Read Bowie: A Biography Online
Authors: Marc Spitz
I said nothing to David Bowie on that afternoon. I didn’t even acknowledge that I knew who he was or that his life and art and music have marked my entire course and that only minutes earlier, I’d been discussing him, considering committing a couple of years of my daily life to rebooting him. I played it supercool like he’d actually taught us Bowie-ists how to be. I was someone else. Adopting a pose
.
The light changed, and I crossed Broadway numbly. I walked past the record store on my block, muttering, “David Bowie … records … In there … ‘China Girl,’ ‘Fashion.’” I let myself into the apartment. I called my agent at the office immediately. I told him that I’d thought it over and that I would indeed write the book you are now holding and that I think this is a good time to look for Bowie in the modern world and reopen a discussion about what he means
.
“That was fast,” he said. “Why’d you change your mind?”
“Suddenly feeling much closer to him,” I said
.
And I did, but not as close as I do now, and not as close, I hope, as you are about to
.
M
ARC
S
PITZ
New York City, August
2009
TO BE READ
AT MAXIMUM VOLUME
I
T WAS THE SECOND NIGHT
of the four-day 2005 CMJ music marathon and film festival, known to most simply as “CMJ.” The Arcade Fire, a Montreal-based collective led by husband and wife Win Butler and Régine Chassagne, were taking what amounts to a victory lap, having created a fast legend for themselves at the previous year’s showcase. Their debut,
Funeral
, a meditation on loss that managed to be somehow joyous, earned an almost unheard-of 9.7 from the often praise-stingy music site Pitchfork and propelled them through that blurry, terrifying, find-an-empty-bathroom-at-the-venue-and-lock-the-door-for-a-minute-to-breathe kind of year that only a handful of bands in this decade can understand, the White Stripes, the Strokes, and the Killers among them. It’s the kind of run a young band can really only have once, in which they visit and perform in parts of the world that had previously seemed like oranges, yellows and pinkish browns on a map. It’s the year in which some of them get to sleep with movie stars, stop worrying about paying the bills with their own checks or not paying the bills at all and
start
worrying about how to write a second album while touring. Lead singers begin to think about things like whether their hair and teeth look as good as they can and if doing something about it (if the choppers do not) means they are compromising their credibility. It’s also the year in which you meet your heroes. Anyone who has witnessed such exchanges as I have on a few assignments will note that they are not unlike the president calling the winning team after the Super Bowl or World Series: stilted congratulations and maybe a few
bits of advice. Bono and Bruce Springsteen are famous for giving this kind of “talk” to the reverential and overwhelmed rock star newbie. It’s the rare rock legend who takes away something for
himself
from these meetings. And in this week, the Arcade Fire has been in the close company of, perhaps, the rarest rock legend of them all.
“This is a David Bowie song,” Butler, his hair hanging over his high cheekbones, announced to the crowd. Three thousand cell phone cameras were thrust into the air as Butler strummed the opening chords to “Queen Bitch.” The song is a decade older than he is, an album track off Bowie’s 1971 release
Hunky Dory
(Butler was born in the spring of 1980, shortly before Bowie released
Scary Monsters
, if you want a bit more perspective). It’s a New York song—an homage to the tough, catty, street-smart songwriting of Lou Reed. At the time of its release, “Queen Bitch” marked a sharp change for Bowie. A fan would have to go back to his obscure, early-sixties R & B releases (as front man for doomed combos like the King Bees) to hear such a sexed-up snarl. Much of his mid-and late-sixties releases were marked by an earnest voice, at turns folky à la the darker end of Simon & Garfunkel or melodramatic and poppy in the Scott Walker mode.
