Bowie: A Biography (64 page)

Haynes’s friend and Sonic Youth bassist Kim Gordon explained the concept of the film to Bowie one night over dinner at Julian Schnabel’s in late 1996 (Haynes had directed the video for the Sonic Youth single “Disappearer”). “Kim tried to get him to concede to have his music licensed for the movie and he said he didn’t feel he was ready to do that,” Gordon’s husband, Thurston Moore, recalls. “He didn’t want to discourage Todd Haynes’s vision but he wanted to keep his music until there was a real Bowie film.”

“My feeling about it was that it was based fairly substantially on Ziggy Stardust,” Bowie said at the time, “and as I intend to do my own version of that, I’d rather not work with a competitive film.”

“‘Lady Stardust’ was going to be a song Brian Slade sings when he has his long hair,” Haynes says. “During the whole dreamy scene of seduction between Christian Bale and Ewan McGregor, I wanted to use the quiet part of ‘Sweet Thing’ from
Diamond Dogs
. We used ‘Baby’s on Fire’ [by Eno] where we were going to use ‘Moonage Daydream.’ The original script started out with seven Bowie songs in it. Finally, we just made a campaign to get ‘All the Young Dudes.’ That would be the anthem that would end the film. But we had to use [Roxy’s] ‘2HB’ instead.”

Bowie’s music has been used to great effect before and since in ambitious films helmed by auteurs like Uli Edel (the 1981 junkie drama
Christiane F
.), Wes Anderson (the 2004 hipster comedy
The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou
, in which vintage Bowie songs are sung in Portuguese by Brazilian musician and cast member Seu Jorge) and Gus Van Sant (2008’s
Milk’s
brilliant use of
Hunky Dory’s
“Queen Bitch”). Its absence in the Haynes film is, for some, a fatal blow. This is not, after all, the Eno/Ferry story. Perhaps if the film had been a bit more happy-go-lucky, it would have sold itself a bit more easily to skeptics. Instead it seems to try to will Eno, Cockney Rebel and T. Rex songs into Bowie songs. “A lot of people also had problems with the Bowie character singing a Roxy Music song that was not even written at that time,” says Moore, tweaking the purists. “But really, so what?” Some critics praised the film, most did not, and except for its sustained cult following on video and the Web,
Velvet Goldmine
was a commercial flop. Bowie, ultimately the only real arbiter who mattered given the subject, offered his own review. Essentially, he’d enjoyed the sex scenes
between Bale and McGregor, and Toni Collette and multiple partners in a hazy orgy scene. “But I thought the rest of it was garbage.” Haynes is naturally “disappointed” by this. “The thing that always made me sad about Bowie’s reaction to my film—and I understand everyone is protecting their own public depiction—but I just feel like I took everything he created with a great sense of freedom of invention. I took it to task and basically accepted it as a delicious fiction of his own making.”

Perhaps the ultimate verdict on
Velvet Goldmine
goes to Bob Dylan, who was impressed enough by Haynes’s body of work to allow total access to his own equally vast myth and Earth-changing music. “I thought Dylan would be the hardest of all, thought I’d truly lost my marbles even presuming. My career sort of began with some adversarial reaction—the Carpenters being my first denial, then Bowie,” says Haynes. “I thought, ‘Oh my god, now I’m taking on the meanest guy of all,’ but instead he said, ‘Sure, use whatever you want, you’ve got life rights and music rights. Pick any song from the canon.’” Asked if he applied any of the mistakes he may have made on
Goldmine
to
I’m Not There
, Haynes replies, “I think I just repeated all my mistakes and stand by them in both films.”

In 2001,
Hedwig and the Angry Inch
, a sister film of sorts to
Velvet Goldmine
(they also share a producer) was released. Based on John Cameron Mitchell and Stephen Trask’s hit off-Broadway play, the film also traffics heavily in Bowie myth and iconography from the Berlin Wall to the Calvin Mark Lee–style third eye on the forehead of Michael Pitt’s rock ingénue Tommy Gnosis. When Mitchell’s Hedwig subjects Pitt’s Gnosis to a “six-month curriculum of rock history,” he/she actually points to the famous Mick Rock shot of Bowie, Iggy and Lou Reed at the Dorchester Hotel press conference in 1972 during the montage.

