Bowie: A Biography (19 page)

“He seemed to think, ‘Right, Hermione’s gone, that’s what we’re gonna do now,’” Hutchinson says.
“Bookends
had come out. Simon & Garfunkel were big. With them as role models, we did some demos. Bedroom tapes. Two guitars going. He would always just say, ‘I’ve got a couple of new ones,’ and play them for me. There was one called ‘Lover Till the Dawn.’ There was another, a song about a spaceman that I thought was a bit more unusual. It had come to him in part because of the current in those days. Space travel just started to happen. But you know that songs write themselves. You get an idea. The song comes to you. He said, ‘Silly one, but here it is.’ I don’t think we thought it was anything special. The title was just a piss-take on the Kubrick film.”

“I remember he came ’round once to that flat that I was in and he said ‘I’ve just written this song a half an hour ago,’” says Gillespie. “And then he got up and strummed the chords and sang: ‘Ground control to Major Tom. Ground control to Major Tom.’ And I thought, ‘What an odd choice of lyric.’ People weren’t writing about things like that.”

If the end of his love affair with Hermione and some form of narcotics-fueled isolation contributed to the vibe of “Space Oddity,” the tale of an astronaut, Major Tom, who deviates from his mission and winds up helplessly floating in space forever, then the catalyst for bringing it all together was indeed Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film adaptation of science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke’s
2001: A Space Odyssey
. The film had opened in the West End that spring and attracted all kinds of “heads” with their stashes to figure out what the nonlinear and often dialogue-free images meant: “Okay, the tapirs are living among the monkeys until the monolith appears. That’s when mankind becomes violent! And the monkeys are no longer vegetarian and … whoa! Pass the liquid cannabis tincture, Bud.”

It’s most likely the early scene in which an astronaut communicates with his daughter on her birthday that inspired “Space Oddity” more
than the film’s iconic opening and paranoid ending. “Tell mama that I telephoned,” he says before ingesting a “stress pill.” The notion of space exploration compromising concrete familial affection or unity appealed to the newly single David, someone who had grown up with a short supply of the security and attention any child requires.

Calvin Mark Lee knew that “Space Oddity” marked his chance to get Bowie signed to Mercury, so undeniable was its hit potential given the strength of the melody and the “space fever” that had taken over popular culture in the months leading up to the July
Apollo 11
mission. At the start of ’69, defying Lou Reizner’s anti-Bowie sentiment, he financed the recording of a demo using Mercury equipment and studio time. “We had to do it all behind Lou’s back,” he tells me, his voice swelling with excitement nearly forty years later. “But it was such a
good
record.”

When Pitt heard the recording he was also excited. He knew that this was something that he could use to secure a new record deal, although he was suspicious about Calvin Lee and Mercury, largely because it was not an English institution but rather partnered with a UK label, Phillips. Its headquarters in Chicago were the object of rumors about mob ties. Pitt even found the money to shoot a promotional clip for the song to add to the
Love You Till Tuesday
film. The result is more like
Barbarella
(the campy, Roger Vadim–directed science fiction film also released that year) than Kubrick. It shows Bowie, looking unnervingly like John Denver in greasy hair and granny glasses, clad in a silver lamé space suit (supplied by Lee) and frolicking with two space babes, played by model Samantha Bond and production assistant Suzanne Mercer. Director Malcolm Thomson reportedly wanted the babes to get it on with Major Tom on camera, but Pitt objected.

The first time “Bowie and Hutch” performed “Space Oddity” live at the Marquee they realized that they were able to captivate the crowd with the dramatically sung dialogue. Hutchinson would sing the part of “ground control.” Bowie would answer as Major Tom. And during the climax, when the “tin can” floats off into eternity, Bowie would play a small electronic keyboard device known as a Stylophone, given to him by Marc Bolan, who also declared correctly that David had written his first big hit.

“The audiences grew because it was so unusual,” Hutchinson says. “The small gigs that we did, he would turn up with that Stylophone. He also had an ocarina. You blew into it and it made a funny kind of noise. He didn’t care if it was a joke instrument. He was quite happy because it was something that really made an impression on an audience.”

Calvin Lee got his way, and ultimately Bowie signed a very modest deal with Mercury Records (without John Hutchinson, who would once again be called away by family obligation). Pre–“Space Oddity,” Bowie was so marginalized that his deal had to go through the label’s New York offices. He was an English singer/songwriter who could not even get a proper deal with the United Kingdom–based parent company of his American label. The first order of business was to record a proper studio version of “Space Oddity” for release as a single. Bowie assumed that Tony Visconti would be the producer of “Space Oddity” and was disappointed when his friend passed. Although he has since revised his opinion, Visconti apparently thought the track was a cynical means to cash in on the excitement surrounding the NASA launch, essentially a novelty record. Gus Dudgeon, a sound engineer affiliated with Cordell and Essex, had worked on smashes like the Zombies’ “She’s Not There” and quickly realized that a potential new one was within his reach. He jumped at it, dismissing Visconti’s wariness. “Well, he’s mad,” Dudgeon said at the time.

