Bowie: A Biography (20 page)
Read Bowie: A Biography Online
Authors: Marc Spitz
Kenneth Pitt and the staff of Phillips and Mercury Records were struggling to take care of the commerce in the summer of ’69. Meanwhile “Space Oddity” made its unofficial debut before a crowd of thousands during a Rolling Stones concert in London’s Hyde Park on July 5, 1969, at their memorial concert for the recently deceased founding member of the band Brian Jones. This was alternative marketing four decades before iPod ads and movie trailer bumpers, but at the time, it was marginalized. It was pop chart success or nothing. Kenneth Pitt, confident that this was the one, reached into his own pockets to try to pay off a “chart rigger” and get his boy on the almighty
Top of the Pops
, shelling out, according to his memoir, 140 pounds and seeing the single rise to number 48 almost immediately.
“At the top of my head, I kept hearing David’s plaintive cry, ‘I just wish something would break soon,’” Pitt writes in his memoir, “and constantly it was spurring me on.”
“Chart success
was
success,” says Simon Napier-Bell. “It wasn’t an illusion of success. A top ten record meant
Top of the Pops
. That generated more sales. That meant live performances,
New Musical Express
interviews,
Melody Maker, Record Mirror
. All this for a hundred and forty quid in a chart fixer’s hand. What a bargain! And in all of these things, Britain, all America, it still is. Illusion first, success follows. That’s the music business.”
In 2009 if a radio DJ receives a vodka-based cocktail or a pair of basketball sneakers from a major label, the leaked e-mails end up a major news story on corruption in the media. In the sixties, such transactions were frowned upon but rampant to the point of being banal. Still, for all of Pitt’s efforts and even with the power of NASA on his side, he could not, in the summer of 1969, turn “Space Oddity” into a real hit. He didn’t lack drive or strategy; it was the record label staff who had no idea how to create a hit. The people with all the money and power did not know how to apply it.
All the while, Bowie was running on a much more organic energy source; he spent his long, sunny afternoons hippie-strumming for a few dozen people atop a simple wooden stool among the block tables and stored casks in the Three Tuns’ sunny back room. “I remember him getting
ready for the Arts Lab one Sunday evening, about four of us lying around in his room. He was playing the Gibson twelve-string, a total outpouring of spontaneous music. Just came out of him,” Finnegan says. “It was just absolutely totally superb. Brilliant off the cuff. Some very wonderful music happening. After the Arts Lab, everybody who had performed used to come back to Foxgrove Road and stay up until two or three in the morning. Lots of spontaneous jamming.”
As the hit single he’d spent the entire decade pursuing was about to chart, Bowie had convinced himself that the pursuit of authenticity was his “chief occupation” and boasted to a reporter about the Lab: “There isn’t one pseud involved. All the people are real—like laborers or bank clerks.” It was easy to view Kenneth Pitt with a measure of cynicism as the hippie movement placed his old-fashioned manners and dress in sharper relief. The Arts Lab, like Turquoise and Feathers, baffled the older man, and he kept away.
“To call it an Arts Laboratory was a bit of a misnomer,” Pitt has said. “It was just a room attached to the Three Tuns Pub.”
Guitarist Keith Christmas, who would play on the
Space Oddity
album and hung out and performed at the Lab that summer, was only a bit more charitable.
“It was just a wee committee of people,” he says. “It was all sort of quite peace and love in a very middle-class sort of way. Beckenham is a sort of suburb of London which is very middle-class. Terribly, terribly middle-class. It had a big garden out the back. It was sort of terraced and it was stretched back to the car park. So of course in those days when sort of smoking dope was fairly illegal, people could go out in the garden and smoke and chat.”
It’s fair to surmise that the infectious, almost pathological focus and drive of the young Angie Bowie, then Mary Angela Barnett (and only a few months out of her teens), was a force that ultimately helped steer David away from the leafy, insular Arts Lab life and its attendant navel-gazing complacency, and toward the earth-shaking rocker he would become in the seventies. Angie had known of David, having been briefly introduced to him by Calvin Mark Lee during a performance of Feathers at the Roundhouse, a converted railway roundhouse, on March 3, 1968.
