Bowie: A Biography (57 page)

Physically Bowie looked remarkably unchanged. A journalist observed at the time, “Incipient crow’s feet is virtually the only sign of his age.” He wore forty well from the skin out. Inside, he seemed like his rapidly aging character from
The Hunger
, trying to convince those who encountered him, “I’m a young man! I’m a young man.” Midway through the record we are told all about the glass spider, the namesake for the monster tour that Bowie would launch in the summer of 1987. Over a dour string arrangement, Bowie—or is it Jareth the goblin king?—takes the spotlight for his “Stonehenge” moment. “Up until one century ago there lived in the Zi Duang province of eastern country a glass-like spider … Having devoured its prey it would drape the skeletons over its web … its web was also unique in that it had many layers like the floors of a building …” The tale goes on for nearly six minutes with unintentional hilarity (“The baby spiders would get scared and search frantically for their mother”) that makes a Bowie-ist long for the days of rats the size of cats and ten thousand people-oids.

Peter Frampton, Bowie’s old friend from Bromley Tech, was surprised to receive a call one day while he was out on tour with Stevie Nicks. Bowie had heard Frampton’s latest album
Premonition
and was impressed. “There were long periods where we didn’t acknowledge each other, ’cause we’re in different spheres of the world, but every like five years we’d make contact,” Bowie said at the time. “The last time I saw him was when I doing
The Elephant Man
and he was living in New York. I always thought it’d be good to work with him ’cause I was so impressed with him as a guitarist at school.”

Frampton, unlike Bowie, was no longer the superstar that he was in the seventies and saw the job as both an opportunity to play megastages
again as well as a chance to reconnect with his old friend. He didn’t bargain for being eaten by the Glass Spider production, with its troupe of dancers (choreographed again by Toni Basil) illustrating each song, countless lighting cues and two full decades’ worth of Bowie songs to learn on short notice, each one with its own distinctive guitar sound (from the Fripp drone of “Heroes” to the Stevie Ray wail of “Let’s Dance”).

“Obviously going from being the head honcho on my own tour to David’s tour, which was this huge production, was interesting,” he says today. “I loved it for the most part but sometimes the dancers would keep stepping on my pedal. Once I was in the middle of ‘Let’s Dance’ trying to do my best Stevie and one of the dancers turned me off … Another night during a very quiet number one of them turned my fuzz box on. It totally blew the vibe. The dancers were not my favorite things. I’ll never perform with dancers again. I’ll have them green screened.” Big eighties greed bled its way into the venue sizing as well and exposed Bowie’s reach as a bit short. “Toni had never directed a stadium show in her life,” says Mark Ravitz, who again designed the set. “I don’t recall a full rehearsal of the show top to bottom, so it never had a total cohesiveness about it, despite all the complexity of the dances. When Frampton wanted to do something as an individual Bowie came down on that. Bowie would get upset at me if I told him he could do it. There were a lot of egos. A lot of it just wasn’t as whole as some of the other tours had been.”

“I want a performance to upset people to a certain extent, to keep people interested so that they say, ‘Hey, you can do that stuff—I’m not quite sure what it meant but it was really exciting,’” Bowie told the
New York Times
, with typical prescience, shortly before the tour played Giants Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey. He would perform twenty-seven songs from every phase of his career, over two full hours, under the eight steel legs of a sixty-foot-high, sixty-four-foot-wide crystal-bodied spider, lit from within like a Lite-Brite toy. The arachnid was built by Mark Ravitz, designer of the Diamond Dogs and Serious Moonlight tours. For the encore
(Aladdin Sane’s
“Time”) he would emerge from the spider’s head, high above the crowd.

“I got up on it myself,” Ravitz says. “Anything I design, if I can do it, they can do it. So one day I got up in the head of the spider. Sixty feet in the air. There’s a three-foot square you’re standing on, steel pipe welded to
it, strapped with weight lifter straps. Foot pedal to make the wings open up. You gotta shit a brick when you’re up there …”

