Bowie: A Biography (49 page)

The title track is next, and Bowie sings it as if he could only do it once before perishing. Sensing the song was bigger than him and rather one of those songs (“Bridge over Troubled Water,” “Respect,” “Sweet Caro line”) that the world owns, Bowie recorded versions in both German (“Helden” is available on the
Sound and Vision
box set) and French. “Blackout” imagines Bowie on the street during the New York City power failure in July of that year, revisiting the coke paranoia that he returned to Europe to avoid: “Get me off the street,” he pleads, “get some protection.” Like
Low
’s second side, side two
of “Heroes”
is largely instrumental. “V-2 Schneider” is a motorik-beat-driven homage to Kraftwerk’s Florian Schneider. “Sense of Doubt” could have functioned as a Fritz Lang score, with its minimalist descending piano riff a sort of cue for some sweaty, bug-eyed, Peter Lorre–esque villain. “Moss Garden” draws its inspiration from David Lynch’s cult classic
Eraserhead
(a Bowie favorite, also released that year, complete with a creepy, urban industrial soundtrack). “Neuköln” is an homage to the district where Bowie and Iggy rented their flats. In keeping with the neighborhood’s bohemian bent, the track features Bowie blowing John Coltrane–style free-form notes on his sax. The album closes with a vocal track, “Secret Life of Arabia,” a Middle Eastern disco number that hints at the world funk Bowie and Eno would pursue on 1979’s
Lodger
.

Bowie, who raved about those spud boys in Devo to anyone who would listen that year and was for a time scheduled to produce their debut
Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!
(Eno eventually did the job), was not the only one reinspired by New Wave. Marc Bolan looked to be making a comeback by 1977. Bolan had fallen on hard times since the heyday of T. Rextasy by refusing stubbornly to adapt. Visconti had changed camps and was making monumental new music with Bowie and Eno. Bolan was left recycling his old glitter riffs and hippie poetry. He still had the capacity to write great songs like “Dandy in the Underworld,” but seemed rudderless when compared to his old friend Bowie.

By the late summer of ’77, however, Bolan, still only twenty-nine, had dropped his mid-seventies bloat and booked a comeback tour with hot punk act the Damned as support. Bolan also was offered his own television show for Granada TV (entitled simply
Marc)
, in which he would greet the audience, play an oldie or two and welcome another act for a
solo spot and then a jam. Bowie, still promoting
“Heroes,”
was booked as a guest in September of ’77. Bowie’s arrival, however, only underscored how big he was and how humble Marc had become. Bowie traveled to Granada studios in a limo with a full entourage. Security was tightened and the set was closed down. Bowie’s reps essentially took it over. Bolan reportedly responded by drinking and sulking. The two jam on an inchoate blues number called “Standing Next to You,” after which a tipsy Bolan stumbles. “Marc fell off the stage halfway through the number,” says Tony James, whose Generation X was the other musical guest scheduled that day. Bolan’s tumble was symbolic. He would be dead before the show aired the following week. “It’s poignant,” Shaar Murray says. “What Bowie understood and Bolan didn’t was you present a moving target. Bolan was a one-trick pony. Kept trying to do his single one trick even after he got too fat to jump the hurdle.”

Bolan was killed in a car accident a week later. Bowie, along with Elton John and Rod Stewart, attended the funeral and paid his respects before the coffin, on which a swan-shaped bouquet lay. The following month, Bowie promoted and sang “Heroes” on Bing Crosby’s holiday special,
Bing Crosby’s Merrie Olde Christmas
, topping a special-guests bill that included Twiggy and Ron Moody (best-known as Fagin in the Oscar-winning musical
Oliver!)
. During Bowie’s non-solo segment, one of the most famous in the history of holiday TV programming, Bing, seventy-four and frail in his cardigan, putters around before a twinkling tree in an old country estate. There’s a ring at the door. It’s David Bowie!

“Hello, are you the new butler?” he asks.

“It’s been a long time since I’ve been the new anything,” Bing quips.

“I’m David Bowie, I live down the road. Sir Perceval lets me use his piano when he’s not around.”

Crosby asks Bowie what he sings.

“Mostly contemporary stuff,” he answers. “Do you like modern music?”

“I think it’s marvelous, some of it, really fine,” Crosby says unconvincingly.

“You ever listen to any of the older music?”

“Sure, like John Lennon and the other one, Harry Nilsson.”

