Bowie: A Biography (51 page)

It makes perfect sense that he’d be drawn to Manhattan at the end of the decade. The sounds of both New Wave and the more caustic “No Wave” movement (the ranks of which included Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, D.N.A., Mars and other bands collected on the 1978
No New York
compilation, also produced by Eno) and the bass-heavy cut-and-paste styles of early hip-hop acts like the Funky Four Plus One and Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five would provide sonic inspiration, appealing to his eternal art school sensibility. Destri, the Blondie keyboardist, and therefore a downtown Manhattan New Wave god, would be his nocturnal tour guide.

“He had a driver named Tony and we’d go out to nightclubs. It was a seedy underbelly of fun,” he says. The pair and their respective entourages would hit the uptown disco Hurrah and repair to the secret back room, which housed a coke salon. But it was downtown, in a year-old converted Tribeca loft called the Mudd Club (a nod to Dr. Samuel Mudd, the physician who treated Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth), where Bowie actually dug the new breed in ’ 79, many of them stone Bowie disciples. “All the people who graduated from CBGB’s would take over the Mudd Club. That was just the period when it was hopping. I was David’s ambassador to these little bands,” Destri says. “He was really, really interested in New Wave.”

“The Nomi thing was happening really strongly at that moment that we first met Bowie,” Joey Arias says today. “We were at the Mudd Club one night, and we were upstairs on the top floor and everyone was getting fucked up and drinking and laughing, very after-hours. We were about to leave when someone said, ‘There’s David Bowie sitting there.’ We just froze.”

“David saw them and said, ‘Oh, I gotta have these guys,’” Destri, then at Bowie’s table, recalls. “He treated his life like it was a gallery.” Arias and Nomi were summoned to the table and soon the latter was put in the odd position of being aggressively flattered by his seductive hero. “David was saying to Klaus, ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe I’m meeting
you
!’ To Klaus!” Arias recalls. “Klaus had met Bowie years ago in Berlin at a train station when Bowie was on a European tour. And Klaus actually carried David Bowie’s bags from their train. And he had a photograph that showed David at the
height of the Ziggy Stardust period. And there’s Klaus with long hair like a hippie, with a beard, carrying the bags for Bowie.”

Nomi and Bowie would exchange phone numbers at the Mudd Club and meet a second time a few days later at a Soho loft. During the second, more formal meeting, they watched footage of surrealist films and planned what was going to be a huge New Year’s Eve concert, choreographed by Bowie’s choreographer Tony Basil. Time constraints forced them to postpone the show, however, and soon they were refocusing their collaborative energies for something truly special to mark Bowie’s booking on
Saturday Night Live
. Although the show had been on for five seasons and had hosted artists as big as the Rolling Stones as well as Bowie-influenced acts like Blondie, he had never appeared there. For his
SNL
debut, at the close of a decade that seemed to see one Bowie-led culture-changing event after another, Bowie had one last wow up his sleeve.

Nomi happily ceded the spotlight to his idol, knowing, like so many do, that to brush up against David Bowie’s aura even for a short time leaves some residue of it lingering for all time. Even today, when people speak of Nomi, the first thing many mention is
Saturday Night Live
(it’s one of the focal points of the great 2004 documentary
The Nomi Song)
.

When Arias and Nomi reported to rehearsal at a midtown studio owned by Bowie’s record label, RCA, a few days later, they were shocked to see their hero unshaven and rumpled. “We expected David to be very, like, alien looking. Very totalitarian, very Big Brother. But he was very casual during rehearsals. His hair was really scruffy looking, and you almost didn’t recognize him because he just kind of blended in with everybody. I couldn’t believe it. I just laughed. It was all so natural. I asked, ‘Where’s David?’ And they said, ‘You’re right next to him.’ Oops.”

Bowie had specific ideas about the visual composition of the piece. He’d base it on a red, black and white color scheme—the same striking combination that rock stars from Marilyn Manson, to the White Stripes, to My Chemical Romance and Green Day have used in the years since. The Nazi flag. The Coke bottle. Red, black and white was the scheme of icons both concentrated evil and the wholesomely universal. “David’s ideas were really strong and specific,” Arias says. “He knew that he wanted me to have the red hair and Klaus to have the black hair.”

