The Man Who Sold the World (28 page)

THE HEART OF PLASTIC SOUL

W
hite rock has lost its contact with the dance by straying too far from black beginnings; black music is struggling to define its own integrity in the throes of new developments in the popular idiom comparable to the be-bop pioneers' impact on 40s jazz. Whatever next? I suggest black'n'white music.” That was
New Musical Express
rock critic Ian MacDonald in 1975. For another voice, try Ron Ross from the US magazine
Circus
: “Any artist who will mean as much to as many in the 70s as the Beatles did in the 60s is going to have to involve black listeners in the same way Stevie Wonder or Jimi Hendrix involved whites.”

For the generation of white musicians who emerged in the mid-sixties, particularly in Britain, black American music represented a touchstone of authenticity—a jewel that they could reproduce in paste, but never hope to match. As American producer Tony Visconti noted in 1974, “Every British musician has a hidden desire to be black. They all talk about ‘funky rhythm sections,' and their idols are all black blues guitarists.” Talking of Bowie, he added: “He's been working on putting together an R&B sound for years.” Like the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Who, and many more besides, Bowie had set out in 1964 with the intention of sounding as if he had been born in Harlem, rather than pre-immigration Brixton. A decade later, he boasted: “It's only now that I've got the necessary confidence to sing like that. That's the kind of music I've always wanted to sing.”

Not that one could have deduced that from the music that he—or, for that matter, the Beatles, the Stones, or the Who—had recorded between 1967 and 1970. All of those acts felt as if they had progressed beyond the need to imitate their black American idols. They were under more direct influences: psychedelic drugs, literature, radical politics, street protests, the decline of a traditional national identity. None of them lost their passion for R&B or soul, but they now inhabited what felt like a more complex universe, which the simple verities of the blues were inadequate to reflect.

Instead, American soul music came to meet them: alongside the rise of black nationalism and black power, the Black Liberation Army and the Black Panthers, performers such as Curtis Mayfield, James Brown, Marvin Gaye, and Sly Stone began to sketch vivid portraits of a black nation in revolt, under threat and forced to confront the starkest economic realities of the age. Only when the black liberation movement was destroyed by covert government interference (the Nixon administration's infamous COINTELPRO initiative), the ghettos of America's cities were flooded with cheap heroin and cocaine, and the revolution of 1970 was repackaged as “blaxploitation” chic in movies such as
Shaft
and
Superfly
, did the culture of US soul slide back into escapism and hedonism, the righteous blast of funk giving way to the dance-floor metronome of disco.

That's a very simplistic overview, of course, which glosses over complex social transformations and political initiatives, and underplays the richness of America's black music during the early to mid-seventies. It was the latter that attracted David Bowie when he moved to New York in 1974. He hung out at the Pierre Hotel, ordering steaks that he never ate and hundred-dollar bottles of vintage champagne, before heading uptown to the Apollo and downtown to Max's Kansas City—sampling the best of the era's sweet soul in Harlem, and an altogether more chaotic brew in the East Village. He wasn't alone in his obsessions: Mick Jagger, John Lennon, and Elton John were all about to welcome contemporary black American influences back into their music, to disguise the hollowness of their closeted rock culture. But Bowie, ever the stylist at heart, was entranced as much by moves and fashions as by music. He fell for the clichéd swagger of what Tom Wolfe, in an essay titled “Funky Chic,” called “the Pimpmobile Pyramid-Heel Platform Soul Prince Albert Coat Got-to-get-over look of [New Haven's] Dixwell Avenue,” in which “all of them, every ace, every dude, [were] out there just getting over in the baddest possible way, come to play and dressed to slay.” As Bowie recalled nearly thirty years later, “it was an attempt to turn the visual around as well as the music”—an escape route from his image as a space invader, his obsessions with political apocalypse, his hard rock clichés, his emotional repression; a reconnection with the body that he was already subjecting to torture by starvation and drug addiction; an expression of (there was no other word for it) soul.

In the remainder of 1974, therefore, he channeled his soul obsessions into one tour that was meant to promote
Diamond Dogs
, and one that clearly wasn't; and into a series of recording sessions whereby the strategies of contemporary black music enabled him to explore psychological terrain left untouched by his rock stardom.

