The Man Who Sold the World (18 page)

Bowie's vocal—also a first take, according to producer Ken Scott—was equal to the majesty of the arrangement, as he hit a high B
b
at the end of the chorus and held it for three whole bars. The passion of that climax contrasted with the acerbic, almost nasal tone of the verses, Bowie's sardonic voice rising to exasperation as he lamented the predictability of Hollywood. (Perhaps it was not a coincidence that while Bowie was lambasting Hollywood, he revised a line from the Hollywood Argyles, whose 1960 hit “Alley-Oop” ended with a very similar line about a caveman.) America's movie capital was the key motif of the song, a manufacturer of dreams and stars that have become stale with repetition. The girl in the first verse—a refugee from “London Boys” [A21], perhaps—can no longer believe in the fantasies she is being fed.

As Bowie widened his sights, so more icons crumpled beneath his gaze: Mickey Mouse, Lennon (up for sale, like any other pop star, regardless of his political ideals), all the heroes of those hordes of what Leona Helmsley would call “the little people.” And where did that leave Bowie, pouring out his heart one more time for people he despised, over a chord sequence that everyone had heard ten times or more? The clash of cynical despair and passionate commitment was almost shocking—not least for what it revealed about how Bowie saw his own role as a star in the making, at the end of this remarkable performance of a deeply unsettling song.

HUNKY DORY
LP

A
rguably the most commercial album David Bowie ever released,
Hunky Dory
was a statement about stardom, and the creation of fame, by a man who was not yet a star. In retrospect, when so many of its songs have become pop standards—“Life on Mars?” [52], “Changes” [48], “Oh! You Pretty Things” [30] among them—it seems remarkable that
Hunky Dory
didn't establish Bowie as the most credible successor to the Beatles that the new decade had yet produced. Instead it passed almost unnoticed, its profile erased rather than boosted by Bowie's decision to proclaim “I'm gay” a few weeks after it was released.

There have been rumors since that either Bowie or Tony Defries, or both of them, chose not to promote
Hunky Dory
in anything like an orthodox fashion, because they were holding back for the launch of
Ziggy Stardust
just seven months later. “It was an interim project to get me through the recording contract,” Bowie explained later, “which meant that I had to have an album out.” If
Hunky Dory
's quality had won out, and the album had been a significant success, then the
Ziggy
experiment might have been abandoned: the impact of
Ziggy
was all the more intense because it was unexpected.

If
Ziggy
represented a concept being brought to life, then its predecessor was an attempt to explore what stardom, and notoriety, might represent. “Song for Bob Dylan” [40] and “Andy Warhol” [47] examined two of the era's dominant figures in Pop Art (in the widest sense); “Life on Mars?” asked whether, ultimately, everyone was for sale; “Changes” found Bowie testing out his own willingness to adapt or compromise to achieve success.

The album cover was both ironic and iconic in its use of star imagery: Bowie arrived at the photo session clutching a volume of Marlene Dietrich portraits, and singled out the image that he wanted Brian Ward to replicate. This was stardom of the old school (a theme he would revisit on
Young Americans
), and the result was a photograph every bit as ambiguous about its gender as “Lady Stardust” [33]. Indeed, Bowie's new record company, RCA,
*
had to be persuaded to accept the design, because it feared that the W. H. Smith's chain would refuse to display such a confusing image of a man.

The London underground newspaper
International Times
astutely noted that
Hunky Dory
“has very little to do with David Bowie the poet, something to do with David Bowie the performer, lots to do with David Bowie the artiste, and most of all with David Bowie the public relations expert. He's caught up in a lot of games, so he plays them properly.” And the games were only just beginning. Alongside the strength of his songs, Bowie was teaching his audience that all stardom is an illusion, everything authentic is a fake. It was time for Ziggy Stardust to ram the lesson home.

 

[53] ROUND AND ROUND

(Berry)

Recorded November 1971; single B-side

When the Rolling Stones covered Chuck Berry's “Around and Around” (the B-side of his 1958 “Johnny B. Goode” single) in 1964, they were acknowledging one of their heroes, in the studio where the original recording had been made. By 1971, when Bowie and the Spiders revived the song for
Ziggy Stardust
, they had shortened the title and quickened the pace, in the same way that Elvis Presley was speeding through his fifties hits in Las Vegas in a vain effort to make them seem as exciting as they had once been. Throughout the seventies, it was almost obligatory for rock bands of every ilk to offer their audiences an encore of fifties rock'n'roll classics: it was, they assumed, the shared heritage of their audience. Some artists made a living from pretending that the fifties had never ended (Sha Na Na, the Wild Angels); others, such as the Flamin' Groovies (particular favorites of Bowie's at this point), channeled the spirit of Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Little Richard into their contemporary music, as if the sixties had never happened. Or as Marc Bolan explained in 1971: “What I've been trying to do is recapture the feeling, the energy, behind old rock music without actually doing it the same technically.”

