Bowie: A Biography (45 page)

“There was no drinking, no smoking allowed at these places. When we opened, we stocked a bar with everything. We wanted it to be a musician’s musician’s studio,” Bruce Robb, a co-owner of Cherokee Studios, says. “But if you woke up at four
A.M
, couldn’t sleep, you could say, ‘Oh, I know, I’ll go to the studio.’ It was like having the greatest exclusive club in L.A.”

Both Keith Moon and Ricky Nelson were working on their own albums when Bowie showed up with his producing engineer Harry Maslin shortly after returning from New Mexico, surveyed the scene, listened to his voice reverberate around the room and announced that he would be recording the follow-up to
Young Americans
there. He and Alomar moved their newly assembled band—bassist George Murray and drummers Dennis Davis and Andy Newmark—into the studio’s “big” room and rarely ever left. At one point, Bowie moved a bed in. Recording
was ’round the clock. Time did not exist. The big room had no clocks and no windows. “I’d come in the following day and they were all still working from the night before. I’d leave and they were still working,” Robb says.

If another artist was booked, say, Rod Stewart, who was also recording at Cherokee around this time, they would simply break down their gear, set it up again in a new room and continue pursuing Bowie’s latest sound: another inspired hybrid of Philly soul, Detroit funk and the mechanized, “motorik” industrial sounds of his favorite new German bands Neu! and Kraftwerk, who purported to be robots in the same emotion-checking way that Ziggy Stardust did with his extraterrestrial conceit. “He was very driven by the feel and the friction,” Robb says. “The record took on a life of its own after a while. He did this because he had to. You could see the burning desire as the album would go on. Rod used to party a lot. David was fairly serious.”

There were other serendipitous influences. One day Frank Sinatra’s people showed up to check the place out. Sinatra was looking to begin recording his post-retirement comeback album (released in 1980 as the triple album
Trilogy)
and had heard about Cherokee. At first the notion of Sinatra’s arrival was intimidating.

“They told us, ‘Don’t speak to him unless he speaks to you. Only call him Mr. Sinatra,’” Robb says. “‘Don’t ask him if he needs a mic check. He’ll just walk in and do what he pleases when he pleases.’” When the great man actually arrived, he was as friendly and sociable as possible, entertaining Bowie, his band and the Cherokee staff with road stories and gossip.

“They became great friends,” Robb says of Bowie and Sinatra, “hanging out in the lounge. David sang harmony on one of Sinatra’s tracks, and Sinatra listened to a version of Bowie’s ‘Wild Is the Wind.’” Based on Sinatra’s enthusiasm for the track, Bowie was inspired to include what might have seemed an odd choice (a middle-of-the-road ballad sung unironically amid mutant Euro-funk and lyrics about blow and the occult) as the record’s closing track.

“David would call up and ask, ‘Is Frank in yet?’” Robb says. As soon as Sinatra arrived, Bowie would emerge from his studio and greet him. “David Bowie was David Bowie all the time,” Robb says, noting that the studio where the album was primarily recorded was protected twenty-four
hours a day by an array of candles, symbols and burning incense. “Some cats have this persona like ‘This is who I am but outside of that I like to play golf’ Sure, he did drugs. And he drank good wine … but it kept him in a head space he needed to make the record. It’s like an actor losing eighty pounds or gaining a hundred pounds for a role. It destroys them physically but that’s what it took. With Bowie, the proof is in the product. It’s an incredible work of art.”

