The Man Who Sold the World (23 page)

Whoever she was, no muse could have wished for a more vivid or affecting portrait, especially from a man who, during that same tour, described himself as “a very cold person . . . a bit of an iceman.” After the octave jump of the first two syllables, Bowie delivered much of the song beyond the high G that he used to regard as the top of his range, as if to demonstrate his vulnerability and commitment, his voice aching with loss and desire. His musicians were equally sensitive to the moment, Mike Garson wrapping Bowie's delicious melody in a wrap of semiclassical, ultraromantic flourishes; Trevor Bolder offering some equally sensitive bass accompaniment; Mick Ronson summing up the moment with a flamenco-inspired solo as beautiful as Bowie's obsession. They were drifting across a gossamer-light song, its verse a succession of tentative, tender steps up the scale, the chorus floating back and forth between B
b
and B natural, melancholy and joy, memory and anticipation, with the equally uncertain closing movement (G#m-G-G#m) suggesting that he already knew that their love affair was over.

ALADDIN SANE
LP

T
he figure on the album cover that was trumpeted on its launch as the most expensive design of all time was the archetype of artificiality—glittered, painted, dyed, decorated with a lightning flash, its flesh marble-cold and deformed with a silver teardrop, sculpted, epicene, emaciated, haughty, vulnerable, and ultimately alien. “David Bowie Aladdin Sane,” read the lettering, as if the two personae were interchangeable (and as if Bowie might indeed be a lad insane). Which is exactly what Bowie's fans assumed, and hoped: that here was another character as striking and persuasive as Ziggy Stardust, ready to lead them on a second adventure into the outer limits of sexuality and identity.

Initially, Bowie was at pains to play down these expectations. “I don't think Aladdin is as clearly cut and defined a character as Ziggy was,” he insisted. “Aladdin is pretty ephemeral.” The album, he explained, was “my interpretation of what America means to me. It's like a summation of my first American tour.” But so relentless was the demand for Aladdin Sane to exist inside Bowie's skeleton that the singer eventually gave in and began to talk about the character as if he were more than simply a set of photographs, a pose, and a song. For example: “Aladdin Sane was a schizophrenic. That's why there were so many costume changes, because he had so many personalities.” Among them, presumably, was Ziggy Stardust—or vice versa—because there was no break in Bowie's schedule, or change of presentation, to differentiate the star of one album from the icon of the next. Fans chose not to ponder the philosophical dilemma—was Ziggy performing as Aladdin Sane, or was Aladdin playing Ziggy's songs?—and simply wallowed in the decadence of it all.

Neither at the time was there any exploration of the lightning bolt across Aladdin's visage—mirroring the flash that was to be found on the flag of the Hitler Youth, was doubled to produce the insignia of Heinrich Himmler's SS cadre, and was also a tarot symbol for the card known as
The Tower
, denoting the need to reconstruct oneself. The bolt had been seen on a gown designed by Kansai Yamamoto for Bowie to wear onstage, though photographer Brian Duffy recalled that Bowie's inspiration was actually a similar symbol used by Elvis Presley—and Bowie himself, fleshing out his portrait of the imaginary Mr. Sane, contended that “I thought [Aladdin
*
] would probably be cracked by lightning.”

Ultimately, Bowie's original explanation—that here was a slightly deranged report on the American scene, from the distorted vision of a rock star—was quite accurate. There was no narrative or theme to
Aladdin Sane
, beyond the sense that civilization could not continue as it was without toppling into apocalypse: a clear case of personal crisis infecting the world beyond. As such, it was arguably a more “real” album than
Ziggy Stardust
; and, also arguably, a more rewarding one at this distance, its Stones-inspired, vivid production enduring better than the somewhat flat sonic canvas of
Ziggy
. But
Ziggy
had an impact beyond the duration of its songs;
Aladdin Sane
was its songs, its sleeve, and nothing more. It did not solve the problem of where Bowie might take his Ziggy character or abandon him: it simply compounded the pressure and his fame.

