Iggy Pop (27 page)

By now, David had, as Angie describes it, simply ‘gone nuts. And any normal person [would have], when they were working so hard, were so stressed and so pissed.’ For the last four years Bowie had been working himself into the ground, but didn’t seem to be getting any benefit from the huge sums gushing into and leaking out of the sprawling MainMan operation. As Tony Zanetta describes it, ‘David was always in total control. And then he decided not to be.’ He seemed to go about acquiring a drug habit with a vengeance. Bowie moved to New York in Christmas 1974, and soon, thanks to Cherry Vanilla, hooked up with one of the city’s leading cocaine-dealers. One of the most telling indications of the contrasting characters of Jim Osterberg and David Jones is that, under the influence of cocaine, Iggy Pop usually attained delusions of grandeur, while David Bowie suffered from paranoia and a sense of imminent doom. Around March 1975 Bowie moved out to LA, initially staying at the house of Deep Purple singer Glenn Hughes, and then with Michael Lippman, the lawyer he used to extract himself from his MainMan contract.

It was in the unrelenting sunshine of a Los Angeles afternoon that Bowie was reclining in the back of a stretch limo when he saw a slightly forlorn figure trudging down Sunset Boulevard. He ordered his driver to slow down, wound down the window and shouted, ‘Hey, Jim, come here!’ Jim thought David looked very pale, thin, ‘but essentially happy, at least about his work’. Some of Bowie’s happiness was inspired by seeing his old friend, whom he invited back to his house. Jim found David consumed with energy, books scattered all over the floor, including a slim volume about faked landings on Mars which David was discussing making into a movie, while characters like Dennis Hopper dropped in and out and David made final preparations for his role in Nicolas Roeg’s movie,
The Man Who Fell To Earth
. Bowie suggested they book into a four-track studio and work on some material.

Rolling Stone
writer Cameron Crowe witnessed one of the sessions at Oz Studios in Hollywood in May 1975, over the course of a number of interviews that reveal a manic, driven, fractured Bowie in what would become the definitive portrait of his LA period. Iggy and David had already recorded several tracks, one of which was a song that would later turn up as ‘Turn Blue’. Over an intense, instrumental track that David had worked up over nine hours in the studio, Iggy improvised stream-of-consciousness lyrics. Looking on proudly, David pronounced him ‘Lenny fucking Bruce and James Dean’, before Iggy’s current girlfriend dragged him out of the studio. Never to return. A few weeks later, Cameron caught up with Bowie again, and heard how Iggy had overslept the next day, called up drunk a few nights later, and when David told him to ‘go away’ he did just that. ‘I hope he’s not dead,’ said Bowie, pithily. ‘He’s got a good act.’

Jim had resumed his wanderings, sleeping rough or with the many LA women who wanted to nurse a down-and-out rock star. One promising venue was the Park Sunset Plaza, just opposite the Coronet, which was a favoured location for Hollywood’s wealthy businessmen to install their mistresses. Naturally, the women had a lot of spare time on their hands. Even more incongruously, by now Jim had an established hideaway in the shape of a huge beachfront property in La Jolla, near San Diego. Mike Page, a San Diego musician, had brought his girlfriend Lisa Leggett to LA for some clothes-shopping on Melrose, and a mutual friend offered to introduce them to Iggy, who was crashing on his couch. Within a few minutes of their meeting, as Mike visited the bathroom, Lisa had invited Jim to come and stay at her parents’ home in San Diego. Somehow, Jim sensed that this was no ordinary property, and he was soon a regular visitor to the Leggetts’ house, which had been built by hotelier Earl Gagosian, founder of the Royal Inns chain; the place was crass and tasteless, and looked like an overgrown Ramada Inn. Mike Page would have long, earnest discussions about blues music with the impoverished but charming Osterberg; only later did he realise that during her visits to LA, Lisa was inviting Iggy to stay in their suite at the Chateau Marmont, where he would call for Dom Pérignon and order Lisa around imperiously. ‘When my friends told me he was getting it on with Lisa, and that he was treating her like shit, it broke my heart,’ says Page, although he adds, ‘It’s possible Jim didn’t know we’d been an item for a long time.’

