Bowie: A Biography (38 page)

The after-party at the nearby Café Royale was fraught. Bowie was celebratory and relieved. The Spiders were sulky and bewildered. Ziggy would live on long enough to record and release one more album. The following week, Bowie and Ronson almost immediately flew to France to record a collection of cover songs that inspired him called
Pin Ups
. The album was recorded at composer George Sand’s studio at the Château d’Hérouville in France. Marc Bolan, who recorded T. Rex’s 1972 album
The Slider
there, recommended it to Bowie. Elton John had immortalized it the previous year on his smash
Honky Chateau
album (its success was largely due to the “Space Oddity”–indebted “Rocket Man”).

In the sunny countryside, Bowie reflected on the last year’s ascension. The music
of Pin Ups
seemed to give him closure; he was taking the hits from the sixties, by the Kinks (“Where Have All the Good Times Gone”), the Easybeats (“Friday on My Mind”), Pink Floyd (“See Emily Play”), Them (“Here Comes the Night”) and the Who (“I Can’t Explain,” “Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere”), ones he could not make, and finally making them his own by camping them up Ziggy style. The album’s single, a cover of the McCoys’ 1965 ballad “Sorrow,” is easily its most restrained moment. The rest is maximum R & B slipped a ’lude (the tempos are slowed to the point of grinding) and laid out on a Vegas floor show (which is exactly how they would soon be presented).

Later that summer, Bowie returned one last time to Wardour Street to shoot a special promoting
Pin Ups
, called
1980 Floor Show
. With Aynsley Dunbar, who drummed on the
Pin Ups
album, replacing Woody
Woodmansey, and a three-piece backup band called the Astronettes, featuring his new girlfriend the now platinum-haired Ava Cherry who he was intent on turning into “the next Josephine Baker.” Bowie took over the Marquee’s stage, where he’d performed in three failed R & B combos as a teenager. Ziggy Stardust killed the sixties. Before being killed off himself, he would revive them.

Bowie first appears in Yamamoto clothing, debuting a new song, “1984,” its Orwellian themes and funky chicken-scratch guitar showing the direction he was headed musically. As tacky as it is (dancers spell out the title credits), the
Floor Show
should not work, but it’s a sexy production; the antithesis of the Kenneth Pitt–produced mid-sixties showcase
Love You Till Tuesday
. “1984” segues into “Dodo,” and Bowie reappears goatlike. He has no eyebrows, having spontaneously shorn them off during U.S. tour two (reportedly after Mott the Hoople rejected “Drive-in Saturday” as a single). A Calvin Mark Lee love jewel is affixed to his forehead.

Bowie makes a devil sign as he serenades a Euro-trash blonde and yet another would-be MainMan star, gender-bending Amanda Lear, on “Sorrow.” “Space Oddity” feels like an oldie among
Pin Ups’
new-oldies. The high point of “I Can’t Explain” is sure, sultry backing vocalists the Astronettes dancing in slow motion. Marianne Faithfull appears in a nun’s habit and duets with Bowie on Sonny and Cher’s classic “I Got You, Babe.” She sounds like Natasha Fatale from the
Rocky and Bullwinkle
cartoons. She returns later for two more numbers, her signature song the Jagger-Richards penned “As Tears Go By” (also given the Natasha treatment) and a
Cabaret
-indebted wedge of cheese called “20th Century Blues.” The Troggs make an insane appearance as well. Watching a bootleg of
1980 Floor Show
, one wonders if they were placed on the bill to make Bowie look that much prettier. They resemble cave children. Lead singer Reg Presley appears genuinely demented. After the Troggs, the event’s last act, a Spanish flamenco group named Carmen (which Tony Visconti was then producing), somehow makes absolutely perfect sense.