 

[75] ZION (AKA ALADDIN VEIN AKA TRAGIC MOMENTS)

(Bowie)

Recorded ca. July 1973; unreleased

“Zion” was allegedly recorded for
Aladdin Sane
; meanwhile, Bowie declared that
Tragic Moments
was a work in progress during the
Pin Ups
sessions later in the year, intended as “a musical in one act . . . probably running straight through both sides.” He then played journalist Martin Hayman a long instrumental, “a highly arranged, subtly shifting piece of music with just a touch of vaudeville.” That description fits the piece of music circulated among fans under the title of “Zion”: it opened with the piano motif that would later grace the “Sweet Thing” medley [100] on
Diamond Dogs
, moved through a weighty Ronson guitar riff reminiscent of the Who's “I Can See for Miles,” and then into a wordless Bowie melody that sounded like a close cousin of the Beatles' “I'll Follow the Sun”—and still on, via a jazzy descent into a piano section that could have featured on
Hunky Dory
, and finally back through the first two movements, to close with a typical Mike Garson flourish. It could almost be the overture for a rock opera, or a skeleton for the
1984
musical, or an attempt to marry half a dozen different themes and moods into a coherent whole, which Bowie chose to abandon.

THE UNMAKING OF A STAR #1: Rock 'n' Roll Suicide

A
s a piece of theatre, it could hardly have been bettered. David Bowie's performance at the Hammersmith Odeon in London on July 3, 1973, had reached its final encore. Before his by now traditional rendition of the elegiac “Rock 'n' Roll Suicide” [61], he stunned his audience—and at least two members of his band—by announcing that “this is the last show we'll ever do.” Cue screams and cries from his audience; startled glances from his rhythm section, who would never work together with Bowie again; banner headlines in the pop press; and knowing nods from those who had anticipated just such an outcome all along.
*

Bowie could not be accused of having hidden his intentions. The previous winter, he had signaled his discontent with the pressure of enacting Ziggy Stardust, night after night across Britain, North America, and Japan: “I feel as though I'm on a tightrope more and more, a kind of precipice.” By January 1973 he was telling a British pop magazine that “I'm not too sure when I'll be appearing on stage in this country again. . . . I may be concentrating on films in the future.” Within his organization, Mick Ronson recalled: “David's retirement was first talked about a few months before, at the start of the British tour. It was never a definite thing, but everything seemed to lead up to that Hammersmith show like it was the last time.” The concert was recorded and filmed by a documentary crew, for an album tentatively titled
Bowie-ing Out
.

There were countless reasons for Bowie to step off the treadmill. He was completing a two-month tour of British cinemas, theatres, and civic halls: sixty-one shows in fifty-three days, crossing the country's notoriously inadequate road system for a diet of anonymous hotel rooms, scrambled meals, and relentlessly enthusiastic fans. After a brief pause, he was booked to endure an even more enervating schedule in America. “There was a time when what I was doing didn't seem to resemble anything anybody else was doing,” he recalled in 2000, describing his personality as “out of sync, not in touch.” Cocaine was now his main nutrient, with all its attendant fears and excesses: “You start on this trail of psychological destruction, and you become what's called a drug casualty at the end of it all.”

Bowie was exhausted beyond simple repair; he was bored with the repetition, of the constant ringing in his ears, the feelings of staleness and circularity. He did not want to be Ziggy Stardust, or perhaps even David Bowie, though he did not know what would remain if he gave up both of these assumed identities. There was also the problem of his band: not just that he wanted a new sound behind him, but the embarrassing fact that two members (Bolder and Woodmansey) had discovered that another member (Garson) was earning enormously more per show than they were, and so they wanted a raise that their manager, Tony Defries, would not grant them.

Defries had another excellent reason for encouraging Bowie to stop. The proposed US tour was being promised as the most elaborate piece of staging in rock history: the stage would be covered in a large plastic bubble, surrounded by a skin beneath which gases of various colors would be pumped during the performance, to alter Bowie's hue and maybe even, as far as the audience were concerned, his size. It sounded like an incredible idea; and incredible it was, since there was no money in the MainMan budget to cover the expense, while RCA Records—which had cleverly been landed with the fees for the loss-making 1972 US tour—were not about to be fooled again. Bowie's US tour receipts could not possibly match the hype that surrounded him, so the planned itinerary would have been financially disastrous for MainMan, whereas operating on a restricted budget and smaller scale would have destroyed Defries's reputation for grand gestures and coups de théâtre.

