Bowie: A Biography (12 page)

“Even his eye, you know, the eye that’s discolored, he always said he’d got it in a crash while playing American football. And that was an unusual thing to be interested in. And he always dressed differently. In knee-length suede trousers with fringe boots and then a white Russian-peasant-type shirt, baggy, with a waistcoat, looking like Robin Hood.”

Gillespie visited the Jones home in Bromley and noted the quaintness of the modest décor, tiny bedrooms and bathroom, and small, neat kitchen. David’s quiet, repressed English parents were like little museum pieces in the wild and wooly mid-sixties.

“It was the first time I’d been to a working-class household,” she says. “It sounds silly but I didn’t know what a little tiny house in a row of houses was like because my life was completely the opposite end. You know, I came from a very good family. I’d only known what kind of … another sort of luxury style. And that was a bit of a shock. And even then he said, ‘I wanna get out of this. I want to get out of this.’ He didn’t want to be in a tiny little place where you sit uncomfortably. We sat there eating tuna fish sandwiches with the parents, and they had the television on and not much conversation went on.”

David’s parents didn’t really know what to make of his career or the people he was occasionally bringing home to meet them. Between concern
over Terry’s frequently erratic behavior and their natural tendencies toward insularity, the house on Plaistow Grove was not necessarily inviting. The couple harbored doubts about the direction David was taking professionally as well. As much as they loved him and wished happiness for him, there didn’t seem to be any money coming in. One vinyl 45 record, like the one the King Bees made, was something to thrill over, but a collection of financially unsuccessful singles was something troubling. Certainly touring was hard work and a source of income, but David would often return from a road trip even more desperate and with less money than he’d left with. The pop stars that John and Peggy Jones saw on television all had broad smiles and seemed healthy, wealthy and well provided for. The day-to-day life of their impatient and wildly ambitious son seemed something altogether different.

Even within this private culture of hope and disappointment, David did not give up. As I said, he could reliably be seen during this period in the Giaconda café, poring over the music weeklies, the
New Musical Express
and
Melody Maker
, and also catching the sets of more successful bands in the nearby clubs. He’d watch each lead singer and take mental notes, studying what worked and why.

“When [lead singer] Phil May and I started the Pretty Things, he came to the gigs quite a lot and that was it really,” says Dick Taylor of the Pretty Things. “By the time we got to the point where we were well known, he’d latched on a bit. He’d follow us around. You’d look up at the gigs and he’d be there. He liked the rebellious image. We were fellow art students who were doing it.” Although he was not yet twenty, some front men, like Steve Winwood, then of the Spencer Davis Group, were only fifteen and enjoying a career in rapid ascent.

The Lower Third, David’s next step on the path to becoming “somebody,” was, like the Manish Boys, another marriage of convenience formed in the hungry environment of Soho. “We were going to have a new singer and hold auditions,” the Lower Third’s Denis Taylor told Capital Radio. Among those who showed up to join were David Jones and future Small Faces front man Steve Marriott, who at the time, with his long, blond hair and thin, pale frame, could have been David’s doppelgänger. David was nervous. He showed up to the café with a copy of his Manish Boys single as if to remind the band that he was already in the
game. He didn’t need to, as he impressed all involved with his voice and surpassed even Marriott (who would become one of his musical heroes and later perform with Peter Frampton in the supergroup Humble Pie).

“David was terrific and we all made our decision in the Giaconda,” Taylor said, “and that’s how it all really started. We liked the stuff he was doing and he really started to develop an image for us as well.”

“We like each other’s ideas,” David stated in the band’s press release, with little effusion. “We have the same policies and fit rather well together. All of us like to keep to ourselves and we like things rather than people.” The band, guitarist Denis Taylor, bassist Graham Rivens and drummer Phil Lancaster, hailed from the seaside town Margate, where they’d been playing as Oliver Twist and the Lower Third. They’d been in London for several months, soaking up the scene around the Marquee and looking for a way in. Sadly, they were even less original than the previous two bands that David had been in. At least they reflected his catholic taste in everything from West Coast jazz to Detroit soul and Delta blues. The Lower Third focused their emulation on one act and were such Who emulators that even Pete Townshend was taken aback by it. David’s time with the Lower Third also marked the beginning of the end for David Jones and Les Conn. Conn explained, “My biggest problem was that I hadn’t the resources to back my judgment. David was too ambitious to hold under the existing conditions. And to my regret, I let him go. There was absolutely no animosity on either side. The way things were, I would have only held him back and harmed his career, and that was the very last thing I wanted to happen. So we shook hands and parted.”