Bowie had gotten a pass with
Tonight
, which didn’t have to carry a megatour on its brittle back, but the naysayers were in the long grass for him this time around, likely because of the sheer scale of the production, which required two full sets, as it took four days to break each one down. It might have been the hair as well, or the cherry-red suit, borrowed from Huey Lewis’s wardrobe for the “I Want a New Drug” video. Unlike during the Diamond Dogs tour, however, he was no longer all-powerful and could not scrap the giant spider and reinvent himself midtrek. He didn’t even have anything to reinvent himself into. He had erected a ridiculous white elephant in the form of a transparent bug and was doomed to stick it out until the end. If anything happy can be derived from this period, it’s that the stinging reviews seemed to snap Bowie out of his torpor. According to legend, consumed with the contempt of a man cured of a gambling or cheating vice, he reportedly had the spider burned in a field somewhere in New Zealand post-tour. It took nearly twenty years for him to see it in a greater context. In ’87 it was incriminating evidence. “I have one of the prototypes of the spider body,” Ravitz says. “Bowie called me up years ago saying that the other one was in splinters. Now he wanted to save it for his archives.”

Carlos Alomar was another victim of the Glass Spider’s jaws. After a dozen years and a half dozen culture-changing albums together, the New Yorker was given the heave-ho. “I knew David wanted to do a different kind of music. But I always thought that if I gave it back to him it would end up going back to the Spiders from Mars,” Alomar has said. “That’s exactly what happened.” Lost and aging fast, he went about looking for something, anything really, in which he could bury himself again. Few besides Alomar were expecting a band, and even fewer figured it was a good idea.

B

owie caused the first (of many) art school fights that I would find myself in. Most of them were over girls or who could pack the most power into a vulgar couplet, but this fight was over whether David Bowie used some kind of lamb’s blood or glands or chromosomes to stay eternally young. I insisted that he would never. A junior painting major
,
one of those rich kids who dressed like a homeless person with designer combat boots splattered with paint, an ironic afro and a cocky rather than needy patina, insisted that not only was this true but it was also keeping him from dying of AIDS. “He doesn’t matter anymore, he’s just another AIDS casualty.” Bowie didn’t have AIDS. Maybe the kid was being
“punk rock”
or thought he was by making outrageously offensive and iconoclastic statements, but his remark seemed too tasteless and baseless to let slide, so I simply had to drink a bottle of Strawberry Hill Boone’s Farm for courage, then find him, confront him and punch him in the eye George Underwood style. This is how I remember it anyway. That kid was a rich asshole, but I see it as a completely punk rock thing to say. Bowie was an idol, and it almost behooved the current generation, especially the insecure artists therein, to take potshots, especially when your idol stops being, well, any good. And in 1988, before Tin Machine and goatees and atonal guitars were able to apply their damage control to Bowie’s career, he’d finally become fair game. He’d played Pontius Pilate that year in Martin Scorsese’s
The Last Temptation of Christ,
and after
Never Let Me Down
there were those who now saw him as a comparably sinister figure. His acting in that film, by the way, is solid. “So you’re the king of the Jews?” he asks Willem Dafoe’s Jesus, and manages to keep a straight face while doing so. The hair, however appropriate (a Roman emperor’s “caesar” cut)
, is
terrible
.

This would not be the last time I would defend the David Bowie of the late eighties, by the way. As a rock writer in my late thirties, I participated in a “best and worst gigs of all time” feature package for a British music magazine that will remain unnamed. The topic of Glass Spider as one of the worst-ever concerts came up and I was approached about writing it up … and I refused. “Why?” my editor asked. “I thought he was really good.” “Marc, he was a cunt.” This in the British sense of the word, of course, meaning, I suppose, “rich feckless asshole.” When I was in that audience at Giants Stadium, and I looked up to see the spider, I was thrilled, and that memory sticks with me. But I also realize now (with a little editorial prompting) that I was easy to get, already someone who would buy the shitty album and the overblown concert tickets and the T-shirts with the horribly cluttered and uncommitted design. It didn’t occur to me then that Bowie was making assumptions about my loyalty, and it didn’t occur to him at the time that we, his audience, would ever let him down
.

25.

