Bowie: A Biography (13 page)

While Pitt has published a detailed account of his years with David, entitled
Bowie: The Pitt Report
, he is taken to task in many Bowie books for guiding his charge away from rock ’n’ roll and toward a career in old-fashioned show business, essentially holding him back from what is romantically thought of as his destiny. “Pitt was quite prepared for David to turn into a cabaret lounge singer,” Angie Bowie says today. “He could have gotten him eight years in Las Vegas in a smoking lounge and he would have thought that he’d made it. It was a very queer gay-mafia type of management system.” Pitt, as is the nature of this process of hindsight, completely dismisses this widely reported and accepted line of thought. Corresponding via letter, he responds to my questions about early management strategy by asking, “Is this your bid to introduce that old chestnut
about me wanting him to do cabaret? I never ever wanted him to do cabaret for which he was unsuitable.”

Many people I’ve interviewed on the subject of Kenneth Pitt have also suggested that his focus was also clouded by his romantic fixation on David. Some of these accusers, like Calvin Mark Lee, the psychedelic gadfly who helped get David signed to Mercury Records, were romantically fixated themselves. Others, like David’s bandmate John Hutchinson, were not. Pitt denies this as well, characteristically avoiding any prurient detail. “Nothing impeded my ability to work with D [as he refers to David throughout the letter] until the green-eyed goddess of jealousy reared her ugly head. She decided that I stood in the way of her own ambitions. And I had to go,” Pitt says. Regardless of what he did or did not do with regard to the more personal end of personal management, it can hardly be argued that Pitt failed to help develop the David Bowie we know today. He was a key figure and should be reconsidered as such.

In the mid and late sixties, Pitt lived and worked out of a two-floor flat on London’s Manchester Street. Warmly lit, comfortably appointed and bordered with tall bookcases and antiques, the study and guest bedroom became David’s first solid home away from home, a place he could turn to when the tiny house in Bromley became too stifling, or, as it would during this period, if Terry’s behavior became too upsetting. He would pull a book from the shelf, whether recommended by Pitt or fascinating on its own, and forget about his life for a few hours with the help of Wilde, Swinburne, Waugh and Orwell or the poetry of William Butler Yeats.

By the mid-sixties, Kenneth Pitt was already what could be considered a show business veteran as well. In the late 1940s, after his discharge from the military, he worked for the publicity firm of J. Arthur Rank, escorting actresses like Jean Simmons, of
Guys and Dolls
fame, to functions and parties. His work took him overseas to America and Canada in the early fifties, where he signed and represented several major pop, jazz and swing musicians, including Stan Kenton, Les Paul, and Mel Tormé, “the Velvet Fog.” He entered the sixties with a very confident style of artist representation firmly in place (for some reason I picture him as Sir John Gielgud in
The Loved One
when I imagine his pre-David existence), especially in Los Angeles. Pitt was primarily interested in finding diamonds
in the rough, young talent in need of nurturing, encouragement, refinement and motivation.

“A classic management style,” he has said. “They were taken from scratch, given an opinion of what I felt they should do, they did it and it worked.” Pitt applied this first to a busker named Danny Purches, whom he turned into a crooner. He signed Crispian St. Peters, who had an international hit with “The Pied Piper,” and had been instrumental in Manfred Mann’s career as well.

“Ken was very interested in the growing group of young professionals that he was representing,” says William Bast, who worked with Pitt in the late fifties while promoting his James Dean–based play
The Myth Makers
in London. “His clients were all young and he was therefore being of a young mind,” Bast adds. “He liked young people. Talented young people. And at the time, those people were all pop singers. For his age he was basically still a teenager. Still into it all. Very much so. Freedom. He was an older man. He wasn’t a kid. Sometimes it was amusing for somebody like me to come in and see him jiving like a kid. He was in his thirties. He was no kid.”

