Bowie: A Biography (26 page)

Once in America, Oscar Wilde was taken to a fete in New York City where he met the great American poet Walt Whitman. David Bowie was taken to Hofberg’s kosher deli in Silver Springs, Maryland, for a corned beef on rye. Oberman asked Bowie what he would like to do after dropping off the luggage at the hotel in downtown Washington, DC, he’d booked him into. “He said, ‘Oh, I’d really like to meet some American people,’” says Oberman. “Hofberg’s delicatessen had the best corned beef that I’ve ever had in my life. So we went to the restaurant and had a great dinner there.” His first taste of kosher cuisine was accompanied by a lot of curiosity on the part of the locals. “He got a lot of stares,” Oberman says. That night, Bowie attended a suburban kegger. Oberman and his brother drove the star to a house party in nearby Garrett Park. “We walk in and the place is just filled with pot smoke. There are huge bongs being passed around all over this party.”

Bowie had, of course, been fantasizing about America since his pre-teens. It did not disappoint. For someone as shy as he was, it seemed an ideal place socially. People came right up to you. There were no painful silences, no repression. Americans were aggressive and inquisitive and Bowie’s slim, elegantly androgynous appearance fascinated them. They approached and even touched him without hesitation, as if he were some exotic zoo animal.

“He was wide eyed,” Oberman says. “He could not believe he was here. I would say he had the mentality of a tourist. He wanted to see things and meet people.” That the nation itself was essentially broke, with a severely devalued dollar and the unpopular Vietnam War drawing hundreds of thousands to protest in Washington and San Francisco, did not seem to matter. This was the land of Evel Knievel and Muhammad Ali. This was the land of Mickey Mouse (Disney World had recently opened in Orlando). Even our boogey men, like Charlie Manson (then on trial for the Tate-LaBianca murders), had outsized style.

(Of the abovementioned people, only Knievel would not be mentioned in a David Bowie song within three years [although Ali is referred to by his pre-Muslim name Cassius Clay in ’74’s
Diamond Dogs
track
“Candidate”]. And this may be due to his rhyming options [discounting “Evel” itself, or “evil,” what do you have left besides “boll weevil”?])

From Washington, DC, Bowie traveled to New York City, where he was met by Paul Nelson. On the verge of becoming a very influential and respected music writer at
Rolling Stone
, Nelson was then doing freelance work for Mercury Records. “I hired him because he had great credibility. They got along really well, David and Paul,” Oberman says. “And Paul had set up a number of interviews with him in the city. The plan was to align Bowie with some of these insightful writers.”

Manhattan was freezing and Bowie amplified his androgynous flamboyance with a giant fuzzy winter coat and beret. Bowie stayed at the Holiday Inn in Times Square, then the world’s nucleus of sleaze and decrepitude. The fear and unease contributed to the adrenaline rush that he was already naturally feeling from all the attention. Bowie would spend the rest of the seventies seeking privacy in expensive hotels. This would be his first and only real time spent among the people, inviting them to approach him. As he visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art or browsed the jazz LPs in the Colony record shop, people would point and whisper. One brazen elderly woman asked him what sort of pelt was used to make his coat. “Teddy bear,” he quipped, and she furrowed her brow and crept off. That night, he caught folksinger Tim Hardin’s set in Greenwich Village. As he walked around, he thought of all of his heroes who’d trod over the same pavement: Jack Kerouac, Bob Dylan, Charles Mingus, Lou Reed.

Next Bowie visited Chicago, where he was feted by the Mercury office staff. The office workers, expecting a gender-bending rock ’n’ roll wild man, were shocked to discover the shy, polite Englishman eagerly offering his hand. Sensing, perhaps, that it might be best to temper any incendiary conduct while in the Midwest, Bowie remained on good, if restrained, behavior.