 

[109] KNOCK ON WOOD

(Floyd/Cropper)

 

[110] HERE TODAY AND GONE TOMORROW

(Bonner/Harris/Jones/Middlebrooks/Robinson/Satchell/Webster)

Performed live 1974;
David Live
LP [109] and extended CD [110]

Bowie promised “some silly ones” during the July 1974
Diamond Dogs
concerts taped for
David Live
, no doubt leading some in the audience to expect a live debut of “The Laughing Gnome.” Instead he worked his way gently toward a contemporary soul sound via two vintage offerings. In “Knock on Wood” he was tackling a song so well known that it was virtually a cliché, having entered the repertoire of every British R&B band in the late sixties. While Eddie Floyd's 1966 original was tightly controlled, relying on its brass section to help it swing, Bowie increased the tempo and let Earl Slick's guitar dominate the arrangement, with an inevitable reduction in subtlety.

Few, if any, of Bowie's following in 1974 would have been familiar with “Here Today and Gone Tomorrow,” a 1968 single by the Ohio Players. Even in 1968 it must have sounded like a throwback, to the era when Smokey Robinson was crafting a succession of hits for the Temptations. Aside from lowering the key, Bowie did little to amend the Ohio Players' arrangement, delivering a faithful but ultimately pointless reproduction of the original.

THE UNMAKING OF A STAR #2:
David Live
LP

T
he mid-seventies was the last era of rock history in which concert tours by major artists were not routinely documented for posterity. David Bowie undertook two lengthy excursions across the United States and Canada in 1974: the first, designed to promote
Diamond Dogs
, was recorded for the album
David Live
, but only a few fragments of concert footage have survived; the second, for which he abandoned the scenery and iconography of
Diamond Dogs
and set out to prove himself a soul singer, was glimpsed briefly in the 1975 BBC-TV documentary
Cracked Actor
, but otherwise exists only in memory and on illicit tapes made by audience members. For fans in Britain, famine replaced glut: after two years of almost frantic touring activity, Bowie was not seen onstage for almost three years.

David Live
was roundly criticized on its release in October 1974: one of Bowie's staunchest supporters, journalist Charles Shaar Murray, wrote: “He seems to be kicking and screaming in a vain attempt to break out of the boundaries imposed on him by the songs, as if he needs them to say more than they are capable of saying; as if they had lost so much of their original meaning to him that he must infuse the lyrics with a desperate theatricality simply in order to convince himself that the songs have not yet become totally impotent.” The staging of the tour was certainly theatrical. Bowie had become obsessed with German expressionist cinema of the silent age, and the treacherous, angled surfaces of the most enduring example of the genre,
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
, were a major influence on the
Diamond Dogs
scenery. Everything in
Caligari
was off-balance, as befitted a film about madness and the uncertainty of identity. For the
Diamond Dogs
tour Bowie combined the tilting floors of
Caligari
with the inhuman cityscape of Fritz Lang's film
Metropolis
, which he had seen for the first time in January 1974.

Lang had arrived in New York a few months before he began shooting
Metropolis
in 1926. He saw the city as “the crossroads of multiple and confused human forces,” though implicit in his film was the belief that love could overcome the confusion and break through the overpowering modernity of a technocratic society. In Bowie's hands, this theme became more vague: instead of Metropolis, his designers built Hunger City, with skyscrapers that seemed to be decaying before the audience's eyes. Yet the singer, his band (positioned modestly stage right, as if observing proceedings), and his two “dogs” (singing dancers) never fully interacted with this vision. Songs were staged in a series of tableaux: Bowie was carried over the audience on a boom, miming a boxing bout, running with a street gang, but never capturing the focused intensity of the silent movies that ran through his imagination.

Critics lamented his vocal inadequacies (as
David Live
proved, his offstage habits had cut away at his range) and the band's lack of engagement with the music. Meanwhile, the gadgets didn't always work, the venues didn't sell out (especially in the South, in cities such as Nashville, Tampa, Charlotte, and Greensboro, where the arena was only 20 percent full), and the running costs were enormous. Even the taping of
David Live
during a six-show run at the Tower Theatre in Philadelphia was problematic: the band mutinied over a pay dispute before they went onstage, and the intended producer, Tony Visconti, arrived only after the shows.

