Bowie: A Biography (43 page)

Song by song,
Young Americans
is played so enthusiastically that no by-the-hour house band could re-create such sonic buoyancy. The European as soul
fan
and not soul
man
is the liberating ingredient. “He would always unblock a musician,” Alomar says, “and allow him his freedom of expression without losing sight of the musicians’ effect on the song. As an example, if you played guitar and you had Jimi Hendrix as the guitarist, would you show him what to play or would you give him a general idea of what the song needed and then adjust his performance to fit the song? Bowie always allowed every musician that freedom. He would play a version of a song on piano, guitar, synth, anything he could use to exact the effect he needed. It was glorious.”

Reviews were largely positive as well. Lester Bangs, who had previously singled out “Time takes a cigarette,” the opening lyric from “Rock
and Roll Suicide,” as the worst ever penned, immediately saw the album as another in a long line of hipster white guys worshipping black culture and put it in smart context. “Now, as we all know, white hippies and beatniks before them would never have existed had there not been a whole generational subculture with a gnawing yearning to be nothing less than the downest baddest niggers they could possibly be. And of course it was only exploding plastic inevitable that the profound and undeniably seductive realm of negritude should ultimately penetrate the kingdom of glitter.” In his raw language, Bangs shrewdly points out that in most gay bars, nobody listened to white English glitter rock anyway. “Everybody knows that faggots don’t like music like David Bowie and the Dolls—that’s for teenagers and pathophiles. Faggots like musical comedies and soul music. So, it was only natural that Bowie would catch on sooner or later. After all he’s no dummy.” Bangs adds, “Bowie has just changed his props: last tour it was boxing gloves, skulls and giant hands, this tour it’s black folk.” That, in Lester Bangs’s terms, amounts to a rave.

Although it was his biggest hit record to date, Bowie opted not to tour in support of
Young Americans
. He made what would be one of his last public appearances for a full year, looking deathly gaunt but elegant in a white tie and wide-lapel tuxedo, to present a Best R & B Female Performance Grammy Award (he addresses the crowd with “Ladies and gentlemen and
others”
and rambles in both English and French before announcing the nominees) to Aretha Franklin for her rendition of “Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing” in the winter of ’75. The Queen of Soul responded with the unintentionally hurtful joke, “Wow, this is so good, I could kiss David Bowie.” Aretha amended, “I mean that in a beautiful way,” but it reportedly wounded him deeply.

In April of 1975, with New York “closing in” on him, as he would tell Cameron Crowe the following year, Bowie made arrangements to leave his unofficial second home behind as well. After drifting from Ava Cherry, he had started dating actress and
Playboy
Playmate Claudia Jennings. Jennings, who was killed in a 1979 auto wreck, is the willowy blonde who appears briefly in
The Man Who Fell to Earth
, naked and making out with Bernie Casey after he emerges from a swimming pool (also naked). She also appeared in the Roger Corman cult film
The Great Texas Dynamite Chase
and continues to be a cult figure among B movie enthusiasts. By year’s end,
Bowie, more popular than ever, became both a genuine movie star and a death-and sleep-defying Babylonian.

W

hile it’s an eternal magnet for rained-on English rock stars, there is something eternally foreboding about Los Angeles. I’m not actually sure what the source of it is. I lived there for five years in the early nineties. I cowrote a book about L.A. punk. Worse, I’ve walked in L.A. after selling my Toyota for drug money (again, early nineties). It is, with apologies to my many friends who do so, “dubious” to stay there for any length of time, as David Bowie keenly notes in the
Cracked Actor
documentary. Hearing a siren on Sunset Boulevard, he blanches and explains to director Alan Yentob that there is “an underlying unease; you can feel it on every avenue. It’s very calm. It’s a superficial calm they’ve developed to underplay the fact that there’s a very high pressure here. It’s a very big entertainment realm. How dubious a position it is to stay here for any length of time.”