True enough,
Station to Station
is another gigantic creative leap forward, as much as
Hunky Dory
was only five years earlier. It’s modern enough, with its crisp, precise playing and angsty atmospherics, to be considered the first real New Wave record. It’s clear from the title track, ten minutes of gloriously self-conscious coke-crash despair, that Bowie is rewriting the rules.
Station to Station
opens with a chugging train (culled from a sound effects record). There are two full minutes of minimalist piano, a pair of notes any child could play. Next, a deep funk bass, and finally heavy but cleanly strummed angular guitar chords and what sounds like the shake of a rattlesnake’s tail (a nod, perhaps, to his recent stay in the New Mexican desert, or perhaps more evidence of coiled coke snakes in his brain). With Bowie’s vocals, which don’t drop in until about three and a half minutes, the length of most rock songs, his latest incarnation, the Thin White Duke, is introduced. The Duke is a party-crashing Nosferatu, “throwing darts in lovers’ eyes.” It’s both thrilling and a colossal bummer (“Once there were mountains on mountains / And once there were sunbirds to soar with / And once I could never be down”). Two years year before Johnny Rotten would scream “No future” on “God Save the Queen,” Bowie informs us that it’s “too late” to be faithful, hateful or anything at all; whereas Rotten will scream, Bowie croons his nihilism, too cool or weary and louche to rage at anything or anyone. “Word on a Wing” is clearly crooned by the Duke as well; it’s the same voice, but with dread swapped for introspection (“Don’t have to question everything in heaven or hell”) and a suite swapped for a warmer melody that’s elegant and simple. “Stay” is urban funk sped up for against-the-wall fucking, as opposed to the horizontal quiet storms of
Young Americans
. That’s not to say that romance is dead here. Has Bowie written a more romantic song than “Golden Years,” the album’s hit single (which reached the Top 5 in
both England and America)?
Station to Station
is never really credited as such, but in actuality it’s an album of love songs, the kind you write when you have no love in your own life, perhaps (or when your girlfriend is swallowed up by the TV set, if “TVC 15” is considered), but perfect for a coming wave of modern angst in my pants pop.

Before the album hit shops in January of 1976, Bowie debuted “Golden Years” on the Saturday morning R & B dance show
Soul Train
. As canny promotional appearances go, it’s a bit awkward. The dancers, mostly African American, are shaking it, literally oblivious to the sickly white guy with the orange hair standing in their midst. Nobody looks up at him at all, almost as if they’ve been gently instructed not to. Bowie himself appears as if he’s about to fall asleep standing up. He comes to just as it’s time to (badly) lip-synch the vocals (even the hand claps are off). Pete Doherty and Amy Winehouse have never looked this wasted. Bowie’s cheekbones are caving in like wet cardboard. His yellow shirt and blue suit look two sizes too big. When he sings, “Doing alright but you gotta get smart,” he points to his brain. They should show it to people in rehab. Three weeks later he appeared on Cher’s post-Sonny and Cher variety show to sing a medley. I don’t even know what to say about this one, except it goes on for forty-five minutes and encompasses every song that was ever written between 1965 and 1975 except perhaps “Spiders and Snakes” by Jim Stafford. Intent on making
Station to Station
a hit, he would debut “Stay” on a third show, the Dinah Shore show with Henry Winkler, before the year was out. In England, Bowie appeared via satellite from “beautiful downtown Burbank” on the popular talk show
Russell Harty Plus
. Harty, who affected a perpetual air of campy suspicion, had interviewed Bowie in 1973 during the apex of Ziggy Stardust’s popularity and takes pains to remind Bowie that he might be out of touch with England’s kids and their taste in pop. Bowie, with his yellow-and-orange-streaked hair slicked back, smokes thick Gitanes cigarettes, drinks Tree Top apple juice from a glass and seems equally unimpressed with the entire affair. Watching it now (the entire interview is archived on YouTube), it seems a “Dueling Brandos” of icy queeniness.

“I’m coming back to England in May to play shows … to you, at you,” Bowie informs Harty. “Look at England. Be there. Be English. As always but English in England.”

“Your accent is not changed, but you’ve been away for two years,” Harty says. “Does that mean you’ve been locked away somewhere?”

“Yes. I don’t talk to anybody,” Bowie answers. Given his behavior in Los Angeles, the exchange is played off as a laugh but remains, of course, painfully accurate.

“But do people talk to you?” Harty asks.

“I’ve heard it rumored.”

Harty wonders what image Bowie plans to use to recapture the public imagination, warning him that a band called the Bay City Rollers might have stolen his fans away.

“The image I may adopt may well be me. I’m sort of inventing me at the moment.”

“You mean ‘reinventing me’?” Harty wonders.

“I’m self-invented.”

“From the waist upwards?”

“It’s jolly uncomfortable,” Bowie quips, and rolls his mismatched eyes. He could easily be talking about the entire interview.

Like the Diamond Dogs tour, Bowie would play arenas in both America and Europe. He and the band decamped to Jamaica but found themselves without lodging. Bowie’s lawyer-turned-manager Michael Lipp man was reportedly blamed for this logistical glitch and soon he was an ex-manager as well, marking a long period of Bowie’s affairs being run almost exclusively by himself and Schwab. Rehearsals concluded in New York City, and the tour opened, as was Bowie’s way, in Canada, at the Pacific Coliseum in Vancouver in early February.

