Bowie: A Biography (60 page)

As with all of Bowie’s lesser work, there are flashes of brilliance on
Black Tie
. “The Wedding” is a rare instance of Bowie’s unguarded emotion and euphoria over his marriage to Iman, and with its Arabic flourishes, it neatly unifies their respective backgrounds, Western pop and Somalia. “Jump They Say,” the lead single, with lyrics that, like those of “All the Madmen,” continued to address Terry Burns’s sad legacy, was, by contrast, authentically dark (if you discount the Mark Romanek–directed music video, which is pure fashion). Although it topped the British charts, it was not the
Let’s Dance-
-style commercial comeback the money men had handicapped it to be. Worse, the album was completely upstaged by the release of Angie’s memoir
Backstage Passes
and her intimation on the Joan Rivers and Howard Stern shows (Iggy Pop, of all people, was the other guest on Stern’s show and refused to remain in the studio with her) that she’d caught David in bed with Mick Jagger. And yet none of this seemed to matter. Bowie’s back catalog music simply refused to give up the ghost and join other “oldies” from the seventies in the classic rock pasture. A third wave of rediscovery, following post-punk and New Wave, came as those indie
rockers who realized they could never look like Bowie started selling millions of records—which did much to bolster their “Hey, maybe I could be Bowie after all” confidence. Dinosaur Jr. did a faithful cover of “Quicksand” off
Hunky Dory
, turning his fans on to an album that they might have never found. Most famously, in the winter of 1994, completely unsolicited, Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain reminded anyone who needed reminding in the wake of another disappointing Bowie album that Bowie was foremost a songwriting genius. During the band’s taping of the MTV series
Unplugged
in New York City, surrounded by orchids and candles, Cobain sang “The Man Who Sold the World.” He read the lyrics from a piece of paper on a stand but that didn’t diminish the feeling that this was some kind of valediction. Dressed in a pale green cardigan, surrounded by his band with cello accompaniment, Cobain demonstrated the versatility of the then twenty-five-year-old song. Bowie praised it as a good “straightforward” version and after Cobain’s death, he added it to his live set list.

“I was at a Bowie concert in 1995,” says Moby today of Bowie’s tour the following year alongside Nine Inch Nails. “The only older songs he played were ‘Scary Monsters’ and ‘The Man Who Sold the World.’ He was playing ‘The Man Who Sold the World’ and the kid next to me said to his friend, ‘Wow, this is cool. He’s playing a Nirvana song.’ It was all I could do not to throttle him.”

Perhaps Bowie’s finest album of the 1990s is his most obscure. Bowie’s soundtrack to the 1993 BBC miniseries
The Buddha of Suburbia
, based on the novel by Hanif Kureishi, barely even appears in the film (which is mostly driven by pop songs, including vintage Bowie). The book, the sexually charged account of a young Indian man from Bromley caught between the old world and the new who moves to London, discovers punk, grapples with racism and turns to theater to discover his own identity touched Bowie. “It made him laugh,” Kureishi says. “Reminded him of his own youth.” Kureishi and Bowie became friendly during the making of the film adaptation, with the icon taking pains to make the author, a superfan, feel at ease.

Bowie and Erdal Kizilcay watched the film (which stars Naveen Andrews, later the star of the hit TV series
Lost
, as Kureishi’s alter ego Karim) over and over again in his Swiss recording studio while writing the music. “He would talk to me about Brixton,” Kizilcay says. “How his
mother worked in a movie theater. I would tell him about Istanbul. We really understood each other.
The Buddha of Suburbia
comes from that and from his connection with Hanif.”

The album track “Ian Fish, UK Heir” is an anagram of “Hanif Kureishi.” “It’s very awkward for everybody with Bowie, and he’s very aware of that,” Kureishi says. “He makes sure that you’re okay. He knows it’s really freaky. ‘Ah, it’s David Bowie.’ He’s just thinking this is an interesting writer he wants to talk to. So he calms you down. He’s always in that position with the rest of the world.”