So the American tour could not happen, although Defries dared not let his client find out why, for fear of losing face where it mattered most. Meanwhile, Bowie prevaricated, which is one reason why his band wasn't told in advance. As Mick Ronson admitted, “In the end it was almost a last-minute decision.” If Bowie's bodyguard, Stuey George, was to be believed, it wasn't even the singer's choice: “His manager decided just before he went on. He didn't react instantly; he didn't think about it until he'd done half the show. . . . He said, ‘What am I going to do?,' and his manager said, ‘Don't you worry, leave it all to me. I'll tell you what we are going to do after.' ” So, according to this account by someone who was at Bowie's side for almost every moment he was offstage, Bowie swallowed hard and did as he was told. Then—the eternal mythologist—he phoned the pop press the next day and explained that he had elected to quit because he wanted to concentrate on working in films (notably a screenplay based on Robert Heinlein's sci-fi novel
Stranger in a Strange Land
) and “various activities that have very little to do with rock and pop.” MainMan added that Bowie would now be “writing the script” for his future: not just the Actor, then, as he'd been credited in the small print on
Hunky Dory
, but the Author as well. Soon Bowie was rationalizing his retirement as a conceptual climax to a conceptual experiment in inventing and achieving rock stardom. “The star was created,” he said, as if he were talking about a robot he'd invented; “he worked; and that's all I wanted him to do. Anything he did now would just be repetition.”

The tedium of life on the road aside, Bowie—acting as and on behalf of Ziggy Stardust—was being more astute than perhaps he realized. By 1973, most of his peers and elders in the business of rock'n'roll were already leaving their peak of innovation and creativity behind and embarking on the long (and, as it proved, highly lucrative) process of reproducing and feigning their youthful passion for audiences who pretended that the excitement was still real. “Will this be the last time?” the media asked at the start of each Rolling Stones tour, before realizing that in the hands of the Stones, the Who, and countless others, rock would pass almost without notice from an embodiment of youthful rebellion into a highly rewarding pension plan.

Bowie could foresee the cynicism ahead, and several weeks before he retired Ziggy Stardust from the stage, he decided to come clean. “Maybe I'm not into rock'n'roll,” he confessed to the
New Musical Express
. “Maybe I just use rock'n'roll. This is what I do. I'm not into rock'n'roll at all . . . it's just an artist's materials.” But his words didn't make sense from a rock star, to an audience for whom rock was a shared language, their way of comprehending the world around them. So nobody, perhaps even Bowie, understood them. It was like Hamlet, at the denouement of his tragedy, holding his script up to the audience and declaring that it was all a façade. Better to do what Bowie did: announce his retirement, and then immediately throw himself into a frenzy of activity and creativity that convinced his public his retirement was simply a career move.

One thing was certain: David Bowie would no longer be Ziggy Stardust (or, for that matter, Aladdin Sane). There would be no more Spiders from Mars. So Bowie had to face an uncertain future without the props that had served him so well. He had created a rock star, and destroyed him. The challenge was to invent a second act for what had been intended as a one-act drama.

 

[76] ROSALYN

(Duncan/Farley)

Recorded July 1973;
Pin Ups
LP

Bowie's first step after his apparent retirement was to travel to Paris with all but one of the Spiders (Aynsley Dunbar replacing Woody Woodmansey) and record an album of songs from the heritage of British rock, 1964–67. The sessions lasted for just three weeks, during which time he also began to sketch out plans for an elaborate piece of rock theatre, and produced a single for another veteran from the mid-sixties, Lulu.

Other motives aside,
Pin Ups
allowed Bowie to repay some overdue debts. His first single with the King Bees in 1964 [A2] had been an obvious attempt to emulate the Pretty Things' own debut, “Rosalyn,” a riot of teenage lust and excess energy. Their hallmark was the slurred, snarling voice of Phil May, compared to whom Mick Jagger sounded like an elocution coach. By 1973, Bowie had realized that he couldn't match May for incoherent aggression, so he substituted adolescent contempt instead, otherwise mirroring the original arrangement with skill but little passion.

 

[77] HERE COMES THE NIGHT

(Berns)

Recorded July 1973;
Pin Ups
LP

In tackling this 1965 single by Them, Bowie was competing with one of Britain's great vocal stylists, Van Morrison. Writer/producer Bert Berns had compelled Morrison to record the song, and a hint of his disdain could be heard in his rasping approach to the chorus. Elsewhere, he managed a reasonable facsimile of the uptown soul sound of Ben E. King, best known for “Stand by Me” and “Spanish Harlem.” Bowie's attempt to channel King, via Morrison, resulted in a sly croon, reminiscent of his mid-sixties imitations of American R&B, while Aynsley Dunbar's drums reduced the playful skip of the original to a plod. The rather awkward, almost squawking saxophone solo was presumably the work of Bowie himself, rather than session professional Ken Fordham, who played elsewhere on this album.

