The Man Who Sold the World (22 page)

Some of that history was available to Bowie as a gentle reader of the music press; the rest he learned from Iggy Pop when the pair met again in Detroit in October 1972. Not an instinctively political being, Bowie chose to satirize
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the cult of John Sinclair, by comparing him to rebel martyr Che Guevara, who even by 1972 was being admired more for his rock'n'roll image (a mustachioed Jim Morrison) than for his example as a guerrilla fighter. The subsequent “panic” told us more about the narrator's sense of irrelevance than about any political realities.

That provided a thematic link with Bob Dylan's “All Along the Watchtower,” which used a similar
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three-chord riff to underpin its apocalypse. Like “The Jean Genie” [65], and indeed Iggy and the Stooges' “1969,” Bowie's recording harked back to the swampy R&B records that came out of Chicago in the fifties, all maracas and tom-toms, creating a tension that pulsed and grew until a single cymbal crash signaled the way out of the chorus/chaos. The entire track seemed on the verge of that electronic sound distortion known as phasing, which finally won sway in the instrumental break, mimicking the “train” drums of Jimi Hendrix's “Gypsy Eyes.” All the sense of disturbance that Bowie's lyrics couldn't satisfy was provided by the turbulence of the final moments, as Ronson's guitar filled the right-hand speaker with wave after wave of dive-bombing sirens, and female voices wailed demonically.

All this was in keeping with what one journalist at the time, paraphrasing Bowie's explanation, called “a vague feeling of impending catastrophe,” a conviction that “the Americans he had met were poised unknowingly on the lip of a cataclysm that would rock the world.” Partly that reflected the milieux in which he had chosen to mix; partly it represented a transference of his own unease onto a nation that was politically and economically troubled, but lacked the cripplingly defeatist mentality that afflicted Bowie's homeland during this era.

 

[68] DRIVE-IN SATURDAY

(Bowie)

Recorded January 1973;
Aladdin Sane
LP

Before the movie
American Graffiti
legitimized fifties teenage life as a subject for nostalgia,
*
not ridicule, the drive-in was a peculiarly American phenomenon, as alien to Europe as the science fiction landscape of Bowie's song. The song's location was the future, when sixties icons such as Mick Jagger and Twiggy (the Wonder Kid) were as archetypal as anything conceived by Jung, and—as in the 1967 movie
Barbarella
—lust was a thing of the past, only accessible from ancient videotapes. It's one of the ironies of “Drive-in Saturday” that technology that sounded so advanced in 1973 is now laughably passé. But then Bowie was a much better alarmist than he was a futurologist. A few months before he wrote the song, Bowie warned British pop fans that they needed to “face up to a future which is going to be controlled by the Pill, and by sperm banks. . . . Man and woman will change. . . . I want to be very optimistic. But I have a hard time being optimistic about the future.” He conjured up his anachronistic desire by placing it in a mythical version of the 1950s, the tapes providing a “crash course” for the ravers of the future, even though “ravers” was decidedly sixties slang. Along the way, he tipped his hat to the T. Rex hit “Get It On” and to the New York Dolls' guitarist Sylvain Sylvain, while preparing his public for the intended launch, the following year, of a group called the Astronettes.

The fifties landscape also permeated the music, from the arpeggio plucking of the opening E chord to the re-creation of the era's vocal group sound—lush but not quite perfect,
*
as you'd expect from denizens of the future. Like a Saturday morning movie serial, the song depended on maintaining anticipation: the opening V chord established a tension that was immediately resolved at the start of the verse, which itself ended in a cliff-hanging B7 chord, preparing the way for the small leap up (and down, from the key of A into G) of the chorus. There were other signals of the era, from the Duane Eddy–style lead guitar to the Phil Spector–inspired percussion. Bowie originally requested Spector's services as producer for
Aladdin Sane
, but failed to make contact with him. The dense, luxurious sound of the chorus hinted at the effect that he had hoped Spector's presence might bring. Within a few months, this epic re-creation of a lost era would itself become a cliché, in the skilled hands of Roy Wood's Wizzard (“Angel Fingers” and “See My Baby Jive” being prime examples).

