Bowie: A Biography (35 page)

“In St. Louis, the Spiders were booked into an arena that held eleven thousand. I think six hundred people showed up,” Childers says. “We had really worked St. Louis too. So we were real apologetic, everyone who had been working on it. So we were really down in the dumps. Being Midwestern kids, they had taken the seats that were on the numbers of the tickets they had bought. So looking out over the arena of eleven thousand empty seats, there would be people here, and people there, and in the balcony and down in front, and all scattered here and about. So David just came out, stopped the show immediately, and walked to the edge of the stage and said, ‘Everybody come on down.’ And so they all got up, and
they all came down and just took seats there in front of the stage, and there and then he drew out the set list and altered the whole show, and pretty much did a lot of it just sitting on the edge of the stage singing directly to the audience. Stood up for the dramatic bits. Used the lighting, used the facilities, but he made it an intimate show tailored to his audience. And that, I think, made as much difference to St. Louis on the next tour being a successful show, because those six hundred people went away feeling special.”

What Bowie lacked in actual record and ticket sales he more than made up for in media appeal. The October 9, 1972, issue of
Newsweek
magazine featured a short profile of Bowie, putting his rooster-cut visage in millions of American homes. Entitled “The Stardust Kid,” the piece accurately, if a bit ornately, frames Bowie as the perfect star for the seventies: “This is a time of confusion, a middle ages, an appropriate breeding ground for the dark, satanic majesty of England’s David Bowie.” This being America, there was much made of his sexuality. “He sings songs about homosexuals,” the writer observes, “but there are just as many straight songs as bent ones.” Bowie has his way with the writer, who is either amused or confused. “My sexual nature is irrelevant,” he says. “I’m an actor, I play roles, fragments of myself.”

Defries, who had started to affect the cigar-chomping, fur-coat-wearing style of a rock ’n’ roll manager, as opposed to that of a buttoned-down British solicitor, knew that overtaking the United States wasn’t about this tour anyway. U.S. tour number one was a theater tour. Bowie and Defries had their eye on a sold-out arena juggernaut and Bowie was instructed to act like a standing-room-only arena rock star until he became one. Promoters were furious at MainMan’s threats to cancel shows, but there would be no scaling back of the outrageous demands. This became the company’s general philosophy: one has to spend, and often lose, money to make it. Given the unsold seats and five-star accommodations, MainMan was in debt to RCA for well over a million dollars already (about five million when adjusted for inflation). Defries was confident that every full seat would, via word of mouth, turn into three or four dozen more in the very near future.

As the tour rolled on, Garson, the only American, slowly became acclimated to the pandemonium and bonded with Mick Ronson
especially, as the guitarist had begun as a pianist and could talk classical and jazz theory. Bolder and Woodmansey discussed spirituality with him. Garson was, at the time, a devout Scientologist. After the shows, when stuck in a less cosmopolitan city, Garson and Bowie, in full Ziggy makeup, would invade the cocktail lounge of whatever Ramada Inn they were lodging in and shock the other guests with impromptu concerts of Sinatra.

“He would sing ‘My Funny Valentine’ and I would back him up on the piano just for fun in a bar,” Garson says. “And he sounded like his version of Sinatra. Mouths would drop. I wish I had a video; it would be on YouTube now.”

Attendance picked up significantly as U.S. tour number one hit the West Coast. They had dates in Los Angeles at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium and in San Francisco at Winterland, where future disco sensation Sylvester (who would record the indelible dance singles “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)” and “Do Ya Wanna Funk” before becoming one of pop’s early AIDS casualties in 1988) provided support. Defries clashed with notoriously tough promoter Bill Graham after insisting that a wall be constructed from the load-in area to the dressing room so that David and his entourage could enter the venue in private. The trek was also yielding major creative dividends, with a whole album nearly complete by the time they reached the Pacific. The notion of seeing America, the whole country and not just the major cities, comes up in those songs and brings Bowie back to his boyhood and the Beat literature that his half brother Terry encouraged him to read.

The forty-six-person U.S. tour number one entourage hit Los Angeles in the third week of October. The city was ready for them. Rodney Bingenheimer had almost singlehandedly turned Hollywood into London West, running his Bowie-inspired E. Club then centered around the Chateau Marmont. The Spiders had no trouble selling out two nights at the 3, 500-seat Santa Monica Civic Auditorium. At one point the most famous bootleg in the Bowie unofficial discography, a recording of one of the shows was formally released by Virgin Records in the summer of 2008. Listening to it now, it’s hard to imagine just how different Bowie and his band must have seemed to the casual concertgoer, fresh off shelling out for Eagles or Santana tickets. After “Five Years,” for example, you can actually hear
people screaming in psychic elation. It’s not just white-noise applause but rather shouts of “Yeah! Yeah! Yes!” Is it the sound of minds being blown? Surely this is what the city had been waiting for, someone to make their decay seem not only sexy but also … meaningful. “Five Years” meant something. The album stands as a document of just how on fire the Spiders were. Ronson is as solid as a walnut tree, adjusting the speed of his backing vocals (fast on “Changes,” slow and chantlike on “Five Years”) with killer instinct and throwing the shred in a way that would have seemed downright impolite on a record (“The Width of a Circle”). Garson’s piano makes the
Hunky Dory
tracks, like “Life on Mars?” soar. Bowie himself is breathy and so English he makes asking for a pair of pliers before “Space Oddity” seem grand. As he screamed, “You’re not alone,” at the end of “Rock and Roll Suicide,” the show closer, he could not escape the irony of staring out into the crowd to see so many of them dressed like him.
“Santa Monica ’72
is the sound of a cult act pushing hard for breakout success,” Pitchfork observed in its review of the reissue.

