The Man Who Sold the World (21 page)

TRANSFORMER
: Bowie and Lou Reed

F
our years after being introduced to the music of Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground by Kenneth Pitt [A42/A44], David Bowie was elated to witness a performance by the band during his first visit to America in January 1971. He went backstage to congratulate Reed, and was embarrassed to discover that the man he was calling “Lou” was actually Doug Yule, who had assumed leadership of the Velvets after Reed's departure a few months earlier. When he returned to the States in September, Bowie endured an uncomfortable meeting with Reed's onetime “producer,” Andy Warhol, before finally connecting with the composer of the Velvets' most enduring material at Max's Kansas City that evening.

The pair struck up a slightly awkward friendship, blighted by Reed's fragile emotional state and legendarily spiky personality. They met again when Reed traveled to London to record his first solo record, a self-parodic, self-titled disappointment. Reed proclaimed that Bowie was “the only interesting person around. Rock'n'roll has been tedious, except for what David has been doing.” Bowie responded by offering to produce an album for Reed. “The people I was around at the time thought Bowie would be the perfect producer for me to make a record that would sell,” Reed said cynically a decade later. First, Bowie set out to introduce the American to his own burgeoning audience, and Reed made his British concert debut as a guest at Bowie's acclaimed
*
performance at London's Royal Festival Hall on July 8, 1972. Tony Defries made strident attempts to shepherd Reed into his MainMan empire: “He was always running around telling people he was my manager, which he wasn't, although he tried,” Reed complained. In tribute to Bowie's influence, Reed even sported glitter and eye shadow for his early UK gigs, before reverting to the leather-clad image that he found more comfortable. During a brief pause in Bowie's schedule, he and Ronson acted as co-producers (with the trusted Ken Scott in the supporting role of engineer) for the best-selling album of Reed's entire career:
Transformer
.

Although it was Bowie's involvement that sold the project, Ronson was the principal creative force on the record, as an arranger and multi-instrumentalist. Bowie's chief role was to keep his troubled artist awake and interested, while encouraging Reed to exploit some of the more outré themes that he had explored with the Velvet Underground—erotic obsession, transvestism, drugs, bisexuality. “There's a lot of sexual ambiguity in the album,” Reed conceded, “and two outright gay songs.” He and Bowie duetted on the deliciously camp trifle “New York Telephone Conversation,” while Reed also explored the full perversity of the Warhol milieu—most famously on “Walk on the Wild Side,” a triumph of Ronson's arranging skills and Herbie Flowers's bass playing, and arguably the most explicit song ever given airplay by naïve British radio producers. The album also provided another showcase for Bowie and Ronson's increasingly inventive use of backing vocals, which had begun to assume a Beatlesesque variety and confidence.

Within months of the album's completion, Reed's trust in Bowie's motives had begun to evaporate. “I don't know what he was up to,” he complained of his fan-turned-producer, “I honestly don't know.” But he was presumably assuaged by the belated success of “Walk on the Wild Side” and the sales of
Transformer
, which lived up to its title by turning a cult artist into a mainstream rock star, for the next decade and beyond. In that context, it hardly mattered that, as one longtime admirer noted,
Transformer
was merely “a collection of songs witty, songs trivial, songs dull, songs gay, songs sad, none of them really much cop.” (One of those songs, “Wagon Wheel,” is now often claimed to have been a Bowie composition, despite being credited to Reed. But that seems unlikely, given that Reed had recorded an acoustic demo of the song several months before he began working with Bowie.) If that judgment was harsh, it also reflected the extent to which Reed had allowed his own personality to become subsumed into Bowie's. He did not respond to Bowie's invitation to produce his next record, the magnificent
Berlin
, a song cycle fueled by paranoia and pain, which left its mark on Bowie's
Diamond Dogs
. The two men briefly considered another joint venture in 1979, until their discussions ended in a fistfight. Only in the nineties would both men's egos have subsided to the point that they could collaborate without fear of being scarred by the comparison.