 

[69] TIME

(Bowie)

Recorded January 1973;
Aladdin Sane
LP

Melodic and structural similarities between the chorus of this song and “Oh! You Pretty Things” [30] weren't an accident, as both were composed during Bowie's piano experimentation of 1971. Indeed, a prototype of “Time,” titled “We Should Be on by Now,” was given to his friend George Underwood that summer, complete with its playful, clock-watching lift from Chuck Berry's fifties rock classic “Reelin' & Rockin.”

Extended and rewritten as “Time,” the song not only shifted its chronological focus from the fifties to the thirties, via the ambience of Mike Garson's Berlin-cabaret-club piano, but also renewed one of the most unsettling concepts of the twentieth century: relativity. As cultural historian Peter Conrad noted, before 1900, “Time flowed always at the same reliable speed: space, by contrast, was immovable. Then, in the twentieth century, the universe suddenly ceased to obey these laws. Time adopted variable, unsynchronised tempi, and space too became mobile.” In Bowie's fevered imagination, as in the temporal realm of modernism, time could shift and bend like a note on his blues harmonica: yesterday's apocalypse might be previewed today. To add to his perturbation, he had recently become obsessed with the culture of a country he had yet to visit, Japan, where verb formations took no account of time existing in the past or the future: everything was in the present tense; everything was happening simultaneously. Time, then, could be both Life and Death; and, in its latter form, it claimed Bowie's friends, such as Billy Dolls.
*

“Time” opened to the distant sound of Garson's piano, offering vaudeville clichés with a distinctly European flavor. Bowie's voice entered with a lingering echo delay, as if to demonstrate time in action. Once the initial verse was over, we were returned to familiar territory, another diatonic descent in the tradition of the “Changes” [48] chorus, with backing vocals marking out the root of each chord. But the decadent romanticism of the song abruptly gave way to horror: Bowie could voice that only with a scream, answered a few bars later by slowly declining howls from Mick Ronson's guitar. The eeriest moment of the song, however, came when yet another of his wordless choruses—remember “Ching A Ling” [A55] and “Velvet Goldmine” [54]—turned into a cacophonous march, with massed Bowies accompanied by saxophone and flute. It was like a scene from Christopher Isherwood's evocations of 1930s Berlin, which—in another reversal of time—had recently been revived in the movie
Cabaret
.

 

[70] ALADDIN SANE (1913–1938–197?)

(Bowie)

Recorded January 1973;
Aladdin Sane
LP

While “Time” [69] could have been subtitled “1973–1933,” the title track of
Aladdin Sane
was both more and less specific. Bowie's inspiration was Evelyn Waugh's 1930
*
novel
Vile Bodies
: “The book dealt with London in the period just before a massive, imaginary war,” he explained. “People were frivolous, decadent and silly. Somehow it seemed to me that they were like people today.” The closest that Waugh came to anointing a hero in his novel was Adam Symes, who tells his lover: “Nina, do you ever feel that things simply can't go on much longer?” While the characters frolic in cavalier ignorance, war is declared during a Christmas Eve carol service, and Symes finds himself “on a splintered tree stump in the biggest battlefield in the history of the world. . . . The scene all round him was one of unrelieved desolation.” It was a fine epigraph for a pop album at the height of the supposedly hedonistic genre of glam rock.

The feeling of two worlds moving at different speeds—glamour and apocalypse, frivolity and war—was emphasized by the way the song was constructed. The verse repeated a virtually identical theme over and over, while the accompaniment constantly shifted its ground, using chords that only a pianist could have conceived. Then, by instinct rather than musical training, Bowie added to the sense of dislocation by launching his chorus melody on a high A (against a movement from G to F major chords), and then continuing to build his theme out of notes that didn't appear in the chords beneath them.

Though the song was unmistakably Bowie's creation, its landscape belonged to jazz keyboardist Mike Garson. His flamboyant glissandi in the verse, the ultimate signs of romanticism, heightened the feeling of decadence—while his extended solo, a phenomenal improvisation around the simplest of changes, stabbed at the keys with reckless flamboyance, apparently unhinged but thrillingly controlled. There were other magisterial but more subtle touches throughout: the eighth-note caresses of the cymbal with a brush over the opening chords, the cameo appearances by a twisting acoustic guitar, the single delayed saxophone note repeated after Garson's showcase, the voice vanishing into echo on the final call of “sane.” And one touch of amused guilt: Bowie briefly offered a line or two from the Drifters' “On Broadway” to acknowledge the similarity between the roots, if not the ambience, of the two songs. Finally, there was a slow decaying of sounds, some tonal, some merely an interruption, a long-held bass note from the piano, one last defiant flourish—and then silence.