Los Angeles makes no sense to me. It is of course a major urban center but it doesn’t look cavernous and easily, mathematically navigated like New York or Chicago or even San Francisco. There’s no grid logic to it. I tried to read
City of Quartz
to figure it out but I just got more confused. Plus, there are skunks and coyotes in the shadowy underbrush. In a city! It’s too primal. It’s a company town, centered above all on the entertainment industry, but it feels neither productive nor constructive to me. People are dying constantly. They overdose in massive plaster or adobe bungalows and on cold marble floors. Others get their thoraxes shot up with automatic weapons as the sickly smell of jasmine penetrates every surface. Violence hangs in the air like exhaust. You could be buying a paper in a clean convenience store, or a cup of coffee in a Winchell’s donuts, and suddenly a burst of gunfire shatters the illusion of safety and suburban calm and homeyness like that scene in
Boogie Nights
with Don Cheadle’s Buck Swope and the bloody bag of money. L.A. is John Holmes and Eddie Nash and Wonderland Avenue. It’s the death of Sal Mineo and Peter Ivers and Jack Nance, who played Henry in
Eraserhead
. Wheat germ killers. It’s the Black Dahlia and Sharon Tate. Nicole Simpson and Bonnie Lee Bakely and Lana Clarkson sacrificed. The chords of “Californication”
by the Red Hot Chili Peppers
, Forever Changes
by Love, Neil Young’s
On the Beach
and “Pacific Ocean Blues” by Dennis Wilson, just about everything the Doors ever made, the hazy, burbling death rattle that underpins Sly Stone’s “There’s a Riot Goin’ On,” “This Town” by the Go-Go’s, “Welcome to the Jungle” by Guns n’ Roses and “Fuck tha Police” by NWA capture it as do “Los Angeles, I’m Yours” by the Decemberists and most of Jenny Lewis’s recorded output. It’s that flute solo in “California Dreamin.” When I think of L.A. in the nineties, when I knew it, I have tremendous respect for the people I know, like Brendan Mullen, Pleasant Gehman and John Roecker, who lived through L.A. in the early seventies, when life was surely much, much cheaper. We lost River Phoenix at the Viper Room, but we had no Manson family or SLA. Joan Didion, as she does, reduces this pervasive sense of unease excellently in her collection of essays
The White Album.

Too much money, too many drugs, too many powerful people and far too many disenfranchised angry spurned poor people around them. When I am in L.A. on assignment, and not at the Chateau Marmont or the Sunset Marquis, where the sheer cost of the room is almost enough to make me feel
safe, I double-check that the door is locked. The nights in those hills are so dark. Add to that rampant creepiness enough Bolivian marching powder to stroke out a Himalayan yak, and your awareness of the illusion of calm is heightened to levels that almost guarantee prolonged psychic pain
.

“There was something horrible permeating the air in LA in those days,” Bowie told Robert Palmer during their
Penthouse
interview in 1983. “The stench of Manson and the Sharon Tate murders.”

In Kenneth Anger’s 1975 book
Hollywood Babylon
, one I’ve read more than once, he talks about the evil roots of the industry. “Yet for the vast public out there H-o-l-l-y-w-o-o-d was a magic three syllables invoking the Weirder World of Make Believe. To the faithful it was more than a dream factory where one young hopeful out of a million got a break. It was Dreamland, Somewhere Else; it was the Home of the Heavenly Bodies, the Glamour Galaxy of Hollywood. The fans worshipped, but the fans also could be fickle, and if their elites proved to have feet of clay, they could be cut down without compassion. Off screen a new Star was always waiting to make an entrance.”

“There’s a form of desperation,” Kim Fowley, a lifelong denizen of L.A., says in typically verbose yet ultimately accurate summation. “Look where we are. A lot of people south of the border think we stole the land. You have a melting pot not by choice but by circumstances. Then there’s the pressure cooker of Hollywood. The rats eating each other in the bottles. If you’re totally fake and totally materialistic and selfish, you get an erection when you walk into town—‘Goddamn, I belong here. This is where I’m destined to be Billy the Kid, Jesse James. I get to be a motherfucker here and they applaud me as I ravage the countryside.’”

