Bowie: A Biography (50 page)

As the seventies ended, England’s first post-Bowie decade was gearing up. Some of the teenagers who watched Bowie perform “Starman” on
Top of the Pops
were now pop stars themselves, like Tubeway Army, Joy Division, XTC and Lene Lovich. Bowie’s Eno collaborations inspired dozens of British youths—like Depeche Mode from Basildon, the Human League from Sheffield, Blancmange from Harrow and OMD from Liverpool—to acquire inexpensive synthesizers and begin composing avant-garde pop singles. “Warm Leatherette” by the Normal was the first and among the finest. Even the classic guitar/bass/drums acts of the new wave, like Northhampton’s Bauhaus, were Bowie-informed. It must have been gratifying and infuriating at once. Bowie was only thirty-two, but already he was being treated like a great star from a bygone era. Worse, many of these acts were vying against him for chart success. Tubeway Army leader Gary Numan’s 1979 solo album
The Pleasure Principle
(powered by the chilly dance smash “Cars”) outsold Bowie’s release from the same year,
Lodger
. The Associates, a wry, romantic Scottish New Wave band, didn’t even bother to write their own Bowie-indebted hit that year but rather gained serious rock-press attention with an accelerated but faithful cover version of Bowie’s
own
’79 single “Boys Keep Swinging.”

21.

N

INETEEN SEVENTY-NINE
began with the first true creative flop of Bowie’s otherwise flawless decade. The actor David Hemmings, star of the quintessential swinging London film, 1966’s
Blow Up
, had befriended Bowie and filmed his sold-out concert at London’s Earls Court the previous year for a proposed documentary, which was never released. Hemmings was attempting to make the shift from actor to director
and convinced Bowie to appear in his debut, a World War I period piece called
Just a Gigolo
, largely because legendary German film icon Marlene Dietrich had signed on. Dietrich received a reported $250,000 for a few days’ work, playing a cynical madam who hires out war-scarred young men to horny European ladies. Dietrich, pushing eighty and apparently too frail to act while standing, recites inane dialogue like “Dancing, music, champagne. The best way to forget until you find something that you want to remember,” from her seat. Bowie seems like he’s suppressing his gag reflex. “I’m the head of a regiment of sorts,” Dietrich muses. “The gigolos! All you need is a battlefield.” The film, which also stars Kim Novak (attempting a Eurotrash accent), and all involved were pilloried by critics upon its release in February. Bowie good-naturedly referred to it as “All my thirty-two Elvis movies rolled into one.”

Perhaps reckoning with his first misstep put Bowie on the defensive when it came to his younger musical rivals. “I’ve seen a few of Gary Numan’s videos,” he quipped to an interviewer that year. “To be honest, I never meant for cloning to be a part of the eighties. He’s not only copied me, he’s clever and he’s got all my influences in too. I guess it’s best of luck to him.”

Numan and Bowie were actually booked to perform on the UK talk show
The Kenny Everett Video Show
in late ’79, but Bowie refused to be in the studio at the same time. The younger performer, a lifelong fan, was crushed. “If I’d met him before
Kenny Everett
I’d have stood awestruck, overwhelmed and probably dribbling like a simpleton,” he says today. “If I’d met him in the weeks after
Everett
I’d have called him a small-minded cunt and gone about my business. He had no reason to be afraid at all. No matter what we achieved, whether we became more successful or not, nothing could be taken away from his amazing career. If he’d handled it differently I would have remained his biggest champion. He was legendary even then and I was just part of the latest wave of new upstarts. I think the majority of the new electronic people worshipped the ground he walked on, so it came as a huge shock to me to see that he obviously felt threatened in some way. I couldn’t believe that he would A, have me thrown out of the building and B, have me taken off the program. That he could see me as a threat seemed ridiculous when, to me, he was close to God and I was a spotty nothing. It mattered nothing to me that I was
selling more records. He was the man. What he did, although no big deal to me anymore, changed the way I felt about him forever. He suddenly became very, very human, no longer larger than life. As I’ve grown older and seen my own career ebb and flow I understand far more how he must have felt, even though I’ve never had the same fears or felt the need to try and harm someone else’s career.”

