Bowie: A Biography (25 page)

Defries and Bowie requested confirmation that Pitt would cease to
be Bowie’s personal manager from that point on. Pitt was a wreck. “I felt only sadness and, sadly, I put the letter aside.” Days later, Pitt responded to the letter, suggesting that they meet and discuss a civil way to dissolve their professional relationship. He also suggested an alternative scenario in which he would continue to be involved with Bowie professionally but only as a handler of contracts and other paperwork. Defries shot this down quickly. He wanted a clean and fast break.

“When this was all happening, Ken did come and see me. We did talk about it two or three times and I did advise him that he was riding a wave that he was in no position to control,” Olav Wyper says today. “And my advice to him was to do a deal with Defries and Myers if he could and get what he could out of it. He had no chance of riding that wave with David. And he should get off and get the best deal he could.”

Pitt, Bowie and Defries had an awkward meeting on May 7, 1970. While Defries spoke, David stared off into space, silent and frail looking. Pitt instinctively detected that Defries was not just David’s legal representation but his next manager as well. Pitt informed Defries that there was compensation due for his losses as well as a percentage of David’s future earnings. Defries agreed and promised to come up with an appropriate figure (at the time Pitt was reportedly willing to settle for a mere two thousand pounds). When the meeting was over David shook Pitt’s hand and left him with a simple “Thank you, Ken.” And then it was over. From his window, Pitt watched Bowie and Defries walk up Manchester Street and disappear around the corner.

Pitt retired from professional talent management in 1982, has lived in Australia and Washington DC over the years and now spends much of his time in the countryside. He and Bowie have kept in touch. “He sends me rare secondhand books that he knows will interest me and I am sure it is true to say that we continue to respect each other,” Pitt writes.

Liberated from Pitt, Bowie tried to pour all of his energy into completing
The Man Who Sold the World
, but he still could not seem to focus. The musical landscape of the album, Bowie’s hardest and darkest yet, was largely down to Visconti and Ronson (the latter intent on creating a heavy blues record worthy of Cream). Bowie, as a rule very good about giving credit to collaborators when it was due, admitted as much, telling
Mojo
, “The sonic landscape was Visconti’s. The band contribution—
how the drums and bass should work together with the guitar—was something Mick got really involved in.”

Visconti and Ronson bonded in the studio. A sharp student of music since his preadolescence, Mick used this opportunity to learn as many production and arrangement techniques as possible. “He was with me all the time, even on the mixes,” Visconti told
Mojo
. “He would ask me tons of questions: ‘Why am I doing this?’ ‘Is it possible to do this?’ I was so glad to have a person that keen on the team because Bowie was really uninterested.”

While producer Visconti and Ronson were forming the album’s musical vision, Bowie spent much of his time shopping with Angela. Terry Burns, during one of his intermittent periods outside of the Cane Hill asylum, had come to live with them in Haddon Hall. On many of the lyrics, which were written often moments before the vocals were due to be recorded, David drew some inspiration from this proximity: it was the closest he and his half brother had been been since the 1950s.

“I just tended him and treated him like a special guest and spent time with him and just chatted away,” Angie has said of this period. “He was a very well-read man and a very interesting man, but with the drugs that were prescribed, he would tend to really not talk too much. I think David attempted to be up-front about the fact that his brother was unwell and it was an excuse for himself later during drug-induced paranoia.”

Much of the lyrical content on
The Man Who Sold the World
seems to be abstracted observations of Terry’s life, both inner and outer. The most explicit of these are the title track, the prog rock “Width of a Circle” (which has no less than three guitar solos!) and “All the Madmen.” The former marks his first real foray into homoerotic lyricism (“He showed me his leather belt round his hips”). The latter is a terrifying track, beginning slowly, with a humdrum narrative device “Day after day” and thundering into a terrifying chorus with Ronson slashing out his protometal chords and Bowie promising, “I can fly, I will scream, I will break my arm, / I will do me harm.” There’s black wit (“Give me some good old lobotomy”) and a folky outro chant of “Zane, zane, zane /
Ouvre le chien,”
which would go on to become a hallmark of sorts, appearing on both 1994’s
Buddha of Suburbia
soundtrack and as a slogan printed on the back drop of his 1995 tour in support
of Outside
.

Its literal translation is “open the dog.”