18.

U

PON HIS ARRIVAL
in Los Angeles in the spring of 1975, Bowie crashed at the home of fellow British rock star Glenn Hughes. Hughes was then the bassist in Deep Purple, which had enjoyed several hit singles, including 1968’s “Hush.” Their proto-metal album
Machine Head
, and its titanic single “Smoke on the Water,” released in 1972, the same year as Bowie’s
Ziggy Stardust
album, had made them arena-filling stars thanks to
that riff
. Worldwide engagements kept him on the road much of the year, so Hughes was happy to share his mansion just behind the famed Beverly Hills Hotel in Benedict Canyon. When he left Bowie alone, however, he did not realize the extent of his pal’s paranoia.

“My house was four homes from the LaBianca house,” Hughes recalls, referencing one of the city’s most notorious crime scenes, where Leno and Rosemary LaBianca were randomly slaughtered by the Manson family just two days after the murder of Sharon Tate and her friends. “And I guess David found out about that. When I came off tour I found all the knives and all the sharp objects under the bed.” Hughes was, at the time, leading a somewhat debauched lifestyle but soon realized his new best friend was taking such decadence to extremes uncommon even for a rich rock ’n’ roller. Unlike Hughes, Bowie was not ingesting blow for the fun of it. He remained awash in neurosis and fears and obsessed with using occult magic to attain success and protect himself from demonic forces. A self-induced cocaine psychosis was, addiction aside, maintained in part because it was a mental instability that he could control, unlike the one that he was convinced was still encoded somewhere in his DNA, waiting to unfold and claim him as it had his aunts and half brother. Regardless of the motives, Bowie’s laundry list of pathology could fill reams.

“David had a fear of heights and wouldn’t go into an elevator,” Hughes recalls. “He never used to go above the third floor. Ever. If I got him into an elevator, it was frightening. He was paranoid and so I became paranoid. We partied in private.” Fortunately in Los Angeles, anything can be couriered in. Soon Hughes’s home became a sort of bunker, and rock stars like Keith Moon, John Lennon, winding down his notorious dissolute “Lost Weekend,” and cohort Harry Nilsson, used to catching Bowie out and about, stopped seeing him almost completely.

“If you really want to lose all your friends and all of the relationships that you ever held dear, that’s the drug to do it with,” Bowie has said. “Cocaine severs any link you have with another human being. Maintaining is the problem. You retain a superficial hold on reality so that you can get through the things that you know are absolutely necessary for your survival.
But when that starts to break up, which inevitably it does—around late 1975 everything was starting to break up. I would work at songs for hours and hours and days and days and then realize that I had done absolutely nothing. I thought I had been working and working but I had only been rewriting the first four bars or something.”

While planning the follow-up to
Young Americans
, Bowie would sit in the house with a pile of high-quality cocaine atop the glass coffee table, a sketch pad and a stack of books.
Psychic Self-Defense
by Dion Fortune was his favorite. Its author describes the book as a “safeguard for protecting yourself against paranormal malevolence.”
Psychic Self-Defense’s
instructions (“Sever all connections with suspected originators”) seem like a paradigm for the isolated and suspicious mode in which Bowie conducted himself during this period, except, of course, for one of Fortune’s key tenets: “Keep away from drugs.” Using this and more arcane books on witchcraft, white magic and its malevolent counterpart, black magic, as rough guides to his own rapidly fragmenting psyche, Bowie began drawing protective pentagrams on every surface.

“It was very speedy coke,” Hughes says. “David never slept. Never slept. He was in a coke storm. We would be up three or four days at a time. I’d leave and come back and continue the same conversation we left off.”