On his stints back in Hollywood, however, Jim was ‘flounder ing’. Towards the end of 1975, he was sleeping in a garage on a lounger mattress he’d stolen from a nearby Thrifty Store. His host was a gay hustler named Bruce, who worked Selma Avenue and whenever he earned a little money would spend it on Quaaludes and share them with Jim. One afternoon Jim downed a couple of Quaaludes, then attempted to steal some cheese and apples from the Mayfair Market on Franklin; once again the LAPD picked him up, and this time he was thrown into jail. By now, the only person willing to bail him out was Freddy Sessler, a well-loved figure on the rock ’n’ roll scene, a Holocaust survivor who was friends with Keith Richards and was known, says Jim, ‘as the kind of guy who can make the party happen’.

Sessler was horrified at Jim’s predicament, and offered him a job. An entertaining raconteur who had the air of Chico Marx about him, Sessler had a finger in a lot of pies, the newest of which was a slightly shady telecommunications venture. Sessler had finagled a list of the Westinghouse phone company’s business clients, rented an LA office and put a motley bunch of telemarketers to working the phones, calling motels and mom ’n’ pop stores on the East Coast to tell them that Westinghouse were closing down in their area, but that their new company could cut them an exclusive deal. For a few short days, Jim plied his trade as a telemarketer. Despite his mellifluous voice and convincing manner, Jim was ‘a terrible failure’, for he was required to start work at five in the morning. Sessler was magnanimous: ‘Forget about it, Jim. I tell you what I’m gonna do. I’m gonna call David. You know he likes you. And he wants to work with you.’

Jim was too proud to call Bowie for help, and instead fled to San Diego where Lisa Leggett, keen to help him onto his feet, funded a three-day, $600 ‘Success and Reinvention’ motivational course, while Sessler continued to try to get Bowie and Jim together. (It wasn’t a bad course, apparently.) In a lucky twist of fate, especially for anyone embarking on Success and Reinvention, David Bowie happened to be hitting town with his Station To Station tour.

On 13 February, Jim visited David at his hotel. David played him a demo of a new song he and Carlos Alomar, his guitarist, had been working on, called ‘Sister Midnight’.

‘Would you like to record this?’ David asked Jim. ‘Then maybe we can record an album around it at the end of my tour?’

‘Hell, yeah,’ was the reply.

Some time that day, Jim was asked to get a bag and report for duty the next morning at 9am, like ‘a rock ’n’ roll boot camp’, joining Bowie’s tour to open what would be one of the most difficult, educational, and ultimately happy and productive periods of his life. The same could be said of David Bowie. Beset by huge pressures, this nervous, jumpy cocaine fiend was, according to so many of those with whom he’d fallen out, selfish and ruthless in his dealings with others. Yet, in his time with Jim, the man who’d called him ‘that fuckin’ carrot top’, David Bowie showed himself a selfless person, one who, says Carlos Alomar, treated his friend with ‘understanding, compassion and gentleness’. This friendship would extend over a longer period than most people would ever realise, and would underpin the greatest music that both Iggy and Bowie would ever make.

CHAPTER 11

The Passenger

It was the summer of 1977, and David Bowie and Iggy Pop had just about had enough of each other. For around a year now they’d been living in each other’s pockets, going to museums together, reading the same books, riding the same train, getting the same haircut, living in the same house. Now this was war.

This is how a battle might go. David would hear a theme tune from a TV channel and transmute it into a catchy riff, which he’d demonstrate for a few friends on a ukulele. Iggy would top him with an improvised lyric about getting it in the ear, or some other crazed stream-of-consciousness hip poetry, delivering it straight-faced and defying his small audience not to laugh. Meanwhile, the crazed Sales brothers, two manic, impassioned musicians who’d spent much of their time in Berlin paranoid they might be turned into lampshades, would seize control of the song, shooting it in a new direction with a beat that sounded like it came from a drum kit fifty feet high.

Sitting upright behind a mixing desk in a stone-lined studio nestled in a grandiose but war-scarred Berlin masonic hall, David Bowie was in open competition with the man whose career he’d done so much to revive. He was sick of Iggy’s rock histrionics, but he was on a roll, the best roll of his life. Jim Osterberg was on a roll too, laughing manically as he wrestled back control of his own music. He had his own apartment, he was living on cocaine, hash, red wine and German sausages, he took a cold shower every morning - or at least thought about taking a shower. He was the happiest he’d ever been in his life.