“Black Country Rock” is a funky T. Rex homage that some interpreted as a piss take on Bowie’s ascending rival (à la Simon & Garfunkel’s 1966 Dylan parody “A Simple Desultory Philippic,” Paul McCartney’s broadly Lennonesque “Let Me Roll It” or Weird Al Yankovic’s Devo homage “Dare to Be Stupid”). If nothing else, it’s a testament to Bowie’s expert style mimicry. Employing his gift for mimicry, he out-Bolans Bolan. His old friend was reportedly upset upon first hearing it but came to see it, as he came to see most everything, as a tribute.

“After All,” with its “Oh, by jingo” refrain, is another throwback to his late sixties penchant for English macabre. Bowie sounds like Boris Karloff settling down for a pot of cozy-warmed Darjeeling in the hollow of a cold marble crypt. “Running Gun Blues” takes on arms dealing with irony. “I’ll plug a few civilians,” Bowie threatens. “She Shook Me Cold” is Zeppelin-style blues. Best of all is “The Supermen,” a sort of Freidrich-Nietzsche-gets-taken-in-from-the-rain-by-a-family-of-cloaked-Druids psycho-folk work out with an odd Latin tempo. It’s Bowie at his most committal as far as facing and voicing the strange is concerned.

With the album completed and due for an April 1971 release, David began considering the artwork. On one of their frequent shopping trips, he and Angela spied a medieval-style tunic draped over a mannequin in the Mr. Fish boutique in Savile Row (the boutique’s storefront can be seen in a snapshot during the
Love You Till Tuesday
film). The Bowies agreed that this would be an ideal garment to wear on the album’s cover, and although it was prohibitively expensive at nearly a thousand pounds in total, they also snapped up three long, slim, Chinese silk velour dresses in pale green, pink and blue. Bowie, his perm now grown out long and straight, posed while reclining on a divan in the great living room in Haddon Hall.

Upon submitting the cover art to Mercury, the Bowies claimed to be shocked when the executives balked at releasing it as it was. Before the cover was restored on subsequent reissues, the American version depicted a George Underwood cartoon of a demented man with a rifle under his arm and a torn-up cowboy hat atop his head. The Cane Hill asylum, where Underwood was once committed himself after a breakdown, looms in the distance, providing a more or less direct reference to Terry and his illness. The “S” in “sold” is a dollar sign. Why they deemed this more appropriate than a lithe, befrocked Bowie, who can say?

“Bloody philistines!” Bowie reportedly shouted when he first heard news of the label’s reaction to his original cover choice. More likely, however, both Bowie and Angie knew that word of a banned or controversial sleeve would get them lots of ink. It was a throwback to the Manish Boys’ Society for the Preservation of Animal Filament gimmick of 1965. This isn’t to suggest that the couple didn’t find the dress a genuinely pleasing frock. Bowie, according to Stevenson, would even wear it in his downtime. “I went ’round his place and he was wearing it,” he recalls. “It was the type of thing a flamboyant Arab would probably wear in the street.”

Bowie’s androgynous style was not uncommon at the time. Any photo of Mick Jagger circa 1970 would suggest a growing comfort with blurring gender lines. There is also a long tradition of drag among British performers from Shakespearean productions up to the Rolling Stones gussying themselves up for the cover of their “Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing in the Shadow” single sleeve.
Monty Python’s Flying Circus
, launched the previous year, featured drag performances in nearly every episode via Terry Jones or Graham Chapman.

“Lots of English comedians dressed up as women,” Hanif Kureishi says. “It’s part of English culture to dress up as a girl. It’s all performance and putting on voices. Messing about. It’s not the same as being gay.
All
Englishmen dressed as women.”

Bowie debuted the songs from the upcoming record in front of a crowd of just 1,500 that summer during the very first Glastonbury Fayre, which is now the massive and prestigious annual summer gathering the Glastonbury Festival of Contemporary Performing Arts. The event was held on a farm in the southwestern countryside by Glastonbury Tor, a hill where, according to Arthurian legend, the Holy Grail was supposedly buried. Bowie performed with Traffic, the Grateful Dead, Hawkwind and headliners T. Rex, among others. Glastonbury was the latest in a series of concert events (beginning with Monterey Pop in 1968) that seemed to confirm rock ’n’ roll’s power to unite and its key role not just in culture, but in the political world as well. Shortly before traveling to the event, Bowie completed a new song that reflected both this shift as well as his personal journey. “I was already a Beatnik, I had to be a Hippie …,” he wrote in a letter to his songwriting publisher that fall. “Now I am 24 and I am married and I am not at all heavy. And I’m still writing and my wife is pregnant …”

