Bowie: A Biography (48 page)

Berlin was and is the perfect city for a person to escape to, as nobody looks up from their pagers or laptop. Every Berliner is so deep in their own head, starring in their own one-person Spalding Gray meets
Synecdoche, New
York–style internal monologue, that it’s easy to see how it would be appealing for a superstar like Bowie was in ’77. It’s a private metropolis, each denizen existing inside their own expressionist cinema show as they go out or go home for the night, but really just … go
.

20.

T

HE NEIGHBORHOOD ALONG
the Haupstrasse, where Bowie and Iggy settled upon arriving in West Berlin, was a cheap, seedy, downmarket-hip Turkish neighborhood. Today, it’s a semigentrified, somewhat more expensive, seedy hip Turkish neighborhood. Locating the building that Corinne Schwab rented for them is easy. The number is unchanged, and so is the facade with its cream-colored plaster walls, huge marble-arched doorway, and ornate brown metal door. To the right, there’s a red bubble gum vending machine with dirty, smudged glass. To the left, the Lotus tattoo parlor. The foyer, with its mosaic tiles, dark mahogany molding, high ceilings and winding, red-carpeted stairway, is also unchanged.

The building is over one hundred years old. It survived two world wars. There are a lot of stories to tell about it. The misadventures of David Bowie and his best friend Iggy Pop are just two of the life stories that unfolded up those stairs. Bowie and Iggy were able to work and enjoy more peace and privacy here than either of them had ever known. Unlike in L.A., the hustlers and dealers were kept away unless they were summoned, and that summoning only happened on the weekends.

Bowie, as he sings on the title track of
“Heroes,”
drank “all the time,” weaning himself off cocaine as he sat over a pint of German beer in his proletariat garb: tweed cap, simple shoes or sandals, black leather coat and wool trousers. At the top of the week, they would write and record; the remainder of their days were earmarked for recreation, essentially cutting in half their potential drug intake. Massively influenced and excited by the German expressionism that he’d mined for the White Light tour, a life in Berlin, among the people, seemed a logical next step.

“It was the artistic and cultural gateway of Europe in the twenties and virtually anything important that happened in the arts happened there. I wanted to plug into that instead of L.A. and their seedy magic shops,” he has said.

Exit the old building and one will likely spend some time lingering in the bins in front of the Bucherhalle, a cavernous antique bookstore directly left of the flat. This shop must have added to the appeal of the neighborhood for Bowie, a major bibliophile. Standing under the yellow-and-white-striped awning, thumbing through clothbound copies, one can not only forget that one is an English rock star, but possibly that one even speaks English. Bowie had succeeded, once again, in disappearing. “Hansa [Studios] was more austere,” says Ricky Gardiner (who plays on
The Idiot
and came up with the immortal bouncing riff for “The Passenger”) of the studio where
Lust for Life
and
“Heroes”
were created. “It had larger spaces. It had huge curtains for making different spaces. It had stark lighting. It was probably technically better, but does this make for better music? It depends what music you are after. David was interested in Kraftwerk at the time, so I expect that had a bearing on it. It was handy, new premises, new vibe, new inspiration.”

Iggy Pop recruited Hunt and Tony Sales, then just out of their teens. The Sales brothers had played with Todd Rundgren during his short-lived period as leader of the art rock band Runt and backed Iggy and James Williamson on the cult “demo” album
Kill City
. The sons of legendary children’s television show host Soupy Sales, they were barely out of their teens when they arrived in Berlin. The Sales brothers, Hunt on drums and Tony on bass, would round out, with Gardiner and Bowie (on keyboards), Iggy’s touring and recording band. The tracks on
Lust for Life
would take
The Idiot
to a new level. The title track, which kicks off with Hunt Sales’s open-tuned drumbeat (inspired by session drummer Shelly Manne’s round, swinging percussion on the
Man with the Golden Arm
soundtrack and the “Peter Gunn Theme”), is of course ubiquitous now thanks to its use in the 1996 film
Trainspotting
and, to a more cloying effect, on the Carnival cruise line commercials.

“When I hear it now on television,” Hunt Sales tells me, “it’s just primal. It gets everything going.” Few tracks in pop history—James Brown’s “Funky Drummer” and Led Zeppelin’s “When the Levee Breaks” among them—are iconic in and of themselves. The first line of “Constructive Summer,” for example, the opening track on indie heroes the Hold Steady’s fourth album,
Stay Positive
, is this: “Me and my friends are like the drums on ‘Lust for Life.’”