FASHION: Turn to the Left

S
tanley Kubrick's film of Anthony Burgess's novel
A Clockwork Orange
premiered in the UK in January 1972, the same month in which David Bowie ventured into the outside world under the guise of Ziggy Stardust. The choreographed violence of Malcolm McDowell (as “Alex”) and his fellow “droogs” would, Burgess predicted, encourage imitations: “After seeing
A Clockwork Orange
, a lot of boys will take up rape and pillage and even murder,” he declared. “Therefore all art should be banned.” He was being both ironic and searingly truthful, and Kubrick would soon take him at his word, preventing the film from being screened in Britain until after his death.

Such was the ease with which irony and outrage merged in the early seventies that David Bowie, who loved Burgess's book and saw an early screening of the film, was able to translate the uniform in which the droogs dispensed their rape and murder into a distinctive brand for a pop group. “I got most of the look for Ziggy from that,” he recounted in 1993. “I liked the malicious, malevolent, vicious quality of those guys.” But he insisted that he had stripped the violence from their image, while being able to retain “that terrorist, we're-ready-for-action, kind of thing.” The film toyed with a series of troubling equations: art as voyeurism, voyeurism as violence, violence as Nietzschean ecstasy. Burgess insisted that he had looked back for inspiration, rather than forward:
A Clockwork Orange
was a report on the world of the fifties and early sixties, not a forecast of a dystopian future. In Bowie's hands, however, everything became futuristic, and everything ironic.

The missing, essential ingredient in that equation was “style,” a quality that had obsessed Bowie since his earliest adventures in Soho with his brother, Terry, at the dawn of the sixties. A decade later, he both reflected and invented the styles of the age, drawing on not only futurism and violence, but also several other vital facets of the seventies: androgyny, individuality, eclecticism. In fashion as in history, this was a decade that was defiantly not its predecessor, but which could not escape being influenced by the recent past. Hence Bowie's importance as a catalyst, for the way in which he compressed symbols from the fifties and sixties—from sci-fi movie costumes to the stage garb of the classic rock'n'rollers—into a series of images that always appeared to be pointing the way ahead. Throughout the sixties, you could understand exactly where youth culture had arrived by looking at Bowie's hair and clothes. In the seventies, people studied Bowie to find out the ways in which they would soon be selling themselves to the outside world.

Cultural commentator Peter York wrote that Bowie's distinctive contribution to style in the seventies was that he introduced “the idea of conscious stylisation—oneself as a Work of Art—to a wider audience than ever before.” To an extent, “oneself as a Work of Art” was also a definition of the Mod subculture of the sixties. What Bowie added was an understanding that “oneself” need not stop at surface appearance, but could become a conceptual art project encompassing every facet of existence.

His influence on appearance was immense, however, provoking thousands of so-called Bowie kids to mimic him. (They needed to look sharp in every sense of the phrase, however, to avoid seeming tragically anachronistic. Woe betide the fan who arrived for a Bowie concert in 1976 wearing Ziggy makeup, only to discover that the once-alien rock star was now masquerading as the star of a Leni Riefenstahl documentary.) The cropped hair sported by him and his wife, Angie, was similar to the feather cuts of female suedeheads at the start of the seventies, but it was Ziggy who made it into a mainstream badge of pride. But whereas Bowie commissioned what he called his “cosmic Clockwork Orange jumpsuits” from Freddie Burretti and his “impossibly silly ‘bunny' costume” (cut unflatteringly short: a hot pants jumpsuit) from Japan's hottest designer, his fans had to concoct his image out of home-styled hair and accessories from Woolworth's.

Bowie himself was both a peacock and a magpie, borrowing looks and styles wherever he could find them. Two years before he visited Japan for the first time, he (like many others) was enraptured by the designs of a designer named Kansai Yamamoto,
*
who staged his first London show in 1971. Bowie credited him as the source for Ziggy's dyed hair: “He had just unleashed all the Kabuki- and Noh-inspired clothes on London, and one of his models had the Kabuki lion's mane on her head, this bright red thing.” Yamamoto subsequently created many extravagant costumes for Ziggy's final months in the spotlight. “He has an unusual face,” he said of Bowie, adding: “He's neither man nor woman.”