Crosby seems to warm up when Bowie mentions his six-year-old son. “You go through any of the traditional things in the Bowie household on Christmastime?” Bowie makes a bad joke about agents sliding down the chimney, and then, mercifully, the shtick ends and they’re crooning together. Supposedly this was going to be a straight duet on “Little Drummer Boy,” but Bowie decided to weave a lesser-known melody, “Peace on Earth,” into the mix because it suited his register better. Crosby abided. It’s become a holiday classic and I will show it to my six-year-old son as soon as he … exists. Sadly it would be Crosby’s final appearance as well, prompting Bowie to joke, with characteristic black humor, that he was planning to stop going on television.

Personally, Bowie settled near Montreux, Switzerland, a quaint resort town popular with tax-exile rock stars because of its state-of-the-art recording studio and annual jazz festival. He spent his days in preparation for the extensive world tour that would keep him on the road for much of 1978. For the first time since Haddon Hall, he also felt like a hands-on dad to Zowie, who would soon answer permanently to Duncan. “The tabloids called me Zowie,” Duncan Jones said in a 2009 interview. “It was my middle name. Then I decided I wanted to be called by my given name when I was fourteen.” Bowie spent every day with the boy, and in the next decade he would accompany his father to movie and video sets and boarding school, fostering his interest in film. He would attend the London Film School and release his debut
Moon
in the summer of 2009. Bowie even recorded a charming narrative for a version of Prokofiev’s
Peter and the Wolf
with music by the London Symphony Orchestra for the boy and even presented him with an early home video copy of
Star Wars
. He also reconnected with his mother, putting the tension he’d publicly referred to on the Dick Cavett show only three years earlier behind him and seemed to gain energy from a sense of family. Bowie’s new respect for family was well timed to his son’s adolescence, and this availability after an early childhood in which the boy often felt “alone” surely kept him from becoming another resentful, spoiled child of celebrity like so many of Bowie’s peers’ offspring did. No less a social realist than Howard Stern opined on the air after seeing a screening of
Moon
and finding it surprisingly intense and engrossing: “You hear David Bowie’s kid and you think he’s going to be a fuck up.”
Or worse, a crap musician. “I rebelled against him,” Jones has said. “By showing no interest in (music).”

Meanwhile, Angie was coming apart. She’d met with Bowie in Berlin during the recording
of “Heroes”
and there it was formally decided they would divorce. “I was no longer able to share him either with black girls, other artists, drag queens or Corinne Schwab,” she writes. “The fantasy had slipped from the frame and was hanging askew.” While in Berlin, the Bowies seemed positive and resigned, celebrating their imminent divorce with a night of partying. When discussion turned to the settlement, a darker pall was cast over everything, as it soon became apparent to her that she was not going to be able to pursue what she believed to be here fair share of the Bowies’ assets.

“I was looking for a lawyer to help me get rid of David,” she says today. “I couldn’t get a lawyer to even see me. In Switzerland they were like, ‘Ha ha. Women hadn’t even got the vote till 1974 we’re not really concerned if you get your half.”

Proceedings turned even darker around New Year’s 1978, when Angie arrived in Switzerland expecting to see Duncan. Bowie, upset that she did not call or visit the child over Christmas, had taken him away. Angie, alone and stranded in the mountains, was inconsolable. That night, she ingested a near lethal dosage of sleeping pills and woke up in the local hospital in Vevey. The incident was covered by the worldwide tabloid press. “I tried to kill myself,” Angie admits, “but my heart wasn’t in it. I’m very competent. If I really wanted to kill myself I think I would have succeeded.”

Divorce proceedings accelerated from there, with Angie’s suicide attempt easily empowering Bowie’s lawyers to portray her as unstable. By decade’s end, Angie was heartbroken and dissolute, living off her small settlement and unable to see Duncan, as Bowie was awarded full custody of the boy. The birth of her second child, daughter Stacia, and the poetry she started putting to music and performing in clubs in the eighties (eventually released as the album
Moon Goddess)
helped her slowly piece herself back together over the years. The release of her autobiography, published in 1993, put her back in the center of public scrutiny, thanks to the intimation she made on both the Joan Rivers and Howard Stern shows that she once caught David and Mick Jagger in bed. She now lives quietly in Tuscon. When Angie speaks of Bowie today, nearly thirty years
after the finalization of their divorce in 1980, one can detect a complex mix of emotions in her voice. There’s pride, anger and, if not affection, certainly respect. She talks about him like someone she no longer really knows, like an abstract thing rather than a person. Her tone tends toward the analytical so much that at one point, I ask her to tell me about the downtime, what the two of them did when they were alone together and nobody else was around—if they just enjoyed a shared silence; whether there was any kind of affection that was pedestrian or if it was all sex, ambition and convenience. He had written love songs about her, after all: “The Prettiest Star,” “Golden Years” and “Be My Wife,” among them. She alludes to a few shared vacations early in the marriage but very little else. Angie is either keeping such memories to herself, and rightfully so, or the passing decades have diluted them a bit.