B

OWIE WAS BEHIND THE TIMES
in 1988. In four years, the indie rock and hip-hop that had gotten under way while Bowie was rebranding himself had started producing masterpieces as culture altering as his own best seventies work, fully realized and fearlessly executed albums that felt like works of modern art—
Daydream Nation
by Sonic Youth,
Surfer Rosa
by the Pixies,
Straight Outta Compton
by NWA,
It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back
by Public Enemy and
Follow the Leader
by Eric B. and Rakim among them. Even heavy metal, long dismissed as puerile or bubblegum, now sounded essential, with Slayer’s
Reign in Blood
and Metallica’s
Master of Puppets
(both released the same year as Bowie’s
Labyrinth
folly) addressing serious topics like the Holocaust and drug addiction, respectively. Guns n’ Roses’
Appetite for Destruction
had combined punk’s rush with a love for smart, theatrical seventies rock like Queen, Elton John
and
Bowie. Bowie briefly dated Slash’s mother when she was a costume designer on
The Man Who Fell to Earth
, but he could no longer hope to keep up with the now grown-up guitarist as he had with those Bowie-influenced bands of the late seventies. Punk, post-punk, New Wave and New Romantic never made Bowie feel like an old fogie, but as he celebrated his forty-first birthday in January of ’88, he had to be wondering whether or not his creative fitness was something he could ever recapture. Musically, Bowie knew that he did much of his best work when paired with a strong collaborator, whether it was Visconti or Ronson or Eno. Erdal Kizilcay, a Turkish musical prodigy who’d worked on the demos for
Let’s Dance
in 1982 and remained a sort of all-purpose asset in the intervening years (playing bass on Iggy Pop’s
Blah Blah Blah
as well as the
Never Let Me Down
record and tour) assumed this role in the late eighties.

Kizilcay was raised in an Istanbul orphanage but found a way out through music, largely inspired by his love for the Beatles. “David once said that my knowledge starts with the Beatles and ends with the Beatles,” he recalls today. In terms of preference this may be semiaccurate (he is also
a jazz aficionado), but in terms of ability, Kizilcay was a prodigy. A conservatory student, he could play guitar, drums, bass, keyboards and any number of exotic woodwinds, strings or horns. Asked to contribute to the soundtrack of an animated British antiwar film,
When the Wind Blows
, in late ’86, Bowie turned to Kizilcay and ended up recording vocals over one of his finished demos. Kizilcay had relocated to Bern but ended up making the forty-five-minute trip to Bowie’s chalet in the small lakeside town of Lausanne to eat dinner, drink wine and talk music. “We used to see each other twice a week,” he tells me, “to work on songs together. Sometimes he’d come to my place and my wife would cook for him. During one of these sessions, David heard the demo. One day he called and said, ‘I loved that demo. Can we turn it into a big classical explosion?’” They added trumpet, trombone, more guitar and bass, as well as one of Bowie’s most committed vocals of his eighties oeuvre, helping both the film and the soundtrack become a huge hit in England. “It became something very powerful,” Kizilcay says. A good start back to creative solvency for certain.

If Kizilcay primed Bowie for the give-and-take that yielded quality results, Tin Machine found him in full-on embrace of the device. The party line on Tin Machine varies. Some see Bowie’s short-lived band (’88 to ’92, roughly) as the sonic and sartorial equivalent of your dad or uncle feeling his age and getting an earring or a too-fast Italian car. However, two decades on from their self-titled debut, this is a totally unfair dismissal, and the notion that Bowie gave himself an authentic jump start by enlisting three other dudes and ginning up the old droog spirit of ’72 may actually be the one that holds. I don’t want to be one of those rock writers who exult in the contrary just because it’s pleasingly perverse, but I tend to agree with theory number two. If I wanted to be perversely contrary, I would certainly try to convince you that
Tonight
and
Never Let Me Down
are underrated. There are entire websites devoted to such second opinions, and one of them does readdress the
Tonight
album.

Tin Machine was guitarist Reeves Gabrels and Hunt and Tony Sales from the
Lust For Life
sessions in Berlin in ’77 and its subsequent tour. Gabrels, then thirty-two and a veteran of semi-successful East Coast bands like Rubber Rodeo, was married to Bowie’s Glass Spider tour publicist and traveled with the extravaganza with all-access credentials. He and Bowie would hang out backstage, watching television, smoking cigarettes and
talking about everything except rock ’n’ roll. At night, Gabrels, a huge Bowie fan since the early seventies, would watch the dancers and the theatrics from the floor and wonder what was motivating his hero (if anything). “I said to myself, ‘I would love the opportunity to just collaborate with him and bring this back to something that wasn’t about having a dance troupe,’” he tells me. “But it was just a pipe dream, so I didn’t bring it up. Instead, we’d watch
Fantasy Island
with the sound off and make up our own story line.”