After Les Conn’s departure, the Lower Third was managed by a tightly wound, round-faced man in his mid-twenties named Ralph Horton. Horton had been a road manager for the Moody Blues, who had a huge hit with “Go Now.” His partner Spike Palmer did time as a roadie with the Rolling Stones. The band auditioned for Horton and Palmer, who quickly got them some gigs and a small publishing contract with the firm Sparta Music, providing everyone with some much needed cash.

The group toured England in a modified diesel-powered ambulance, a gift from Rivens’s father. The windows were blacked out, and the vehicle still had a working blue gumball siren atop the white plastic roof. It was big enough to stow their gear, even to sleep in, and could easily cut through a
metropolitan traffic jam. The band rode in the back, while David was given the privilege of riding in the passenger seat with Horton, whose affection for his new artist was something that he reportedly could not hide.

“He took a liking to David definitely and from that point it was no longer a singer and a group, it had become a singer with a group, which is a different thing altogether,” Denis Taylor said. While the band shivered in the ambulance, David would often sleep in Horton’s flat in relative warmth and comfort. “David used to travel in a Jag to any gigs,” Taylor recalled. “He never put gear away when we’d done our work. It became obvious that Ralph was looking after him.”

“Ralph Horton was uptight and tense,” says John Hutchinson today. Hutchinson would play with David in the Horton-managed post–Lower Third band the Buzz. “He was probably in love with David. He fancied David. I guess he believed in him too. Nothing against him personally but he was a bit uptight, and he got more uptight as things got tougher, I suppose.” His doting on the lead singer drew rancor from the other members of the band, but it was a lack of funding that ensured that the Lower Third would be yet another short-lived entity. The band managed to tour beyond England, playing a short residency in Paris during the Christmas and New Year’s holiday of 1965 and ’66.

With an inability to gain any real traction, soon the band went the way of the King Bees and the Manish Boys. Horton stuck with David but it was clear that he was in over his head. He did not have the vision to sell his star and began looking for other successful managers to help with the task.

“Ralph called me out of the blue one day and introduced himself,” recalls Simon Napier-Bell, then manager of Marc Bolan’s pre–Tyrannosaurus Rex act John’s Children. “He asked if I would come to see him and have a chat about a project. His flat was a basement in Pimlico and the project was sitting in the corner—David Jones. Ralph asked if I would be prepared to help with David’s management and as an introductory offer suggested I might like to have sex with him. Although the boy in the corner seemed acquiescent, the overall sleaziness of the idea rather put me off, so I turned it down. Consequently I neither slept with him nor managed him. In retrospect I admit both things might have been worth doing.” Such events were not unheard of at the time. The London-based
pop business was full of gay men, and a pretty lead singer knew that even flirting with an insider with the right connections could lead to career advancement.

“Gay was illegal,” says Napier-Bell. As early as 1966, one could technically be thrown in prison Oscar Wilde–style for committing “sodomy.” “Gay people who didn’t want to live in the closet had to find something to do with their lives … Sexual self-interest was the main force behind casting in Hollywood since the twenties. It didn’t grind to a halt. If you’re gay and you fancy a boy, you’re likely to be making a better choice of artist for teenage girls to fall in love with than a straight man would make. So trusting your instincts worked well. Getting yourself a bit of sex on the way was just natural.”