When the first tour ended in New York, a chance discussion with a MainMan employee forced Bowie to face an uncomfortable truth: he had misunderstood the entire nature of his business relationship with Tony Defries. What he had signed, and what he had chosen to believe, were diametrically opposed. He had imagined that he must be the co-owner of MainMan alongside Defries; instead he was merely one of the company's employees, albeit the single most profitable individual on the staff. Bowie felt betrayed, and his personal relationship with Defries effectively ended at that point. His first decision in his new state of awareness—like Adam and Eve after they'd tasted the apple—was to cover himself up, to lessen his liabilities: specifically, he ordered that the next leg of the tour, due to open in September on the West Coast, should proceed without the ruinously expensive scenery and special effects.

He also revamped his live band, replacing several experienced musicians with young black hopefuls from New York. Shepherded by Mike Garson, and led vocally by the then-unknown Luther Vandross, they were allowed to open the subsequent shows, to the disgust of many fans who had come to see Ziggy Stardust, not an unknown band of R&B singers. Although much of the material and arrangements remained intact (including Bowie's reduced range), publicity centered around the handful of new songs that Bowie had added to the repertoire, all of which revealed a strong soul influence. Reviewers were virtually unanimous: as a soul man, Bowie was “a non-singer of the Lou Reed school,” “lightweight,” “hoarse,” “undistinguished,” “raw, uneven and generally strained.”

It was now impossible to describe Bowie without mentioning his emaciated appearance, his skull clearly visible beneath his skin, like one of Egon Schiele's distorted portraits of sickness. Associates had been worrying about his attitude to food since the late sixties, when Ken Pitt's secretary complained that he never seemed to eat. His bodyguard during the Ziggy tours, Stuey George, talked as if he were a willful, self-destructive child: “You'd give him something to eat and he'd say he'd have it in a minute, so that in the end you would have to take the work off him. Many times he would go for days without eating, then he couldn't get any food down. We had to fix Complan [a nutritional food supplement] and make him eat.” By 1974, he would taste a little milk or cheese in the early hours, but otherwise ingest nothing but alcohol. Observers guessed that he weighed no more than seven stone (eighty-four pounds). Journalists noted that he was “almost ravaged, beyond belief.”

He was also trapped in a routine of epic drug use. It was, said guitarist Earl Slick, “self-destruct time.” That was a more accurate summary than Slick perhaps realized. On October 23, 1974, Bowie returned to his hotel after a show in Chicago to watch an
In Concert
TV special based on the final Ziggy show the previous year. He could hardly have been taken by surprise to see the broadcast: he had remixed the tapes of the performance a few days earlier, for this exact purpose. But as he saw himself at the height of his powers just fifteen months earlier, in a state of innocence about his financial situation, something inside of him cracked. “I nearly threw myself out of the window,” he revealed later, claiming that Defries had never told him about the film. “I saw everything for the first time. And I nearly threw myself out. I was trying, but they stopped me. I just couldn't take it.” A week later, as if nothing had happened, he was back onstage in New York. “I saw everything for the first time”: where he had been, what he had become, what he had believed, how he had been manipulated, what lay ahead. It was too much reality to bear.

During his run at the city's famous Radio City Music Hall, he filmed an appearance on Dick Cavett's TV chat show, sniffing uncontrollably, tapping a cane on the floor incessantly as he spoke, singing with passion but little voice, and resembling a famine victim. A few weeks later, he was spotted in a New York club with Bob Dylan, “moving very strangely, looking very thin, and also a bit crazed.” It was this man who recorded one of the most directly emotional albums of his career, and then resolved to overturn the business relationship that had guided him to fame and all its attendant curses.

 

[111] I AM A LASER

(Bowie)

 

[112] SHILLING THE RUBES

(Bowie)

Recorded August 1974; unreleased

A spontaneous decision led David Bowie to Sigma Sound in Philadelphia, the base for Gamble & Huff's sweet soul empire. He booked the studio for two weeks, naïvely assuming that he would be working with the musicians he had heard on hits by the O'Jays, Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes, and the Three Degrees. But they were engaged elsewhere, so it was a mixture of New York players and local singers who accompanied him as he attempted to confect his own facsimile of the Philly soul sound. Beyond that, his agenda was vague. This was not a project built around a concept, unless you included one possibility that flitted across his mind: the enticing but commercially perilous idea of chronicling his feelings about his career, and more specifically his declining relationship with the MainMan, Tony Defries.