“During the session, dear Gus was quaking in his boots. It might have been the first thing he ever produced,” Herbie Flowers, who plays bass on the single, said. “And I know he only booked me because of my name. Gus and I were from a jazzier background; we were more into Miles Davis and Charlie Parker than Elvis. ‘Space Oddity’ was this strange hybrid song. With the Stylophone and all the string arrangements, it’s like a semiorchestral piece.”

The new version of “Space Oddity,” recorded in London’s Trident Studios (where Bowie would record nearly all of his early seventies music) on June 20, would be an epic. The arrangements were plotted on the studio bulletin board with all the precision of an actual lunar mission. Strings come in here. Herbie Flowers’s bass here. Mick Wayne’s guitar here. Trident’s resident keyboardist Rick Wakeman, who would soon go on to great fame with Yes, was brought in to play the Mellotron, a proto-synthesizer
that had been made famous by the Beatles two years earlier on “Strawberry Fields Forever.”

“Gus and David were looking for a Mellotron player and Tony Visconti recommended me,” Wakeman says today. He arrived at the studio to find a more hands-on artist/producer collaboration than any he’d seen before. Even in the late sixties, a producer, it was understood, was the didactic voice. The artist was the compliant craftsman.

“Gus was a different class. He worked to get on tape what the artist wanted,” Wakeman says. According to Visconti, much of the arrangement was indeed David’s creation. “David was light years ahead of how the industry thought. Simple as that. I didn’t think it was a novelty song at all. I thought it was astonishing.”

Once it was finished, Lee, the technophile, stepped in again to ensure that the single would be truly monumental. “I wanted a couple things done and got them to do it,” he tells me. “I wanted the single to be mixed in stereo. That had never been done for a single before. I also wanted to make sure it was as long as possible. Not just three minutes. And I wanted David’s picture on the sleeve, which was also hardly ever done [singles were usually issued in plain paper sleeves with the name of the label printed on it]. I wanted to give his first single for Mercury a huge sense of impact.”

His first single for the label has also become, in a way, David Bowie’s signature song, traditionally the first track on any of his many best-of compilations. It’s as good an introduction as you will get to his peerless period (say, ’69–83). Forty years on, it remains one of the half dozen David Bowie songs that are played daily on American classic rock radio, and to hear the watery acoustic guitar intro rise slowly from a segue of, say, a Joe Walsh or Bad Company song provides lasting proof of just how powerful a song it was and remains. It’s a mood changer. It’s a put-down-what-you’re-doing-and-pay-attention-to-this kind of song, a five-minute story song with sonic invention and vocal charisma to burn. In the spring of 1969, shortly before its rush release, it seemed like the only thing that could stop “Space Oddity” from its destiny of becoming David’s first genuine hit single was the failure of NASA and its astronauts themselves. This was in fact something discussed by the Mercury marketing and publicity departments.

“We took a big chance,” Lee says. “If anything happened to the
astronauts, the record would tank. He sings about being lost in space. Nobody would play it. Oh, but it was such a
good
record.”

8.

T

HE
T
HERE
T
UNS
P
UB
, in the London suburb of Beckenham, is where David Bowie cofounded Growth, an “Arts Lab” designed to spread consciousness and import the progressive ideas of London and San Francisco to suburbia. The Arts Lab was basically a meeting held every Sunday in the pub’s rear (it’s now a Zizzi fast food Italian chain restaraunt) and yet the modest venture, drawn from David’s romantic and cultural partnership with a recently divorced journalist and mother of two named Mary Finnegan, would provide David with his first permanent base outside of his childhood home in nearby Bromley as well as another quasi-family that would create a pattern for the more flamboyant entourages and professional retinues that would mark his life in the seventies and eighties. More important, Finnegan’s modest home on shady Foxgrove Road and the “Lab” (essentially the pub’s back room) would be a place to write and perform his new material. Strumming his Gibson on his tiny bed on Plaistow Grove was fine, but as his songwriting became more ambitious and expansive, he knew he would require more space and equipment, and soon the already tiny area grew crowded with equipment. Finnegan was older, having married and had children in her late teens and early twenties. Taking jobs at various London newspapers and commuting, as Bowie did, via rail, the dark-haired, elegant-looking woman was experiencing a belated sense of abandon when she first encountered Bowie (who had been visiting her neighbor and mutual friend, the local artist Christina Ostrom, and her then boyfriend Barry). “I didn’t have a youth,” she says today. “So by the time I got to London, I caught up with my youth effectively. I became a hippie. I kept my domestic life going all the time. I was quite responsible about my kids. I made sure that their needs were met.”