These developments are as scary to young people today as they were in 1970. Before “Changes,” however, they had no anthem to assuage them. “Turn and face the strange,” he sang, most likely to himself. The bridge, however, is directed to his parents’ generation: “And these children that you spit on / As they try to change their world / They’re immune to your consultations / They’re quite aware of what they’re going through.” A sentiment as old as the Grail itself but so eloquent (even when he swaps “spit” for “shit” on 1974’s
David Live
album) in delivery and conviction that John Hughes would use them to open 1985’s
The Breakfast Club
, all alone on a black title card. It would not be David’s last anthem. He has many (“All the Young Dudes,” “Heroes”), but “Changes” (which would open his 1971 album
Hunky Dory)
is his most durable. It’s a young person’s song that manages to follow David through his career with grace and not nostalgia (even when he brought it out during his 2000 headlining set at the now massive Glastonbury festival).

Haddon Hall’s gothic splendor was demolished in the mid-seventies and converted into a block of ugly flats that must have felt very modern at the time. Thirty years or so onward, it’s now a real eyesore. It resembles a Travelodge off the interstate, with thick, frosted glass windows and drab brown bricks. There’s a row of garages, and the great driveway where Bowie’s Jaguar was parked has been converted into a parking lot. Haddon Hall’s current landscape exudes none of the energy of its legendary days, and the titanic music that was dreamed up inside can no longer be heard. Many of its current residents probably have no idea that they live in the haunted house of the modern age.

11.

W

HEN THE
I
RISH LITERARY AESTHETE
Oscar Wilde disembarked from the USS
Arizona
on January 3, 1882, in his green coat, seal-trimmed collar, blue necktie, silken turban and patent leather shoes, he was famously asked by customs officers, “Have you anything to declare?” and answered, cigarette in hand, “I have nothing to
declare except my genius.” The press from every major newspaper, including the
Saturday Evening Post
, the
Herald
and the
World
, was there to cover his first trip to America. When Bowie—at this point intent on being part of the continuum of aesthetes both decadent and profound, and determined to represent a modern-day version of Wilde’s fin de siècle philosophy and pose—went through customs at Washington’s Dulles International Airport on January 27, 1971, only Mercury publicist Ron Oberman was waiting … with his parents.

It was determined that Washington soil, rather than that of Chicago or New York, would be the first that Bowie would step on, and not for any real strategic reason. Oberman was more or less his only companion in and liaison to this new world, and he happened to be staying there with his parents.

Bowie, who would later develop a notorious fear of flying, flew eagerly, having almost no experience to base any rational fear on. While he had no work visa and could not legally perform, Oberman was determined to introduce him to the right people (hip journalists, ambivalent but charmable Mercury employees) at coordinated exhibitions in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco. The
Man Who Sold the World
album, which was released in November of 1970, was not a hit. Mercury
had
managed to break Rod Stewart on a global scale. His single “Maggie May” was number one on both sides of the Atlantic. Also in 1971, Marc Bolan and T. Rex had an American hit with “Bang a Gong” (curiously only after altering the song’s original UK title “Get It On”). Elton John, another figure from the Marquee Club rhythm and blues scene, was quickly becoming one of the biggest stars in pop. Even Bowie’s old Deram Records labelmate Cat Stevens was becoming a big star in America. His melancholy “Wild World” was ubiquitous on AM radio. The thinking was that if only Americans could meet Bowie, via the press, and see how charismatic and unique he was, he would surely be next in line. It would not be so easy, of course. Bowie was more authentically arty and different than any of these peers, certainly more so than Tony Orlando and Dawn, the Osmonds, Bread and other American hit makers of the time. Even getting through customs was a challenge: “We were waiting outside the plane, fifteen minutes, half an hour, forty-five minutes; there was no sign of him,” Ron Oberman says. When Bowie emerged through
the gate an hour and a half later, Oberman was relieved. “I said, ‘What happened?’ And he answered, ‘Oh, they held me on the plane. Maybe because I look so strange.’”