But at night he’d dream of revenge.

When Jim got on board David’s Station To Station tour, he was teaming up with an operation that was far tinier than anyone suspected. Outsiders thought they saw a huge organisation run with fascistic precision, yet in truth this was a family operation, revolving around David, Coco Schwab, Jim, publicist Barbara de Witt and her husband Tim, acting manager Pat Gibbons and photographer Andrew Kent. Each day followed a strict routine; plane flight, soundcheck, short break, show, nice dinner, then sleep. Even with such a tight routine, Bowie found time to check every detail, reviewing the set and looking at slides for release to the press after nearly every show, revelling in running a tight ship rather than the out-of-control leviathan he remembered from MainMan days.

In retrospect, it was obvious that Bowie had made up his mind to rescue Jim Osterberg even before he had set off on the tour, which opened in Vancouver on 2 February 1976. He and Ben Edmonds had discussed the fallen rock star at some length during tour rehearsals, and while Bowie flitted from subject to subject with his characteristic gadfly intensity, there was a fondness in his remarks about Jim, someone who was ‘not so hard and knowledgeable and all-knowing and cynical. Someone who hasn’t a clue . . . but has insights.’

Comments such as these perhaps gave the impression that Bowie was patronising about the man with whom he’d share most of the next eighteen months. Certainly, many people at the time accused Bowie of being coldheartedly manipulative, co-opting Iggy to gain credibility - indeed, German Stooges fan-club organiser Harald Inhülsen later accused Bowie of kidnapping Iggy as if in some thrillingly perverse sexual and musically exploitative conspiracy and keeping him ‘under his thumb’. Such conspiracy theorists tended to ignore the depths of Bowie’s admiration for Iggy, a man he knew could achieve feats of which he was incapable. They also underestimated Jim Osterberg’s own resilience and self-belief. After Jim joined the Station To Station tour in San Diego on 13 February, even close observers such as Andrew Kent and Carlos Alomar were struck by how unintimidated Jim was by his surroundings, or his so-called rescuer. ‘There was no kowtowing,’ says Alomar. ‘I saw them simply as real mates. Meeting Jim the first time [in February] I didn’t have a reference for why they were friends. Nor would I describe them as musical friends - they were just . . . friends.’

Indeed, while Alomar observed a partnership of equals, his predecessor, Mick Ronson, thought his old boss was almost besotted with Iggy. I discovered this when the guitarist and I happened to be discussing Bowie’s voice. I had mentioned how David’s singing had changed, as he’d switched to a lower register between 1974 and 1976, when Mick shot me a quizzical look, and in his beautifully pristine Hull accent interrupted me. ‘Well, you know why that was, don’t you?’

‘Why his voice changed? [Pause] Er . . . because he was influenced by someone?’

‘Exactly!’

‘So you think David wanted to sound like Iggy?’

‘Sound like Iggy?’ Ronson laughed. ‘He wanted to
be
Iggy!’

A few years later, asked about Ronson’s theory, Iggy leered cheekily before proclaiming, ‘
Everyone
wants to be Iggy!’ Then he apologised for being so ‘hokey’, before pointing out that ‘if there was any wanting going on, it was certainly two-way’. In truth, while Jim admits that it was pathetic that he’d been reduced to the condition in which he’d found himself at the end of 1975, he also points out that even at this low he was ‘not without resources’. It’s easy to discern the almost unshakeable confidence - or, in Nick Kent’s words, ‘that skyscraper ego’ - that drove him, the conviction that one day his music would be appreciated. By now, with the little knots of fans he knew about in Los Angeles, New York, London, Paris and Germany, Iggy was aware, as he says, that ‘my numbers were legion’. Meanwhile, Jim Osterberg, the empathetic, talkative, charming man who liked to nestle up with a good book, had far more in common with David Jones than anyone who took their images at face value could realise: that coy, slightly flirtatious manner, that skilled reading of power structures and social situations, that childlike enthusiasm, that indefatigable energy.