If Yamamoto was the first designer to adopt Bowie as a deliciously angular model, the singer continued to prowl the most fashionable stores in London and New York for inspiration. They, in turn, created their fantasies out of nostalgia. Vintage clothing stores—The Last Picture Frock, Nostalgia, Paradise Garage—were (comparatively) cheap, ecologically efficient at a time of industrial disputes and material shortages, and conveyed glamour borrowed
*
from bygone ages. This applied especially to the thirties chic that passed rapidly from artists such as Lindsay Kemp (with his ostrich feather fans) into the mainstream, growing more popular as the West drifted further into recession—as if the only way of coping with a return to the economic emergencies of the pre–World War II era was to reinvent its style as well. By mid-decade, people were reading Stella Margetson's
The Long Party
, a study of “high society in the 20s and 30s,” watching Robert Redford glide effortlessly through the depression-free gardens of
The Great Gatsby
, and, perhaps, reaching for the sleeves of either
Pin Ups
(with its back cover portrait of Bowie in a Tommy Roberts suit, like a twenties Chicago gangster) or
Young Americans
(with classic-era Hollywood cover portrait). Many of the symbols of mid-seventies fashion—platform shoes, flyaway lapels, high-waisted flares—originated from the thirties, though few of those who adopted them in 1973 wanted to hear that their grandparents might have worn the same styles.

It was Tommy Roberts who, in 1970, opened Mr Freedom on London's Kensington Church Street. Like Bowie, the store offered a choice of identities to borrow or reconfigure, from the art deco of the thirties through fifties rock'n'roll to sixties pop. As
Vogue
magazine declared, “there are no rules in the fashion game now. You're playing it and you make up the game as you go.” Marc Bolan could have acquired an entire wardrobe at Mr Freedom, his skeletal figure acting as the perfect show pony for its hip-hugging, reflective trousers and tight-cut jackets. Among the store's designers was the delightfully named Pamla Motown, whose cropped red hair and androgynous face marked her out as a hybrid clone of Bowie and his wife. A minute's walk from Mr Freedom was the Biba store on Kensington High Street, which brought the revivals of deco, art nouveau, and the Belle Époque within reach of the girl on the street.

Biba also attracted the attention of the tiny urban guerrilla cell known as the Angry Brigade, who exploded a bomb inside the store on May Day 1971. In the terrorist fashion of the times, they issued a communiqué to explain their assault on the cult of selling: “Life is so boring there is nothing to do except spend all our wages on the latest skirt or shirt. Brothers and Sisters, what are your real desires? The only thing you can do with modern slave-houses—called boutiques—IS WRECK THEM. You can't reform profit capitalism and inhumanity. Just kick it until it breaks.”

Theirs was a lone voice. Novelist J. G. Ballard might have noted cynically, “The next religion might come from the world of fashion rather than from any conventional one,” but even those who advocated the overturning of conventional morals and the hollowness of social thinking were far from immune to the pull of fashion. And so it was that Malcolm McLaren, a fellow traveler of the iconoclastic Situationist movement, found himself in 1972 running a vintage clothes shop on the premises that had previously held the iconic sixties boutique Hung on You, and then two of the stellar influences on the new decade, Mr Freedom and Paradise Garden. McLaren leased the building at 430 King's Road in Chelsea for the remainder of the decade, and the changing names of his business told their own story: from Let It Rock to Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die; then Sex; and finally Seditionaries, by which time McLaren was notorious as the manager of a rock band who compressed the world-weary contempt of the Angry Brigade into a single message: “Anarchy in the UK.” Anthony Burgess must have nodded sagely in recognition.