The level of Angie’s responsibility for David’s success is impossible to gauge. She certainly refuses to claim credit for it. “That’s for other people to say. People who are respected among the industry have said that I changed his focus and the way he worked and how he presented himself. He was very talented and when he met me, he was driven. He’s from Yorkshire. They know how to make money and he had a very weird family life. Most people who are very successful have suffered. And he didn’t really suffer but he suffered because he could never suffer to the extent or have the experiences that Terry had, and Terry went crazy because of it. In his heart he always felt guilty and the self-loathing is what makes him the great artist that he is. It’s a common motivator for a lot of great artists. They either get molested when they’re children, have a terrible experience—they nearly die falling off a cliff going to see the Grand Canyon—and you think whatever. Something happens that causes them to take life and twist it into what it is they think life should be giving them back for what they suffered.”

Bowie tried to duck the tabloid scrutiny of his marriage, using, as always, an imminent project, in this case, a world tour, as a means to keep himself focused and sane. The ’78 tour reunited Bowie with his White Light/Station to Station touring band, expanded to include synth players Roger Powell and Sean Mayes—whose tour diaries were posthumously published as
We Can Be Heroes—to
handle
Low
and
“Heroes”
material. Electric violinist Simon House and lead guitarist Adrian Belew, whom
Bowie poached from Frank Zappa, completed the lineup. Zappa, a Bowie hero from the sixties, was apparently not happy to lose Belew.

“David and Frank tried to talk to each other, or rather, David tried to talk to Frank, but Frank wouldn’t have anything to do with him,” Belew recalled. “Frank kept calling him ‘Captain Tom.’ It was kind of an ugly scene, really. In the end, it worked out pretty well. A few days later, I talked to Frank about it and he gave me his blessing and said, ‘Go on. I hope it works out for you.’”

Despite the blatantly uncommercial material on both of his Eno records, each contained big radio hits (“Sound and Vision” and “Heroes,” respectively). Coupled with the popularity of the
Changes
compilation and his reputation as a stellar live performer, Bowie was able to take this uncompromised new material back into arenas in America, Europe, Australia and Japan. The first section of the set list relied heavily on the
Low
and
“Heroes”
material, with “Be My Wife,” “Weeping Wall,” “Speed of Life,” “Breaking Glass” and “Blackout” leaving some, as the
NME
observed in their live review, “plainly restless.” The middle section of the show was earmarked for hits like “Fame” and “TVC 15,” with the Ziggy-era material saved for the climax (even in ’78 there were still kids in attendance in full glitter drag). “Rebel Rebel” was the nightly encore. While the tour was Bowie’s first of the seventies to focus on musicianship over theatricality, there seemed to be reminders of the cavalcades of old everywhere.

“When we showed up for the sound check at Madison Square Garden,” Belew recalled, “the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey circus was also housed in the bowels of the building, which was a huge labyrinth of a place. I was standing onstage doing my guitar check when I turned around and saw four elephants behind me. I think they had maybe thirty or forty of them, and they’d bring them up four at a time, square them off and let them eat. It was unreal. Later that day, we had a banquet room where there was lots of food laid out, and some of the wives, children and band associates were there. The door burst open and suddenly a chimpanzee in a houndstooth suit and roller skates came whirling around the table, chasing the kids all over the place, followed by his handler in an identical suit, holding a little placard that read ‘Here’s
my chimp. He’s done a thousand commercials and movies.’ It set the tone for that particular evening. Talking Heads, Dustin Hoffman, Andy War hol and other famous faces were in the audience. I’d have to say that was the most memorable and exciting show we’d done.” A ’78 tour document was released, in all its sectioned glory, as the double album
Stage
.