Bowie: A Biography (36 page)

Around this time, Angie attempted to re-create herself as an actress named Gyp Jones, an abbreviation of “gypsy”—clearly a nod to the headier, happier days when she was careening through London with her undies in a bag—and “Jones,” her husband’s given name. “The initial plan was to work on his career and make him famous and then he and I would work on my career and make me famous and successful too,” she says.

While in L.A. Angie auditioned for the part that Linda Carter eventually got on the CBS series
Wonder Woman
. By the time the Bowies moved out of their suburban nest in Haddon Hall in early 1973 and found a proper rock star apartment on Oakley Street in the Chelsea section of London, their marriage was unraveling. Zowie was largely cared for, like many children of the very famous, by trusted friends and expensive professional nannies. David would later cite not being around for much of his son’s formative years as one of his biggest regrets and took pains to make amends later in the decade.

Angie comforted herself with retail, decorating the place in opulent fashion with antique dressers, Chinese carpets, a grand piano and the best audio-visual equipment available.

With glitter becoming all the rage (and running the gamut from bubblegum heroes sweet to blunt-edged carpetbaggers like Gary Glitter and Mud to the openly gay cabaret of Jobriath and the sublime art-school-educated geniuses in Roxy Music), the business of keeping Bowie and MainMan ahead of the curve was not cheap, and in the Regent Street offices in London and their Park Avenue offices in Manhattan, amid the leather armchairs and framed portraits of Bowie, charges and chits on George Underwood–designed MainMan letterhead flew around like ticker tape. Bills would come in and pile up: travel expenses, promotional expenses, charge accounts, clothing, food, rent, studio time and limousines.

On the surface, MainMan looked like what Defries envisioned it as, a Disney-like, catchall entertainment company. “He wanted to be a star-maker,” says Cherry Vanilla. “He wanted to go much bigger than he ever went. He wanted to have a building on Park Avenue with his name on the top of it. He wanted to have an empire. A huge empire. He really wanted to have movie companies. Cecil B. DeMille and Colonel Tom Parker all rolled into one.

“MainMan was a great, great company in its day,” she continues. “It had a mystique. We all had secretaries. We all lived in New York. It was a glorious, glorious time, but I always knew it couldn’t last because at some point something had to kind of implode, and it kind of did.”

“Ah, but what did justify it was the end result, which was people believed that MainMan was this huge, rich entity. It was like Hollywood in the thirties,” Tony Defries biographer Dave Thompson, who has also written several great books on Bowie, counters. “They weren’t just launching a musician, they were launching a
star
—the idea was, we’re not gonna have David build from the ground up like everybody else. He’s not gonna grind for thirty years like Slade or T. Rex. He is going to
appear
as a star. So the first thing you do is you hire him bodyguards. ‘Why does he need bodyguards?’ people start asking. Then the word goes out: ‘Well, David’s worldview is a little unusual and there’s a lot of crazies out there.’ The headline the next day: ‘David Bowie Under Attack.’ If somebody
from MainMan can go out with their company credit card and order this huge meal for fifty people, it conveys wealth, it conveys importance, it conveys strength.”

When asked about the expense accounts, Leee Black Childers just chuckles. “The word that does not apply in that sentence is ‘accounts.’ There were a lot of expenses. No one seemed to be keeping track of the accounts, however. There was no cash flow really. There was no cash. And this is fairly well known, that we took limousines because we couldn’t afford taxis.”

The lifestyle seems glamorous—it seemed so to me when I read about it—but imagine living like that all the time when you just want to relax and watch TV and eat a hamburger in peace and not have to be outrageous. “Everyone thought we were living this incredibly easy fabulous lifestyle, when in fact if you think about it, it’s really hard, because
nothing
is free,” Cherry Vanilla says. “If you’re eating at Max’s for free and drinking champagne at rich people’s houses for free, you have to be on, on, on! You can’t just be sitting there. You’ve got to be ‘Cherry Vanilla.’ You’ve got to be constantly telling stories. And every day was exhausting. So when you say the office, again, we were
always
in the office. The world perceived us as doing nothing; we were working our butts off all the time. We never missed a trip; we never missed a chance to forward David’s career, thereby forwarding our own fortunes. And hopefully keeping the ball rolling for a while. Tony Defries told us almost daily that we were not going to be successful otherwise, which may have been his way of getting us to work all the harder. He was like the big daddy to us all, you know, even though he was our age. I think he was
younger
than me. We all approached him in that way like Daddy. And he treated us that way purposely. Like instead of giving us a regular salary, we all got a hundred dollars a week and our rent paid. And an expense account at Max’s Kansas City and the use of limousines. So we were kept more like children. So was the band, so was Bowie. It was like a control freak thing.”