It was Bowie’s first full soundtrack, as his work with producer Paul Buckmaster for
The Man Who Fell to Earth
was abandoned after John Phillips got the job. The discipline of having to conform to an already completed film project seemed to help Bowie focus. Despite its status as the interpretation of Kureishi’s fictionalized childhood, it’s Bowie’s most directly autobiographical work since
Hunky Dory
. Bromley is all over it. “Living in lies by the railway line … Screaming along in south London,” he sings. While the film was critically acclaimed and the soundtrack drew his best reviews in a decade, it remained the great, lost late-era Bowie record until it was reissued on CD in 2008. “He was amazed how little the BBC paid,” Kureishi says. “Nobody ever paid him so little in his whole life. He was really shocked.” If he felt like a struggling artist after his paltry BBC wage (and the failure
of Black Tie)
, 1995’s
Outside
placed the artist back into the willful fringe. In fact, a decade and a half on, it remains possibly the ultimate art-fuck record of all time, born out of a jam session in Mountain Studios in the early fall of 1994, shortly after the completion of the
Buddha
soundtrack album, that included Bowie, Kizilcay, drummer Sterling Campbell, a returning Mike Garson, Carlos Alomar and Brian Eno. “We were just checking levels to separate the instruments and we started to jam,” Gabrels says. “Suddenly Brian was holding up a sign that said ‘Just Continue,’ and he started in with his electronic noises. Suddenly everyone starts to look at each other like ‘Hey, there’s something happening here,’ and we decided to finish an album like that. David was painting the whole time that we were playing. He had an easel set up in the studio. As we went on, Bowie did all the segues that tell the story throughout the album in real time as we jammed. All the different voices. Baby Grace, Algeria Touchshreik, Leon Blank, Nathan Adler …” The unusual approach to recording was nothing new to anyone
familiar with Eno, but the more classically trained Kizilcay was initially thrown. “He cannot even play four bars,” he tells me. “I must say this. He’s too clever. An interesting guy but I don’t know how he became so famous. He cannot play two harmonies together. No idea how to play the keyboard.”

Experiments like running Martha and the Vandellas’ version of “Dancing in the Streets” (as opposed to Bowie’s own duet with Jagger) through the headphones and instructing the band to jam along with it, then playing back the results with the original song dropped out of the mix perplexed Kizilcay. “He’d spent time writing us letters. Everyone got a different letter,” he says. “I was in Arabia and I was going to marry the sheik’s daughter, so I was to play funky Arabic disco?”

When word got around that Eno, who’d spent much of the eighties and early nineties working with U2 (in addition to producing the Manchester band James’ immortal “Laid” and creating the start-up tone for Microsoft’s Windows program) had reunited with Bowie, the anticipation was high that they’d come up with another masterpiece on par with their “Berlin trilogy.”
Outside
, in my opinion, is as good a record as
Low, “Heroes”
or
Lodger
. Rather than being ahead of its time or behind its time, it’s simply Bowie’s most of-its-time work since his late-sixties hip pie folk material. Bowie was fascinated by the apparent fin de siècle disintegration of culture, the speeding up of information and the primitivism exemplified by the body piercing, tattooing and body manipulation of the Lollapalooza nation; the performance art of Los Angeles–based artist Ron Athey, an HIV-positive firebrand who shoved spikes into his forehead, leaving pools of contagious blood on gallery floors; and the industrial rock of bands like Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor, once a shy Ohioan Bowie obsessive, then a fishnet-clad drug addict who recorded his masterpiece
The Downward Spiral
in the house where the Manson family butchered Sharon Tate and her friends. “I would put on
Pretty Hate Machine
on the Tin Machine tour to clear everyone out of the back of the bus,” Gabrels laughs. “And then sometime in ’94 David came to me and said, Oh, Reeves, you gotta hear this record!’ It was
The Downward Spiral.”
Once the music was recorded, Bowie began to put together the album’s narrative (sorry, its “non-linear gothic drama hyper circles” as the promotional material described it). Basically, it’s the end of the millennium and society has become so jaded that something called Art
Crime or Art Murder has become the next big thing (wasn’t it the next big thing in 1974 when Divine declared as much in
Female Trouble?)
. Nathan Adler, a kind of Philip Marlowe meets Harrison Ford’s Deckard in
Blade Runner
, is some kind of culturally plugged-in detective pursuing a missing child (Baby Grace) who is feared to be a victim of the phenomenon. For all its highfalutin backstory,
Outside
succeeds largely because the music itself is so exciting. Like
The Buddha
(and unlike
Black Tie)
, nothing here feels like a sketch (which is truly impressive given its spontaneous origins).