The show was broadcast on U.S. television show
The Midnight Special
, one of the weirder moments in seventies TV (and this is an era that includes
Lidsville, Circus of the Stars
and “Next Stop Nowhere,” aka the
Punk Rock Episode of
Quincy)
. “I remember watching it,” says Camille Paglia. “He had one costume with the two hands coming from behind to grab his breasts. It was the most sexually radical thing you could ever imagine seeing on American television at the time. He was pushing the envelope so far. He was a performance artist even before the phrase ‘performance artist’ was in circulation.”

And with that, Ziggy was gone. “Each man kills the thing he loves,” Wilde wrote in his most famous poem, “Ballad of Reading Gaol.” Ziggy Stardust was killed by all three of the means Wilde itemizes. The “flattering words” and “kisses” of others made Bowie see his creation as a great triumph but a potential millstone. Surely the option to do so was there. Bowie might have remained Ziggy Stardust for decades. Ultimately Ziggy is done in with Bowie’s own “sword,” to use Wilde’s word, shocking even those close to him, like the Spiders, with its abruptness, as though if there were second thoughts, he might be spared.

The haircut remained for another half year or so. Some things are harder to kill.

I

They actually
make
Bowie coke mirrors. I bought one on eBay UK. But since I don’t do coke anymore, I gave it to a girlfriend as a gift. She uses it as a compact
.

A

By 1973, cocaine, long a recreational substance and status symbol with an extensive history of glamour, was so firmly entrenched in the culture that President Nixon declared war on the cocaine cowboys importing it from Colombian killing fields in private planes and disseminating it throughout the cities and suburbs until coke abuse took on the properties of a biological epidemic. Disco swingers wore “Coke Adds Life” pendants, and 18-karat gold spoons against their hairy chest or perfumed cleavage. Consumption was often done in restaurants and bars with the same élan one would use to sample from the wine list. As late as 1974, many people still weren’t convinced it was at all addictive.

“So much publicity has gone out on heroin that people don’t want to get started on it,” Irwin Swank of Chicago’s Bureau of Narcotics is quoted as saying in a
Newsweek
cover story on the cocaine craze. “But you get a good high with coke and you don’t get hooked.” Mr. Swank, clearly a glass half full kind of Narco.

Bowie certainly got hooked, and like most doing the white line at the time, coke provided more of a psychological balm at first. Bowie likely used massive quantities of gak to completely remove all traces of Ziggy Stardust and cauterize the wounds. Even then, there were detectable particles of Ziggy in his personality and so, Bowie surmised, his entire psyche needed breaking down until there was absolutely nothing left. Each bump he plugged his nose with, fed into the nostril on the end of an antique knife (his preferred method), was rock ’n’ roll chemotherapy. As a former mod, Bowie’s appreciation for the energy that speedy drugs can afford a busy and enthusiastic artist was already in place. The blow would, as is its way, get the
better of him eventually, but for a time, it certainly fuelled a dizzying period of creativity and action. Bowie used coke like a sculptor uses a chisel.

“David was actually very grounded. He was, like, a very solid individual,” Tony Zanetta says. “He really wasn’t a very wild person at all. He was a very disciplined artist. Where he went astray was in his experimentation with coke. It was like one day he had to drink a glass of wine, and the next day he was a terrible cocaine addict. It seemed at first that it was an affectation, that it was part of his stardom personality. But because of the nature of coke, you don’t just dabble in it. I think it affected him more than he bargained for.”

Cocaine helped David Bowie exist as a fabulous rock star
offstage
. Sigmund Freud, another celebrated user, wrote of ingesting “a little cocaine, to untie my tongue,” and this was likely a bonus for David, who was at heart a painfully shy, suburban kid and now was suddenly looked upon as the life of the ongoing glitter party.

Cocaine makes for good ritual as well. Whether you are alone, writing, or at a party, it actually slows things down (speedy as it is) and gives one the illusion of control as it’s prepared, mathematically divided and shared. When you no longer recognize your life as it was, the heartbeatlike
chop chop chop
rhythm of lines being cut can be soothing, as ironic as that might seem. There were even medicinal properties. A smoker since his teens, Bowie was emptying two packets of Marlboros a day into his lungs. The cigarettes punctuated every second of his seemingly ceaseless inspiration and facilitated him in getting it all out and down on paper, again via rhythm and ritual. A natural bronchodilator, cocaine is appealing to smokers as it deconstricts the vascular tissue in the lungs, making it easier to chain-smoke and, certainly for a time, sing.