Bowie's performance of “Round and Round” seemed to have been conceived in a similar spirit. Had it been included on
Ziggy
, as Bowie originally intended (and as the title track, no less), it would have punctured any fantasy that the Spiders were exotic rock stars from another planet. They'd have been exposed, instead, as leaden-footed and crass, fronted by a man who had learned little about how to generate rock'n'roll excitement since “Liza Jane” [A2] in 1964. Mick Ronson's instantly recognizable guitar sound—the tonal product of a wah-wah pedal, a Marshall amp, and a 1968 Les Paul—was perfect for Bowie's material, but overdramatic for a twelve-bar rock'n'roll tune. The Spiders' “Round and Round” worked only if the previous interpretations could be wiped from history.

Berry's song wasn't the only borrowed tune to feature in the Spiders' stage shows, though it was their solitary homage to the fifties. Bowie preferred to revisit more recent memories, which is why he treated Cream's “I Feel Free” to a turbulent makeover, Ronson regularly indulging in a lengthy guitar solo while Bowie changed costumes backstage. Lou Reed's “Waiting for the Man” [A44] and “White Light/White Heat” were also in Ziggy's repertoire: “white light makes me sound like Lou Reed,” Bowie sang hopefully but not entirely accurately. His occasional version of the Beatles' “This Boy,” a B-side from 1963, was interesting to imagine but not to hear. More intriguing, in retrospect, was the medley of two contemporary James Brown cuts that Bowie concocted in 1972, combining “You Gotta Have a Job” with “Hot Pants.” This was unusual territory for a rock band: although Mod acts such as the Who had tackled some of Brown's early R&B hits, no British performers had dared to attempt the propulsive funk that was his current bag. Bowie's audience must have been baffled as he strutted the stage like the R&B legend he'd dreamed of becoming in 1965, manfully squeaking his soprano sax in imitation of Brown's sidekick Jimmy Parker. All would become clearer in 1974, despite Bowie's promise two years earlier that “I'm never going to try and play black music because I'm white. Singularly white!”

GLAD TO BE GAY

I
n 1971, Bowie visited America in a man's dress and told the
Daily Mirror
, “My sexual life is normal.” In 1972, he told
Melody Maker
's Michael Watts, “I'm gay, and I always have been, even when I was David Jones.” Watts astutely noted Bowie's “sly jollity” during that January interview: the campness of someone who presented himself as “a swishy queen, a gorgeously effeminate boy” and displayed gay magazines prominently on his coffee table when journalists were due. Sexual preferences aside, this was a carefully chosen pose, for all Bowie's subsequent claim that “It wasn't a premeditated thing.” It certainly worried his mother, who asked him, “What's happening, David? Are you changing your sex?” “Don't believe a word of it, Mum,” Bowie assured her.

The music business had a glorious tradition of gay managers, lyricists, and, no doubt, performers, but no celebrity had chosen to “out” himself as flamboyantly as Bowie, others preferring to let their audiences assume (the painter David Hockney, with his delicious canvases of young male swimmers) or vehemently deny the slightest vile implication (Liberace). Homosexuality had been legal for consenting adults in England and Wales for less than four years, and in America gay liberation was the last and slowest of the sixties counterculture movements to be accepted by the so-called New Left.
*
The British censors had balked at the publication of Jean Genet's novels, while Hubert Selby's
Last Exit to Brooklyn
in 1966
*
aroused outrage not merely for its savage rape scene, but for the impunity with which its author described his male characters as “she.”

Bowie's openness to the idea of bisexuality was presumably what had encouraged Kenneth Pitt to arrange his client an interview with the newly launched magazine
Jeremy
(promising “out of this world gay fashion, humour and fiction”) in 1969. But Bowie was not yet ready to launch a crusade. It was more than two years later—after the formation of the Gay Liberation Front, from which Bowie made sure to distance himself; after the editor of another gay magazine,
Spartacus
, was arrested for sending indecent literature through the mail; after the release of films centering around bisexual relationships, such as Pasolini's
Teorema
and Schlesinger's
Sunday Bloody Sunday
(for which Pitt had secured Bowie an audition)—that Bowie was finally prepared to admit to his diversity of sexual choices, and more important to use bisexuality as a fashionable PR tool. Pitt was given no credit; this was a Bowie/Defries production. Within a few months, Bowie was placing his arm casually around Mick Ronson's shoulders on
Top of the Pops
and miming fellatio to Ronson's guitar onstage, producing an image that was immediately milked by Defries's organization for its full shock value.