Lust for Life
is more carnal than
The Idiot
. In a lot of ways, it’s the better record, but it certainly finds its narrator panting after underage girls in knee-high leather boots (“Sixteen”) as much as it finds him searching his soul (or maybe the panting is part of the soul-searching).

“Sex, booze, drugs,” Hunt Sales says. “Berlin was open twenty-four hours a day. Bars, clubs. It had a vibe then. You had all these people within the Wall. That’s gotta do something to people’s psyche. You know what I mean? Being trapped in this place. I think it found its way into the records.”

“Hansa Studios was an interesting place at the time. The Berlin Wall was still up. Berlin was really something you couldn’t pin down at all,” John Cale, who recorded with fellow ex–Velvet Underground member Nico in the city around this time, recalled. “You’d have to drive through East Germany to get there. Being in West Berlin was very different from what it is now: everyone was nuts, living on the edge. It was a real circus over there. When Brian and I did that Nico concert where she insisted on singing ‘Deutschland über Alles’ [in October 1974 at the Nationalgalerie], they went nuts. All the young people there were living with the Wall. It was a fiery place to be. There was a lot of distrust near the border, but West Berlin was partying twenty-four/seven.”

Inside Hansa there was always the uneasy sense of being monitored, which might have contributed to the defiant emotionalism of the lyrics Bowie began to write (as well as the vocals he would soon deliver). One day, while staring out at the Wall from the studio’s fourth-floor window, Bowie spotted Visconti and his mistress, the singer Antonia Maas, sharing a kiss only a few hundred yards in the distance. He imagined the Communist guards, who stood constantly atop the checkpoint looking down on them, clutching their rifles. Bowie knew a bit about what life was like on the east side of the wall. He and Visconti had crossed the borderline as tourists and were familiar with the radically different way of life on the other side, how everything seemed to have frozen a quarter century before them, the cars, the fashions, the queer old Trabant autos.

As he wrote, Bowie imagined two lovers, one on the East Berlin side, another on the West Berlin side, who must meet quickly and fleetingly, a sort of Cold War Romeo and Juliet. Under constant risk of arrest or death, they dream of being free, swimming together like dolphins (anyone
who has been to the area on a hot afternoon can attest that the notion of sleek aquatic mammals gliding under cool waves does not come immediately to mind).

Bowie and Eno, the song’s cowriter, agreed that the idea, lyrics and melody were among his strongest ever and quickly began parsing out musical options. What makes “Heroes” arguably David Bowie’s finest song, however, was a product of happenstance. Robert Fripp, the former King Crimson guitarist, knew both Bowie and Eno (he appears on
Another Green World)
and was suggested by the latter. In New York at the time, he flew out to Berlin on short notice, went straight to the studio, was played the melody and immediately began improvising the signature circular riff, which articulates the longing, aching lyrics and Bowie’s dramatic, Judy Garland–worthy larynx-straining delivery.

“‘Heroes’ was a searing, wonderful guitar thing,” recalled Adrian Belew, who would play the riff every night on the subsequent world tour. “He was so hot, he’d rip your head off. Robert was always able to carve out his own little ideas in guitar playing that are instantly recognizable.” Fripp did three full takes once the riff was down, and after rewinding it for playback, Visconti, at the desk, accidentally played all three at once. “I casually played three guitar takes together and it had a jaw-dropping effect on all of us,” Visconti writes in his autobiography. “The constant mutation of the three sounds was entirely complementary and we had the intro of ‘Heroes’ without doing anything more. It’s now instantly recognizable as sound in our collective psyche.”

Using a device developed and perfected on many of Iggy’s
Lust for Life
tracks (such as “Success” and “Turn Blue”), the backing vocals used for “Heroes,” on which Eno can be clearly detected, repeat and thereby reinforce the lyrics. “I … I can remember,” Bowie shouts; “I remember,” Eno and the band echo, doing much to gin up the emotions, and deftly complement the swirling drone of the multitracked guitars.

