Bowie: A Biography (29 page)

Meanwhile, Tony Defries traveled to the RCA offices in New York City with tapes of both David Bowie and Dana Gillespie’s new material. He was confident that he would return to England with two major record deals, despite the fact that Gillespie had only a few failed singles to her credit and Bowie was a three-time loser as far as albums were concerned. He was so certain that Bowie would be the biggest new star, not just a Bob Dylan for the seventies but also a Marlon Brando, a James Dean and an
Elvis Presley, that he made a grand gesture of securing the rights to Bowie’s then worthless Phillips/Mercury material. If most RCA executives did not know who David Bowie was, none of them had any idea who Tony Defries was. They would soon find out.

“They brought me in to bring in the strange and freaky stuff, the underground stuff,” John Cale said of his tenure as an A & R man at Warner. “So there we were with
Hunky Dory;
the deal was on the table and everyone was trying to figure out how this cabaretish, Brit art rock could work. At Warner’s at that time, you had the Doobie Brothers and Alice Cooper and all of that, which they understood. But coming around to the art side of things, they just didn’t understand what David was doing. Everyone was scratching their heads, saying, ‘How do we do this?’ It’s a very difficult thing to fight for in a large corporation like that if nobody understands where they’re going with it. It really wasn’t fair, certainly not to David. There were certain things you knew you weren’t going to get your hands on in those days and that was one of them. You were struggling in the trenches most of the time. You’d see the writing on the wall during meetings, when you’d ask a question and people would just turn away from you. But I loved
Hunky Dory
. It was unique and strange and very unorthodox. But if you tried to explain British music hall tradition to the executives, they just wouldn’t get it. I was really disappointed I couldn’t do anything at Warner’s with him. I think later on in the seventies when I saw the thing build with Bowie, it all started to make sense to people.”

Defries was undeterred by this rejection and remained confident that this material would result in a superstar deal. “David was an almost totally unknown name but Tony had grand ideas,” Gillespie says today. “Defries was good; he created this mystique, you know. He talked big and people became—they got hooked in on what he was talking about. They liked how he was talking.”

Defries made good on half his claim. RCA’s Dennis Katz passed on Gillespie but could not deny the power of David Bowie’s new material. RCA at the time had Elvis Presley, but their rock division was lackluster as far as new young stars were concerned. Katz could see how Bowie would be perfect for the label and as a result found Defries’s bluster charming as opposed to off-putting. Still, even by record industry standards, this was an aggressive character.

Upon his return to London, Defries informed David that he was on the same label as Elvis Presley. The RCA contract was modest. Two years, three albums, at just over thirty-seven thousand dollars each. The royalty rate was standard for the time. It hardly lived up to the rumor of a million-dollar deal that Rodney Bingenheimer was spreading throughout L.A. music circles, but RCA had major power, and Defries had created a wedge into the music business and, even better, the American market. A devotee of Elvis’s audacious former carny turned manager, Colonel Tom Parker, Defries had gotten an artist signed to Elvis’s label. As far as he was concerned, the gilded doors were unlocked, and all he and Bowie had to do was storm through.

His next order of business was dismantling and restructuring the publishing deal that Pitt had set up, which he attacked with the same lack of regard for English propriety. When it was done, he showed Bowie a piece of paper that indicated that he was already technically a millionaire. Forget that he hadn’t sold any hits or made the money yet. It was there. On paper. Again, all they had to do was go through the formality of actually doing it. And while they were carrying this out, Defries said, it would be good if David would
act
like a millionaire rock star. David and Angie were impressed that the success he’d been pursuing since his early teens was now just a matter of following instructions, like heating up a can of Heinz beans.

Any suspicions were allayed when the Bowies placed Zowie in the temporary care of their neighbors in Haddon Hall and flew to New York to formally sign the RCA paperwork in the fall of 1971. RCA had gone out of their way to make the Bowies feel special. Mercury had put him up in a Holiday Inn. This time, RCA booked him into the Warwick Hotel on Fifty-fourth street, the William Randolph Hearst–built palace where Elvis, the King himself, stayed. Waiting for them in their suite was Presley’s full vinyl catalog, as if to say, “This is the good company you will be in.”

“This is it, isn’t it?” Bowie reportedly said to Angie as they looked down on Central Park from their window. After nearly a full decade of chasing fame and power, this was it.