“In Chicago, New York, he didn’t wear any dresses,” Oberman says. “But he wore the dress in L.A.” Los Angeles was much more encouraging when it came to such things. They loved a good show. Bowie was met in Los Angeles by then Mercury Records publicity officer Rodney Bingenheimer. Bingenheimer, who would later open the legendary glitter nightclub
Rodney’s English Disco and become one of our best and most influential disc jockeys (he is still on the air at KROQ in Los Angeles), was known for his flawless rock taste. He’d been an assistant to Sonny Bono and, ironically, a stand-in for Davy Jones, the Monkee who inspired Bowie to change his name. A tireless Hollywood gadfly, in ’71 Rodney was already a super-Anglophile, well turned on to Bowie when almost nobody in America knew who he was. Before being hired by Mercury, he was one of the few people in America who actually bought the
Space Oddity
record. Bingenheimer would routinely shop for imports at a record store, just up Hollywood Boulevard from the local Mercury office. “It was like the only store at that time that actually had import albums,” he tells me. “I bought the
Space Oddity
album there. By the time I went to Mercury of course I already knew all about him. I loved his music and his style. He seemed like one of a kind. Kind of different for a British artist. It wasn’t that jangly pop.”

Rodney was as much a music fan as David was, and they quickly bonded over pop records, movie gossip and girls. The diminutive scenester was excited to take Bowie to local clubs and introduce him to all the right people, including his friend and fellow skirt-chasing pop obsessive songwriter/producer Kim Fowley.

Bingenheimer’s enthusiasm for Bowie (“godhead” is the word he uses to describe such artists, as in “Brian Wilson is godhead. Oasis are godhead.”) was greater than his loyalty to his employer. He had contacts at every label in town and was happy to conflict with Mercury’s interests by parading Bowie before executives from other companies who might poach him for a bigger and better setup. With two failed Mercury records and his ears full of kibitzing about the kind of rock ’n’ roll largesse afforded Los Angeles–plundering acts like Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones, Bowie seemed eager to be poached at the time.

“I’d take him over to Liberty Records. We would walk down Orange, walk right past Hollywood High, and the kids would be out there having lunch. And that’s how the rumor went out that we were trying to pick up girls at Hollywood High. Actually he wanted to pick up a new record contract. Liberty Records was across from Hollywood High.” Bingenheimer also arranged for Bowie to stay at the well-connected record producer Tom
Ayres’s house in the Hollywood Hills. Anybody who was anybody stayed at Ayres’s place when visiting L.A. There he also met Gene Vincent, the fifties rock icon famous for his echo-drenched hits like “Be-Bop-a-Lula” and a somewhat jarring stage act in which he led his combo, the Blue Caps, through a rockabilly set while dragging his leg, which was permanently injured in a motorcycle crash, behind him. Vincent with his cavernous bone structure and towering physique, was ill and down on his luck, but like many of the first wave of rock ’n’ roll heroes, he remained a star abroad. Bowie was thrilled to meet him and the pair jammed on early versions of “Hang On to Yourself” and “Moonage Daydream” (both of which would end up on the
Ziggy Stardust
album two years later). Such specactles didn’t seem unusual inside the Ayres palace. Ayres, a former paratrooper, had been a nocturnal Hollywood character since the beatnik era, producing novelty hits like “Hot Pastrami” by the Dartells and connecting the right people to one another as a sort of self-deputized public service. Ayres’s place was just off Sunset Boulevard, high above the old Source health food store (made famous in the last L.A. scene in
Annie Hall
, where Diane Keaton tells Woody Allen she is not going to return to New York with him). It was a grand 1920s castle patrolled by a massive Great Dane named Blue.

Another taste of Hollywood opulence whetted his appetite for a greater success, the kind he did not achieve with Kenneth Pitt (as well as the kind that Oberman did not have the infrastructure to provide and the kind that Tony Defries, the legal adviser who was fast becoming his full-time manager, saw as well within his reach). In early February, Bingenheimer and Ayres threw a party to introduce Bowie to the in crowd of L.A. Although Los Angeles would five years later be the location for Bowie’s darkest period (and, some say, his best recorded work), at the time, he was smitten, and, according to Fowley, cannily sober. “It was his ‘I’m new in Hollywood, how does this place work?’ phase,” says Fowley. Bowie was studying the lay of the land and making notations. He would sit on the floor, clutching a leather briefcase, which probably contained lyrics and notebooks. He scribbled ideas to himself as people passed around him and Warhol superstar Ultra Violet, also in attendance, did her best to steal much of his attention. “She looked like a prune version of Paulette Goddard,” Fowley would recall. Bowie was getting hundreds of musical ideas as well. While at the party, Fowley offered Bowie a copy of a record by Wigwam, a new Finnish band
that he was producing. Sure enough, Fowley would detect not only some of Wigwam’s melody style on Bowie’s next album but also the line “Look at those cavemen go,” in a song called “Life on Mars?” It’s a direct lyrical nod to the Hollywood Argyles’ 1960 number one hit “Alley Oop” (which Fowley produced when he was still in high school) and reveals just how adept Bowie was becoming at refining the sounds and snippets of overheard dialogue swirling around him and turning them into songs that skirt pastiche and seem entirely original. One thinks again of the party chatter in the back room of the pub behind his childhood home in Bromley. He didn’t know how to process all the information back then. He was too young, but the notion of such things as raw materials surely got into his head very early on.