The Arcade Fire is a big band, a sort of casual collective where a friend visiting from out of town who happens to be carrying a Dobro or a fiddle seems welcome to join in semipermanent fashion. The noise they make is a patchwork wall of sound, one that can easily fill up an arena while retaining a haunted air. It would be easy to imagine a guest vocalist being drowned in this wash of noise (which they play with a passion that occasionally borders on camp, smashing their drum heads madly and the like). But the guy in the white suit who walked to the mic to spit out the opening line—“I’m up on the eleventh floor and I’m watching the cruisers below”—was, again, no ordinary man. He not only cut clean through the mix (turning the headliners into a backing band before hitting the line “He’s down on the street and he’s trying hard to pull sister Flo”) but he also cut through the insane roar of excitement and disbelief emanating from the vast field. Not that this was a big secret. The Arcade Fire had clearly charmed Bowie, reminding him, perhaps, of his own bohemian strum sessions in suburban Beckenham at the end of the sixties. These Arts Labs were held every Sunday night and often lasted until sunrise
Monday morning; by then big ideas were shared and strengthened and the mettle of new, hopeful, reaching songs was tested. The Arcade Fire’s gear, with its scratches and stickers, had the look and feel of such musty, smoke-cured ad hoc “studios.” Yes, they were genuinely exciting; U2 had recently embraced them as well. Yes, they were new; their songs offered a forceful emotional stir in an era marked by garage-rock swagger. But they were also still liberal arts ragamuffins, with the planet opening up to them rapidly, and this clearly returned Bowie to his creative square one—a place where he needed to be, in light of his own life-changing events of 2004. I will repeat for emphasis, it’s the rare rock legend who takes away something for
himself
from a meeting with young up-and-comers.
Bowie had been blogging about the band and had appeared with them on September 8 at Radio City Music Hall in a televised charity event, Fashion Rocks. On that broadcast, only one week earlier, he had still seemed frail. He dressed in a light gray suit and black shirt, and to those familiar with his slim, elegant visage, he appeared a little thicker and older as he performed. Fashion Rocks was his first time onstage since the procedure, and even rock legends are not immune to a case of nerves (one recalls John Lennon throwing up backstage at Madison Square Garden in 1974 before joining Elton John, as if he’d never sold out Shea Stadium or Candlestick Park before). Seven days’ exposure to the Arcade Fire, and perhaps the warm night air, had done something good to Bowie. He’d been getting a bad rap as a cultural vampire since the Human League and Devo were considered the next big things, but even if that was accurate, it was all about the rejuvenation of sound. The Central Park show, energized in a way that Fashion Rocks was not, was tantamount to a rejuvenation of spirit, and there, onstage, as he took the lead on the band’s best-known song, “Wake Up” (Butler offering only a burbling echo-drenched vocal), Bowie seemed to be putting his vulnerability, his own impermanence and the immortality of his music, legend and influence into some kind of working order once again. He looked like he’d written the thing himself.
“Something filled up my heart with nothin’,” he sang. “Someone told me not to cry. But now that I’m older, my heart’s colder, and I can see that it’s a lie.” There, on that stage, he was a god, inspiring awe in both the crowd and the musicians he’d joined. But he was a man too, wary of
overexertion, learning the steps again, older than the lead singer and the drummer put together. But brand-new once again.
It is, to date, the last transformative moment in his nearly fifty-year career, and like every previous Bowie incarnation, it keeps us watching for what’s coming next and thinking differently about everything that came before.
T
HERE’S AN ALIEN
in the window of the house next door to the one where David Bowie was born on Stansfield Road in Brixton, a southern borough of London. It peers out, gray skinned, with black, oval-shaped eyes and a tennis-racket-sized skull, the same kind of inflatable spacemen for sale in the gas station gift shops that one stops at while driving through Roswell, New Mexico.
X-Files
/E.T.–faced aliens. It might not be there now, should you decide to make a new pilgrimage, but it was there when I traveled to Brixton, as if to say, “Welcome, biographer!”