He and Angie never did get to meet Elvis on that trip. The King was in Vegas, but Bowie did meet several figures who had been, in his eyes, just as important as Elvis Presley. The first of these was Andy Warhol.
With his associates from the cast of
Pork
as ambassadors, David was brought to the Factory for an awkward tête à tête with the pop art king on the afternoon of September 14. After surviving an assassination attempt in June of 1968, Warhol had tightened security at the Factory and Bowie had to prove that he was who he claimed to be before gaining admittance to the Factory.

Wearing a floppy black hat and baggy trousers, his hair long in the blond, Veronica Lake glamour girl style (he had posed as such on the cover of
Hunky Dory)
, he sniffed and shrugged. Bowie played Warhol the song he’d written for him. Warhol was polite but later took offense at the lyric “Andy Warhol looks a scream.” Bowie told Warhol he was a great admirer of his art. Warhol told David that he was a great admirer of his yellow leather shoes.

“I met this man who was the living dead,” Bowie would later remark in a
Rolling Stone
interview. “Yellow in complexion, a wig on that was the wrong color, little glasses. I extended my hand and the guy retired, so I thought, ‘The guy doesn’t like flesh, obviously he’s reptilian.’ He produced a camera and took a picture of me. And I tried to make small talk with him, and it wasn’t getting anywhere. But then he saw my yellow shoes. He then started a whole rap about shoe design and that broke the ice.” Twenty-five years later, Bowie would re-create Warhol’s oddball appearance and all of his ticks quite expertly in Julian Schnabel’s film
Basquiat
.

More fruitful was Bowie’s meeting with Lou Reed. Reed was himself an RCA artist, albeit one whose bloom was not nearly as full as Bowie’s. Reed’s self-titled first post–Velvet Underground solo release, despite strong material like “Wild Child” (which rhymes “piece of sweet cheese” with “our lives and our dreams”), had been a flop. The failure of the self-titled effort and the then-marginalized legacy of the Velvets had put him in jeopardy.

“Lou was going through an incredibly bad patch around the time that I first met him, and he was being left on the side in terms of what his influence had been,” Bowie has said. “And none of us knew what his influence was going to be—the direction of the Velvet Underground’s reputation.”

Reed was polite but quiet and a bit sullen as they dined at the Chinese eatery the Ginger Man. The coolness was shrugged off as Lou being
typically “New Yawk” as far as Bowie was concerned. Defries’s eyes lit up as he watched Reed sneer and roll his eyes. Reed clearly had the potential to be marketed to high heaven. Bowie was merely starstruck. They went on to Max’s Kansas City, the Warhol hub on Park Avenue. Reed begged off but Bowie was not finished meeting heroes. “I hope we see each other again; this has been such a thrill for me,” he told Reed.

At Max’s, Lisa Robinson placed a call to Danny Fields, the downtown habitué who had first signed the Stooges to Elektra Records. At the time, the Stooges had been dropped by the label, and although Pop’s solo contract had been retained they were largely considered a spent force. Iggy was deeply addicted to heroin and essentially babysat by Fields. Fields was at the end of his rope. A student of pop culture, he knew exactly why Bowie would be attracted to Iggy. “Any touch of Iggy made you cool,” he says today. “There was a kind of indefinable poetic brilliance that he saw in Lou and Iggy that there’s no word for. And I think David thought that he was more practical and that they were loonier artists in the real sense of artists as madmen. I think he liked that about them. Because David was never a madman. I think he felt guilty about not being a madman, because how could you really be a good artist without being a madman? And now he had two of the maddest madmen in the world, one on each arm, Iggy and Lou, both of whom I had managed and so both of whom I was glad to be rid of. For me, it was just a load off my back, off my mind, off of everything. I felt so guilty about the Stooges. I signed them to Elektra and they didn’t sell any records. I thought their music was brilliant and I still do. But I couldn’t get them arrested and they were back in Ann Arbor getting in trouble and holding up gas stations to pay the rent. The house was getting torn down. Iggy was getting deeper and deeper into drugs.”

Iggy Pop, in his opiate fog, had less of an understanding about just why he should be attracted to David Bowie sight unseen. He was in Fields’s apartment, only a few blocks away on West Twentieth Street in Chelsea, absorbed by a movie that was playing on television. He couldn’t be bothered to tear himself away, and in his state, the commitment of traveling a few blocks was already massive. Fields knew who Bowie was and insisted that this was worth it.