 

[64] MY DEATH

(Brel; trans. Shuman)

Performed live 1972–73;
RarestOneBowie
CD

The second of Bowie's homages to Jacques Brel—after “Amsterdam” [17]—was mediated through the dual prisms of Scott Walker, who recorded “My Death” on his 1967 debut solo album, and lyricist Mort Shuman, whose English translation was included in the theatrical show
Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris
, and was made available to Walker several months before the show premiered off-Broadway. Both Walker and Elly Stone, who sang Shuman's adaptation onstage, assumed that mortality demanded a portentous delivery, and Bowie followed suit when the song
*
joined his live repertoire in 1972. It allowed him to experiment with the mannered crooning that he would later adopt on the
Station to Station
album, while thematically it reinforced the imminent conclusion of Bowie's adventures with Ziggy Stardust. “I can't think of a time that I didn't think about death,” he admitted in 1997. Sadly, Bowie seemed not to have heard Brel's uproarious original recording from 1960, which treated death with cavalier contempt, marching in military fashion over its pretensions to importance.

 

[65] THE JEAN GENIE

(Bowie)

Recorded October 1972; single A-side and
Aladdin Sane
LP

“In England, David Bowie may become—may already be—a real star, but in the American context he looks more like an aesthete using stardom as a metaphor. . . . I felt unsatisfied; more than that, I felt just the slightest bit conned. Something was being promised that wasn't being delivered.” That was the verdict of American critic Ellen Willis on Bowie's third US appearance, at New York's Carnegie Hall on September 28, 1972. “I had flu that night,” Bowie said a decade later. “I'll never forget that.”

Bowie had arrived amid a publicity campaign worthy of Hollywood's most brazen mythmakers. At a time when other British acts (notably Marc Bolan's T. Rex) were struggling to establish themselves in the United States, MainMan booked their artist into major arenas and halls on the back of two singles (“Changes” [48] and “Starman” [60]) that had failed to climb higher than the low 60s on the Hot 100 chart. It was effectively the Ziggy Stardust coup played out on an international stage: an imaginary star demanding instant reverence and respect.

Even with a roving spotlight lighting up the sky outside, and an audience including Andy Warhol and his Factory entourage, plus celebrities such as Tony Perkins, Alan Bates, and Lee Radziwill, more than 500 of the 2,800 tickets for the Carnegie Hall show could not be sold, and had to be given away (with MainMan's approval) to ensure a full house. Elsewhere, in Cleveland, Memphis, and Detroit, MainMan's strategy worked. But across the South and the Midwest, the tour was a disaster. Only 500 seats were sold for the 5,700-capacity Kiel Auditorium in St. Louis, and just 250 for a show in Kansas City, during which Bowie got drunk and fell off the stage. Other concerts were canceled to avoid a similar fate. Most embarrassing for Bowie was his visit to San Francisco, for two nights at the Winterland Arena. Unfortunately for Bowie, the Cockettes—an ultracamp cabaret troupe, starring future film star Divine alongside Goldie Glitters and Paula Pucker—were staging a new revue that weekend at the Palace Theater. Much of his potential audience chose to sample the delights of their nude ballet and risqué song-and-dance routines, rather than his somewhat tamer form of flamboyance.

The US tour took an enormous mental toll on Bowie: each successive week saw him ingesting more cocaine and less food. Yet there were compensations: Bowie recruited a key musical collaborator, jazz pianist Mike Garson; was introduced to the New York Dolls; and struck up a lasting friendship with Iggy Pop, who invited him to mix the amateurishly recorded tapes for the third Stooges album,
Raw Power
.

Meanwhile, Bowie channeled his bus-window impressions of America into the songs that would fill his next album. A simple process of addition produced one of his most enduring singles: he took the guitar riff
*
from the Yardbirds' arrangement of Muddy Waters's “I'm a Man”; combined it with the climactic build on a repeated chord that the Yardbirds used on another R&B standard, “Smokestack Lightning”; created an imaginary character out of his observations of Iggy Pop; and found a title by playing with the name of Lindsay Kemp's literary hero, Jean Genet. He honed his ideas at the RCA Studios in Nashville, and “The Jean Genie” was recorded in New York a few days later. It was rush-released in Britain, coinciding with another RCA release, “Blockbuster” by the Sweet, that was built around the same Muddy Waters riff (and in the same key). To Bowie's chagrin, “Blockbuster” narrowly outsold “The Jean Genie”; the British rock press loyally assumed that Sweet had “copied” Bowie, but neither act had heard the other's record in advance.