“Leon Takes Us Outside” is a preamble much like
Diamond Dogs
’s “Future Legend,” setting the mood. “It’s happening now,” Bowie sings with new confidence on the title track, a middle-aged legend exciting himself. “The Heart’s Filthy Lesson,” the lead single, is NIN-style funk with Garson’s distinctive piano running through the track (Reznor, who remixed the song into a minor alt-rock hit, would collect on the favor by pinching Garson for his equally ambitious double album
The Fragile
in 1999). “A Small Plot of Land” is a flat spread of electronic jazz, segueing into “Hallo Spaceboy,” Bowie’s most convincing rocker in two decades (since “Rebel Rebel”). Its lyrics hearken back to the halcyon days of glitter as well (“Do you like girls or boys?”). “The Voyeur of Utter Destruction” asks the question, what if the outro of “The Bewlay Brothers” was expanded into a four-and-a-half-minute song? On “We Prick You,” Bowie demands, “Tell the truth,” as if willing himself completely out of his late-thirties torpor and into the new, abrasive realm of industrial rock ’n’ roll (one, of course, fully indebted to him already).

An offer was made for a Bowie / Nine Inch Nails package tour, one Reznor was initially somewhat reluctant to accept. “There were similar sensibilities in their creation of art,” says Mike Garson, who would work with Reznor on
The Fragile
. “Trent, being young, obviously he grew up on David and he was a hero to him. But they became peers at that point.”

“I was afraid to meet him because he is my hero,” Reznor says. “If I had to say there’s one person I’ve wished I could be, for a multitude of reasons it would have been him. I was kind of afraid to really be around him and meet him, because almost everybody that you end up meeting like that, they can’t live up to the superhero that you’ve created in your mind.
And he didn’t in an odd way.” Reznor at the time was living out the nihilistic lyrics of
The Downward Spiral
, addicted to drugs and alcohol and so full of doubt and self-loathing that the acclaim and fan worship could only seem perverse. Bowie recognized his former self in his new collaborator and tried to offer some big-brotherly guidance.

“I saw a guy that was at peace with himself and seemed happy, and still was making music that I thought was good but wasn’t about to die every night,” Reznor says of Bowie. “I remember a couple of nights of him putting his arm around me like I’m his brother, giving me some advice. I think later we talked and he said, ‘I saw a lot of myself in where you were at the time,’ which is bad things about to happen. He had been there himself. And I knew he’d been through a lot of bad shit. And somehow I was in the midst of this bad shit with a lot more bad shit to come, and it made me feel like, all right, someone can come out the other end and still be cool. I was jealous when I saw him, because I was like, ‘Fuck, man, my life feels like it’s spinning out of control, and it’s not spinning upward.’”

Like Cobain, Reznor saw Bowie as a sort of older brother figure, a survivor who used his pain to make beautiful art but realized that he did not have to linger in a stale and nihilistic energy field, that age and wisdom were possible, as well as a better navigation system through the obstacles of extreme psychic pain and megafame. Cobain never got there. Happily, Reznor seems to have found his way.

Bowie rehearsed with his new band, anchored by new drummer Zachary Alford and bassist Gail Anne Dorsey, whose extreme-looking crew cut perfectly fit with this gleefully assaulting new aesthetic. “Aside from her magnificent voice, she played only the fattest, most tasteful bass lines,” says Alford of Dorsey. “She is a knight in shining armor. That’s why we call her ‘Dame’ Dorsey. She has a sense of style and poise. She’s just breathtaking. A powerhouse. She adds a smoothness to the music that just glues the whole thing together.” Gabrels and keyboardist Peter Schwartz rounded out the lineup for the rehearsals in New York, and the tour opened in mid-September on the East Coast. NIN, despite being the bigger act at the time, opened, with a characteristically riotous set.

“There was no intermission at all,” then NIN drummer Chris Vrenna says. “We designed a four-song band segue that would slowly introduce Bowie and his band as NIN and Trent exited. The first song of
this segue was ‘Scary Monsters.’ Bowie came out and performed with NIN. Then we did ‘Reptile’ from
The Downward Spiral
, where Trent and Bowie shared the vocals. Then our backdrop curtain went up and Bowie’s entire band and the entire NIN band performed ‘Hallo Spaceboy’ off Bowie’s record. Lastly, the NIN band all left the stage and Trent and Bowie sang ‘Hurt’ with his band. Trent would wave good-bye afterward and then Bowie’s show continued on from there. It was fairly complicated to pull off, with both bands on moving risers and changing backdrops and scenery throughout the whole segue.”