“I heard about him from the British press,” Fields says. “Iggy knew nothing about him. No one knew anything about him at the time. In
Melody Maker
I think there was a poll of artists who were trendy or important in the UK at the time and they asked David Bowie who his favorite new male vocalist was and he said Iggy Pop, and that blew my mind. I told Iggy this over the phone and he said, ‘Oh, that’s nice. How does he know who I am?’ And I said, ‘You know, they pay attention in England to what we’re doing here in America more than we do.’ I poked him and I prodded and I put a splash of water on him. Iggy’s laying there with a lot of clothes on, passed out. Max’s was only two or three blocks from where I lived. So I said, ‘That guy David Bowie who said that nice thing in
Melody Maker
, remember?’ Iggy says, ‘Yeah? What about him?’ ‘Well, he’s here now and he’s with Lisa and Richard Robinson and he’s at Max’s and he wants to meet you.’ And Iggy groans, ‘Oh, God. I’m so tired.’ And I said, ‘Come on, come on. We have to do this. It’s good for your career because he’s now more famous than you are.’ So we went over to Max’s and Lisa and Richard were sitting at the round table in the back room. I introduce them. They start talking about music or something I hate and I just backed off and let them talk about it. And that was it. They were musicians talking about music or records. Thank God they had something to talk about and I don’t have to participate. I did my job. Iggy thanked David for saying those nice things about him. And their relationship was made that night. They became friends. David at that time immediately took Iggy under his wing and said, ‘Let’s work together,’ and I was up to here with Iggy. I couldn’t take it anymore. Iggy wasn’t in a good place and they were costing me a fortune and I wasn’t making a penny from them.” “He was doing real well in the business,” Pop has recalled. “And I wasn’t exactly ripping up the entertainment world.”

Todd Haynes’s 1998 quasi–Bowie biopic
Velvet Goldmine
re-creates this moment, and by most accounts, it’s accurate. Brian Slade, the David Bowie figure (played by Jonathan Rhys Myers) asks Curt Wild, the Iggy Pop figure (played by Ewan McGregor), “How can we help you, you must tell us. What do you need?” Wild replies, “Everything,” explaining, “See, heroin was my main man. But now I’m on the methadone and I’m getting my act together. You come here and you say you wanna help and I say, ‘Hey, far out.’ You could be my main man.” Slade stares at Wild and we see hearts in his eyes. Slade’s manager, Jerry Devine, the Tony Defries figure (played by Eddie Izzard), stares at Wild and we see dollar signs in
his eyes. “I liked what I saw,” Pop said of the meeting with Bowie and Defries. “I started hanging about with him, and he approached me with the idea of a management contract. Steve Paul [manager of Edgar and Johnny Winter] also approached me and others who wanted to make me into David Cassidy. I think Tony had this idea at first. I had the idea I could talk him round to doing my music instead of something churned out by specified musicans.” Only Defries had his eye on more than just Pop. He wanted the entire back room at Max’s on his mission.

“Bowie’s manager was fishing,” Fields says. “It was a large fishing expedition and he was collecting back-room people and he wanted to create a world of his own, a management organization that was well connected, able to tap into the resources of brilliant people who really had nothing specific to do.”

The Max’s Kansas City network was the early-seventies equivalent of viral marketing. Although marginalized in a way that hipsters of today are not, their reach as far as spreading the word about an exciting new performer like Bowie was vast. Everyone knew someone who knew someone who simply had to hear all about him … and tell all of their friends. Because he was even vaguely associated with Warhol, those with a vested interest in staying up on such things started dropping the name “Bowie” at the right parties. The fact that these were essentially kids and not professional record industry personnel didn’t matter to Bowie and Defries. They had street smarts and personality, and that was more than enough to qualify them for executive roles in this new management office (which would be named, perhaps in honor of Iggy’s comments, MainMan).

“Tony Defries was very calculating,” Childers says, “but he had a very dry but very good sense of humor about it all. He kept things in perspective very nicely. But he would say—because we would say, ‘We don’t know anything about business, we don’t know what we’re doing.’ And he would say, ‘That’s exactly why you’re here. You’re doing exactly what you should be doing. You’re just acting crazy, breaking all the rules and causing a sensation, which makes David look like he’s breaking all the rules when he doesn’t have to because you’re doing it.’ Make no mistake, we were thrilled. What would have happened to us? We would have just gone down in flames possibly. We weren’t making any money. We were
making negative money. Those of us who could read and write had jobs. Others just lived the best way they could. I worked for David Bowie for over two years before my mother ever told anyone in the family what I was doing. I told her that I was teaching school up north.”