Also in attendance was journalist John Mendelsohn. Mendelsohn, another one of the hip writers Oberman had reached out to, was profiling Bowie for his first-ever
Rolling Stone
feature story. Published in April, under the headline “David Bowie: Pantomime Rock?,” it’s hard not to read the interview today without seeing it as a sketch for what Bowie was cooking up. Bowie frets about being dismissed as “mediocre.” He needn’t have worried. Mendelsohn describes Bowie as “ravishing, almost disconcertingly reminiscent of Lauren Bacall.”

“My performances have got to be theatrical experiences for me as well as for the audience,” Bowie told Mendelsohn. “I don’t want to climb out of my fantasies in order to go up on stage—I want to take them on stage with me.” In the most oft-quoted point in the interview, Bowie channels Lindsay Kemp, telling Mendelsohn, “I think [music] should be tarted up, made into a prostitute, a parody of itself.” He signs off with, “Tell your readers that they can make up their minds about me when I begin getting adverse publicity: when I’m found in bed with Raquel Welch’s husband.”

Everywhere Bowie went, people seemed to be pressing records into his hands. At a radio station in San Francisco, Mendelsohn played Bowie a record by an obscure garage band from Ann Arbor, Michigan, who called themselves the Stooges and were fronted by a man named Iggy.

“On the first radio tour he heard Iggy, also the Legendary Stardust Cowboy, Annette Peacock and in Los Angeles a lot of L.A.-based talent: Kim Fowley, Randy Newman and the poet who lived in motels! What’s his name? Tom Waits!” Angie told me during an interview we did in 2000. “He ransacked their ideas! Of course! That’s what artists do. Experience
life through listening and interacting with people and other artists and then reinterpreting it in their peculiar way. That’s why they don’t have day jobs! Too much intellectual pillaging and looting!”

The trip was successful in a creative way. Professionally, despite some of the important connections he made, the venture did little to sell records.
The Man Who Sold the World
was not a success, but Bowie was fast picking up what it took to write a hit. England had one official radio station, a few independent stations like Capital Radio and some pirate transmissions that broadcast from boats and barges anchored offshore and therefore unregulated. America had
hundreds
of stations. Traveling across the country, his brain was bombarded with popular music in a way it had not been before; hooks and more hooks seemed to radiate into his creative cortex, from Three Dog Night’s “Joy to the World” to Jean Knight’s “Mr. Big Stuff,” to Bill Withers’s “Ain’t No Sunshine,” to Sly and the Family Stones’ “Family Affair,” to the Carpenters’ “Rainy Days and Mondays,” to just about every track on Carole King’s megaselling
Tapestry
(the year’s biggest hit).

Bowie returned to gray, freezing England from sunny California that winter determined to get his act together. The professional life he’d left behind was, when compared to the lives of his new friends in America, in shambles. Worse, Tony Visconti and Defries did not like each other, not least of all because Defries reportedly approached Visconti like an employee and not an artist. With Bolan’s career in gear in both England and America, it wasn’t long before Visconti decamped semipermanently (he would return in 1974). “Defries also wanted to manage me as a producer,” Visconti wrote. “I wasn’t so enamored with the idea and didn’t like his style so I was not easily seduced.”

With no support for a tour or any further promotion on the part of Mercury, Bowie’s band subsisted on a small deal for a Bowie-free record by the Hype, with new drummer Woody Woodmansey permanently replacing original drummer John Cambridge. It didn’t result in any product and soon it became harder and harder for Bowie’s backup group to justify remaining in London while David dealt with a change in management and, eventually, a change in record labels. In Hull, Ronson could work and record and play when he felt like it. Down in the capital, he was
left waiting for something to happen. He returned north, played occasional gigs under the name Ronno (Ronson’s nickname) and did some session work (including an unused guitar part during the recording sessions for Elton John’s “Madman Across the Water”).