Bowie ran through the vocals for the three tracks he would be performing. Singing there in his rumpled shirt and five o’clock shadow, it was still Bowie. He could turn it on just by opening his mouth. “David started singing, like, all of the material. It was, like, literally a concert for Klaus and I. We were, like, gagging a little bit, it was like we were being serenaded by Bowie. We played it cool, though.”

Both men were starting to get famous on their own. Arias was affiliated with the Italian fashion retail outlet Fiorucci. He worked in the mid-town store and modeled for various high-and low-end designers. Nomi’s act was hot and label interest was already there. This was a different level: a national television spot … with David Bowie. Inside, they were barely retaining their composure.

“I knew Laraine Newman, who was an original
[Saturday Night Live]
cast member,” Arias says. “We knew each other from the Groundlings improv group in L.A. [where many
SNL
cast members begin]. So I used to go to
Saturday Night Live
every weekend and sit there with her and watch them rehearse and watch the show. And I remember asking Laraine, at one point, ‘If David Bowie ever comes to this show, please, please, I gotta be here. I’ll do anything but I’ve gotta see this man in person.’”

Bowie’s performance on
SNL
even shocked his band. While they were not shocked to see a rumpled version of their leader during the week of rehearsal that led up to the live spot, he had not clued any of the musicians in on what he would be wearing—or doing—on Saturday night. “For ‘The Man Who Sold the World,’” Destri says, “I was totally unprepared for the plastic suit. All that week we’re rehearsing in jeans and sweatshirts … come show day he wouldn’t tell anyone what he was wearing. The whole band was shocked. We were totally thrown. We still knew our chord changes and our little bits. Then for the next song, he’s wearing a dress, with his hair parted. He looks like Katherine Hepburn.”

“TVC 15,” the piano-driven boogie woogie off 1976’s
Station to Station
, would be the second number revived, and Bowie had changed costumes. He now wore a full-length dress that appeared to be gunmetal blue. “It was a Chinese air hostess uniform,” Arias recalls. The collar was tightly buttoned. He wore what looked like thick pantyhose and matching shoes. A cold, utilitarian number, not feminine but certainly a dress. He kept his hands in the pockets as he sang the vocal melody line. Behind
him, Nomi stood frozen while Arias casually read the newspaper. Bowie grabbed the microphone and the camera zoomed in on his face. By the end of the song, Nomi had dragged a hot-pink stuffed poodle across the stage on a leash. A television screen was embedded in the dog’s jaws, and it flashed the performance as they performed it.

“Boys Keep Swinging” was the third and final number performed on the episode and heralded another costume change. Bowie had replaced his Chinese airline hostess dress—in fact, he’d replaced his entire body—with a puppet’s torso. The head of David Bowie sang the song. A marionette’s torso and limbs danced under his giant Bowie head as though on strings.

“They pulled the mic over to a green screen and he puts a little puppet under his head,” Destri says. “He pulls the strings with the puppet and all you see is the puppet with David’s head going, and we’re off to the side just being the band, like, ‘Okay, let’s watch the head for our cues’!”

“It was all very Dada,” Arias says. “He was into this whole German expressionistic thing and very surreal. But it was fun; we just sat there having a good time. David was on the screen and we were standing there doing it and we could see him on the monitor and we were just doing this bit.”

More slow, stunned applause followed. People all over the world were discussing the performance in the hours and days immediately afterward. “It seemed like Manhattan was at a standstill that night,” Arias says. “You can ask people in New York what were they doing that day; everybody will say ‘I was home watching
Saturday Night
, watching Joey and Klaus with David Bowie.’”

“We were all thrilled to see Joey and Klaus on
SNL
with him,” Magnuson says. “Being ‘annointed by Bowie’ was something every teenager obsessed with glam rock in the early seventies dreamed of.” Nomi and Arias wondered when it was all over if they were indeed part of Bowie’s performing company. Would there be more pieces like this? At the after-party, at One Fifth Avenue in Greenwich Village, the two camps mingled and there was talk of developing this act. Bowie seemed enthusiastic about the prospect. But ultimately, he’d forge ahead into the new wave alone, having primed himself for the early eighties right there in front of millions, using Arias and Nomi as his New York City mechanisms. “I think that’s his genius,” Arias says today. “He works with people and then
he gets touched and all of a sudden it triggers something in him and he moves on.”