Finally, Bowie was working-class. He spent the sixties and early seventies watching friends like the much younger Peter Frampton, and later Marc Bolan, as well as peers like Pete Townshend enjoy the spoils of fame while he struggled to pay bills. The preponderance of coke seemed to function as confirmation that he’d made it. It was also an ideal drug for Bowie’s highly sexualized new world. “Until you’ve got a mouth full of cocaine, you don’t know what kissing is. You never get tired! You’re on 4th speed all the time, and the engine purrs like a kitten with the stars in its
whiskers,” Aleister Crowley wrote. Every wham-bam assignation went off more smoothly with a toot.

Bowie had already recorded two tracks for the follow-up to
Pin Ups
in October 1973 at London’s Olympic Studios: “1984,” that sinister Winston Smith-meets-John Shaft wah-wah-pedal orgy, and the B side “Dodo.” The following month, however, he was no closer to completing a follow-up to
Pin Ups
. With MainMan losing capital by the day, the pressure was on. However, fueled by cocaine, titanic creative ambition and the sense that from now on everything he laid his long fingers on would be golden, Bowie ignored it all and set about planning another elaborate stage show, or perhaps a film or a Broadway show. He also began work on writing and producing an album for Ava Cherry. He produced a version of his “The Man Who Sold the World” with English pop sweetheart Lulu (“To Sir with Love”), who was looking to move her career and image in a more adult direction. This is another Bowie hallmark: taking an artist at a career crossroads, usually one who has seen better days professionally, and reinventing them as a different pop entity, one boasting the Bowie glow.

“He invited me to his concert. And back at the hotel, he said to me, in very heated language, ‘I want to make an MF of a record with you,’” Lulu said. “‘You’re a great singer.’ I didn’t think it would happen, but he followed up two days later. He was übercool at the time and I just wanted to be led by him. I loved everything he did. I didn’t think ‘The Man Who Sold the World’ was the greatest song for my voice, but it was such a strong song in itself. I had no idea what it was about. In the studio, Bowie kept telling me to smoke more cigarettes, to give my voice a certain quality. My take on it is that he wanted me to sing on something of his and wanted to produce me. He wanted to make me different somehow. It was the package that was great. We were like the odd couple. A lot of people had raised eyebrows.” This must have delighted Bowie. While “The Man Who Sold the World” was not a chart-topping hit (while Bowie’s background vocals can be clearly heard on this faithful version, it’s not a duet), it got a lot of attention for both of them, especially after a short film was shot to promote the single. Lulu is featured in a full man’s suit and fedora hat. “It was very Berlin cabaret. ‘The Man Who Sold the World’ saved me from a certain niche in my career.”

Bowie spoke enthusiastically about adapting the Russian underground comic book
Octobriana
for the screen as a vehicle for
1980 Floor Show
starlet Amanda Lear, but shortly before the holidays, his own theatrical production began to occupy most of his time. Rumors that Bowie was even being tapped to produce Queen’s second album began to circulate around this time.

Once he finally did enter the studio early in the new year, he produced and performed much of the new album himself, and when another musician was required, like bassist Herbie Flowers or drummer Aynsley Dunbar, Bowie would dictate how he heard the music in his head, and it was re-created faithfully. Call it cocaine precision, or whatever you like, but for the next three records, right up until his first Eno collaboration in ’77, Bowie was the last word in the studio.

“I have to take total control myself. I can’t let anybody else do anything, for I find that I can do things better for me,” he admitted to the writer William S. Burroughs during a tête à tête moderated by Chris Copetas that November (it appeared in a February 1974 issue of
Rolling Stone). “I
don’t want to get other people playing with what they think that I’m trying to do.”