Mary Finnegan was charmed upon meeting Bowie and quickly invited him to become a lodger, despite his inability to pay any regular
rent. “I offered him my spare room and he accepted that. Was somewhat taken aback by the mountain of audio equipment he moved in. He was an established name in the music business but he was totally down on his luck then,” Finnegan says. “Penniless. I supported him for quite a few months. No money at all. Flat broke. But he was living with his parents and he was desperate to get away. I didn’t feel sorry for him; he wasn’t that sort of person. He had a sort of inherent strength. I just liked him very much. Very exciting. Played stunningly good music. Charismatic, enormously good fun to be around. Lots of people recognized his talent even then. He just wasn’t making it and he was very worried. Profoundly worried.”

At twenty-two, David Bowie was now a veteran in the UK pop world, signed to his third label. He had survived his parents’ remoteness and the specter of his brother’s illness by finding solace and understanding in music. The advanced self-education process of the previous two and a half years, spent studying Buddhism and devouring the libraries and lectures of both Kenneth Pitt and Lindsay Kemp, had also strengthened his values. But they had also solidified a conflict, one of real art vs. commercial art, that began at Bromley Tech and would last for the rest of David Bowie’s career. This conflict was set in cement at the Beckenham Arts Lab.

“The Arts Lab was originally going to be a folk club,” Finnegan says, “just David having an outlet to perform, but it soon became a place where all sorts of ideas were met with unbridled enthusiasm and intensity. The least likely place you would imagine. It couldn’t be more sleepy middle-class suburban. With the Lab, what we wanted to do was reach out to people and broaden their horizons. His means of reaching people psychologically and socially was via music and entertainment. Also street theater. We would walk up and down the Beckenham High Street dressed up in the most outrageous outfits. Engaging with people on a grassroots level. Really quite shocking. Not political in the sense that we would interpret that word today. More social action. Not talking; doing. Taking art into the streets and making it accessible. Taking it out of its ivory tower.”

Bowie found that he could reconnect with his Buddhist spirituality via the Lab as well. “He was still quite serious about Buddhism. But he’d given up that serious intent by the time I’d met him,” Finnegan recalls. “I think he realized that if he was going to carry it through he was going to
become a monk. Show business and Buddhism didn’t really mix and match for him.”

Show business and Buddhism. Art and commerce. These tides seem to be constantly at odds churning inside David Bowie, each a powerful force, bringing with it a strong wave and ultimately a violent collision and temporary abandonment. Sometimes the friction produced brilliant chemistry, other times it led him too far from his better angels, but the rhythm of the waves, art and commerce, vice and verse never stops. Those Bowie fans who care to look into such things can clearly see this pattern. It’s a “one for them, one for me” rhythm that many other great artists with an uncanny knack for commercial appeal but an unceasing need to use their gifts to get at a hard truth have employed (artists like Radiohead and filmmaker Steven Spielberg come to mind). Is there any difference between Bowie going from his hit “Plastic Soul” period of ’75 and ’76 to his highly experimental trio of “Berlin” records with Eno, and, say, Steven Spielberg’s
Jurassic Park–to–Schindler’s List
trajectory? Every concession to hitmaking and crowd-pleasing is usually followed by one that seeks answers or understanding without fear of getting as far-out as possible. This would accelerate in the eighties and nineties, a reaction to the unforeseen and certainly unprecedented success of
Let’s Dance
. He’d follow
Tonight
, the lackluster 1984 follow-up to
Let’s Dance
, with his far edgier, proudly English and insular work on the
Absolute Beginners
soundtrack. His lazy duet with Mick Jagger on Martha and the Vandellas’ “Dancing in the Street” (which was recorded for charity, so I won’t go into how utterly shit it is) was followed by an ’86 reunion with Iggy Pop on the
Blah Blah Blah
record.
Never Let Me Down
, perhaps his most cynical and commercial release, and its Spinal Tap–like Glass Spider Tour in 1987 were immediately followed by his work with the self-consciously noisy, arty and gleefully irritating “band” Tin Machine. From there we go to the crowd-pleasing and catalog-value-stoking best-of live shows, the Sound and Vision revue. A reunion with Nile Rodgers, the architect of the
Let’s Dance
sound, followed with 1993’s
Black Tie White Noise. The Buddha of Suburbia
, a completely uncommercial soundtrack to a BBC miniseries that was not even released in America and was Bowie’s best work of the nineties, succeeded that, and it goes on and on. He protected himself from the dirty business of turning “Space Oddity”
into a hit by immersing himself in the rising Arts Lab–style collective culture that was spreading throughout Britain in the late sixties.