When they’d first met, Jim had been impressed by Bowie’s English, vaudevillian aesthetic and his quirky methods of unsettling people - whether it was sporting bizarre haircuts or kissing Ron Asheton full on the lips. Now, as Bowie’s tight-knit crew made their way from California through the Midwest into Canada and beyond, all by road or train, there came a more profound respect for Bowie’s ‘psychic stamina’, as Jim watched this notionally effete man play show after show, keep a handle on the business side (which was complicated by a split with new manager Michael Lippman) and still be bursting with creative energy. ‘And then he’d go out to a club after almost every show until four in the morning and do all the other things that we were doing. And he never showed bad form, not once.’ There were quirks in Bowie’s behaviour - ‘an odd, theatrical, slightly megalomaniac’ way of relating to people - but this hardly perturbed Jim, who knew this was a tendency to which Iggy was prone, too.

In turn, Bowie’s crew, notably Carlos Alomar and Andrew Kent, were surprised to see this notorious rock ’n’ roll animal join the tour with such civilised self-sufficiency, often engaging their overburdened employer in conversation, or at other times sitting with little glasses over his nose reading the political columns in the morning papers while sipping an espresso. Bowie’s quiet mentions that ‘we have to do something for Iggy’ seemed eminently reasonable, even the fact that Iggy was being given one of Carlos Alomar’s best compositions, the brand-new ‘Sister Midnight’, which the band had introduced to their set during rehearsals in Vancouver. In its initial form, the song was a taut, tough example of Bowie’s new idiom, blue-eyed soul, but even at this stage, there was a new minimalism in the song’s mechanistic repetitions. During the long train and car journeys across America, David played Jim Kraftwerk’s
Radioactivity
album on cassette (plus Tom Waits, and the Ramones) and they discussed David producing an album for Iggy at Musicland, Giorgio Moroder’s studio in Munich. Fatefully, where Jim had rejected the concept of working with Ray Manzarek for fear he would lose his Stooges audience, he grasped the opportunity of working on an experimental, electronic album with both hands, realising instantly that ‘there was a power to the music that he seemed willing to provide for me’. David even explained, after playing Jim a rough, raw demo of ‘Sister Midnight’, probably recorded during the
Man Who Fell To Earth
sessions, that this kind of jagged-edged experimentation was something he might not be allowed to release under his own name; the implication, presumably valuable for Jim’s self-esteem, was that in producing an album for Jim, David was not just doing him a favour - Jim would be doing David a favour, too.

This unique partnership would, over a remarkably short period, create four albums that would showcase a radical change in their own music, and just as radical a change in the landscape of popular music over the following decade. Iggy’s two albums would prove he could make great music outside of the Stooges; David’s two albums would effectively cement his reputation as a world-class artist, one who was happy to exist at the cutting edge of musical trends. Not since Van Gogh and Gauguin spent nine weeks together at the Yellow House in Arles had two artists of such stature, with such distinct styles, cooperated so closely, with such influential and fulfilling results. But where the two painters’ creative winning streak had culminated in madness and breakdown, Bowie and Iggy’s great, innovative work together would prove a healing process for two severely damaged individuals.

The increasingly obvious personal and musical rapport between the two stars would eventually inspire persistent speculation about whether their bond extended to a sexual relationship, too. Bowie had famously declared himself gay in
Melody Maker
back in January 1972, while Iggy was already celebrated in San Francisco’s gay community, just about all of whom claimed to have been the one who treated him to the celebrated blowjob at Bimbo’s in 1974. There are plenty of observers who are convinced the two did the dirty deed, and many of them happily share entertaining stories of how it happened. Sadly for those of us who fantasise about such things, the people who were there say otherwise. Jim himself, while agreeing that ‘it’s good to try new things’, unblushingly denies those stories. More tellingly, Angie Bowie - who would regularly vie with her husband for the most outrageous sexual exploits and has treated listeners to stirring accounts of her ex-husband’s gay encounters - contends that there was no hanky panky of a sexual nature. ‘No. I absolutely doubt it. I would have to ask, who would be on the bottom?’