The first thing audiences saw as they took their seats in the arena was Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel’s sixteen-minute-long surrealist short film
Un Chien Andalou
, immortalized by the Pixies’ “Debaser” and famous among film students and art-damaged types for its signature image—an eye ball (actually bovine) being sliced vertically and bleeding jelly. “Geiger Counter,” from Kraftwerk’s latest,
Radio Activity
, was the pre-show soundtrack, suggesting Cold War edginess to thousands of stoned rock fans looking for two hours of escapism.

Then a harsh white spotlight and Bowie, his hair again slicked back, walked down the stairs in a black vest, white shirt and black pants, crooning, in a more deadpan register, “The return of the Thin White Duke,
throwing darts in lovers’ eyes,” as if he was ruining some mass wedding ceremony by announcing the punch is toxic. Despite the austerity, uncommon to nearly all arena rock spectacles of the day, the White Light tour, as it came to be known, was another commercial and artistic success. Critics praised the minimalism.

“In its own way
Station to Station
was quite stylized too,” journalist Chris Charlesworth says. “Albeit quite different from
Diamond Dogs
. I really liked the white lights effect and the black suit; he looked unbelievably cool with his Gitanes. Just because it was black and white doesn’t mean it was a bare minimum. It was another staging idea at a time when staging ideas weren’t common in rock. Everybody else was bare minimum with nothing but amps and drums onstage.”

When the tour hit Detroit’s Olympia Stadium in March of ’76, Madonna was in the audience, certainly taking mental notes about how to keep your fans and critics guessing. A lifelong student and fan, she would induct Bowie into the Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame twenty years later in 1996.

Iggy Pop resurfaced again once the White Light tour rolled back into Los Angeles. Since being dropped from MainMan, Iggy had sunk even further. He was arrested for shoplifting, sleeping in a garage, and trying to write songs with James Williamson but mostly in a drug haze.

“Iggy was in such bad odor with the rest of L.A. that most of the dealers refused to let him into their apartments,” Nick Kent writes in his classic anthology
The Dark Stuff
. “He’d made such a mess of his life during the two years he’d been based in L.A. that everyone had him written off as nothing more than a washed up loser. The word was out on him in all the clubs anyway, and it wasn’t just confined to the Sunset Strip and Santa Monica Blvd.” Worse, others who had used Bowie’s boost to a more profitable end slagged Iggy Pop off publicly.

“Iggy is very stupid,” Lou Reed said. “Very sweet but very stupid.”

“I think Iggy’s the most overrated star ever,” former Mott the Hoople front man Ian Hunter groaned.

When he began to vomit fluid of unrecognizable origin and indescribable color, and with the police threatening to prosecute him for vagrancy, he finally committed himself to the Neuropsychiatric Institute in L.A. Slowly, he got healthier. While inside, he listened to James Brown’s “Sex Machine” on repeat, boiling up the creative juices. Once Iggy was out
of the hospital but broke and too proud (what with drug-demon Iggy at bay), a go-between named Freddie Sessler took it upon himself to call Bowie, who was eager to see his old friend again.

Iggy and David met in David’s posh hotel on February 13, 1976. David played Iggy a cassette of a groove he and Alomar had worked up and asked if he might like to record the song and add some lyrics. Iggy was told to pack up a bag and return to the hotel the following morning. David was going to take him on the road. They would try to make another album and help each other become healthy and accountable. “With Bowie,” Iggy writes in his memoir
I Need More, “I
didn’t feel compelled to go to sleep every time something unpleasant happened.” The slumber, it’s implicit, being chemically assisted.

“Bowie lost a brother [to mental illness],” Kim Fowley says. “Iggy might have been the brother who took the place of the brother that he lost. Sinatra didn’t have a brother either. Sinatra’s brothers would have been Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr.”

Iggy’s cultural stock was about to rise as well. When the American leg of the Station to Station tour closed at Madison Square Garden on March 26, Iggy and Bowie went down to a new club called CBGB to see the Ramones. A buzz went through the tiny club. To his surprise the crowd in the tiny, filthy club on the Bowery was thrilled by the notion that Iggy was there. This provided Pop with a much-needed ego boost, given his somewhat downgraded status from influence and major concern to pal and hanger-on with regard to the Bowie universe of the time. The tour was not without its problems though. Bowie and Pop were arrested on marijuana possession charges during a stop in Rochester, resulting in the single most glamorous mug shot in crime history taken during his arraignment and auctioned on eBay in late 2007.