David Bowie
Ground Control to Davy Jones
Despite a new album and tour, David Bowie claims to have rocked his last roll.Corinne Schwab is probably the last holdover from David Bowie's glitter-glam phase - the days of Ziggy Stardust, Moonage Daydream, gaudy costumes, hulking bodyguards, ex-manager Tony De Fries and the back-room-at-Max's-Kansas-City-mystique. In her three years as his secretary, Corinne has watched Bowie shrewdly work up to his most difficult move yet: the switch from cultish deco rocker to a wide-appeal and recording star/entertainer. "I want to be a Frank Sinatra figure," Bowie declares. "And I will succeed."
Wheeling a cart in a Hollywood supermarket just three blocks from where David is working on his new LP, Station to Station, Corinne says she has no doubts about something so obvious as Bowie's success in achieving his stated goal. The way she sees it, David has only one problem. "I've got to put more weight on that boy," she sighs. And with that she carefully places eight quarts of extra-rich milk in the basket.
Down the street at Cherokee Studios, David Bowie is just back from three vice-free months in New Mexico where he starred in Nick Roeg's film, The Man Who Fell to Earth. He is still glowing form the experience and, says Corinne, the healthiest he's been in years. He is relaxed and almost humble as he scoots around the studio and directs his musicians (Carlos Alomar and Earl Slick, guitars; George Murray, bass and Dennis Davis, drums) through the songs. It is a complete evolution from the David Bowie of six months before. But then, of course, anything less than a total personality upheaval would be entirely out of character for him. "I love it," he cracked several months earlier. "I'm really just my own little corporation of characters."
He is actually anything one wants him to be at any given moment - a paranoid hustler, an arrogant opportunist, a versatile actor, a gentleman, maybe even a genius. He had, after all, made a warning up front. "Don't expect to find the real me...the David Jones [his true name] underneath all this."
May 1975 -- It's four in the morning, Hollywood time, and David Bowie is twitching with energy. He's fidgeting, jabbing a cigarette in and out of his pursed lips, bouncing lightly on a stool behind the control board in a makeshift demo studio, staring through the glass at Iggy Pop.
Bowie has spent the last nine hours composing, producing and playing every instrument on the backing track, and it is finally time for Pop to do his bit. After all, this is Iggy's demo.
Bowie touches a button and the room is filled with an ominous, dirgelike instrumental track. The shirtless Iggy listens intently for a moment, then approaches the mike. He has prepared no lyrics, and in the name of improv, he snarls:
You go out at night from your sixty dollar single down in West Hollywood
With your ripped off clothes that are bulging
at the seams
I can't believe that you don't know you look ugly.
I mean, are you really all that dumb?
I mean, I don't want you to be that dumb
you know.
But you are
You're just dumb
Straight out of the cradle and into the hole with you.
He begins screaming.
When I walk through the do-wa.
I'm your new breed of who-wa.
We will nooowwwwwwww drink
to meeeeeee.
Bowie clutches his heart and beams like a proud father watching his kid in the school play. His whisper is full of wonder. "They just don't appreciate Iggy," he is saying. "He's Lenny fucking Bruce and James Dean. When that adlib flow starts, there's nobody like him. It's verbal jazz, man!"
Pop himself is spent from his eruption; he listens only once to the completed cut and groggily proclaims it "the best thing I've ever done." A woman acquaintance materializes, as if on cue, to drag him out by a handful of his platinum-dyed hair.
"Go and do what you will," Bowie calls after them. "Just don't be too long. We have a lot more work to do tomorrow."
"Don't worry," Pop mumbles. "She never lets me kiss her anyway. Ever..."
"Good. Good." David adds an afterthought. "Iggy, please keep healthy."
Pop is still mumbling as he walks out the door. "I don't believe my patience," he says to no one in particular. "I just don't believe my patience. She won't even let me give her one little smooch..."
He leaves Bowie laughing, partly at the soporific anti-wit, but mostly over a successful effort at producing the unproducible.
Less than a minute later, Iggy Pop is the farthest thing from his mind. Bowie's blanched, bony face has already fallen into furrows. "I am very, very bored," he says.