As far as his less canonical music and iconography was concerned, he spent much of the late nineties sketching. He composed tracks for the soundtrack for the French-based video game Omikron before joining Gabrels in Bermuda to work on material for the follow-up to
Earthling
. Unbeknownst to Gabrels, Bowie was about to do a tonal about-face, withdrawing from the agit–art rock of
Outside
and the drum and bass of
Earthling
to produce a series of new material that amounted to his most introspective since the late sixties. Bowie had put forth the notion in the press of revisiting Ziggy Stardust as a musical around this time as well.
Like many in the grip of pre-millennium tension, he seemed to be sensing his mortality, and the slow, searching mood of the new songs, like “Survive,” and “Thursday’s Child” (inspired by the autobiography of the late cabaret singer Eartha Kitt), lend this theory some validity.

“Hours …
was sort of the
anti-Earthling
,” says Plati, who was brought in after the Bermuda sessions, as well as a short session in London, to aid in the production back at Looking Glass in Soho. “No beats, no technology, just naked songs. I try not to interpret lyrics other than to find my own meaning in them—which I think is the point. ‘Survive’ hit me in particular because I was going through my own rough patch at the time, so I connected with it.”

Hours …
is a good record to put on the morning after you did something regrettable. It will likely put your transgressions in perspective and allow you to catch a breath or two before calling your rabbi, priest or Zen master. It’s easy listening for uneasy people. “Survive,” the album’s best track, is even more explicitly haunted by regret. “I should have kept you,” Bowie worries, “I should have tried.” His voice is reminiscent of the old Deram recordings, perhaps deliberately so (“Who said time is on my side?” he laments at one point). Musically, it’s an affecting melody, strummed on a guitar that, after
Earthling
, sounds refreshingly solid and wooden. Another track like “If I’m Dreaming My Life” feels a bit more sketchy and seems musically indecisive but thematically, it’s in perfect pitch with the ongoing elegant bummer that is the record as a whole. The actual rockers fare better here.

Again confident enough to throw his arms around cyber culture without worrying that the gimmick would hold sway over the music (justifiably so, as much of
Hours …
is as strong as its three predecessors), Bowie and online music site Bug Music launched a contest that offered fans a chance to write lyrics to one of his and Gabrels’s musical compositions (posted on Bowienet with just a hummed melody). Bowie and Gabrels would record the winning song live on the Web. Of the reported eighty thousand submissions, Bowie chose the submission of Alex Grant, an Ohio student with a New Wave haircut. In May of 1999, Grant was flown to New York City to watch Bowie sing his words—and to be watched. While it seems quaint now, at the time, this was truly inventive and drew heavy traffic to the simulcast (run on
Rolling Stone
magazine’s site). During the webcast, Bowie seems respectful, reading the lyrics off a stand and
loaning them more conviction then words like “Grown inside a plastic box. Micro thoughts and safety locks / Hearts become outdated clocks / Ticking in your mind” really deserve.

“‘What’s Really Happening?’ was really cool to do—it was a new way to reach out to his fans,” Plati says. “Sure, it was an experiment—what wasn’t? Remember, there was no blueprint for any of those sorts of things. We were doing webchats around the same time—they felt incredibly cutting-edge!”

“The Pretty Things Are Going to Hell” (“they’ve worn it out but they’ve worn it well”) is an elegy for the specter of glitter, which still clearly haunts Bowie in his weaker moments: “You’re still breathing but you don’t know why / Life’s a bit and sometimes you die.” Well, always you die, and that notion seemed to be sinking in, one that was possibly not, what with the potential Y2K glitch looming, the most sellable fin de siècle product. The cover sleeve to
Hours …
based on the
Pietà
by Michelangelo, the statue of the body of Christ displayed in St. Peter’s in the Vatican, literally features Bowie hanging on to himself, cradling his own visage in his arms as if to telegraph to his fans that a bit of comfort would be quite nice right about now. Few responded to the collection.
Hours …
marked the first Bowie studio album to fail to crack the American Top 40 in over a quarter of a century (intent on giving it a post-millennial fair shake, Bowie reissued it in 2004 on his own ISO label as a double disc). Bowie played “The Pretty Things” on
Saturday Night Live
in the early fall of ’99, at the Net Aid benefit concert in October of 1999 and in an episode of VH1’s
Storytellers
, and committed to a series of intimate club shows in Paris, Dublin, Italy, Denmark and New York City, marking the first time fans could see him in a relatively intimate venue in three decades.