What really guzzled up the cash was the need to duplicate the success of Bowie. For all of his success with his primary client, Defries could not duplicate it with anyone but Bowie. Lou Reed had Bowie-associated hit records, but he was not a MainMan artist and excluding Mott the
Hoople’s revival with “All the Young Dudes,” Defries didn’t seem to know how to bottle lightning twice. Dana Gillespie had a failed record; the Stooges’
Raw Power
had been released in early 1973 and sold nothing. There was no tour budget and Iggy was too zonked on heroin to promote it anyway. During one in-studio appearance at a local radio station, he got naked and began playing with himself on the air, providing the listeners with a running commentary.

As with Bowie, all MainMan artists had their every need taken care of so that they could concentrate on creativity. They were assured that all MainMan artists were equal, but they were also obliged to sell, and with the exception of Bowie, who would not be selling anywhere near a Rolling Stones or an Elton John–like level until 1975 or so, nobody did.

Meanwhile, Bowie, the company’s cash cow, returned to London and entered Trident Studios in the third week of January 1973, again with producer Ken Scott, Ronson, Woodmansey, Bolder and now Mike Garson to finish the material he’d written during U.S. tour one. He was under enormous pressure. Without the overhead, Bowie might have deviated further away from Ziggy even sooner than 1974, but he simply could not afford to.
Aladdin Sane
, the resulting album, is seen by some critics as subpar on the heels of something as momentous as the
Ziggy
album, but it has achieved classic status as well, and clearly the songs, which are top-notch, are all the evidence one needs that the artist was still way ahead of the game. The sleeve features an emaciated, lonely Ziggy with a lightning bolt painted across his face and a teardrop pooling in the left clavicle of his bare chest as if to say, “I am the only one striking.”

