Bowie: A Biography (54 page)

Raised in Greenwich Village, Rodgers began playing guitar at sixteen. By his early twenties, he was making a living with a series of high-profile gigs, including with the house band at Harlem’s Apollo Theater and on the classic PBS children’s program
Sesame Street
(where future Bowie collaborator Luther Vandross and Fonzi Thornton also worked for a time). By twenty-seven, Rodgers was an international star, but one who could not get played on MTV or white radio as an artist or a producer. He had crafted Debbie Harry’s 1982 solo debut
KooKoo
but it had failed to achieve the kind of success Blondie had enjoyed.

“Working with [Rodgers] was an eye opener,” Bowie told
Penthouse
the following year, “because he pointed out to me a lot of things I hadn’t really noticed about America, about the changes that have taken place for him and how difficult it is now for him to get music played on white radio or white television and boy—he’s talking white radio, white television.
When I started watching the cable music channel MTV, I found the racism extraordinarily blatant,” Bowie added.

“Bowie was the most outspoken critic of the Michael Jackson issue,” says Alan Hunter of the channel’s refusal to play Michael Jackson and other R & B pop artists
pre-Thriller
. “He slammed [late VJ] J. J. Jackson [an African American]. He was being interviewed and out of nowhere he said, ‘Why don’t you play any black people?’ J. J. sputtered for an answer in defense of MTV.”

Rodgers, then only thirty, was a huge Bowie fan, having toured England in the Ziggy-mad year of ’73. He felt out of place in his outfit at the time, a straight R & B combo called New York City. “I was very embarrassed doing those old soul standards,” he told
The Face
in 1984. “I just didn’t fit. Sometimes blacks can be straighter than whites, older middle-class blacks. I’d come in with brocade jackets, patched jeans, and silver purses dangling from my shoulder. I was doing lots of acid. I saw myself as a rock superstar.” Chic, according to legend, was inspired to add female singers Norma Jean Wright and Luci Martin to the band’s then unsuccessful lineup by noticing the models on the covers of Roxy Music sleeves.

Since the mid-seventies, Rodgers had envied the career path of his old acquaintance Carlos Alomar. “My whole life I’ve been following Alomar,” he said. “All the things I wanted to do, he got there first. He had the Apollo job, the Bowie job …” When the Bowie collaboration began, the Chic leader figured he would finally have a chance to demonstrate that he could make a real New Wave record for a mostly white audience. As they worked through the winter, recording the demos Bowie had written in Switzerland during his extended hiatus (as well as Iggy Pop’s “China Girl”), it became clear that it was now both David Bowie and Nile Rodgers’s turn to cross over with something that not only combined the best of both genres but, like
Station to Station
, created something new entirely, a sort of future-funk blues that felt both modern and classic at the same time. The sound that Rodgers and Bowie hit upon in the winter of ’82, holed up in the Power Station, would also be used to create Rodgers-produced soulful New Wave hits for Madonna (“Like a Virgin,” “Material Girl”), Duran Duran (“The Reflex,” “Wild Boys,” “Notorious”), INXS (“Original Sin”), the Thompson Twins (“Lay Your Hands on Me”), the
B-52s (“Roam”) and even Mick Jagger
(She’s the Boss)
by the end of the decade.

David Bowie the free agent was a hot property but the star opted to sign with EMI on the strength of Queen’s recommendation. Finally free of Tony Defries in a contractual sense, eight years after leaving MainMan, with his divorce final and enough artistic credibility and cultural cachet to bank for life, he was no longer hampered by the past. Like Roxy Music’s
Avalon
, a major hit for the veteran art rockers in 1982 (also granting them a fresh, young MTV audience), Bowie’s new material would be unapologetically romantic and defiantly pleasing to listen to. In fact, that would
be
its edge.

In the years since
Let’s Dance’s
worldwide release in the spring of 1983, it has been unfairly maligned by Bowie purists as his sellout record, but it’s every bit as high concept as his canonized seventies efforts. Unlike some of its more diluted, less successful follow-up efforts, like 1984’s
Tonight
and ’87’s
Never Let Me Down, Let’s Dance
was, in its way, as revolutionary as
Ziggy Stardust, Station to Station
or
Low
.

“This record is pure celebration,” Charles Shaar Murray raved in his
NME
review of
Let’s Dance’s
title track, “a tribute to love and life that is as uncontrived as anything he’s ever done in his entire career … With this album, Bowie seems to have transcended the need to write endlessly about the dramas of being David Bowie and about all his personal agonies. This album just goes straight to the heart of it: it is warm, strong, inspiring and useful. You should be ashamed to say you do not love it.”

