Bowie: A Biography (65 page)

Bowie and Visconti began working on the
Heathen
album in Manhattan but relocated to Allaire Studios, situated on a two-hundred-foot-high top in the Catskill Mountains in upstate New York, on the recommendation of a mutual friend. Bowie had been somewhat blocked in the city and had a spiritual convergence of sorts as soon as he set foot in the building and began. “Walking though the door everything that my album should be about was galvanized for me into one focal point,” he said at the time. “It was an ‘on the road to Damascus’ type of experience, you know; it was al most like my feet were lifted off the ground.” There among the deer and the eagles soaring overhead, Bowie and Visconti created the record, one of Bowie’s best, with a renewed sense of purpose. From Picasso to Warren Beatty to David Letterman, you can see once perhaps less-than-accountable
alpha males of the arts and letters melting when a little baby comes into their life. “Overnight our lives have been enriched beyond belief,” Bowie, a father again at age fifty-five, told UK magazine
Hello
. As they raised the little girl, in perhaps the
greatest
testament to his devotion to his new daughter, Bowie gave up smoking. A heavy smoker since the early sixties, Bowie began seeing a hypnotist in effort to stop in the mid-nineties. He’d taken to eating Australian tea tree sticks by the dozen. Cigarettes and coffee were his last remaining vices. With regard to the Marlboros, nothing worked until he became a father again, and even then, it was a struggle.

“I remember him coming offstage during that last tour of his and going backstage to see him,” says Mick Rock. “He’d officially stopped smoking. Maybe his wife had gotten on his ass, starting to get a bit worried about him. I think his father had died in his fifties. He’d stopped buying cigarettes. After the show, he was looking for a roadie to catch cigs off, looking around to make sure Iman wasn’t around.”

Before entering the studio with Visconti, Bowie found time to steal a scene in Ben Stiller’s fashion-industry send-up
Zoolander
among an egregiously long list of would-be thieves that included Winona Ryder, Billy Zane, Paris Hilton and Lenny Kravitz. When Stiller’s titular male model clashes with Owen Wilson’s Hansel (“Who you trying to get crazy with,
ese?
Don’t you know I’m loco?”), a “walk-off” is suggested. Ten minutes later, the rivals meet in an abandoned warehouse and audiences are treated to “the real world of male modeling. The one they don’t show you in magazines or on the E channel.” As bad techno plays, Stiller and Wilson limber up. “All right, who’s going to call this sucker?” Wilson asks. “If nobody has any objections, I believe I might be of service,” a familiar voice offscreen offers. And with the cue of “Let’s Dance” on the soundtrack, Bowie nearly makes off with the “best scene-stealer” honors (and would completely own it if Will Ferrell had not been in the cast).

Bowie and Visconti were upstate on the morning of September 11, 2001. Bowie, an early riser, happened to be at his upstate residence, watching the lone working television, when the first plane flew into the tower. Both Bowie and Visconti were eventually able to reach their loved ones and confirm that they were safe but were then faced with the awkward situation of being stuck up in the mountains while the city recovered. They made a halfhearted attempt to continue recording, but by sundown, they
found themselves out on the studio porch watching orange smoke billow up into the sky to the south. They could see Ground Zero burning for the next week.
Heathen
, released the following June, was an across-the-board success, Bowie’s biggest critical and commercial hit since the early eighties, breaking the U.S. Top 15 in its debut week and the Top 5 in England. It garnered the most plaudits of any album since
Let’s Dance
.

“Bowie seems to have finally realized that he’s just been trying too damn hard,” Pitchfork observed in its review. “Where 2000’s
Hours
was a brooding, wrist-slitting account of Bowie’s laments about growing old and irrelevant,
Heathen
is the sound of acceptance. He’s relaxed, even serene, and the songs clearly reflect this with a nonchalant charm reminiscent of the Bowie of old.”

The album opens with “Sunday,” which plainly evokes September 11. “Nothing remains,” he sings. “Look for cars or signs of life.” A faithfully jagged and tough version of the Pixies’ indie classic “Cactus” from 1988’s
Surfer Rosa
follows, with Visconti approximating Steve Albini’s startling drum sound and “you are in the room” ambience. Because
Heathen
is such a New York record (“Slip Away,” a sort of middle-aged “Life on Mars?” mentions local children’s show host Uncle Floyd and his puppet friend Oogie, the Yankees and Coney Island), it’s hard to continue to avoid reading into lyrics that in places seem to chillingly foreshadow the city’s darkest day as one listens. “Watching all the world and war torn / How I wonder where you are,” Bowie sings on “Slip Away” (written for the
Toy
sessions a year before).