By the end of March, the Station To Station US tour concluded with a masterful performance at Madison Square Garden, followed by a star-packed party at the Penn Plaza Club, during which David spent most of his time ensconced with Jim, as old acquaintances like John Cale dropped by. Jim looked almost glowing with health, wearing a suit he’d bought for a court appearance with Bowie the previous day in Rochester, New York, to answer charges - later dropped - following a marijuana bust at the Flagship American hotel, four days earlier. Iggy’s public appearances represented the first confirmation that he was about to return from oblivion.

When Bowie left New York on an ocean liner bound for Cannes on the 27th, Iggy remained in New York for a couple of days at the Seymour hotel, gaining the first inkling that his life was about to change. For the first time he realised that a new generation of musicians were terming themselves ‘punks’ and emerging in his image. That weekend he sat down with Pam Brown for the cover story of the fourth issue of
Punk
magazine and, in typical fashion, narrated a crazed, incredible tale of his recent past - most of which, of course, was essentially true. Over the same period he appeared at a reception in his honour at CBGB, the Bowery club run by Hilly Kristal that was the cradle of punk in the US; later he took
Punk
editor John Holscomb and photographer Roberta Bayley out for lobster at Phoebe’s. Before catching his plane to Italy, he asked Roberta to post a pair of handcuffs that he’d bought on Times Square to his son Eric. Although he’d hardly seen his child during the preceding year, he was now trying for once to be ‘a proper dad’, before he embarked on his adventures in Berlin. The final line between his chaotic past and a new beginning had been drawn a couple of days before, when he’d jammed with Johnny Thunders and Syl Sylvain in a New York loft; Johnny asked him if he wanted to get high. For the first time in his life, Iggy said no.

Bowie had been remarkably resilient, considering the stress he’d been under for the last year and the mental torture and paranoia he’d suffered in Los Angeles, a city that he - and ultimately Jim, too - would regard as evil, almost vampiric. He was, Jim noticed at the time, damaged, in need of a soulmate, but wasn’t going to show it. That restraint endured until their stopover in Switzerland in April, when he started to open up. Almost certainly, he also discussed the state of his marriage with Angie, a remarkable, unconventional partnership that was showing the strain of their constant separations; it was an open relationship, but Angie was becoming increasingly jealous of anyone who got intellectually close to David. This applied to Jim, about whom Angie was ambivalent, and it particularly applied to Coco Schwab. Coco, or Corinne, Schwab, was an exceptionally able and organised character who’d been hired as a secretary by Hugh Attwooll at MainMan in the summer of 1973. Hugh took a vacation a few weeks later and, he says, returned to find that Coco had learned how to do his job within 36 hours. As a result, Tony Defries decided to dispense with him. Now Coco controlled access to David, relieving the psychic-ally overburdened star of a huge range of responsibilities, but infuriating everyone who felt they’d been frozen out - most notably Angie.

The next, crucial shared experience that would help bond Jim and David was a mysterious train trip to Moscow, arranged on the spur of the moment to fill the gap between stop-offs in Zurich and Helsinki. Andrew Kent, who had the best working knowledge of French, spent a couple of days shuttling between Zurich and Basel to obtain the necessary transit visas for the mammoth rail trip, which was undertaken by him, Jim, David, Coco and Pat Gibbons. As they clattered through Poland, stopping every now and then to take on supplies of soup or bottles of beer, they saw towns still pockmarked with bullet holes and a landscape scarred by unrepaired bomb-craters; drawing alongside a goods train in Warsaw, they witnessed a worker unloading coal piece by piece in the grey, freezing sleet, a dreary, poignant image that would later be commemorated in Bowie’s beautifully sombre instrumental, ‘Warszawa’, on
Low
. Around 700 miles into the journey, the group encountered their first bureaucratic hassles at Brest, the ancient Slav city that now sits in Byelorussia, but which in 1976 straddled the border to the USSR. All the passengers had to disembark as they switched train lines to the broad-gauge Russian system, and as Kent remembers it, they were greeted by a menacing, albino KGB agent with the phrase, ‘We weren’t expecting you.’ Bowie’s huge cache of books was searched, and some of them were reportedly confiscated for dubious subject matter which concerned the Third Reich; however, according to other recollections, the party’s brush with the KGB was actually inspired by Jim impetuously giving away some of the flowers that filled the group’s cabin, an act construed as an attempted bribe.