In 1969, Bowie would have been breaking genuinely new—and potentially threatening—ground. By 1972, the US garage rock band Alice Cooper was already ensconced as rock's cartoon transvestites, with Alice himself noting, “Everyone is part man and part woman, and the people who are threatened by us haven't dealt with their own sexuality. People are really surprised when they meet us and find out that we're all straight.” He would soon be reinforcing that point with a tongue-in-cheek boast about the fourteen-to-sixteen-year-old girls who dominated their audience: “We get so much action from them, it's untrue.” If gay stars were still shocking, seventies society chose not to be concerned about rock's infatuation with what was lasciviously known as “jailbait.” Yet Bowie's “I'm gay” statement still won him more publicity than his recent
Hunky Dory
album, preparing a reputation that would serve him well when he donned the disguise—the week after that interview appeared—of the gender-ambiguous, alien-origin Ziggy Stardust. If Ziggy was a cartoon like Alice, at least he existed in three dimensions.

Together, these two reprobates certainly left their mark. One American rock writer noted that 1972 had become “the year of the transvestite.” Bowie's buddy Mick Ronson was persuaded to board the wagon: “I'm gay,” he explained helpfully, “inasmuch as I wear girls' shoes and have bangles on my wrist. I get offers, too—but I don't accept them.” Established British star Cliff Richard, for whom the very existence of sexuality seemed troubling, was certainly shocked: “Bowie is physically a man no matter what he does, and I think it must be pretty confusing for his audiences. I mean, it doesn't help young people when they see him like that.” It took Lou Reed—the man who would pose with a boyfriend named Rachel on an album cover, and then deny every imaginable rumor about himself a decade later—to separate artifice from action: “Just because you're gay doesn't mean you have to camp around in make-up. You just can't fake being gay. If they claim they're gay, they're going to have to make love in a gay style, and most of these people aren't capable of making that commitment. And that line—‘everybody's bisexual'—that's a very popular thing to say right now. I think it's meaningless.”

Bowie continued to milk the image of bisexuality throughout Ziggy's lifetime, aided by a growing entourage replete with gays, transvestites, and every variant between. In later years, he was altogether more ambiguous on the subject. For example, in 1976 he was able to tell one interviewer, “It's true, I am a bisexual,” adding that he admired the looks of Japanese boys aged eighteen to nineteen; while telling another, “Positively not. That was just a lie. . . . They gave me that image. . . . I never adopted that stance. It was given [to] me.” He completed his denials by pretending in the latter interview that he had never heard of Lou Reed until he was compared to him in 1971 (see [A42]).

A more sensible Bowie came clean to Paul Du Noyer in 2002: “I found I was able to get a lot of tension off my shoulders by almost ‘outing' myself in the press in that way. . . . I wasn't going to get people crawling out the woodwork saying, ‘I'll tell you something about David Bowie that you don't know.' It perfectly mirrored my lifestyle at the time. There was nothing that I wasn't willing to try.” That was the spirit of Ziggy, recalled in a more accepting age by a man who no longer needed to care about his image. In any case, hyped or otherwise, his pronouncement in January 1972 genuinely cheered those who knew precisely which way they were leaning. As Boy George recalled in his autobiography, “Even if Bowie's claim that he was bisexual was a fashionable hoax, he marginalized himself for a sizeable chunk of his career. He took a risk that nobody else dared and in the process changed many lives.” Tom Robinson, whose “Glad to Be Gay” in 1977 became the uncompromising anthem that Bowie was unwilling to provide, noted: “When Bowie came up with
Hunky Dory
, I knew what he was talking about, and it affected my life in an enormous way. Had that message been stronger, and not broadcast on the radio, I'd never have heard it.” Bowie's hype became a generation's lifeline.

 

[54] VELVET GOLDMINE

(Bowie)

Recorded November 1971; single B-side

“Probably the lyrics are a little too provocative,” Bowie warned in 1972 about this teen sex fantasy oozing with references to oral sex. Though he sold himself as a King Volcano, by the second verse he was already exhausted. Like “Sweet Head” [55], “Velvet Goldmine” was recorded for
Ziggy Stardust
, but sensibly exiled: even after John Lennon had posed naked on an album cover,
*
the pop world was not ready for a star who suggested bathing his lover's face in semen.

The song was a tribute to the creative possibilities aroused by the Velvet Underground, rather than a pastiche of their sound(s); musically, it owed more to a fusion of Gene Vincent's fifties rock'n'roll and the electric thrust of Marc Bolan. It burst into action without even a minimal fanfare, as if the narrator were ready to explode, the combined electric/acoustic guitar assault grinding back and forth relentlessly across the tonic-subdominant chord change. But the guitars disappeared in the chorus, an altogether more sinister exercise in minor chords—more apt for the Berlin cabaret than New York's Lower East Side. By the close, it sounded like a parade of Nazi troops humming their way to the front line (compare “Ching-A-Ling,” [A55]), accompanied by operatic guffaws—a heady cocktail for Ziggy's admirers to swallow.