 

[78] I WISH YOU WOULD

(Arnold)

Recorded July 1973;
Pin Ups
LP

One of just two songs on
Pin Ups
not to be offered in the same key as the original models, “I Wish You Would” was also the album's first major piece of reinvention. Bowie's arrangement hinted that he had begun to soak up the mechanical, European (and defiantly non-American) rhythms of Kraftwerk. Mick Ronson's contribution was to remove “I Wish You Would” from the repertoire of the 1964 lineup of the Yardbirds (with blues purist Eric Clapton on guitar), into the Pop Art–oriented Yardbirds sound of 1966–67, when (Ronson's hero) Jeff Beck and then Jimmy Page were at the helm. One of Page's trademarks was playing his guitar with a violin bow; Ronson and Bowie enlisted an electric violin player (from the French band Zoo) to similar effect. His spectacular inventiveness, culminating in a menacing rumble of feedback that suggested a distant explosion, provoked Bowie into an impressive imitation of Page's colleague in Led Zeppelin Robert Plant. On every level—from classic rock cover to conceptual art project—this was a stunning success.

 

[79] SEE EMILY PLAY

(Barrett)

Recorded July 1973;
Pin Ups
LP

If “I Wish You Would” marked one chronological extreme of the
Pin Ups
repertoire (the Yardbirds were performing Billy Boy Arnold's American R&B tune by the end of 1963), “See Emily Play” represented the other. Pink Floyd's second single, originally issued in June 1967, was the only song tackled by Bowie that came from the era of full-blown psychedelia. Written by Syd Barrett, an influence on Bowie's songwriting in the late sixties and early seventies, Pink Floyd's record was a breathtaking mixture of electronic experimentation and commercial pop.

Realizing that it would be pointless to imitate their pioneering exploits in sound, Bowie chose to lean on his strengths: the hard rock theatrics of Mick Ronson's guitar, his own insight into the psychology of alienation, and his willingness to use vivid colors in his arrangements. Pink Floyd's trippy playfulness was forgotten; instead Bowie introduced the eerie vari-speed vocal ensemble he'd used on “After All” [20] and “The Bewlay Brothers” [51], as if he were signaling that there was an inevitable path from the lysergic adventures of the so-called flower power era to mental disintegration. Mike Garson's typically free-spirited keyboard solo revived memories of his work on “Aladdin Sane” [70], while alluding to Wagner's “Also Sprach Zarathustra” theme.
*
Ronson's string arrangement widened the cultural horizons still further, as it moved seamlessly back in time from the twelve-tone experiments of the early twentieth century to close with a melody borrowed from a Beethoven symphony.

 

[80] EVERYTHING'S ALRIGHT

(Crouch/Konrad/Stavely/James/Karlson)

Recorded July 1973;
Pin Ups
LP

Few records issued during the British beat boom of 1963–64 came close to matching the naïve excitement of the debut single by the Mojos, who were briefly one of the rawest of the era's Liverpudlian bands. Everything thrilling about their performance—Stu James's rasping vocal, the untutored energy of the band, the sense that nobody quite knew what was going to happen next—was lost in Bowie's arrangement, which sounded like a parody of rock'n'roll from a West End show. His track had no center, least of all his own vocal performance, which slipped from shoddy Elvis impression to mock R&B without any apparent purpose. The final insult was the Beatles pastiche (from the climax of “She Loves You”) of cooing vocals and major 6th chord: it was impossible not to imagine the entire band going down on their knees and posing for the camera with their “jazz hands” held high.

 

[81] I CAN'T EXPLAIN

(Townshend)

Recorded July 1973;
Pin Ups
LP

The Who's first single under that name, “I Can't Explain” was a compact portrait of Mod incoherence, sweetened just enough by producer Shel Talmy to pass as an acceptable 1965 pop hit. Bowie trimmed the signature guitar riff from four chords to three, lowered the key from E to C, cut the tempo, and emerged with a track that approximated the feeling of swimming underwater. Strangely, this rethinking worked, from the crunch of guitar, cymbal, and steam-whistle sax that opened the song, through Bowie's intensely arch vocal interpretation, set to a robotic dance rhythm. Mick Ronson reproduced the famous guitar solo from Johnny Kidd & the Pirates' 1960 hit “Shakin' All Over” to add to the joyous sense of confusion.