How Angie materialized is a matter that varies according to different people’s recollection. Bowie notoriously informed Cameron Crowe during
their September 1976
Playboy
interview, “Angela and I knew each other because we were going out with the same man.” While it is not chronologically perfect, the statement is more or less an accurate one. “I think David was very, very open in that interview,” Calvin Mark Lee says. “I was having an affair with Angie. And I did introduce her to him at the Roundhouse. So we were going around with the same person.”
“I was absolutely gobsmacked to find out about her,” says Finnegan, who was convinced that she and David were monogamous. “Shattered. Deeply deeply miffed. I was really hurt. Once we established some common ground it became clear she’d been around pretty well the whole time that he was with me. Although neither Angie or I were aware of it.”
I
have a Polaroid photo of myself and Angie Bowie sitting in a banquette at a friend’s Lower East Side bar. I don’t remember posing for it but for some reason I’ve saved it. It’s about seven years old at the time of this writing, so I would be about thirty-one and Angie would be in her early fifties. She is slim and tan, with high cheekbones, plucked eyebrows and a shock of bleached white hair. She wears a spaghetti-strap black dress and in the photo, one of the straps is falling off. I am wearing sunglasses indoors. I have a cigarette dangling out of my mouth. My hair is short. I wear a short-sleeve black shirt and an iridescent green tie. My head is tilted to the left and touches hers as we pose, as thought we’ve known each other for fifteen years. It was the first time we’d ever met in person. That should tell you something about Angie Bowie’s energy. I’ve asked other people who’ve known her whether or not they felt the same thing upon meeting her in person: a sense of hyperfamiliarity and comfort, as if she’s never stopped being a hostess, coordinator and leader of some kind of ever-flowing outsider scene. I’ve known people like her. The politically incorrect term for some of them is “fag hag,” I suppose, and doing theater in New York, I’ve certainly had my share of association with this type. But there’s something different about Angie, and it’s entirely possible that her place in the larger Bowie myth is that difference. In a way, she is a great artist in her own right, only her art is socialization. I had never thrown a party for anyone in my life and, as I said, was already over thirty when I threw a
party for Angie Bowie. I feted her. Invited friends in the music and publishing industry, took care of the music, the cocktails, took care to make sure she was comfortable, as this type of thing seemed somehow more important than I’d ever thought it could or should be. This photo is a document, in its way, of Angie Bowie’s often unsung but no less great talent
.
I also wish to mention that Randy Jones, the cowboy from the Village People, attended this party. I just want that on the record, since I have no Polaroid of him
.
M
ARY
A
NGELA
B
ARNETT
was born on the northern coast of the island of Cyprus in 1949 to her mother, Helena, and her U.S. Army colonel father, George Barnett. Her father had relocated to Cyprus after the war.
“My father escaped the Depression by leaving America and becoming a mill operator in Saudi Arabia,” she tells me. “Then to the Philippines. Unfortunately the second year that he was there, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. He was in the ROTC. He had no choice but to go up into the mountains and fight in a guerilla war against them. All these people who worked for my father went with them. For three years in the American army no one knew who was alive and who was dead but they kept hearing that the guerilla resistance was harassing the Japanese and generally causing havoc. They couldn’t send supplies. They sent nothing. But for three years they lived in the mountains of north Lausanne. When he came back they asked him to go to DC and become a general. He went on a recruiting tour of America. He saw what was happening in the South and he told them there is no place in these times for an army. ‘The way this country is now, I have fought with brown men for three years and you want to treat these people so badly?’ He wouldn’t accept the generalship. He accepted a mining job in Cyprus instead. He went there as a lowly foreman with no degree in mining yet. For three years they argued with him about the GI Bill. Finally the army gave him his allowance to go to
college. He went back to America for three years and got his degree. My older brother went to college the same time as him. That was the kind of man he was. He was a bona fide person who did what he said. He did not believe he was a hero. That really affected who I am. I’m very focused. I think it’s because of him. My mother encouraged me to learn from him. At that time, women had nothing. They had no choices. No rights. So from when I was born in 1949 to the invention of the Pill in 1962, I had fourteen years of women being broodmares—this is how they were perceived—and women being second-class citizens.”