On “A Better Future,” perhaps his most classic pop song of the new millennium, he pleads, “Please don’t tear this world asunder … Please make sure we get tomorrow.” It’s a terrible thing to say, but these odd bits of tragic prescience actually make the album even more powerful.

As Pitchfork observed, tracks like “Afraid” take the intense self-scrutiny
of Hours
… to more solid ground. “I wish I was smarter … I wish I was taller,” Bowie whines (over one of his better late period riffs) before arriving at actual conclusions: “I believe in Beatles”—a wry nod to John Lennon’s “God”—“I believe my little soul has grown.”

Covers of Neil Young’s “I’ve Been Waiting for You” and the Legendary Stardust Cowboy’s “I Took a Trip on a Gemini Spaceship” are delivered with fan-boy glee and affectionate irony respectively. (“I shot my space gun,” Bowie sings on the latter. “And boy, I really felt blue.”)

When Paul McCartney and others began organizing a 9/11 tribute concert the following month, Bowie was one of the first to sign on and quickly put a band together. “As New Yorkers, we’d been violated … and David is nothing if not a New Yorker at this point,” says Plati, who led the band that night. It’s Bowie who opens the entire concert, sitting on the Garden floor playing an odd instrument known as an Omnichord, a handheld synthesizer that plays preset rhythms and basic chord changes. The melody was not, as a result, instantly familiar until he began to sing. Then it slowly became recognizable as not a Bowie song, but rather Simon & Garfunkel’s 1968 classic “America,” a tribute to the place that had been Bowie’s spiritual home since his half brother first gave him a copy of
On the Road
in the late 1950s.

“David’s opening of the show—solo, on Omnichord, performing Paul Simon’s ‘America’—was moving, haunting, eerie, to say the least. It was a surreal atmosphere anyway, and that really drove it home. You could hear a pin drop in the Garden. Though once we launched into ‘Heroes,’ the roof came off the place,” says Plati. “From my vantage point the audience on the floor was mostly firefighters and cops, and they loved every second of it—by the time the Who came onstage, they were totally gone.”

Shortly after helping a city deal with its grief publicly, Bowie was forced to deal with his own privately. His mother, Peggy Jones, died in April of 2002 at the age of eighty-eight. Having long since reconciled with her son, she lived in comfort at the St. Alban’s nursing home outside of London. Work, as it had always been, amounted to the only truly effective way of processing pain and loss. Bowie had not toured since
Earthling
, five years earlier, and an offer to headline the second annual Area tour (Area 2) organized by his neighbor Moby seemed under the circumstances a good idea. The two had struck up a friendship after Moby remixed
Earthling’s
“Dead Man Walking” (as he would later do with
Reality’s
“Bring Me the Disco King”).

In the months following 9/11 New York seemed to awaken from its cultural torpor and, with regard to rock and art anyway, become a great culture center again. “New York, I think, is his cauldron,” says Moby. “So many of his heroes came from here. New York, for all its problems, is still the world center for so many things. Look at his choices of where to live. Geneva. Berlin. If he lived in London his life would be miserable. He’d be tossed into
a blender and pureed all the time. L.A., he lived there making
Station to Station
. New York makes perfect sense and there’s the historical context.”

Bowie’s love affair with the city was further expressed in the fall of 2002 when it was announced that he would perform concerts at venues of varying sizes in each of the five boroughs, following the route of the annual New York City marathon. The October 11 opening show would take place on Staten Island at the music hall at Snug Harbor; from there his arena-ready band would play the intimate St. Anne’s Warehouse the following day. Four days later, they’d booked the Queens College Golden Center, Jimmy’s Bronx Café and a closing night on October 20 at the Beacon Theater on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. “I could get home from all the gigs on roller skates,” he quipped upon announcing the tour.

