Bowie: A Biography (40 page)

“When I started rehearsing with the band for this tour, I suddenly realized I was enjoying singing again,” Bowie told
Los Angeles Times
critic Robert Hilburn, then writing for
NME. “I
hadn’t enjoyed it in a long time. It was just a way to get my songs across. But when I started rehearsing I began enjoying it and I found I actually had a voice. That’s really exciting for me. My voice has improved in leaps and bounds. I’ve been flattered by some of the things the musicians have said about my singing.”

The Diamond Dogs tour opened at Montreal’s Forum on June 14. Anticipation was massive. Audiences filed in as weird tape loops and animal noises bleated out of a PA system which was set in the middle of the floor for maximum impact. There was no opening act and a delay of nearly an hour ratcheted up the suspense.

Finally, the lights dimmed, and the eerie “Future Legend” blared out of the PA. Then Bowie appeared, seated in the palm of a giant hand, set inside a massive, glittering mirror ball. The lights flared up and hit the mirrors just as the guitarists stroked out the wah-wah riff of “1984.”

“Each song is linked together so that no delays occur during the show, and he doesn’t even take a bow at the end,” journalist Chris Charlesworth wrote in his
Melody Maker
review. The band was often hidden behind flats at stage right, and Bowie did not break down the fourth wall and address the audience with any “Hello, Cleveland”–style salutations.

“I think it was the first time I saw a rock show where the star didn’t connect with the audience at all,” Charlesworth says today. “He behaved as if the audience wasn’t there. I don’t think they were put off by it. As I recall David’s fans accepted it because his fans were more open than most, knowing as they did that David was a rock singer who experimented with different ideas. They expected him to be different and adopt personas like an actor, and that was why they liked him. I think, by and large, David attracted a more intelligent, well-read, cultured fan than, say, Led Zeppelin, or—heaven forbid—out-and-out boogie merchants in blue denim.”

Some of the material over the course of the two-part two-hour concert was familiar (“Rebel Rebel” was quickly followed by “Moonage Daydream” from the
Ziggy
album) but Bowie no longer resembled Ziggy Stardust. His hair was flat and parted. He wore a designer suit and suspenders. For “Sweet Thing,” he stood on the bridge in a trench coat. His backing singers/dancers would tie him in ropes for “Diamond Dogs;” for “Cracked Actor,” he sang into a skull, Hamlet-style, and “Panic in De troit” found him singing and shadowboxing in Everlast gloves. Bowie appeared in the crane, over the now dazzled crowd, singing “Space Oddity,” and during the encore of “The Jean Genie” and “Rock and Roll Suicide,” a spotlight was thrown on David and the dancers, creating shadows that extended to the rafters of the arena. Each new number seemed to stand and satisfy on its own but blend perfectly into the production at the same time.

“The audience realized they were witnessing something totally different from a normal rock concert,” Charlesworth wrote. “The cheers grew louder, but few could imagine the surprises in store … To grasp every detail one would have to watch at least three shows … He can only be described as an entertainer who looks further ahead than any other in
rock, and whose far-reaching imagination has created a combination of contemporary music and theatre that is several years ahead of its time.”

The following concerts in Toronto and Ottowa hockey arenas were equally successful both critically and commercially. Word-of-mouth reached America, where tickets quickly sold out, many at a then unheard of price of ten dollars per person. The first leg of the tour ended in mid-July with two sold-out dates at New York’s Madison Square Garden, rock’s most prestigious arena. Filling “MSG” was confirmation that he’d succeeded at everything he’d set out to do with regard to rock ’n’ roll, theater and personal reinvention. Coke-stoked ambition had brought something entirely new to the Garden. Combining Broadway staging and Hollywood sets, and a loud, fluid, sexy rock ’n’ roll road show, Diamond Dogs the tour is the precursor to every ostentatious and risky outing that played there ever since, as well as each lazy and gilded one. Of all Bowie’s innovations, the first leg of his 1974 trek might have altered show business the most. Parliament Funkadelic’s Mothership Connection tour (in which a giant spaceship hovers and lands onstage) and Elvis’s Vegas period (not to mention every other pop star’s Vegas period, from Elton John to Cher to Celine Dion) would not have existed without it. Nor would U2 or Madonna’s early-nineties stadium tours or the millennial spectacles that ’N Sync, the Backstreet Boys and Britney Spears undertook (Mark Ravitz worked on the boy band’s tours as well). Kanye West’s 2008 Glow in the Dark tour, with its talking spaceship, neon piping and elevated pyramid, owes Diamond Dogs tribute. Following such a lasting creative triumph, not to mention a genuine commercial triumph, another artist might have done a victory lap. Typically, Bowie was about to rip it all down again and reinvent Diamond Dogs as a stripped-down soul revue (while casting himself not as the prophet of urban doom but rather as a skinny, slinky white soul boy in Puerto Rican street hustler gear). Hunger City’s skyscrapers and props would be placed in deep storage. There were rumors that the expense was simply too much to keep it going, but most likely Bowie had already moved on to something new. “After all the effort, I honestly don’t know why,” Ravitz says. “Maybe it was too much to deal with. The trooping around was too much. Or maybe it just didn’t fit anymore with the new music that he was hearing.”

