Talking to Girls About Duran Duran: One Young Man's Quest for True Love and a Cooler Haircut (5 page)

Bowie’s big radio hit that eighth grade year was “Ashes to Ashes,” which was his sequel to “Space Oddity,” revisiting the story of Major Tom. (Rock stars are allowed to do that? Isn’t that cheating?) Bowie sounded like his voice was changing, like mine. He mumbled and wailed, as if he were stuck somewhere very frightening indeed, but had no idea how to get back home, like he’d missed the 7:20 bus from the Plaza. By the end, he was screaming, “I want to come down right now!” But Major Tom doesn’t get to come down, he’s still up there floating, and this time nobody’s listening and nobody mourns him.

“Ashes to Ashes” is Bowie’s most famous video—it’s an acclaimed work of art, one I’ve seen exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art. But there was no MTV back then, so “Ashes to Ashes” was only a radio hit. The one time I saw the video at the time was on
Entertainment Tonight
, and it scared the bejeezus out of me. Bowie is a sad clown on the beach, apparently agitated by a little sand in his tights, walking under a bloodred sky with a bunch of goth priests and priestesses. He strolls the beach with an old lady who looked remarkably like my grandmother. He also walks in front of a bulldozer, which I guessed must symbolize harvesting the crops of awesome.

I decided I knew exactly what this song was about. Bowie was clearly suffering “cold turkey” withdrawal from drug addiction, a topic I knew well from watching TV. Starsky and Hutch had to deal with this shit all the time. You know the
Baretta
episode where Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs is a junkie? And his dad Whitman Mayo gets accused of killing the drug dealer? Well, I knew the word “junkie” from this episode, so Bowie couldn’t slip a thing past me. Bowie was going through cold turkey, like Gene Hackman in
The French Connection II.
Gene Hackman demands they lock him in a room so he can suffer and sweat and scream, and that they bring him nothing except cheeseburgers with extra onions. So heroin always reminds me of onions. (I don’t like onions at all, which may be why I’ve steered clear of hard drugs.)

For those of us who were too young to be doing drugs and dyeing our hair orange at the time, this was a prophecy of the future. Not in terms of fashion—the pyramid-on-head look? Impractical. Ziggy Stardust’s loincloth? Too Pampers. The Pierrot constume as beachwear? As Tim Gunn might say, that’s a lot of look, David. We need you to go upstairs and clean out your space, okaaay?

Even a rabid Bowie freak has to be a little weirded out that the whole “Bowie’s in space” thing is still such a huge hit, such an inescapable cultural presence, after all this time. Major Tom is still totally famous, despite the fact that nobody gives a crap about real-life astronauts anymore. By now, he’s the
only
famous astronaut there is, unless you count Buzz Aldrin, who was famous enough to (1) go on
Punky Brewster
after the
Challenger
explosion and tell Punky it was still okay to want to be an astronaut when she grew up, and (2) go on
The Rosie O’Donnell Show
to recite the lyrics of “Rocket Man.”

The story of Major Tom keeps getting rewritten—for the story so far, see Elton John’s “Rocket Man,” Peter Schilling’s “Major Tom (Coming Home),” Joy Division’s “Disorder,” U2’s “Bad,” Neil Young’s “After the Gold Rush,” Black Sabbath’s “Supernaut,” and so many more. Lou Reed turned it into “Satellite of Love,” while Depeche Mode turned it into “satellite of hate.” The best scene in any Adam Sandler movie is when he takes his first helicopter ride in
Mr. Deeds
and leads the cast in a sing-along of “Space Oddity.” Cat Power can do her acoustic version of it in a car commercial, and nobody even thinks that’s strange. Like you’d ever want to be in a car driven by Major Tom! They’d never find your car again! Your GPS would simply read, “I think my spaceship knows which way to go” and then poof, you’re gone!

Practically every Major Tom song is great—who doesn’t love “Rocket Man”? (Besides Bowie, that is?) I think it’s just because everybody knows what it’s like to be crushed out on satellites. And when Peter Schilling sang “Major Tom (Coming Home),” about feeling so lost and confused on earth that you just want to blast off to your own private planet and be a pop star on your own private screen, leaving all the earth girls behind, I knew exactly what he was singing about too. Like Patti Smith says, “Okay, earth boys—you had your chance.”

The man has often stated he was out of his mind on drugs for much of this period; he claims he can’t even remember making his best album,
Station to Station
, and he’s cheerfully admitted, “I honestly have no idea what I thought between 1975 and 1977.” What we do know is that at some point, the universe said, “Mr. Bowie, meet cocaine. Cocaine, Bowie. Get acquainted, you two!” And so it came to pass that Bowie spent a ridiculous amount of his golden years gadding about L.A.like a blond coat hanger with a dead rock star hanging on it.

The blow-and-shoulder-pads days were strange even for Bowie: going on
The Dinah Shore Show
with Henry Winkler (“I’m a great fan of Fonzie”), singing “Song Sung Blue” on TV with Cher, even appearing on the Grammy Awards to present an award to Aretha Franklin, who proclaimed, “I’m so happy, I could kiss David Bowie!”

There’s no doubt Bowie was one fucked-up rock star then. He went through a powder-brained period of talking up fascism, as if any self-respecting fascist would be caught dead marching beside David Bowie. Like all English people his age, he was besotted by hilarious superstitions, embodied in the quintessentially English figure of Aleister Crowley, who wouldn’t be one of the ten weirdest people in my apartment building but somehow symbolized evil and decadence for all the English rock stars of the ’70s. It’s odd because Crowley just looks like Willard Scott, except nowhere near as scary. Come on, what’s more demonic—living in a castle and wearing a Sphinx costume or going on nationwide TV to predict the weather and talk dirty to hundred-year-old ladies?