Bowie took time out from the
“Heroes”
album sessions to play keyboards on Iggy’s tour in support of
Lust for Life
. Amazingly, tour rehearsals actually marked the first time Bowie ever saw Iggy perform live. Tickets sold quickly, largely because of the rumors that Bowie would be singing as well. Fans clamored to see Bowie play in small theaters and large clubs. When the tour opened in Canada in the summer of ’77, many were
puzzled. Bowie sang background vocals exclusively and remained seated at his piano bench to the side of the stage for the entire set. The concerts were Iggy showcases. If Bowie’s status as band member was the bait, all were confident the newly healthy Iggy would be the hook. If people could see the man perform live, they would be won over. While many new fans were indeed converted, if one looked at the stage from the lighting rig, with a bird’s-eye view, it would have been obvious that Bowie was the draw. The general-admission floors were lopsided: thinned out at the center and packed in front of the keyboardist. Bowie didn’t encourage any of this attention, barely glancing at the crowds as he played. His regard for Iggy kept his ego in check. He even deigned to fly from gig to gig when the tour bus was too slow, evidence, if any was needed, of his commitment to his friend’s career. “David was a good band member and he played that role very carefully,” says Ricky Gardiner. “At no time did he make any attempt to upstage Iggy, which, given the circumstances, may have been tempting.”

Blondie was one of the bands Bowie and Iggy heard about while in New York on the ’76 White Light tour. They had just released their debut, which was a hit in Australia but had yet to take hold in America, and Bowie and Iggy chose them as the opening act for Iggy’s tour. Within two years, they would be New Wave superstars, and the tour with Iggy and Bowie amounted to their training.

“We did two nights at Max’s before we left,” says Blondie drummer Clem Burke, “and after the second night we all got into an RV with one bed and went up to Canada. Woke up and we were in the dressing room. David and Iggy come in: ‘Hi, it’s gonna be a great tour.’ It was like a dream. It was a big thing for us. It was a dream sequence. To wake up sitting in a dressing room half-asleep in Toronto and having those two walk in …”

“What happened was, after our sound check, both David and Jimmy come running up the stairs to our dressing room to say hello,” keyboardist Jimmy Destri elaborates. “We were initially told, ‘Don’t bother the star. Don’t bother the star.’ Of course we weren’t gonna bother them. We were in our own fantasy world of trying to be little stars ourselves, so we were looking at Bowie trying to pick up clues on how to do that. They came upstairs and then it became obvious why they were so friendly. They both were rakishly misogynistic guys looking at Debbie. Probably
why the Ramones didn’t get the support slot on that tour. Bowie walked up to Debbie—and this is Debbie’s side of the story—and said, ‘Can I fuck you?’ And she turned around to him and said,
‘Can
you?’”

Despite the new fans gained on tour, Iggy found it hard to shake the bad luck that had dogged his career. Shortly after the album’s release in August, Elvis Presley died and RCA channeled all their industrial efforts into printing up Presley records for mourning fans. That was bad luck for Iggy, because he had made a big effort over a considerable time to get to that point, having a decent tour organized and going down well. “Sod’s law can operate at the most inappropriate time,” Gardiner says.

After the summer Iggy tour, Bowie committed himself to completing and then promoting
“Heroes”
(the quotes were meant to convey irony, according to Bowie) as much as possible. The Bowie that television and concert audiences would see that fall would be a casually attired bloke with short brown hair.

“As his appearance gets straighter the music gets weirder,” Kris Needs observed in
Zigzag
that October, the month the record hit shops. Critics gushed once again
(NME
named it their record of ’77). The album opens with much suspense: two notes repeated like John Williams’s
Jaws
theme, and Eno’s “Sky Saw”–like guitar sizzle, until Bowie finally emits a cry of Ooooh” and then a barrage of esoteric phrases (“Weaving down the byroad, singing a song / That’s my kind of high roll gone wrong”) in yet another Bowie-voice, that of an atonal robot wired for maximum angst. Robo-Bowie warns of “slaughter in the air / Protest on the wind,” and a malevolent ghost in his very own machine (“Someone else inside me / someone could get skinned”). “Joe the Lion” finds Bowie fascinated by West Coast art radical Chris Burden, the performance artist who was famously crucified on a Volkswagen in a 1974 piece entitled
Transfixed:
“And he said, ‘Tell you who you are / If you nail me to my car.’” “Sons of the Silent Age” is “Heroes” in the abstract. A love song of equal passion (“Baby, I’ll never let you go,” Bowie wails), its lyrics are much less direct (“Don’t walk they just glide in and out of life / They never die, they just go to sleep one day”). Opening with an Eno-treated, shimmering fanfare complete with ascending sax melody, it’s played for maximum drama but its meaning and impact, especially compared with the song that immediately follows it, gets muddled.