But he is still charged up. He jumps to his feet, skips to the next room and straps on an electric guitar. This is Bowie the rocker and the image is striking. He stands under the studio's deep blue light, dressed like a scruffy street corner newsboy from the Thirties, bashing on a bright orange instrument that perfectly matches the hair peaking out from under his cap. Over the next couple of hours, Bowie moves at break-neck speed. Before long he has written and recorded a new song and entitled it "Movin' On." Only three months before, he and John Lennon had come up with the Number One single "Fame" in only 45 minutes. "Another song," he groans. "That's the last thing I need. I write an album a month as it is. I've already got two new albums in the can. Give me a break." He is happy. It's 7 a.m. and David Bowie is finally content as he locks up the studio.
Driving a borrowed VW bug through sluggish morning traffic toward the Hollywood Hills, his eyes never stop scanning the streets. He thrills over the massage parlors, billboards and stumbling itinerants. "L.A. is my favorite museum," he says.
Bowie had fled New York by train (he does not fly) only five days earlier. After the numerous lawsuits, countersuits and injunctions over his split with manager Tony De Fries and the MainMan Companies, New York, he says, began to "close in on me." Now he is staying at the home of Deep Purple bassist Glen Hughes. While Purple is on tour, he's been living there with Hughes's housekeeper, Phil. When he lets himself into the house, David finds a stranger, Phil's houseguest, drunk and half asleep on the sofa.
Bowie extends his hand tentatively. "Hello, I'm David. Who are you?"
The stranger is quickly aroused. Looking exactly as if he'd just awakened to find David Bowie standing in front of him, he pumps his hand wildly. "I'm Jack," he says. "Hey man, fucking-A great to meet you. Phil told me you were staying here too. He's asleep now...so how you fuckin' doin' anyway?"
After a quick breakfast spent dodging inquiries ("I hear you only play soul music now. That true?"), Bowie graciously explains that he's late for an appointment. He leaves the house, hops into the car and shrieks: "Oh my God, what a cretin! He's totally wrecked my nerves, that oaf! Christ!" He calms down and politely begins easing out of the planned interview -- his first in more than three years. He begs exhaustion after two full days without sleep. "Why don't I just drop you off at your hotel and we can get together next week?" He has already swung into the direction of the Beverly Wilshire. "You know, I may even check myself into the hotel for a day of sleep. No one will know where I am, no one will bother me...yes, that is exactly what I'll do." At the front desk, however, he hears that guitarist Ron Wood is staying in Room 207, and Bowie decides to pay his old friend a visit. He procures a fine champagne and raps on the door.
Wood has just fallen asleep, but is glad to see Bowie nonetheless. They exchange stories on what they're up to in L.A., then settle down to listen to a cassette of the Jeff Beck Group live at Detroit's Grande Ballroom. Sprawled across the hotel room bed, Bowie is by now well into his fifth or sixth wind. And the interview on. "Well," he asks, "what do you want to talk about?" One mentions the MainMan lawsuits.
Bowie's speech assumes a quiet, studied tone. "The split had been building up for some time. For the last year and a half, I've had no empathy with them whatsoever. It took me that long to stop touring and come back to finding out where the office was really at. I guess it was a bit hard for them to come to terms with what I wanted to do. A lot of people who I never even met got involved. I grew to dislike their attitude. So I just said goodbye. No, of course, it isn't that simple, but I'm going to make it that simple. It's not going to bother me. I'll survive. I'm far from broke. I'm free." (Reached at the New York MainMan offices, De Fries refused to comment.)
"I've never been so happy," Bowie says. "I've got that good old 'I'm gonna change the world' thing back again. I had that once. I was a strong idealist once, then when I saw all my efforts being mistranslated, I turned into an avid pessimist. A manic depressive. Now I feel strong mentally again. You could probably hear from Young Americans that I'm on an upper. It's the first record I've actually liked since Hunky Dory.
"Basically I haven't liked a lot of the music I've been doing the past few years. I forgot that I'm not a musician and never have been. I've always wanted to be a film director, so unconsciously the two mediums got amalgamated. I was trying to put cinematic concepts into an audio staging. It doesn't work."