Whoever lives there certainly knows who was born next door. If the alien had eyelids it’d be winking. Otherwise, this block, like every other block in the area, is as quiet as it must have been six decades ago. The house itself is three stories high, pale brick, with a double-arched doorway painted French white. A chest-high brick wall separates it from the adjacent buildings. Another brick wall girds the property, sectioning off a very tiny lawn and a spindled tree that extends just past the chimney. It’s a handsome if compact residence. Unlike the demographics of Brixton, which was predominantly a white, middle-class enclave in the years just after World War II, this home is static. In another fifty-two years, while jet packs and flying cars travel overhead, one can imagine it looking exactly the same. There’s no brass plaque here marking David Bowie’s birth, but it is, nonetheless, a landmark, one pristinely preserved whether by design, accident, simple lack of means or inclination. That David Robert Jones came into the world here at 9
AM
on January 8, 1947, is hardly unique; many children in the late forties were born at home and not in a hospital. Midwives were summoned once the water broke, as one would call a plumber or policeman. The house’s real significance has less to do with David’s and more to do with his mother and father’s story anyhow. This was a second-chance home, the place where they hoped to build a strong family unit after their dark and complicated childhoods and some false
starting on either side with regard to romance and parenthood. Brixton was still in wreckage thanks to the Nazi buzz bombs and the depleted nation’s inability to quickly rebuild when David’s mother, Margaret Mary Burns, from Royal Tunbridge Wells in the county of Kent, met his father, Haywood Stenton Jones, from Doncaster, Yorkshire. She was known as Peggy and he as John. It was not a posh area but it was theirs, a place to create new memories and remain protected from the pain they’d known.
Of the two, Peggy had the most to distance herself from. Several incidents occurred in her teens and early twenties that could cumulatively take on the characteristics of a Burns family curse. Mental illness seemed to be seared deeply into the genetic code (as has been well documented by other biographers and commented on by Bowie himself). David spent much of his early adulthood wondering when, not if, he was going to go legitimately mad. Schizophrenic behavior can lay dormant until triggered by a cataclysmic event. For Peggy, and her four sisters and brother, this event was of course the Second World War. However, Victoria Burns, the second child, and Vivienne, the fifth, began exhibiting signs of mental illness early on. The constant explosions of the Luftwaffe’s missiles and the nightmarish prospect of the Nazis occupying the United Kingdom coupled with the heartbreak of falling in love with a series of noncommittal soldiers would push their tendencies into full-blown afflictions during the war years. The disease manifested itself mostly as irrational behavior—nonsensical comments, unkempt appearance, chain-smoking, promiscuity, extreme passivity—so it can be argued, given the seemingly domino-like effect it had on the Burns girls, that schizophrenia itself was another, if quieter, cataclysmic event. Peggy’s father, Jimmy, was a professional soldier of modest means, and the home they shared on Meadow Lane was close-quartered enough to amplify any breach in acceptable social behavior. Certain studies do indicate that those with schizophrenic brothers and sisters are more likely to exhibit schizophrenic tendencies themselves. Someone with one schizophrenic parent is even more likely to develop the disease. Peggy, the oldest child, ultimately exhibited behavior that might be considered borderline. She could be loud, theatrical, and act out. She was basically spared the full effects of the illness, possibly
because it was not actually something that was inherited but rather a very, very sad coincidence within this one English family. Still, it was certainly a specter, and so, at age twenty-two, Peggy became the first Burns sibling to leave the house. She found work as a resident nanny for guests of a nearby hotel, the Culverden Park Arms. It was during this period that she had a well-documented but exceedingly brief dalliance with the Black-shirts, a faction of nationalists headed by a Parliament member named Oswald Mosley (“Mister Oswald with the swastika tattoo,” in Elvis Costello’s debut single “Less Than Zero”). Much has been made of this in other Bowie biographies, given David Bowie’s also well-covered fascination with fascism four decades later in the mid-1970s. One need not be an apologist (or superfan) to see how Bowie’s publicly stated and since recanted endorsement of Hitler’s charisma and the merits of a fascist leader overtaking Britain, while speaking with Cameron Crowe in a notorious 1976
Playboy
interview, was the product of cocaine psychosis rather than any real fidelity to notions of racial purity or governmental insurrection. Peggy’s attraction (leading to a fleeting attendance of one rally) was, it’s been said, even less substantial in its motivation. It was the actual black shirts, those sleek and slimming namesakes, that attracted her rather than loudly spat polemics against immigration and integration.