David’s fifth band in less than five years was called the Buzz, which was ironic, as they too had none. “He was not even a big fish in that little pond,” says Hutchinson, who auditioned for and joined the Buzz after wandering into the Marquee. “He was just another singer that hadn’t done very much. The musicians knew him but the general public hadn’t seen much of David in those days. He was quite a small fish really. But I had enough respect for him. I’d seen his advert in the back of the
New Musical Express
. He used to have a weekly advert. ‘We’re looking for gigs.’ With a little photo of him. I realized that somebody who could organize something like rehearsals at the Marquee Club was fairly organized.” Hutchinson had a wife and child and was wary about joining a pop group but was persuaded by David’s professionalism and talent.

By the spring of 1966, the Buzz had a residency at the Marquee and Ralph Horton had secured a backing deal of 1,500 pounds against 10 percent of their royalties from a private investor named Raymond Cook. Things looked like they were about to finally come together. Hutchinson brought in a keyboard player named Derek Boyes who added a thrumming Hammond organ to the band’s sound for some of David’s new compositions.

“He’d written quite a lot,” says Hutchinson. “None of us had day jobs. Ralph more or less said, you need this to be full-time. By the time we started playing, the set that we’d set off with would be a mixture, about half and half. Mostly his songs.”

An unusual influence could be detected in some of this new material. David had veered away from his blues influence and developed a creative crush on British entertainer Anthony Newley, then in his mid-thirties. A former child star (he played the Artful Dodger in David Lean’s 1948 adaptation of Dickens’s
Oliver Twist)
, Newley had grown into a singer, dancer and actor given to tuxedos. In middle age, he was not only a sort of white, English Sammy Davis Jr. but he would also write the latter’s most famous song, “The Candy Man.” Other international hits included “What Kind of Fool Am I?” and “After Today,” from the movie musical
Dr. Dolittle
, in which he also appears. He was briefly married to Joan Collins, but who wasn’t? Newley, who died in 1996, was not a rocker, but rather the kind of singer/dancer/actor a show business type often referred to as a “triple threat.” Hipsters appreciated him ironically or dismissed him as a tacky ball of cheese. New ley’s patter was vulnerable to cheeky chappy-isms. There’s footage online of him singing “The Candy Man” while carrying a child’s wicker basket of sweets, tossing them out languidly as he croons. It makes Shatner look restrained. There are no real explanations for just why David fell so hard for the Newley act. Years later, even he would shrug his shoulders and wonder if he’d temporarily lost the plot. One sound theory given David’s history as high school rebel is that Newley’s shtick was so very different from the gruff white blues singer archetype. The theatricality of a Newley or a Sammy Davis Jr. or even the middle-aged Judy Garland (who would soon become another touchstone for her ability to attack and wring every drop of emotion out of a song) was what struck him. There was no subtlety to Newley, and the lyrical innuendo in sexed-up, raunchy blues numbers had gotten David Jones nowhere.

“It was the right time to be doing that kind of music because blues is really happening in England, but I think he just wanted to be a bit more theatrical. And of course Anthony Newley was around, and for some reason he really adored Anthony Newley–type songs,” agrees Dana Gillespie. “Anthony Newley is kind of corny, but he seemed to think at that time that was kind of the thing to like. But he went through phases, you know; depending who he met he’d absorb their culture or whatever he wanted, then he’d kind of move on. But Anthony Newley was an odd thing. It’s like saying I’m crazy about Dick Van Dyke.”

David’s Newley fixation also made him wonder if being a bandleader was his destiny after all. Maybe he was a triple threat too and a one-man show. By the end of the year, he would gain representation from a man who would support this instinctive decision, his first truly powerful talent manager. He would cease to pursue success via the modernist blues. He would also cease to be David Jones.

6.

K

ENNETH
P
ITT WAS
already nearing his forties when he took on the nineteen-year-old David Jones as a personal management client. Although tall, quiet and buttoned-down himself, much like John Jones, Pitt admired the wit and audacity of performers. Given to good tailoring, expensive books and travel, he was no prissy intellectual. He was a war veteran, having landed in France on D-day working within the British army’s signals unit. Also unusual for those in his show business circle, Pitt was openly gay (whereas many of his peers remained in the closet long after homosexuality was formally legalized in the U.K. in 1967). Pitt’s approach to his own sexuality was that of a liberated arts enthusiast and committed equal-rights seeker, a quiet revolutionary.