It was around this time that lots of Bowie spottings began to take place. “Bowie was at the show last night!” “I just saw Bowie.” “I shared a cab with Bowie.” Ironically, as the city was under implicit siege (on constant orange alert), David Bowie walked around with no protection to speak of. He’d become, as he had in Berlin in the late seventies, very much a man of the people, grabbing coffee in the morning, unbothered, at Café Gitane by his apartment.

“If he wanted off the street, he could do that too,” says Moby. “It’s a bourgeois city. If he wants to have a five-hundred-dollar dinner he can do that. I’d see him walking on Prince Street on the way to dinner and we’d just run into each other. It made him feel more comfortable knowing he had a friendly face a block away. I think he really enjoys it. Every door is open. He and Iman, on their own, they’re both iconic superstars. Together they are closer to royalty. They are our royalty.”

Bands like the Strokes, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Secret Machines, Interpol and the Liars made a living downtown and went to exciting shows. Bowie started going out again and drawing inspiration from the new rock. He’d be spotted at many of the early club shows of the above-mentioned bands and used his influence among Bowienet subscribers to talk many of them up. A visit from Bowie backstage became tantamount to being in the court of the king of New York. It meant your band had arrived. As with New Romantic and Britpop, Bowie drew energy from the scene, and his next album, in the words of Tony Visconti, promised a “tight New York sound.”

29.

I

T IS HARD
to listen to
Reality
, recorded in New York in 2003, without considering that it is Bowie’s last album at the time of this writing, and if he releases another, it will remain his last musical statement for over a half decade. That’s a “reality.” One listens to swan-song albums a bit differently, whether it’s
Let It Be, In Through the Out Door, Closer, Strangeways, Here We Come
or
Unplugged in New York
. As potential swan songs go,
Reality
is worthy. I think it’s even better than
Heathen
, bolstered as it was by the confidence-building reception of that project. The songs seem fuller, and with the addition
of Station to Station–era
guitarist Earl Slick to the fold, it’s much more of a guitar record. “New Killer Star” addresses, as tristate luminaries Sonic Youth’s
Murray Street
or Bruce Springsteen’s
The Rising
did before it, 9/11. Bowie sings of the “great white scar over Battery Park” in his vaguely sinister Thin White Duke voice (the one that always brings maximum drama). “Never Get Old,” pushed by a great Gail Anne Dorsey bass line, manages to be both sentimental and existential (not to mention freakin’ hysterical). “There’s never gonna be enough money,” a deranged-sounding Bowie screams, “There’s never gonna be enough drugs … never gonna be enough sex.” Equally out-there is his rearranged take on the Modern Lovers’ immortal “Pablo Picasso” (already covered indelibly by Burning Sensations on the
Repo Man
soundtrack). Bowie adds the adjective “juicy” to the type of avocado the girls would turn the color of when the great Spaniard drove down the street in his El Dorado. “The Loneliest Guy” is Bowie’s smokiest torch song since “Lady Grinning Soul” in ’73. As Garson plinks an after-hours melody Bowie croons in a sexless falsetto, “I’m the luckiest guy / Not the loneliest guy.” “Days” (not the Kinks song of the same name) is something of a prayer. “Hold me tight,” Bowie sings over a spare acoustic, “All I’ve done, I’ve done for me / I gave nothing in return, and there’s little left of me.”

A faithful version of “Try Some, Buy Some” by the recently deceased George Harrison is included, as is a revisiting of “Rebel Rebel,” his most pure and lasting rocker. Rock ’n’ roll seems to be tacitly acknowledged on
Reality
as one of the youthful things that grow more and more true as one gets old, not a simple pleasure, but its pleasures a simple truth. Like Joe Strummer, Bono, and Springsteen every time he reunites with his E Street Band after two or three solo albums, Bowie was starting to realize that the rock medium he’d “tarted up” in his youth was still there to give him dignity and, more crucially, fun in his old age. It meant something. Why else reunite with Visconti? Why play tiny venues in the Bronx when he could still fill arenas? Family mattered, certainly. Bowie, a doting father, spent time with his daughter, taking care to be there in her early years, knowing he was not around when his son was developing.

Bowie’s rediscovery of rock ’n’ roll purity was reflected in the tour he was planning in support of the album, which was released in mid-September to more strong reviews and sales, hitting the British Top 3 and the American Top 30.