It would be almost fifteen years before Bowie appeared solo on
SNL
again (with
Tin Machine
in 1991, doing an excellent cover of Roxy Music’s “If There Is Something”), primarily because his debut appearance was so hard to top. Klaus Nomi passed away only four years later, becoming one of the first icons of the New York New Wave scene to die of AIDS. Arias saw Bowie a few times after that, but only very briefly. A quick hello backstage at an Iggy Pop show, a warm moment at a fashion show.

“That night, Bowie opened the gate to the eighties,” says Destri. “He sniffed out the new wave and fashioned an eighties thing.”

22.

A

LTHOUGH HE WOULD END
the decade no more a musical leader than he’d been in the sixties, for a while, about four years, Bowie’s eighties reign was glorious. He began the decade by instructing his angry kid brothers, the primarily English punks, on how to reinvent themselves, essentially functioning as the Rosetta stone for post-punk and New Wave. Would Johnny Rotten have been able to survive the flameout of the Sex Pistols had it not been for Bowie destroying Ziggy Stardust and saying, with all the conviction required, “I am a soul singer now. This is the new me”? Lydon has that very conviction when he appears, with Keith Levine, on Tom Snyder’s late-night
Tomorrow Show
in 1980 to promote his post-Pistols band Public Image Limited. Bowie’s notion of a self-invented rock star, “not me but an idea from me,” which both Ziggy and the Thin White Duke were, allowed someone equally savvy like Lydon to call his new group, well, not a “group” at all, but a corporation.

“We ain’t no band,” Lydon tells the perplexed and hostile Snyder while bumming a cigarette. “We’re a company simple. Nothing to do with rock and roll doo-dah.”

“Okay,” Snyder replies, wishing, perhaps, he was anywhere else.

“Companies can mess about with musical instruments. There’s no limits,” Lydon says, later adding, “History does not matter. Your program is called
Tomorrow.”

But Lydon knew his history well. Post-Bowie, the reinvention of a band’s entire identity now had a precedent. One can still detect the Pistols in Public Image Limited’s 1978 debut single “Public Image,” with its slashing guitar and caterwauled vocals, but not so in ’79’s second PIL album
Metal Box
, issued in its vinyl version in a tin canister and available today on CD as
Second Edition
. Gone are the Ramones and
Nuggets
–indebted guitars. When they come in, via stone-faced Keith Levene, on tracks like “Death Disco” and “Albatross,” they seem instead lifted from eccentric Jamaican producer Lee “Scratch” Perry’s Black Ark Studio sessions. Jah Wobble’s bass is dubby and doomy, and Lydon’s vocals, often buried in the mix, now seem genuinely and not ironically disturbed. It’s as close to
Low
as a major artist had come.

Then there were the New Romantics. Once a sexually, racially and intellectually integrated movement, punk had, on both sides of the Atlantic, become a haven for violent and often racist young men by 1980. Even enlightened alternatives, sister movements to the more emotionally revealing post-punk, such as the Coventry-based 2 Tone movement, led by the Specials, the Selecter, Madness and the Beat, attracted skinheads and National Front members to the clubs. First-wave UK punks who sensed that rock steady was not a good fit for them kept an eye open for something else, and their answer, too, was David Bowie.

“I think Bowie’s influence on that generation of British pop kids was immense,” Jon Savage says. New Romantic restored Wildean wit, sensitivity and flamboyance to the pop aesthetic, with ruffles, velvet, elaborate jewelry, costume and quips becoming the norm. Ziggy-style theatricality was also favored, as was, of course, a smart sexual ambiguity. In early 1980, as Bowie finished work on his new studio album,
Scary Monsters
, at the Power Station in midtown Manhattan, London nightlife was becoming as Bowie-mad as it had been nearly a full decade earlier, at the apex of glitter rock. It was a full-on Bowie revival, the first of its kind, really, as the artist’s output did not really lend itself to nostalgia. But for the transitioning punks, the hits of ’72, ’73 and ’74, the “Starman”s and “Jean Genie”s and “Rebel Rebel”s, were the perfect tonic for the troops.

Steve Strange, one of the leading lights of the New Romantic scene thanks to his tenure in the electropop band Visage and his cofounding of the popular “Bowie Nights” at London club Billy’s and, later, the larger Blitz, grew up in Wales. During the Ziggy era, he was not only a superfan but a self-created Bowie doppelgänger, courting trouble from his teachers and local bullies.