“I

f You Only Knew” by Patti Labelle; “Me and Mrs. Jones” by Billy Paul; “Wake Up Everybody” and “Bad Luck” by Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes (with Teddy Pendergrass on vocals); “When Will I See You Again?” by the Three Degrees: this is the wonderful sound of Philadelphia. “TSOP.” It’s elegant strings, a gently vibrating electric piano, velvety drums, a sax nuzzling in to fill a pocket of silence in the arrangement, filling up the mind with images of cognac-warm romance, fur rugs, a crackling Dura flame log, high heels and long, glossy leather coats with elaborate buckles and belts. Even the Philly soul that takes on man’s inhumanity toward man (like the O’Jays’ “Back Stabbers”) is arranged like a lusty and plush pop suite. This kind of stuff ruled the radio in the first half of the 1970s, and post-Ziggy David Bowie fell in love with these records so much that he started making them. When I was five years old, this same Philly soul nurtured me like Jif peanut butter and Kool-Aid did. With the exception of Chicago, Led Zeppelin, Elton John, Jethro Tull, Carole King and Wings, this is
all
I can remember listening to as a child, most of it via eight-track tapes played through the side speakers of a white plastic Weltron 2001 ball. Even today when I hear “Betcha By Golly Wow” by the Stylistics or “Games People Play” by the Spinners (who started out in the sixties as a Detroit-based Motown act and having had a hit with the Stevie Wonder–cowritten “It’s a Shame” but became a bona fide Philly soul phenomenon in the seventies), I am taken back to the summer of ’75, a certain time in American life when gloom, terror, anger and despair (exemplified by the Nixon resignation, which I watched on television with my babysitter the year before) seemed to be waning and Americans began hoping for a better way again. “Young Americans,” the Bowie song that shared radio space with much of the abovementioned soul songs on “black” radio, spoke to this hope. “Do you remember your President Nixon,” he asks. It’s one of Bowie’s least detached vocal performances throughout, and listening to it now makes me believe that his hope and love for America, his spiritual country since childhood, was painfully sincere as well. Bowie wonders, “We live for just these twenty years, Do we have to die for the fifty more?” It’s the sound of the seventies finding its better angels. Even today, as we in the twenty-first century search again for those angels, “Young Americans” has the power to erase some dead, hopeless feelings inside. Like every damn song I’ve mentioned in this section, it can still make me break down and cry
.

17.

T

HE STRIPPED-DOWN
and funked-up Diamond Dogs tour, renamed “Philly Dogs,” after the soul hit by the Mar-Keys and attendant dance craze, rolled back into the greater Los Angeles area for a full week of sold-out shows at the Universal Amphitheater in early September of 1974. Fans hadn’t been warned that this was an entirely new Bowie and were expecting a hard-rocking glitter gator, not a slicked-back soul boy in a blue Pierre Cardin suit. “They were staying at the Beverly Hills Hotel,” recalls Jeff Gold, then an employee at Rhino Records (not yet a label at the time but the city’s hippest record store, located in the Westwood area). “We went down there and waited outside to get his autograph on some records. There was a very nice black guy out there who would talk to us. He said, ‘He’s not gonna be out for another three or four hours. Get something to eat and be back then.’ We thought this guy was a bodyguard. Later that night, we went to the show at the amphitheater and the guy’s singing with Bowie on a disco song called ‘Fame.’ The ‘body guard’ we were talking to was actually Luther Van-dross. And somehow between the last tour and this new one, Bowie had gone disco?”