At the time, Bowie had already signed the contracts for his film debut in The Man Who Fell to Earth. Not that director Nick Roeg (whose previous credits include Far From the Madding Crowd, Walkabout, Don't Look Back and Performance) had an easy time but was fascinated by the fact that Roeg had waited eight hours for him after he forgot an appointment. The two held an eight-hour conversation lasting into the next afternoon and Bowie was sold. "It didn't take long for me to realize the man was a genius. He's at a level of understanding of art that tremendously overshadows me. I was and still am in awe of Roeg. Total awe." Still, parts of the script were rewritten.
Before he fell to earth, Bowie had been reported ready to star with Elizabeth Taylor in Bluebird. "I never said that," David counters, "Elizabeth Taylor did. It was her idea for me to be doing the film. I read the script though and it was very dry. I mean she was a nice woman and all, even if I didn't get much of chance to get to know her. She did tell me I reminded her of James Dean - that endeared me to her - but her script was so...boring. My own films are more important anyway."
Bowie has been voraciously writing screenplays and scenarios ever since the three-month Diamond Dogs tour of two years ago. His first completed script is Dogs, a film which could star Terence Stamp and Iggy Pop if Bowie can work it out. David is especially amused by his casting. "Terence is going to be Iggy's father," he titters. "Isn't that lovely?" I can't wait to direct it."
"I think, you see, that the most talented actors around are all in rock & roll. Iggy never should have been a rock & roll singer, he's an actor. Dave Johansen [the former New York Doll] is an actor. A renaissance in filmmaking is going to come from rock. Not because of it, but despite it. I'll tell you, I've got nothing to do with music. I've always interpreted or played roles with my songs."
Ron Wood, who's been quietly listening all along, comes alive. "Why did you get into rock & roll, then?" he asks.
"Rock & roll is a very accessible medium for many young artist. Don't you think so? I like music but it's not my life by any stretch of the imagination. I mean I was a painter before, but as a painter I couldn't make enough money to live. So I want into advertising and that was awful. That was the worst. I got out of that and tried rock & roll because it seemed like an enjoyable way of making my money and taking four or five years out to decide what I really wanted to do. I have no ideals on being a starving artist at all."
"Same as me," Wood chortles. "Otherwise we'd both still be in art school, eh?"
"Absolutely." Assured that Wood is an interested listener, Bowie settles into a monologue:
"It's interesting how this all started. At the time I did Ziggy Stardust, all I had was a small cult audience in England from Hunky Dory. I think it was out of curiosity that I began wondering what it would be like to be a rock & roll star. So basically, I wrote a script and played it out as Ziggy Stardust onstage and on record. I man it when I say I didn't like all those albums -- Aladdin Sane, Pin Ups, Diamond Dogs, David Live. It wasn't a matter of liking them, it was 'Did they work or not.' Yes, they worked. They kept the trip going. Now, I'm all through with rock & roll. Finished. I've rocked my roll. It was great fun while it lasted but I won't do it again."
One can assume then, that Bowie is asking for a separation from the "Glitter Rock King" tag?
David is offended by the notion. "Not at all. I'm very proud of that tag. That's what the public's made me and that's what I am. Who am I to question that? I am the King of Glitter Rock, aren't I, Ron?"
"The reigning king." Wood goes to his writing desk and scribbles. "I don't like giving people tags," he cackles, "but here. For the king." He hands Bowie a $15 price tag, on the back of which he's written "King of Glitter Rock."
"Fifteen dollars!" Bowie deadpans. "Well, I guess glitter rock was always cheap anyway." A full minute is spent in laughter, then Bowie abruptly turns skittish and paranoid. "I keep drifting off." He admits to being tired. "My thought forms are already fragmented, to say the least. I've had to do cutups on my writing for some time so that I might be able to put it all back into some coherent form again. My actual writing doesn't make a tremendous amount of sense...frankly, I'm surprised Young Americans has done so well. I really, honestly and truly, don't know how much longer my albums will sell. I think they're going to get more diversified, more extreme and radical right along with my writing. And I really don't give a shit...." Finally Bowie bows:
"Could I have a little break? I can't go on like this. Just sitting here talking...it wears me out."
Courtesy of Rolling Stone #206 - Cameron Crowe - February 12, 1976