The “classic” roots of Bowie's record—its slightly wheezy blues harp and snake-rattle percussion—ensured its longevity: if “Starman” was the sound of 1972, “The Jean Genie” might have been recorded in 1966, or indeed 2006. Its lyrics created instant rock'n'roll mythology, touching on fashion, drugs, and rampant sexuality, with a nod to the Max's Kansas City scene in New York, where everyone had been familiar with the powder known as Snow White. His vocal had a playfulness that undercut the menace of the band, which was deliberate; his rhythm guitar occasionally missed its entrance into the chorus, which was not. But “The Jean Genie” was never intended to be about antiseptic perfection: its selling point was exuberance, not exactitude.

 

[66] WATCH THAT MAN

(Bowie)

Recorded January 1973;
Aladdin Sane
LP

In September 1972, David Bowie witnessed two consecutive shows in the Oscar Wilde Room of Max's Kansas City by the New York Dolls, whose transparent assemblage of classic rock images proved more enduring than the brittle collision of influences that comprised their music. Though their commercial impact was negligible (neither of their albums reached the US Top 100 chart), they represented America's most committed response to the British glam-rock movement—not least because they owed their fashion sense to the same West London stores and stalls that were frequented by Bowie and Bolan. The Dolls' guitarist Johnny Thunders also preempted the early punk bands by sporting a swastika armband for confrontational effect.

In New York, the band attracted the attention of homosexuals, transvestites, and those few members of the Warhol entourage who didn't fit comfortably into either category. So it was inevitable that Bowie would seek them out. “He's a collector,” said his producer Ken Scott, “of anything and everything, experiences, influences, the lot.” Bowie was reported to have told the Dolls at their first encounter that they had “the energy of six English bands.” It was that spirit that he attempted to capture on “Watch That Man,” a decadent collage of impressions from Max's (notably his meetings with Wayne County and Cyrinda Foxe), the Sombrero in Kensington, and the pages of Evelyn Waugh's
Vile Bodies
(whose characters would not yet have become bored with the jazz standard “The Tiger Rag,” which became little more than a cliché after Benny Goodman's hit version in 1936). As for the focal point of the action, he was a chancer, a hipster, a voyeur, and a star;
*
the verses were his, but the perspective (and the key) changed for the chorus, where he was now the one being watched.

Maybe the basis of life as a chancer (and a star) was taking inspiration wherever it could be found. The structure of the chorus—punch the first syllable, then pause for effect—was reminiscent of a track Bowie had recently produced for Mott The Hoople, “Momma's Little Jewel.” The vocal blend—lead buried deep in the mix, female backing almost more prominent—was identical to the sound of the Rolling Stones' newly released
Exile on Main St.
album. The rest was pure hard rock theatricality, from the viscous layers of guitar to the boogie-woogie lines of the bass, and the guttural grunt of Bowie's saxophone holding up the bottom end.

 

[67] PANIC IN DETROIT

(Bowie)

Recorded January 1973;
Aladdin Sane
LP

Politics as passion or politics as posture: that choice shaped rock's involvement with radical activism during the late sixties and early seventies. In the motor city of Detroit, blues fan, beat poet, and perpetual dissident John Sinclair responded to the defiance of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California, by forming the White Panther Party, whose manifesto demanded “rock 'n' roll, dope and fucking in the streets!” Police brutality in the city provoked extensive riots among the African-American community in 1967, and Sinclair aligned his Panthers with those seeking to banish racism from the streets and end the war in Vietnam. In 1969 he was jailed for possession of a small amount of marijuana; a prolonged protest campaign, climaxed by a concert featuring John Lennon, brought about his release. Meanwhile, the rock band that Sinclair had managed, the MC5, carried the Panthers' manifesto into thousands of homes via their debut album,
Kick Out the Jams
.