At the behest of Ralph Horton, who remained deep in debt and could no longer handle David’s career on his own, Pitt agreed to come by the Marquee on April 17, 1966, to hear David Jones. Pitt was instantly attracted to David Jones. In
Bowie: The Pitt Report
he writes poetically about the nineteen-year-old’s attire as if entering details into a catalog: “biscuit colored hand knitted sweater, round necked and buttoned at one shoulder, its skin tightness accentuating his slim frame.” He also saw someone with a natural talent, one that could transcend the London pop scene and reach as far as Hollywood, Broadway and Las Vegas. Likely pepped by Horton, David did numbers that had never been performed on the Marquee’s stage, such as Judy Garland’s “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” Pitt was also impressed by David’s natural charm and intelligent, cultivated mannerisms. “The average pop singer fronting the big groups of those years was the sort of person you couldn’t even talk to about things like that or indeed, about anything else,” he wrote.

After the audition at the Marquee, Horton took David to Pitt’s office. David too sensed that Pitt was different, not the typically thuggish, road-hardened pop manager, rather an aesthete and a gentleman. Even better,
Pitt had worked with, lived with and rubbed up against genuine stars, not just English R & B singers and guitarists. “Let’s do a deal with Ken,” David told Horton.

A five-year contract was put forth but Pitt insisted on first meeting John and Peggy Jones. Again, it seemed the proper thing to do. David was no longer a minor, but Pitt had a courtly policy of making sure a potential client of David’s age and experience level was truly ready for the task at hand. Pitt found John and Peggy supportive of their son’s career choice but unable to fully mask their hidden concerns.

“I first visited David’s home in 1965 when I was sure it was a little more impressive than when you saw it,” he writes in response to my question about its size and whether or not he believed that the close quarters fed David’s ambition. “It was typical of the horticultural terraced cottages that sprang up in rural Kent in late Victorian and early Edwardian times. In the fifties when David’s father bought the three-bedroom property and modernized it, it would have been considered to be a comfortable home in which to bring up a child, and David was happy there, in spite of his mother’s inability to impart affection, which remained with her until the end of her days. David once said to me, ‘My mother never kissed me.’” Like Owen Frampton, David’s Bromley Tech arts professor, Kenneth Pitt was an older man who fortified David with substitute tenderness and encouragement.

While in America in early 1966, Pitt had heard of a new television program based on a Beatles-like pop group and costarring a London-based stage star named Davy Jones (who had appeared most famously in Lionel Bart’s West End production of the musical
Oliver!)
. It was suggested to his new client, who had been flirting with a name change for five years by this point, that it might be a good idea to commit to one. After a few days’ deliberation, David informed Pitt, who informed the record company, that David Jones would hereby and forever be referred to as David Bowie.

“There are too many David Joneses,” David Bowie explained in an early record label biography. “David Jones is my real name and when I first turned professional two years ago my pirate-like character was just right at the time and the name fitted in with the image I wanted to give myself.” In Martin Scorsese’s Bob Dylan documentary,
No Direction
Home
, Dylan is asked about changing his name from Zimmerman to Dylan, in homage to Dylan Thomas, a heroic poet from the opposite shore of the Atlantic, and spoke of the liberation that comes with such reinvention. “I don’t feel like I had a past,” he says. “I couldn’t relate to anything other than what I was doing at the present time.”

When David took his name from Colonel James Bowie, the nineteenth-century Texas revolutionary who perished in the Battle of the Alamo, he was making the very same statement about a personal house cleaning. James Bowie was risible and aggressive. He was a veteran of the War of 1812 and took part in several treacherous frontier expeditions in the name of personal fortune and American manifest destiny. And then there’s the famous short-bladed, upturned knife that bears his name, the one he used to gut his foe Sheriff Norris Wright in a famous 1827 duel outside of Natchez, Mississippi. Certainly the name change was suggested to him for professional reasons but in the end, he called himself Bowie because he fancied aligning himself with one of America’s greater badasses and ultimately, because he wanted to. It was not a name given to him by Pitt or a professional publicity officer as a marketing tool. It was a name that he certainly had to live up to, but not one that he had to grow into, as it was one of his own design.

Bob Dylan, and David Bowie a few years later, laid groundwork for the empowered reinvention that would become a part of what made punk rock so liberating. Almost without exception, one decade after David went from Jones to Bowie, every punk in New York, London, Paris, Los Angeles and any other city or suburb where a given name and place didn’t seem to fit would have a self-invented moniker and a clean slate to go with it. You could almost say that when David became a Bowie, he stopped being a follower and officially began his five-year crawl toward becoming a bona fide culture leader as fearsome in his own realm as Jim Bowie was in the saloons of the American South and Southwest.