Bowie was feted by the famous disc jockey Wolfman Jack at the after-show party, which drew every freak in the Golden State. RCA paid for the cocktails. The Wolfman had a fully functional disco in his home (much like Steve Martin’s during the decadent third act of
The Jerk)
, complete with a pro sound system, spinning mirror ball and flashing lights. Bowie stood in the center of it. Nobody approached him. Bingenheimer and Fowley arrived. As the party went on, joints were lit up, cocktails passed around and the dance floor filled up. Bowie spotted a girl he fancied dancing with Fowley. “We were dancing away and Bowie comes up to me on the dance floor the way Gene Kelly would slide up to Fred Astaire in one of those old Hollywood musicals,” says Kim Fowley. “Anyone seeing it would say, ‘Oh, gay man sliding up to other feminine man to have a giggle.’ He slides up and says, ‘Are you in love with this woman or may I take her into the bathroom? Why don’t you and her follow me if she’s not your girlfriend or wife?’ I looked at the girl and said ‘David would like to have a word with you.’ Then he said to her, ‘How do you do, I’m David Bowie. I’d like to discuss life or the universal whatever, my dear.’ He gave me a wink, a bit of a thank-you wave. A David Niven–style wave. Went to the bathroom, obviously, to have an intimate discussion. I always thought he was so clever pushing that androgynous thing. They went into the bathroom and soon heard, ‘Oh no.’
Two drag queens were there, hoping that David Bowie was gay. When they saw their hero going in a bathroom with a woman, they went ballistic. I heard him lock the door and the drag queens took their high heels off, smashing the door, screaming, ‘Whatever she’s doing, we can do better. Let us in, throw the bitch out. We can do a better job on you than she can no matter what’s going on in there.’”

Bowie was more or less a teetotaler on the tour. There was far too much to do, and the rigors of being onstage and turning in a stellar performance every night required him to be a dead sober workaholic. Sex, of course, was another story: it was good exercise and, in Los Angeles in 1972, the equivalent of a politician glad-handing a potential voter. “Wham, bam, thank you, ma’am,” indeed. While he would later dismiss it as the most vile locale on the planet, the love between Bowie and Los Angeles was in full flush.

“L.A. was tailor-made for Ziggy Stardust,” Leee Black Childers agrees. “L.A. is like David. The city changes its personality to suit whoever is in town. So they had all become spacemen for that weekend that we were there. Whereas if it had been a reggae band they would have all been, you know, Rastas. And they all have all the necessary outfits and equipment in their obviously well-appointed homes. Nobody’s poor in L.A. And so all the groupies were dressed in glitter and platforms galore. And all the kids were dressed with makeup on and everything. So it looked like the town was totally behind David.”

The Spiders’ entourage had checked into the Beverly Hills Hotel, the massive, shell-pink structure off Sunset Boulevard, on the advice of Lisa Robinson. They lived off the fat of RCA, with roadies bringing back tourists from up the street and signing away for surf-and-turf dinners and champagne. There were groupies floating in the swimming pool.

Cynthia McCradu was a young friend of Rodney Bingenheimer’s who had met Bowie earlier in the year while on a trip to London and spent a day with him in Haddon Hall, until Angie shooed her away. “David was the most funny, giving, intelligent person,” she says today. “[During that visit] he showed me his garden. I said, ‘What are you growing?’ And he said, ‘Mostly weeds right now.’ He was so gentle and funny and intelligent. I’m really happy that I met him before it was all ruined.”

McCradu felt special in sleepy, leafy Beckenham. She’d seen a more artistic and domestic Bowie, perhaps more David Jones than Ziggy Stardust. Only a few months later, in the Hollywood groupie jungle, she was aghast at the behavior she witnessed at the E. Club and the fervor with which Bowie, now in near-total Ziggy mode, dove in. The club itself was a mirror-lined speakeasy type of place. They served beer and wine and food, and had a doorman card people to keep out the underaged, but fake IDs were plentiful.