But even if Bowie was crazy, dangerous and utterly baleful in every aspect of his influence on my impressionable little brain, I learned a lot from him. Even at his most out-there space-trippy, he’s making the case for earth. Even Ziggy, his most glitzily self-destructive concept project, ends with a big ballad that’s explicitly antisuicidal, insisting that you shouldn’t destroy yourself or cower from life, you should just find somebody as fucked-up as you to love (or at least be nice to), so you can treat each other like you’re rock-and-roll stars. He seemed to say,
you’re not alone
, since there are millions of other pathetic freakazoids out there, and the
B
section of the record store is where you will find them hanging out, so get cracking. Give one another compliments like “You’re wonderful” or “You’re a total blam blam” or whatever it is slutty Martians say to one another.

When I hear him sing “Ashes to Ashes,” he sounds scared, but he also sounds like the golden years are just beginning, because he knows the sky is full of lovesick space cadets like him or you or me, if you just care enough to notice them. And the stars look very dif-fer-ent today.

1981

 

 

 

 

Why do we look to pop singers to tell us how to be boyfriends? I wish I knew, but we do. I still do—even though pop singers are probably the least qualified people on earth when it comes to such matters. Monogamous musicians are like vegan hockey players. But Ray Parker Jr., he was serving up boyfriend lessons on a monthly basis.

“A Woman Needs Love” kept humming out of the speakers at Houghton’s Pond, where my sisters and I went to swim. Since my voice was changing, singing along was a challenge—I would pick either my tenor or baritone and try to push it all the way through. My sisters thought it was hilarious, but one of the things I liked about Ray Parker Jr. is he didn’t sound like he was mean enough to make fun of me for not being able to sing like him.

Ray Parker Jr. was cool. He reminded me of Mr. Rourke on
Fantasy Island
, who was always lecturing Tattoo on what women want and what women need. Every time Tattoo would say, “Boss, she is beautiful,” Mr. Rourke would shake his head and say, “Tattoo, my little friend, how many times must I remind you?
All
women are beautiful!”

Ray always sang about women and what they need, and he always seemed to know what he was talking about with hits like “A Woman Needs Love.” He schooled me in my duty to the ladies of the world, because women need love and ask for lots and lots of it and it is in your selfish interest to satisfy their stupid whims and careless demands. If you cannot supply their needs, they will find various other men to supply the various needs you are not meeting. I was shocked at Ray’s scenario: “One day you might come home early from work, open up the door and get your feelings hurt.” I had a vague idea of what that might look like, and it wasn’t good.

Ray never stressed, though. He did not sweat the technique. He wasn’t exactly a high-strung diva or even a megafamous pop star—he was what serious
Match Game
fans call a “fourth seater,” the guy taking up the pivotal chair between Charles Nelson Reilly and Richard Dawson. You don’t want a chatty comedian in that spot (that’s the first seat) or a glamorous sitcom starlet (the sixth seat), just someone exuding a quiet charm and warmth to keep the game moving.

That was RPJ. He ministered to his flock of suburban swimming-pool acolytes who hung on his every word and shuddered at his parables of the Eternal Feminine. He stayed relaxed through it all. He reminded me of my grandfather, who’d sit there puffing his pipe while my grandmother ranted and raved. Then she’d ask him, “Are you over it?” and he’d nod. Then they’d go back to normal and he’d do some dishes.

In the news, Jimmy Carter had just gone to Poland and inadvertantly caused a crisis because his interpreter bungled his Polish speeches—Jimmy told the bewildered crowds that he “lusted” for their country, and that he had left America “never to return.” It was not a successful diplomatic mission. The Polish premier Edward Gierek later reportedly said, “I had to grit my teeth from time to time. But one must not be rude to ladies or interpreters.” That seemed like something Ray or Mr. Rourke would say.

We go to pop singers to hear such extravagant bended-knee submisson to the female will—we learn from our advice-mongering studs on the microphone. And we will ourselves into believing they have any idea what they’re talking about. I have read Smokey Robinson’s autobiography, which is admirably frank on his swinging sex life, and I cannot help but think of how much I depended on Smokey Robinson to teach me how to be a boyfriend, a suitor, a husband. Just in the way he sings “ooo” in the chorus of “Ooo Baby Baby,” he taught me tons about how to be erotically bereaved, how to suffer for erotic choices poorly made, mistakes regretted, opportunities unwisely seized, reconnections that aren’t possible. The lyric is just a rough sketch telling you why the “ooo” is in the song, but nobody really needs it—it’s all there in the “ooo.” He taught me to be miserable suffering for a woman, and how to love every minute of it. But even after reading Smokey Robinson’s autobiography, and learning that he spent the “Tracks of My Tears” years getting more ass than a tour-bus driver’s seat, I still take a seminar from him on bending to the will of women every time I hear him whimper “You Really Got a Hold on Me” or moan through “Baby, Baby Don’t Cry.”

In his own way, Ray Parker Jr. is one of these musical sages of love. “A Woman Needs Love” was a hit that made me ponder my duties to women. Although I was only a boy, I was getting a sense of the ever-increasing list of services I would be called upon to provide, outside of those contained in various soul songs.