Lodger
is strong enough an effort to stand alongside any of the great New Wave releases of 1979, from the Cars’
Candy-O
, to the Police’s
Regatta de Blanc
, to Blondie’s
Eat to the Beat
, to Public Image Limited’s
Metal Box
. While included in the “Berlin trilogy” of
Low
and
“Heroes,” Lodger
was not recorded at Hansa but rather at Mountain Studios in Montreux, near Bowie’s home, shortly after the close of his 1978 world tour. Work was completed in New York City in the new year. The same major players—Eno, Visconti and Alomar, and the Dennis Davis and George Murray rhythm section—appear, as does Belew. The popular opinion among critics upon its release was that the record was the least of the three, but in time, its reputation has improved and world-beat tracks like “African Night Flight” and “Yassassin” can now clearly be heard as influences on Talking Heads’ much more highly regarded 1980 album
Remain in Light
(also produced with Eno), the David Byrne/Eno experiment in sonic collage
My Life in the Bush of Ghosts
and Paul Simon’s 1986 masterpiece
Graceland
. While hardly happy-go-lucky (the single “DJ” begins with the priceless verse “I’m home, lost my job, and incurably ill”) it lacks the shocking newness of
Low
or the emotional immediacy
of “Heroes.”

“Lodger
is a nice enough pop record,” Jon Savage wrote in his
NME
review, “beautifully played, produced and crafted, and slightly faceless. Is Bowie that interesting?” He dismisses it as “avant AOR.”

“Before
Lodger
, the music was darker and probably less experimental,” said Belew.
“Lodger
was more of a world record—urban and eastern at the same time. It seemed he was spreading his wings in that direction, incorporating world music styles. It really inspired me to open up my guitar playing. David was great at stretching you out. It was perfect preparation for working with Talking Heads, where they knew what they wanted but needed a sprinkling of fairy dust on it.”

Lodger’s
promotional
videos
, however, were as innovative as anything Bowie had ever done before. Bowie and director David Mallet created
original clips for each of the album’s three singles, “Boys Keep Swinging,” “DJ” and “Look Back in Anger.” Two years before the launch of MTV, the artists who bothered to make videos at all shot mostly performance clips against white backdrops. Bowie spent both time and money and brought real invention to the form before it became commonplace.

“They’re authentically strange,” director David Mallet says of the early clips (Mallet would shoot videos for singles from the next three Bowie albums). “The age of video became the first time anybody had any freedom in the British cinema. Hammer horror [films], I guess, in the fifties and sixties, maybe, but what music videos brought to Britain and Europe was really the equivalent to the French avant-garde. It was the first time UK filmmakers were able to spend money and do what they wanted.”

Bowie’s commitment to leading this movement is in evidence with the “DJ” clip, in which he traipses into a busy London street at night unannounced while Mallet films him. Pedestrians slowly realize who he is and run up to kiss and touch him while he lip-synchs. Dangerous, sure. But Bowie knew it would make a great shot. “That was real, that was as completely real as you can get,” says Mallet. “Wasn’t even anybody notified that it was going to happen. On my mother’s life that was real.”

Bowie was spotted at one of the Human League’s London concerts that April and popped up at a Nashville stop on their first American tour, studying them from the crowd. He found the League, who projected slides on themselves while performing, to be a bit more inventive than most of the other Bowie-indebted New Wavers. “They sound like 1980,” he commented. It was Bowie’s video clips, however, not the Human League’s or Gary Numan’s, that
looked
like 1980 and beyond.

Sensing an opportunity to distinguish Bowie from the already expanding glut of New Wave acts (even Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers were referred to as such in ’77), RCA marketing executives came up with an effective slogan to promote
“Heroes”
in early ’78: “There’s New Wave, There’s Old Wave and There’s David Bowie.” It immediately placed him in a class by himself, while acknowledging the new breed but reminding them that he’s been around and survived.