I should take a moment to point out here that the correct pronunciation of “Bowie” is absolutely regional. In America, it’s “Bow” as in “bow tie” and “-ie” as in “evil.” In England it’s “Bow” as in “when the bough breaks, the cradle will fall” and “ie” as in “evil.” In “Up for the Downstroke” George Clinton of Parliament Funkadelic calls him “David
Boo-wee” and cannot imagine him in his funk. Every time I’ve heard him say his own name, David has used the American pronunciation.

David’s first recording as David Bowie was made for Pye Records producer Tony Hatch. In 1999, during a taping of the VH1 series
Storytellers
, he described “Can’t Help Thinking About Me,” his debut single as David Bowie, to the audience as a “beautiful piece of solipsism” but lamented the lyric “My girl calls my name, ‘Hi, Dave / Drop in, see you around, come back if you’re this way again,’” as “two of the worst lines I’ve ever written.”

Ralph Horton knew Tony Hatch, a proven hit maker, through his association with the Moody Blues, and it seemed like a good match, one that would finally result in a much needed major chart topper. Pye executives saw promise in Bowie as well. In a conversation with Hatch, he explained that Pye, “as a smaller label, had great success, although the general policy was still to throw as much mud at the wall as possible on the basis that some of it would stick.” Several Bowie biographies claim that shortly before the recording Hatch reportedly handed David the tambourine that Petula Clark had played on the Hatch-produced smash “Downtown” (although Hatch refutes this, admitting, “I don’t recall Petula having a lucky tambourine”).

The fate of “Can’t Help Thinking About Me” would suggest that if it had existed, Clark had clearly removed the magic from the instrument anyway. Despite the inauspicious start, Bowie and Hatch continued to make records for Pye with his backing band the Buzz. Toiling in the studio, they hoped for some kind of rare pop spark, à la Brian Wilson and the Beatles, and drove the long-suffering engineers crazy as sound levels were set and reset. This was, after all, the cusp of the “studio as instrument” wave, which would result in masterpieces like
Pet Sounds, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
, the Zombies’
Odessey and Oracle
, and
S.F. Sorrow
, by Bowie’s old suburban art school cronies the Pretty Things.

“A lot of the inspiration started coming on the day of recording,” Hatch says of the shift in the approach to recording during this period. “It was frustrating for the balance engineers because they might have to wait a couple of hours before there was anything to record.”

Best among the Hatch-produced early Bowie singles (which are all available on compilations) is the wonderful “I Dig Everything.” The organ
riff and tempo are straight out of a perfect Austin Powers afterworld, calling to mind yellow solar rays on a wet MG bonnet. The lyrics could do with a bit more irony: “I wave to the policemen but they don’t wave back / They don’t dig anything,” but David sells it like a dosed snow cone at a summer be-in. It was released in August of ’66, and why it wasn’t a smash in the vein of “Daydream” by the Lovin’ Spoonful or “Groovin’” by the Young Rascals is hard to say. It was certainly peppy enough. Its failure must have done a number on its author’s mind. He was digging everything but the commercial ceiling atop his animal filament, which not only blocked out the sun but also seemed to be made of brick and mortar. No matter how much he tried, there was no breaking through.

“You released a single, hoped for a good reaction from the BBC, but they wouldn’t really get behind a record until it either picked up loads of plays or the orders started coming in,” Hatch says. “I, particularly, recognized something special about Bowie, although I’m not sure if this was shared by everyone in the company. I personally loved his take on London life and was very disappointed when we couldn’t make others realize just how original he was. I vividly remember the day my managing director called me into his office and said, ‘We’ve just been going through your recording expenses. You’ve spent thousands of pounds on David Bowie and we still haven’t had any hits. I think we should let him go so you can focus attention on your other signings.’ Contracts were usually for one year with options in the favor of the record company. I don’t know how Bowie or his management felt about Pye but, very reluctantly, I agreed that we should part company. But, bloody hell, I knew it wouldn’t be long before we’d see him at number one.”