 

[55] SWEET HEAD

(Bowie)

Recorded November 1971;
Ziggy Stardust
extended CD

The effect of introducing “Sweet Head” and “Velvet Goldmine” [54] to the sketchy scenario of
Ziggy Stardust
would have been profound. Was Ziggy, one wonders, specifically designed to be the first outwardly gay rock'n'roll star?
*
He would certainly have been the first to sing about “spics” and “blacks,” language that located the opening verse in the heart of the borderline racist, white supremacist teddy boy culture that was the British guardroom of rock'n'roll in the mid-fifties.

That language littered the opening chapters of Nik Cohn's novel
I Am Still the Greatest Says Johnny Angelo
(see “The Making of a Star #2,” page 164) and “Sweet Head” suggested that regardless of the sexual inclinations of “Brother Ziggy,” he and Johnny Angelo were very much cut from the same egomaniacal cloth. (Note the way in which Bowie issued instructions to whichever groupie, of whatever gender, happened to be servicing his mighty organ.) That made them blood brothers to the genuine fifties rockers, men like Jerry Lee Lewis, who could easily have sung, like Bowie, about their desire for the young
*
and the loud. For the first and, arguably, only time in his career, Bowie set out to re-create the sound of the fifties, as filtered through the young American sensibility of bands such as the Flamin' Groovies and the MC5. His vocal was stuffed with bravado, fleet-footed, sneeringly confident, rolling his “rrrs” and turning “wall” into a feline howl.

After a power chord introduction (A major to A6), Bowie built the bulk of “Sweet Head” around the simple E-A progression that was, insisted his friend Lou Reed, the heart of rock'n'roll. Only the middle section dipped briefly into the vulnerability of a minor chord, before reverting to the swagger of the majors. Bowie delivered the most convincing rock vocal of his entire career, only to sideline this stunning performance in favor of more subtle, and cerebral, material.

Several other songs were apparently recorded by the Spiders during this period, but permanently shelved, including “The Black Hole Kids,” “It's Gonna Rain Again,” and “Only One Paper Left.”

 

[56] FIVE YEARS

(Bowie)

Recorded November 1971;
Ziggy Stardust
LP

Bob Dylan once claimed
*
that he wrote “A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall” in response to the Cuban Missile Crisis, filling each line with the ingredients for an entire song because he was afraid the world would end before he could finish them all. “Five Years,” the first act of
Ziggy Stardust
, was Bowie's equivalent: snapshots of the end times, which were survived only—like cockroaches after a nuclear holocaust—by the ominous drumbeats that had introduced the song. His jump cuts through urban decay moved from a market square that might be in England to a fantasy America of symbols and stereotypes—the Cadillac, the “black,” the “queer,” and a girl carelessly fixated on her milk shake, mocked by Bowie in a sarcastic recitative. His narrator watched dispassionately at first, before his humanity took hold, and he was seized by the urgency of imminent apocalypse. But crisis seemed surreal, and once again Bowie identified himself as an actor. (In an amusing echo of a Monty Python catchphrase, he also complained that his brain hurt.)

Bowie's vocal was certainly delivered with an actor's certainty. As he moved almost imperceptibly from calm to hysteria, his voice nearly shredded under the strain, culminating in a primal scream reminiscent of John Lennon's anguish on his 1970 song “Mother.” That was not a coincidence: “Five Years,” which used the I-vi-IV-V structure of a thousand doo-wop songs, was set to a stark, minimal piano accompaniment in the “Mother” style, gradually becoming more ornate until it sounded like another song from the same Lennon album, “God.” But whereas Lennon stripped down his accompaniment to a basic trio, Bowie's song added an autoharp to emphasize key chords, and then acoustic guitar and strings for the second verse. By the finale, the orchestral players were fighting for air against amplified guitar static, scraping despairingly at their own instruments while the last of the human race screamed around them.

There were just five years
*
left, Bowie insisted till the last, but the apocalypse was unfolding right now, regardless of what he had promised. Had he telescoped time, replaying his warning to prove that he had been right? Or was he demonstrating the powerlessness of the prophet? That ambiguity reverberated through the album that followed, undermining trust in soothsayers, heroes, and even starmen from beyond our world.

 

[57] SOUL LOVE

(Bowie)

Recorded November 1971;
Ziggy Stardust
LP

“Soul Love” followed “Five Years” [56] on
Ziggy
, and mimicked its portentous drum rhythm (and the priest among its cast of characters). After the panoramic vision of the apocalypse, it apparently offered a more optimistic landscape, with bongos and acoustic guitar signaling mellow fruitfulness. Then Bowie's voice appeared: dull, jaded, depressed, sapped of vitality, as if he'd stumbled briefly into a warning of
Low
spirits five years ahead.