 

[71] THE PRETTIEST STAR

(Bowie) (see also [13])

Recorded January 1973;
Aladdin Sane
LP

Amid the rock'n'roll swagger and almost sickly decadence of
Aladdin Sane
, the revival of Bowie's little-known 1970 single “The Prettiest Star” seemed anachronistic—neither contemporary nor apocalyptic enough to fit the album's themes. It certainly received a more sympathetic arrangement than before, being taken at an altogether faster pace. Mick Ronson replicated Marc Bolan's original guitar solo, but this time it sat within the track, rather than outside it. While doo-wop vocals and country-tinged piano lent the song a late fifties feel, the middle section featured a quartet of male voices that conjured up the world of Edward VII, as if the entire performance were an exercise in demonstrating the supple nature of time.

Bowie's own status as “the prettiest star” in the glam-rock field—or at least Marc Bolan's closest rival—was evidenced by the amount of memorabilia that was now on the market to tempt his fans. Besides the usual posters (more often than not carrying photographs from the “Space Oddity” [1] era, as his management—in an early example of multimedia control—controlled the image rights on Ziggy Stardust portraits), it was also possible to buy Bowie pillowcases, alongside those featuring Bolan, Donny Osmond, and David Cassidy.

 

[72] LET'S SPEND THE NIGHT TOGETHER

(Jagger/Richards)

Recorded January 1973;
Aladdin Sane
LP

Variously described by critics down the years as camp, bisexual, or gay, this riotous assault on a Rolling Stones single from 1967 was more accurately a celebration of Bowie's utter dominance over the world around him. Other covers of classic rock tunes during the Ziggy era (from “This Boy” to “I Feel Free”) were conventional or ill-conceived, but “Let's Spend the Night Together” jettisoned the tight control of the Stones' original and thereby set the entire tradition of sixties rock aflame.

The Spiders set out their manifesto from the start: a crushing guitar chord, savage smears of synthesized
*
noise, and Mike Garson's fearless romp through all the major chords from D to F#, casting key signatures to the winds. Thereafter they settled for inflamed Chuck Berry riffs, while Bowie sang as if he were setting fire to every line. In the most daring, ridiculous moment, he broke the song down into a fifties-styled monologue, a pastiche of Paul Anka's mock sincerity on “Diana,” perhaps. “Let's make love,” he purred, and was answered by two orgasmic spurts of Ronson's guitar, the briefest and most brutal of couplings. Spend the night? On this evidence, Bowie could hardly bear to spend two minutes with his battered victim.
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[73] CRACKED ACTOR

(Bowie)

Recorded January 1973;
Aladdin Sane
LP

Three layers of prostitution collided on Hollywood's Sunset Strip in this song: offering money for sex; sex for drugs; worship for fame. “They were mostly older producer types, quite strange looking, quite charming, but thoroughly unreal,” Bowie recalled of the Strip's clients. The fifty-year-old star (insert your own choice of name) of “Cracked Actor” was “stiff on his legend”: erect, famous, over the hill, effectively dead. He despised the whore, “a porcupine” of dope tracks, and the whore despised him. It was just another sales transaction in the city of dreams. The rhythm guitar cranked mechanically up and down its succession of barre chords with a whore's indifference, while Ronson wavered between grunts of feedback and howls of equally contrived ecstasy. This was standard early seventies hard rock raunch, with a jaded air of glam, enlivened by a suitably flashy vocal, with Bowie building himself up to a climax that was stolen by Ronson's insistent guitar solo.

It was probably not a coincidence that the age differential between whore and trick in this song exactly mirrored the gap between Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider in the cinematic tale of erotic obsession
Last Tango in Paris
, which premiered in New York during Bowie's autumn 1972 US tour. The film provoked shocked headlines around the world for its graphic sexual context, although only the woman was seen in a state of full frontal nudity—because, claimed director Bernardo Bertolucci, he identified himself completely with Brando's character, and could not bare to expose “himself” on-screen. Bowie himself would not be so reticent on-screen before the decade was out.

 

[74] LADY GRINNING SOUL

(Bowie)

Recorded January 1973;
Aladdin Sane
LP

Legend has it that “Lady Grinning Soul” was an ecstatic love song to the soul singer Claudia Lennear, best known as the supposed inspiration for the Rolling Stones' “Brown Sugar,” and perennial backup to white rock stars who required some authentic African-American passion in their work. The pair certainly met toward the end of his late 1972 US tour, and the song was written and recorded immediately after his return. But despite the regularity with which she has been named as the subject of both songs, a reliable source for this attribution is difficult to find.