Side one opens with a chukka-chukka rhythm at once funky and strange, followed by a soothing electronic riff and Bowie announcing, “I know when to go out, I know when to stay in. And get things done.” “Modern Love” is the sound of someone who’s been away, reflecting some (“It’s not really work / It’s just the power to charm”). The new times terrify him some, but he’s going to use the fear and stay positive. “China Girl” differs from Iggy’s ’76 version primarily thanks to Bowie singing the melody and a soulful “little China girl” before the verse (which is more or less identical to Iggy’s). The arrangement of the Chinese bells is altered slightly for maximum pop impact as well, but who can blame him? How else does one take lyrics like “I stumble into town, just like a sacred cow / Visions of swastikas in my head” into the British and American Top 10? And just putting the song on
Let’s Dance
enabled Iggy to survive the
eighties and probably the early nineties too (up until his fluke Kate Pier-son duet hit “Candy” anyway). Completing the front-loading of the album (three hit singles in a row) is the title track, easily the most unconventional number one hit single of the modern era. With wood-block percussion, short bleating horns and Tony Thompson’s titanic drums driving the track for nearly eight minutes, Bowie pours out his most romantic and insistent vocal performance since “Heroes.” He starts out cool and flirty (“Put on your red shoes and dance the blues”) and finishes all sweaty (“If you should fall into my arms, tremble like a flower”). I interviewed the singer/songwriter M. Ward in the summer of 2009 and took a moment to ask him about his striking cover of “Let’s Dance,” which breaks the hit down to its basics and reimagines it like a Nina Simone torch song. “I always wanted to do a stripped down version of a dance song,” he says. “The beautiful thing about ‘Let’s Dance,’ I found are the lyrics. The production is great but it tends to hide the fact that the lyrics are so good. It’s a song I remember from my childhood, but I didn’t really realize what Bowie was saying in that song until I recorded it.” “Let’s Dance” also introduces the concept of “Serious Moonlight,” the title of the world tour. Bowie told an interviewer around this time that the term “serious moonlight,” a refrain throughout the song and the moniker of the
Let’s Dance
world tour, is essentially meaningless.

“It was an Americanism that I liked. Serious this … serious that …” Lyrically, however, the magic comes from trying to picture said moonlight. Is it blue? Yellow? Low hanging and full or an intriguing sliver peering through some windblown clouds? Or maybe it’s a half moon, like the tour set’s model or the mylar balloons dropped on the crowd in the “Modern Love” video? The other hallmark of “Let’s Dance,” of course, is the appearance of guitar god Stevie Ray Vaughn, contributing just one blues note midway through and taking the song out with his distinctive, fat but tough, weirdly melancholy style. Vaughn, then just twenty-eight, was a Dallas-born hotshot whose band Double Trouble had just started to come up from the bar circuits thanks to high-profile appearances at jazz and blues festivals like Switzerland’s Montreux (where Bowie first saw him in ’82). By the time “Let’s Dance” topped the charts, he had released his own hit record
Texas Flood
and opted out of playing on the Serious Moonlight tour (there were rumors that he’d fallen out with Bowie after Double Trouble
were booked and then dropped as the opening act for the entire tour). Nobody has sounded quite like him since his death in a helicopter crash in August 1990, and each time another guitarist (whether it’s Earl Slick, who did the tour in ’83, or Peter Frampton, who toured with Bowie in ’87) plays the song, they can do nothing but humbly imitate the man. Most people stop listening to
Let’s Dance
here, but the album still has much to offer. “Without You” is a classy midtempo ballad that strongly resembles early-eighties Roxy Music. “Criminal World” has a pop reggae groove that acts like Sade and UB40 would do much with as the decade wore on. “Cat People (Putting Out Fire),” Bowie’s 1982 collaboration with Giorgio Moroder, reappears as well. “Shake It,” with its falsetto delivery and female backing vocals, is something like a godparent to U2’s 1993 hit “Lemon.”

Straight Bowie appears stripped to the waist and shadowboxing on the album’s sleeve. He is tan, rested, with a little meat on his bones (he actually looks like he might be able to take you in that fight). The real achievement is the hair, however, his most radical tonsorial statement since the Red Hot Red Ziggy rooster cut a decade earlier.