At age nine, Angie was shipped off to St. George’s, a small, private Swiss boarding school in the city of Clarens. Although comfortable, Angie was one of the only Americans and her family was relatively one of the poorest; her education was funded by her father’s mining firm. It was there that she first discovered her rebellious spirit. “Like most boarding schools there were many rules and regulations,” she writes in
Free Spirit
, the first of her two memoirs. “No gum, no swearing, no playing jacks on hall tables and only two to a piano box during practice.”
She studied all the major subjects as well as art and theater, showing expert aptitude in all areas as a matter of course. “I was a great student. I was a prefect. I couldn’t get into trouble. That wasn’t a possibility. My father and mother couldn’t afford to send me to that school; our company sent me to that school. I was an extension of my father’s dignity. I had to do every single thing correctly, have great grades, be a prefect, be house captain, do everything that had to be done, learn French, learn Spanish, learn Italian. That was my job. The only thing that was of any importance in our house was having a function.”
This isn’t to say that Angie avoided trouble. Her natural inquisitiveness and rebellious spirit often put her at odds with the more provincial aspects of her faith. “Catholic school was a nightmare,” she says. “I couldn’t stand the smell. It smelled of peanut butter and plastic.”
When she was seven she was caught being kissed by a neighbor, incurring the rage of her otherwise good-natured father. “I got beaten within a fuckin’ inch of my life by my father,” she says. “He came back from work and found me with this boy Billy McDonald. Billy said to me, ‘Oh, come into the woodshed,’ and I guess he tried to kiss me. Billy was sent off. My father was just the most wonderfully well-read and pleasant
man I had ever come across, but his face had become like a monster and he chased me into the house. The company, Cyprus Mining Corp., used to provide all the furniture. The bed that was in my room had one of those old-fashioned iron bed frames. He got a camel whip and he tried to swat me. He was red in the face and furious.
“To me it was the most natural thing. The little boy tried to kiss me and I’m nearly murdered? The only thing I wanted to know was why nobody would talk about sex. It was interesting to me. I really had a problem with it. You have to understand we’re talking about the 1950s. Nobody would say jack. No one would explain jack.”
A lifelong intellectual curiosity that directly led to her and David Bowie becoming bisexual rock ’n’ roll liberators a decade and a half later began with the swing of that camel whip. “It has to do with investigating what the problem was with everybody about sex,” she says. “Couldn’t understand it. Didn’t get it. Obviously the motivating feature of the planet. All the major religions were about making cannon fodder so you could recruit more people to your religion, but basically if you’re not fucking everything that moves and inseminating people that you conquer then what’s the point? The whole thing was about sex. They needed more pussy.” Angie has written a slim book on bisexuality called
Bisexuality
(“I do believe in intellectual sexuality,” she writes. “That’s what makes me bounce out of bed every morning and attack life”) and is currently working on a more epic history.
Before studying economics and marketing overseas at Kingston Polytechnic College in London, Angie studied in America at Connecticut College, then a women’s school. There she began an affair with a troubled student named Lorraine. It was a union that the faculty and authorities considered scandalous. “What else was I supposed to do?” she tells me of the affair. “I promised my father I wouldn’t get pregnant.” While at school she began to realize that society was not set up for her to enjoy the kind of options she felt best suited to. “Being someone’s wife was never an option for me.”
Angie’s heroes were, tellingly, all male. “I was big on Gandhi. He was assassinated about the time that I was at school in Switzerland. I read
Nine Hours to Rama
. All about the gentle nature of peace through nonviolence and the whole idea that men and women share all domestic tasks
equally. That resonated with me. I was just crazy about Gandhi. Then when I was at college, as everyone does at college, I read Khalil Gibran books, and that finished any idea of organized religion for me. And with that it finished any kind of idea of being a wife and mother. Do you know Khalil Gibran? He was a very brilliant Lebanese man. Being in school and being alone and isolated, Khalil Gibran was like a toss-back to my home. He was a friend, you know what I mean? Between the covers of a book. And the most important line of his that I remember all the time is that ‘children are the arrows that you shoot from the bow.’ To me that was totally accepted. I never looked back, never wanted to go back and be a child. Never wanted to live amongst my family. [After school] I was happy to be the arrow. Fly through the air.”