“Watch That Man” opens the record with a crunchy Ronson riff and a post-party inventory: “Shakey threw a party that lasted all night. Everybody drank a lot of something nice.” He is still the observer of or Kerouacian commentator on others’ debauchery, but for the first time on record, he sounds equally jaded or wasted. The track is propelled by the kind of fifties-style doo-wop backing vocals that had become a powerful trend thanks to the debut that year of
The Rocky Horror Show
in London. David, Angie and their entourage took in the show multiple times and, as they’d done with
Pork
two years earlier, were clearly taking notes in the margins of their programs. Like most of
Aladdin Sane
, “Watch That Man” is given a geographical marker (New York) that reflects the peripatetic
year that Bowie had just experienced. The title track is marked quite elegantly with the name of a cruise ship, the HRMS
Ellinis
(which sailed from Britain to Japan, where Bowie would tour later in the year) as well as cryptic birth/death/rebirth dates (1913–1938–197?), said to be the years immediately preceding the two world wars and, according to fan speculation, the imminent World War III. The track itself is not shot through with dread as much as languor. Along with Elton John’s “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” (also a title track to a 1973 release) it is one of the best “come-down” tracks ever, another perfect segue from party to post-party to hangover. Garson’s playing is broad, almost a bebop/Thelonious Monk parody, but it fits perfectly with the loss of equilibrium implicit in the lyrics. “Drive-In Saturday” is another doo-wop pastiche with campy lyrics (“His name was always Buddy”) that, like those of “Life on Mars?” bring to mind the cinemas of Beckenham and the spark of the London mod scene, now a decade gone (“It’s a crash course for the ravers”). London luminaries like it-model Twiggy (who would pose with Bowie on the cover of his next release
Pin Ups)
and Mick Jagger are name-checked (although the geographical mark is an incongruous “Seattle-Phoenix”). Bowie scats playfully over the fade-out. “Panic in Detroit” returns us to the apocalypse already in progress. A portrait of Iggy Pop (“He looked a lot like Che Guevara”) written while mixing
Raw Power
, it’s a Bo Diddley “bum de bum de bum bum bum”–style beat treated with wailing backing vocals that call to mind Merry Clayton’s on the Stones’ equally nightmarish “Gimme Shelter.” “The Prettiest Star” gets a second life, as does “Queen Bitch,” in the form of its left-coast counterpart “Cracked Actor.” Opening with Ronson’s feedback, it’s another fifties-style, basic rock track with lyrics that are seventies L.A. to their sleazy, catty core. In full Warhol-damaged mode, Bowie embodies an aging star admonishing a piece of junked-up rough trade (“Forget that I’m fifty cause you just got paid” and later, “Smack baby smack is that all that you feel?”). It’s geographically tagged, unsurprisingly, “Los Angeles.” “Time,” the album’s second single after “The Jean Genie,” is marked “New Orleans” and opens with a ghostly Dixie brothel piano before Bowie again invokes Belgian singer/songwriter Jacques Brel (whose “My Death” he covered on the
Ziggy
tour). It’s possibly his weirdest single since 1967’s “The Laughing Gnome,” but unlike that track, it’s uncut and highly effective troubled-teen catnip, almost
surgically assembled to appeal to kids in smoky bedrooms with Bowie posters on their walls (“You are not a victim / You just scream with boredom,” after all). There’s a dramatic pregnant pause, then Ronson’s guitars spiral in, screaming like horror movie damsels. Like “Rock and Roll Suicide,” “Time” ends with an audience-inclusive sing-along, a string of “La la la” before Bowie punctuates it in vaguely corny fashion with “Yes, time!” The passing of time is an age-old theme (check the Stones’ “Time Waits for No One,” the Pretenders’ “Time the Avenger” and every Smiths track ever written) but it’s never been tackled with an unabashed, almost giddy theatrical pretension (“Goddamn you’re looking old!” Bowie shouts). “Let’s Spend the Night Together” is covered very, very campily, with a revised breakdown toward the end (“They said we were too young / Our kind of love was no fun”), complete with Ronson’s “talking guitar” (five years before Van Halen’s debut) and a headphones-friendly shout of “Do it!” The album closes with its best track, “Lady Grinning Soul.” Like “Aladdin Sane,” it’s driven by Garson’s piano and Bowie’s saloon singing at the high, torchy end of his range. Like “Panic” it’s a portrait in lyrics of a dangerously soulful black chick who drives a VW Beetle, plays a mean hand of canasta and will, if you are not careful, “lay belief on you” and “be your living end.” With its Spanish acoustic guitar fade-out, it manages to be hypersexual and objectifying but never sleazy. It’s in fact as genuinely affectionate a song about getting regally shagged by a hot black groupie as you will ever find. The yin to “Brown Sugar”’s yang?

“Aladdin Sane
, that’s me having a go at trying to redefine Ziggy, and making him what people wanted,” Bowie would tell the
NME
years later. “The Ziggy Stardust album told the whole story. There was nothing more to say. And I knew when I was making
Aladdin Sane
that the bottom had just fallen out of the whole idea. That was a tough period and I felt for the first time and the only time like I was working for somebody else. Tony Defries and his MainMan organization had seemingly made me a star and I felt obliged to do something to live up to Tony’s expectations. Yeah,
Aladdin Sane
was kind of a sellout.”

As such, it worked brilliantly. Released that April,
Aladdin Sane
was, at the time, the biggest advance hit in UK chart history, debuting at number one in April of 1973 and cracking the U.S. Top 20. “The Jean Genie,” written in New York and recorded in Nashville and London, was released
as the first single. Shortly before the Winterland tour date, Mick Rock had shot a video with Marilyn Monroe lookalike Cyrinda Foxe on the streets of San Francisco. Bowie does his best James Dean in black leather. The short was fed to UK and American music shows in advance of the album’s spring release. “I actually directed four Ziggy videos in total. This short was supplied to music shows in the UK and America, although in truth there were few outlets for ‘promo’ films as they were then dubbed. It was shot in one day and one night on a shoestring in San Francisco to promote his new single ‘Jean Genie.’ It was edited in one eight-hour day, and I drove the editor nuts. He said he’d never work with me again. You’ll note that it’s full of cuts. No special effects. There isn’t even a dissolve. We didn’t have money for anymore time, but with the advent of MTV in the early eighties, the legendary rock critic Lester Bangs said it was ‘the moment the modern music video began,’” Rock says of the landmark clip.