Booked to make his return to late-night American television to promote
Lodger
on the January 5, 1980, episode of
Saturday Night Live
,
Bowie wisely focused his attention on another thrilling video presentation. The performance stands as one of the best and strangest moments in the late-night variety show’s three-and-a-half-decade run. To Bowie’s left, a small man, dressed all in black, stood and stared straight ahead. To Bowie’s right a taller man, dressed all in red, with dyed red hair, did the same. As an eerie synth chord gurgled, the two men picked Bowie up and carried him to the microphone, upstage. Bowie is wearing a large bow tie, the size of two slices of New York pizza placed end to end. It’s pinned to a PVC breastplate in the shape of a tuxedo shirt. His black coat is covered in glittering plastic sequins. His sleeves are long and loose. His trousers are striped. His high cheekbones are covered in a pink Kabuki blush. To this day, most bands come on
SNL
and simply play their hit single. Bowie was playing “The Man Who Sold the World,” the title track to an album that was at the time nearly a decade old. When the number was over, the side men carried Bowie back to his original mark. He stood rigid as they placed him down, and Blondie moonlighter Jimmy Destri’s keyboard emitted a series of sci-fi burps and hums. A collective reaction of “What the hell was that?” could be detected as the crowd, stunned, applauded. Bowie’s black-clad backup singers didn’t allow themselves any satisfied smiles as the performance concluded. One, Klaus Nomi, then in his mid-twenties, was a solo performer and already a fast-rising star on the New York New Wave club scene. He was born Klaus Sperber (Nomi is an anagram of
Omni
,, as in the defunct science magazine) in the small mountain town of Immenstadt in Germany. Sperber moved to Manhattan in the mid-1970s. While working as a pastry chef, he refined his act. Shy and gentle offstage, he spoke with a thick German accent. Onstage, he was completely without peer, and by the late seventies, he and his backing band were selling out trendy discos like Xenon and established hipster venues like Max’s Kansas City with their highly theatrical mix of sixties pop (a great version of Lou Christie’s falsetto classic “Lightning’ Strikes” appears on his self-titled debut) and opera. Nomi was not classically trained, but he had an uncanny multioctave range that managed, when required anyway, to skirt camp for genuine beauty. Nomi was slight and balding but worked that into his otherworldly appearance as well. The pointy black hair on either side of his skull was waxed into sharp triangles. A phallic clump of it, rounded at the end, protruded from the top of his
elfin skull like a single antenna. Nomi’s stare was blank but his expression was wry. His lips were painted black and bee stung. His cheeks were deathly white. Klaus Nomi looked like Felix the Cat’s demented German cousin. On any other stage, he could have been (and often was) a sensation. But there, to Bowie’s right, he was merely part of the act. The other singer, dressed in red, was Joey Arias, also in his mid-twenties and a performer and New Wave disco figure who sang background vocals in Nomi’s act. Arias was Hispanic and handsome. Like Nomi, and virtually everybody who figured into the Manhattan New Wave scene that held the city enthralled in the post-disco late seventies, he was a transplant from somewhere else.

New York City in 1979 was nothing like the family-friendly squeegee-free shopping mall city it is in 2009. Three years previous, President Ford had famously told its bankrupt civic leaders to “drop dead.” Times Square was full of porno. The Lower East Side was a haven for shooting galleries. Mugging, rape and murder were rampant.

“The thing that made that whole New Wave scene possible was the fact that the city was falling down,” says Destri. “All these bands could perform around each other and afford to live in a central venue. Every time the economy goes south, art grows. If you were an actuary or an accountant you’d consider those years horrid, but if you were an artist, you’d consider them magic. New York was peeling. It was piss stained. It was falling down but at the same time, it was vibrant.”

Painters, rockers, experimental theater troupes and drag queens poured into these neighborhoods. No matter how oppressive it was, for many of them, it was better than the unhappy home life they’d fled. And with a modicum of street smarts and a few dollars for the cheap rents, they could establish a genuine scene.

“You could live on practically nothing, which meant you didn’t need to get a ‘real’ job, which left one time to be endlessly creative,” says actress/singer/performer Ann Magnuson, who moved to the East Village from West Virginia in 1978 and hosted several of the New Wave revues at venues like the Mudd Club and Irving Plaza. “Making art or music or performance or just turning your everyday life into a spectacle. Bowie had turned into something godlike to certain kids who loved the weird, the edgy, the arty and the glam. By that point he had become deified.”