During July and August of 1974, Bowie had indeed “gone disco,” causing many fans of Ziggy Stardust to quite literally do some soul searching. “Now I see disco as art, great popular art,” Gold says. “But at the time, Bowie going disco was a horrifying, horrible, reprehensible betrayal by our hero. A betrayal of the highest order.”

Unlike that of Gold—an obvious music fan who would enjoy a long career as an executive at both Rhino and Warner Brothers records—some anti-disco sentiment would occasionally manifest itself as subtle, and sometimes not so subtle, racism, as with the notorious “Death to Disco” rally-turned-riot in Chicago’s Comiskey Park in 1979, and while it seems quaint now with popular music being more or less fully integrated, we should not forget just what a radical thing this must have seemed in 1974 and ’75. Bowie would not be the first English pop star to have a
crossover hit on “black” radio—Elton John’s “Bennie and the Jets” was a fluke crossover hit topping both the pop and R & B charts in 1973—but he would certainly be the first to fully embrace and
pursue
this style of music, with a full album and live presentation indebted to the sound of Philadelphia. Rod Stewart, the Rolling Stones, and of course the Bee Gees would record “disco” singles within the next two years. It would take the Bowie-indebted Kiss another two after that to go disco. None of them, not even clothes horse Elton, would master the right look to go along with the new sound. Only Bowie did the research. Bowie’s new stage wear was an homage to Harlem style. During the break between the Diamond Dogs and Philly Dogs tours, while holed up in the Sherry-Netherland Hotel in Manhattan, Bowie would often venture up to Harlem to study R & B shows and gape at the opulent, post–
Super Fly
fashion statements that the blacks and Puerto Ricans on the sidewalk and in the lobby were making: zoot suits, wide-brim hats, white shoes and fur trim. The next time he stepped onto a concert stage, he would be dressed in Harlem street-hustler garb. His escort during these trips was a guitar virtuoso five years his junior from the Bronx named Carlos Alomar. They’d met while Bowie and Tony Visconti were mixing
Diamond Dogs
in New York and bonded over music. Alomar, then working as a studio musician for RCA, told Bowie, in true warm but uncensored New Yorker style, that he was too skinny and took him up to the Bronx to meet his wife and mother and eat a home-cooked meal. A friendship and creative collaboration that would span the better part of the next two decades was begun. While at the Sherry-Netherland, Alomar was fascinated by a gigantic, black theatrical trunk that never seemed to be unpacked. When he asked what was inside, Bowie proudly opened it to display dozens of vintage records.

“Imagine my surprise when he opened it to show me his collection of R & B and jazz recordings, from old Delta blues to jazz,” Alomar says. “He had them all. David was infused with soul music well before his sessions in Philadelphia. It is no secret that the British idolized American black music and studied it religiously. And it was no wonder that given the chance to record at Sigma Sound recording studio, he jumped at the opportunity.” Sigma was founded by Joe Tarsia, the chief engineer at Cameo-Parkway Records, the great Philly-based label responsible for
“96 Tears” by? and the Mysterians and Dee Dee Sharp’s “Mashed Potato Time,” among others. In the late sixties Cameo-Parkway was taken over by Rolling Stones manager the late Allen Klein. Phased out, Tarsia opened up a studio, Reco-Arts, on North Twelfth Street in the Center City district in the summer of ’68. He soon noticed that the room had uniquely warm acoustics, likely because the prewar heating system’s steam heat had worked its way into the wood. Later, while eating at a nearby Greek diner, Tarsia came up with the name Sigma Sound.

By the early seventies, Sigma had become the favored studio of the producing and songwriting team of Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff (who were inducted into the Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame in 2008). Starting with the hit “Cowboys to Girls” by the Intruders, Gamble and Huff’s Philadelphia International Records acts, backed by the MFSB (Mother Father Sister Brother) house band (a sort of East Coast version of Motown’s Funk Brothers), launched the career of the O’Jays, Teddy Pendergrass, Lou Rawls and the Spinners. While carrying on his fantasy lifestyle of a bona fide City of Brotherly Love soul man (and allegedly carrying on an affair with one of the Three Degrees) Bowie did not neglect paying real respect to the black music he loved where it counted. For the new album Bowie would put together his own version of a crack Philly soul backing band—Mother Father Sister Bowie, if you will. “Bowie knew that the easiest way to change your sound was to change your musicians,” Alomar explains to me.