conscious evocation of classic Pop Art principles, deftly using the clichés of fifties and sixties rock to satirize pop's superficiality, while employing irony and camp as a way of distancing themselves from the purely ephemeral pap around them. Roxy's frontman, Bryan Ferry, was Bowie's only serious rival as the self-constructed symbol of seventies Pop Art, though it was his short-term colleague Brian Eno who proved to be more influential than Ferry on the decades to come (and indeed on Bowie himself).

Although Bowie gave every sign of wishing that he could have enjoyed Ferry's past—with its apparently seamless journey from miner's son to art school aesthete—he had stumbled upon a less certain but more enduring way of translating constant artistic innovation into a credible career. It would be his destiny to extend the genre of glam rock, and then transcend it, while his peers struggled to escape its curse.

 

[63] JOHN I'M ONLY DANCING

(Bowie) (see also [117])

Recorded June 1972 and January 1973; both single A-side

The setting: the Sombrero Club in London's Kensington Church Street. The clientele: all of the city's hippest queens and most available boys. The visitors: David and Angie Bowie, plus whichever of their straight friends they could tease into accompanying them. The scenario: boy arrives with boy, but dares to dance with another he/she. Cue the chorus . . . and remember that Bowie claimed in 1972, “I don't know anything about fag-rock at all.”

Some antecedents: the opening riff used the most familiar chord change in rock'n'roll, but at a speed that harked back to the version of “Pontiac Blues” that R&B veteran Sonny Boy Williamson recorded with the Yardbirds in 1963. Mick Ronson's stuttering final G chord stemmed from a later Yardbirds incarnation, responsible for the 1966 single “Shapes of Things.” Bowie's “oh lawdy” interjection, meanwhile, predated the British blues boom by conjuring up visions of Al Jolson in blackface, waving his jazz hands at the camera as the talkies began.

Having slowed his output since the torrent of 1971, Bowie could write nothing except hit singles. That such an uncompromisingly gay song should reach the UK charts (and receive BBC airplay) testified to its naked panache, from the explosive drumbeats across the opening riff to the guitar noise echoing eerily between the speakers at the climax. Bowie's voice was harsh and brittle, but still soared to a crazily high falsetto D as he expressed his needs. Rarely were the Spiders' rhythm section of Trevor Bolder and Woody Woodmansey so central to the impact of a Bowie recording, with Bolder's bass walking up and down the E minor scale during the first half of the chorus, before dealing out notes an octave apart with consummate ease. Besides the resonant acoustic guitar, Ronson laid down a grumbling electric figure beneath the verse, as if trying to emulate a saxophone, before adding a police siren wail to the chorus. The collective effect was propulsive and hypnotic, but still Bowie wasn't satisfied.

The Spiders duly returned to the song during the
Aladdin Sane
sessions, and without any fanfare their second attempt was substituted for the first, though by then sales of the single had dried up. The retread was faster, more unhinged, and added a saxophone to replace Ronson's imitation, but it sacrificed two of the most thrilling aspects of the original: the percussive arrival and the marching bass. In one respect, though, it was arguably more satisfying: if the guitar crescendo of the first recording hinted at orgasm, the second took it all the way.