“I’m with David at a table,” McCradu says, “talking, and we danced and suddenly this little girl comes in and she pushes me off the chair and says, ‘I’m gonna be with him now. You’ve already had your time with him.’ And I go, ‘Who the hey are you and what the hey are you doing? Little girl, you need to put your clothes on.’ That was my introduction to Queenie and Sable and Lori. Little girls twelve, thirteen, fourteen years old. Quite frankly if I was a mother or father, I would have whipped their hide and made them stay home. [The next time I saw him] David was now fucked-up, into the frenzy of everybody wanting to have sex with him in the limo on the way to the recording studio. On the sidewalk in front of the hotel. In the bathroom. Everywhere he turned, everybody wanted to sex him. And he was enjoying that. That was exciting to him, I believe. I think after a while, these people, they just start sucking the life out of you …” As it was at Bromley Tech, David viewed sex as a means to capture and hold attention. He had become an Elvis or a Little Richard at last; his rock ’n’ roll made the girls and boys lose control.

“It was a very sexual period,” Mick Rock observes. “A lot of sex going on but initially less drugs than you might think but certainly a hell of a lot of rutting! David generated a lot of sexual heat. He had a totally futuristic charisma and energy. He did have those amazing facial bones, a very skinny body, and photographed in a unique and sexy way. Everybody was buzzed about David, boys and girls and everything in between!”

“Suddenly David was not to me a man you can talk to anymore,” McCradu says. “He was consumed by all the
sexualness.”

Bingenheimer shrewdly made sure that everyone knew that Bowie was associated with the club. “Oh, he signed a contract with the club to be on the board of directors,” Bingenheimer says. Rodney soon parlayed that association into moving and expanding the E. Club into the more iconic
Rodney’s English Disco. By the time that opened a few blocks farther east up Sunset Boulevard L.A. had gone glam crazy and Bowie was its king.

Bowie remained in Los Angeles to do some work on Iggy and the Stooges’ MainMan debut,
Raw Power
. “Originally Tony wanted David to produce us,” Pop said, “but I wanted to produce myself. He still wanted David to remix the tapes, adding some horns or whatever. I didn’t want that.” Pop relented, but in 1997
Raw Power
was rereleased with an alternate, Iggy-approved mix. Fans remain polarized and which
Raw Power
is superior remains the subject of rock-geek round (bar) table debate. Bowie then returned to England in December for a short series of dates, including two benefit shows for his late father’s employer, Dr. Barnardo’s children’s charity, at London’s Rainbow Theater. Bowie spent the Christmas holidays of 1972 with Zowie and Angie in Haddon Hall. It would be their last in Beckenham, as a tight family unit.

The Bowies must have certainly found it strange, after the whirlwind of sex, spending and speed-traveling through America, to be back in the suburbs. Angie could not retrieve the mail without hearing high-pitched screaming. In certain circles, she was just as iconic as he was, but when he became Ziggy Stardust the experience got bigger and more people were sharing in it. David did not, at that time, flaunt his dalliances, and neither did Angie. They were progressives. Their marriage was open. Angie felt flattered that so many people of both sexes wanted her husband. Increasingly it was not women or men but fame itself that was the third party in their relationship. History is littered with failed “open marriages,” including those of Sigmund Freud, Charles Darwin, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre. Open marriage may be a genuinely progressive notion, but it’s clearly easier in theory than practice. If such a union is to work, it requires close and consistent proximity between the two agreeing partners. The couple must grow or evolve together, but even if they do, throw in fame and long periods of estrangement often due to professional commitments, and it ceases to be a liberating union and becomes one that can foster suspicion and jealousy and spite even with the must liberated partners. In their study
Open Marriage
, Nena and George O’Neill, for example, write, “The central problem in contemporary marriage was relationship. The attempt to solve the problem by moving into group and
communal situations did not seem to mitigate the problems we discovered in the interpersonal relationship.” David’s steadiest companion post-fame was Ava Cherry, an eighteen-year-old African American beauty from Chicago. Like Bowie, she had a unique and soulful voice (check out the Astro nettes’ rarity “I Am Divine”). She also matched his flair for attention-grabbing and would spend the remainder of the glitter era with a platinum blond crew cut. According to Zanetta and Edwards’s
Stardust
, the Bowies’ laissez-faire attitude toward sex was something she had to grow into. The morning after their first night together, Bowie casually introduced Cherry to his family, stating flatly, “This is my wife and kid.” While Angie would come to loathe Cherry, at the time she was up for anything, as was their rule. Two years into their relationship, Bowie and Cherry would practice the same openness for better or worse. “If David kept an affair secret, it meant he had some feeling for the woman,” Zanetta and Edwards write. “Otherwise he had a friendly discussion with Ava about the one-night stand and gave her an evaluation on his partner’s performance.” Eventually Bowie and Ava Cherry’s relationship would go the way of his first marriage, making the notion of a lasting open marriage or steady relationship that much more challenging if not utterly dubious. Sometimes progress can break your heart.