Hence “Shilling the Rubes,” street slang for a form of exploitation that was second nature to any huckster or (as Bowie knew from experience) salesman. Rumor had long suggested this as a possible song title from these sessions, though with no evidence to support it until 2009, when a private vendor on eBay briefly posted samples of these two songs (plus working versions of “After Today” [114] and “Young Americans” [113]) to prove that he did indeed possess original tapes from the Sigma Sound project. And there, at last, was “Shilling the Rubes” (take 1), a slow, dramatic variation on the James Brown ballad tradition (“It's a Man's Man's Man's World” being the closest equivalent). Only a minute of the song circulated before the tapes were withdrawn: enough merely to show that Bowie intended to pin a businessman to the wall with bitter humor.

A slightly longer extract of “I Am a Laser” (marked simply “Lazer” on the tape box) also surfaced, with an entirely different feel to the Astronettes' version [93], and totally rewritten verses—one of which began by referring to the rumored working title for the album,
The Gouster
(a youth fashion of the fifties and sixties that could best be defined by borrowing a song title from New York Dolls vocalist David Johansen: “Funky but Chic”).

 

[113] YOUNG AMERICANS

(Bowie)

Recorded August and November 1974;
Young Americans
LP

Note the title: it never appeared in this song, where everyone—he, she, I—wanted “the young American.” So did every advertising executive in the nation, every politician, every pop star. As a temporary immigrant, albeit one who was being advised not to return home for tax reasons, and who would never be resident in Britain again, David Bowie knew the pull of the mythical young American only too well, as it had dragged him from South London, via the media of movies, rock'n'roll, and beat literature, to New York, California, and now Philadelphia, in his quest to become what he had worshipped since he was a child. On one level, then, “Young Americans” was the portrait of a fantasy: the global dream of how it would feel to have life laid out before you in the land of plenty.

Yet there was more to this myth than simple obeisance to the Yankee dollar, and all it could buy. In the summer of 1974, with Watergate in the news, unemployment lines around the block, the economy on the edge, being young and American was a less certain fate than the myth allowed. The dream might already be over, childhood affluence and teenage promise snuffed out in a moment of economic decline, where the young Americans might have to “die for the fifty more” years. After the opening verse of the song, with its moment of sexual passion so transcendent that she doesn't even care if he takes her behind the fridge,
*
it's only a moment before they're married, and he's the breadwinner on his knees in despair, not lust. Even the Barbie doll on the poster (movies, records, advertising, it didn't matter) had suffered a broken heart as the myth disintegrated. Yet the power of fantasy, of the ad man's game and stardom's sheen, was so overwhelming that it could replenish itself even at times of national dread, to the point where young Americans had already forgotten their vanquished president (who'd resigned days earlier, prompting his successor to promise, optimistically: “our long national nightmare is over”)—and maybe couldn't even remember yesterday.

There was another layer to American mythology that Bowie began to explore only after he'd questioned the nation's collective memory (and, incidentally, changed the song's key). He was working in a studio run by black entrepreneurs, with mostly black musicians, on music that was inspired by the sound of black America. As a kid, that had been the most seductive part of the myth, before he knew what it meant to be black in this land. Now, after the official end of segregation and the supposed death of discrimination, what was black America, the youngest America of them all? Was it the high, quasi-feminine falsetto voice of a sweet soul band? Or the pimp and hustler stereotypes that peopled blaxploitation movies? What did it mean to process your hair, or shape it into an Afro, using Afro-Sheen? What was the black identity in America, when the black nation was crippled by fantasy just like the white, and divided between the ghetto and the self-improving middle class? Where did that leave soul music? And, as Bowie sang with a mighty octave-and-a-half leap, was there nothing that could make him “break down and cry”?

That was merely the last of a series of questions posed by the would-be young American who had grown up surrounded by myths, and no longer knew which one to believe or follow. By the end, he was barely coherent, flashing out images and fragments of sentences that didn't run together, as a cacophony of American voices and myths filled his mind. All of this was in the song—material for sociological dissertations and psychological reports, a dazzling series of snapshots of real America and mythical America and Bowie's place in the country and the myth. And none of it seemed to be thought, merely felt, as if it had emerged in automatic writing, and he had found the courage to let it stand as a genuine, unfeigned response to the mystery of what America represented in 1974.