Shortly after the record hit shops, Gabrels announced that he was leaving the fold after a decade as Bowie’s guitarist (a run that rivaled Carlos Alomar’s and lasted three times as long as Mick Ronson’s). The
Storytellers
taping would mark his last time playing alongside Bowie. Page Hamilton of early-nineties grunge-metal rockers Helmet was drafted as a replacement for the live dates. Earl Slick and Mike Garson, both seventies all-stars, returned, and Plati was given the role of official musical director of the shows. Always one to make a virtue of a possible free fall, Bowie used the occasion to pull up more-obscure songs like “Quicksand” from
Hunky Dory
and “Stay” from
Station to Station
. These were true fan shows and seemed the first instance of Bowie realizing he could literally play anywhere he wanted, without having to mount a high-concept stage show for each album. “Reeves’s workload got heavier and heavier,” Zachary Alford says, “and I think that wore him down a bit.” Gabrels cites various reasons for his choice. It was partly due to a desire to take the business out of the music business and just play again, partly a sense that he’d been there and done it over the course of eleven years and partly because of friction between himself and Schwab.

“She is not a very happy person,” he says. “I felt like for a long time, I just got tired of doing what was necessary to maintain my own safety against whatever sort of crap she might pull. The band would come offstage and if she wanted to see a movie that was playing on HBO she would tell David that the crowd wasn’t into it so she could get back in time. He’s like anybody: you can bum him out, you can grind him down.”

Post-Gabrels, Bowie did exactly what he did post-Alomar at the end of the eighties, shortly before the Sound and Vision tour and the repurposing of himself as a “band member” with Tin Machine: he started looking to his past for inspiration, or at least some kind of graceful stopgap. That fall it was announced, appropriately enough, that Bowie would headline the first Glastonbury festival of the twenty-first century, some thirty years after he played the inaugural event in support of
The Man Who Sold the World
. As the sun set over the rolling fields, Bowie took the stage, bowed calmly and walked to the mic to sing “Wild Is the Wind” as the crowd let forth an enormous cheer. He introduced “Changes” by letting the crowd know he’d just written it the first time he’d played there. The following day, Bowie and the band returned to London to do a recording for the BBC Radio Theatre to be packaged alongside sessions from the early seventies. Between the club dates in the fall and Glastonbury in the summer, Bowie and Plati planned to record an album of revisited material from Bowie’s mid-to-late-1960s output. With a working title of
Toy
and a track list that reportedly included “I Dig Everything,” “Can’t Help Thinking About Me” and “Let Me Sleep Beside You,” the album was conceived as a sort
of Pin Ups
without the hits.

The birth of Bowie and Iman’s daughter, Alexandria Zahra (Arabic for “inner light”), on August 15, 2000, put the sessions on hold, and by the time the album was ready for release, Bowie’s relationship with his label Virgin had
become tense (they were reportedly eager for an album of new material, not a seminovelty covers album, in order to generate excitement for the back catalog, recently released for digital download).

Bowie began negotiating with different labels, eventually signing a lucrative deal with Sony; the
Toy
material was broken up and either redistributed to B sides or retitled for inclusion on his next project,
Heathen
, which would find him reunited with a key figure from the era in which they were recorded. In the years since producing
Scary Monsters
in 1980, Visconti had kept busy with projects for artists as diverse as the Boomtown Rats and Debbie Gibson. He was recovering from a divorce (from John Lennon’s former girlfriend May Pang, who also dated Bowie and appears in the “Fashion” video) after eleven years of marriage. The reconnection with Bowie marked a sort of acceleration in his producing activity (he’d follow it in rapid succession with albums by the Dandy Warhols and Manic Street Preachers as well as Morrissey’s 2006 release
Ringleader of the Tormentors)
.

Having a young child in the house again certainly turned Bowie’s mind to his past. He has a history of calling people out of the blue after they figured they’d probably never hear from him again. John Hutchinson, Keith Christmas, Mike Garson and now Tony Visconti had all been contacted this way. Visconti’s falling-out with Bowie reportedly had to do with his declining to mix the sound for the massive Serious Moonlight tour. They’d reconciled but were no longer as close as they’d been through the sixties and seventies, despite the fact that both men were living in lower Manhattan. A date for coffee led to plans to make their first album together in twenty-two years.