“I thought the Serious Moonlight preppy look was a terrific contrast to the sort of spaced-out pale scrawny look,” says David Mallet, who shot the trio of videos for the album’s three smash singles. “It was so different and unexpected. And he looked great.” “To me the
Let’s Dance
persona was the last massive and significant change to his image,” Simon Reynolds says. “He went from being cocaine-ravaged thin, with this totally gaunt, pallid face, to this new healthy look—blond hair, tanned looking, very exuberant.” Presenting himself to a live audience, Bowie would choose a peachy yellow/orange zoot suit. As a student of painting he must have known that the color of the fabric, like the color of his new hair, called sunshine and positive energy to mind. There were few rock stars of Bowie’s caliber touring the world in 1983. The Rolling Stones had made their stadium run in ’81. The Who had played their “farewell tour” in ’82. Rod Stewart, Billy Joel, AC/DC and Def Leppard were playing arenas, but none of them promised the theatrical experience that a Bowie concert did, and advance ticket sales were beyond brisk. Only the Police’s tour in support of
Synchronicity
came close. The Serious Moonlight tour kicked off in Brussels on May 18 and then traveled to Germany on May 20, followed by dates across England. American audiences were given a preview when David Bowie
headlined the third and final day of the second annual (and last) US Festival in southern California (along with Stevie Nicks, the Pretenders and U2). Bowie, Van Halen and, most controversially, opening-night headliners the Clash were all rumored to be paid seven-figure fees by the festival’s sponsor, Apple Computers.

Serious Moonlight hit American sports arenas in July before traveling to the Pacific rim in late ’83 (over two million people would purchase tickets by the end of the run). Bowie’s big band (Slick; Alomar; Thompson; bassist Carmine Rojas, replacing George Murray; sax men Lenny Pickett, Stan Harrison and Steve Elson; keyboardist Dave Lebolt and backing vocalists the Simms brothers) all dressed in retro hepcat zoot suits and wide-brimmed hats in uplifting shades of green and peach. The set list drew from Bowie’s entire career, opening most nights with a bluesy “The Jean Genie” (Mick Ronson sat in with the band during a tour stop in Canada) and spacing the
Let’s Dance
material and other hits like “Heroes” and “Rebel Rebel” throughout lesser-known material like
Low
’s “What in the World” or the Velvets’ “White Light/White Heat.” “Modern Love” closed the show most nights. This would be Bowie’s first tour to employ massive monitors on either side of the stage, which the visually savvy star knew instinctively how to work for the nosebleed seats of stadiums. Thanks to rave word-of-mouth from the European dates, anticipation for the American leg and the chart success of “China Girl” on the heels of “Let’s Dance,” Bowie became one of the rare rock stars to grace the cover
of Time
magazine. “Yes, Michael Jackson may have sold more records, and yes, the Police can sell out Shea Stadium. But Bowie, in many ways, can meet them and match them both, and offer something else too. A Bowie concert, shorn of excessive theatrics, is a raved up tutorial in rock ’n’ roll survival. A history lesson with a horn section. This show is about the fall and rise of David Bowie,” writer Jay Cocks observed. Serious Moonlight was a blockbuster in part because it marked the first real generation shift in ticket buyers, from baby boomers to teenage future Generation Xers.

Serious Moonlight was, like the ’78 tour, unencumbered by darkness, but Bowie’s taste in film roles had not mainstreamed along with his music. Prior to the release of
Let’s Dance
, Bowie filmed a small part in a homo-erotic film called
Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence
. Bowie played a yellow-haired British army officer who becomes the object of the painfully
unrequited love of a Japanese officer, played by Ryuichi Sakamoto, then a Japanese pop star in Yellow Magic Orchestra (themselves a synth-pop act highly influenced by the Berlin trilogy). Sakamoto was in the crowd when Bowie took the Ziggy stage show to Japan and remained a devotee for a decade. The film, directed by Nagisa Oshima, the Japanese maverick who helmed
In the Realm of the Senses
, was filmed in the Pacific islands. Bowie shared an intense, blue-lit love scene with Sakamoto, who snatches a lock of his hair before leaving him to die, buried up to his neck in the hot sand.

“He’s buried and he’s dying and he understands the love between enemies,” Sakamoto tells me, describing the scene today, “He is generating some special vibrations and I really felt that. It was a Christlike death … When I cut his hair when he’s buried, that moment in life really felt that spirit. I’d heard of that kind of love going on in the army. A man’s world.”