Bowie: A Biography (66 page)

“I always thought if you take the spectacle away, people would just love him to come onstage with blue jeans and a T-shirt and sing his own songs,” Erdal Kizilcay told me when we were discussing the florid and garish Glass Spider tour. “Even on Sound and Vision, there were bands playing before us without having this light show. Bryan Adams played before us once, and he had great sound. He was really amazing. He sang like a god. I’m ashamed after. People would prefer David to just be near them and sing ‘Space Oddity’ and ‘Blue Jean’ than be the movie guy playing Mickey Mouse.”

The Reality tour, launched that fall, would prove to be the antithesis of “the movie guy playing Mickey Mouse.” Bowie, looking healthy and fifteen years younger than he actually was, and wearing a black T-shirt and sneakers, would fill arenas by offering nothing much more than a killer rock ’n’ roll show played by a top-notch band. The fact that the tour would never complete its scheduled run and may stand as his last ever is beyond disappointing.

Encouraged by brisk box office and some of the best live reviews of his entire career, the run was extended well into 2004 and Bowie was booked to headline various summer festivals in Europe. Then, on May 6, at the James L. Knight Center in Miami, a lighting technician fell from a rig shortly before Bowie and the band were to take the stage. The concert was canceled. At a concert in Oslo on June 18, he was struck in the eye by
a fan who felt like it was a good idea to launch a lollipop stick at his face. He briefly stopped the concert, informed the projectile lobber, quite correctly, that she was a “fucking wanker” and then the show went on. Whether or not these events were harbingers is something for writers like me to say, so I will say: these events were probably harbingers.

In the May 1983 issue
of The Face
, Bowie addressed rumors that he had suffered a secret (and ostensibly coke-induced) heart attack. “No, never,” he says. “That was delightful but untrue. It was very romantic but I’ve got a very sound heart.” Twenty years or so onward, twenty years of stress, creativity and performance, and twenty years of smoking, would catch up with David Bowie in June of 2004. “I knew for years that he was having some chest pains but he swore me to secrecy, and I should have told Iman,” Gabrels would tell me. “Because Iman, that’s the only person he was afraid of.” Mick Rock, who’d shot a series of portraits of Bowie in middle age, also recalls some unspoken health concerns. “I remember him coming offstage in Oslo on his last world tour and Coco taking me backstage to say hi and the first thing on his mind was a cigarette,” says Mick Rock. “He’d officially stopped smoking. He’d started to get a little worried about his health, and maybe he was getting pressure from his wife. I think his father had died in his fifties. He’d stopped buying cigarettes, but, after the show, he was looking for a roadie to cadge a ciggie off. He was looking around to make sure no one noticed and told on him! It was kind of sweet, really. This huge star in a very human moment. Of course it turned out that just about everyone knew what was going on.”

Bowie had a few minor physical setbacks over the course of the tour. In November a show in France was scrapped due to laryngitis. The following month, Bowie performed several European dates while suffering through the flu. But by the spring he seemed in great health. The attack came on suddenly. While onstage in Prague on June 23, Bowie walked offstage, complaining of a sharp pain in his shoulders. A tour doctor examined him and determined it was a trapped nerve. The following show, two days later at the Hurricane Festival in Germany, was not canceled. Reports went out later that day that Bowie had collapsed backstage and was being treated for a shoulder injury at a nearby hospital. For a full week and a half, this is what the newswire services reported; however, rumors began to circulate that the event was much more serious.

On July 8, Bowie’s publicist Mitch Schneider announced that the singer was home in New York City recovering from emergency surgery to repair an “acutely blocked artery” to his heart. The angioplasty had been a success, according to reports, and Bowie’s prognosis was good, but the condition that required it and the surgery that repaired it were certainly life threatening. “The heart surgery wasn’t routine,” a friend told one of the English tabloids, which had seized on the story. “It was a lot more serious than anyone’s letting on.”

Days later, Bowie released his own statement: “I’m so pissed off because the last 10 months of this tour have been so fucking fantastic,” he said. “Can’t wait to be fully recovered and get back to work again. I tell you what, though, I won’t be writing a song about this one.”

“I saw him about three times on that tour, and he did a brilliant show. He was as terrific as I’d ever seen him, and I’d seen many of his concerts over thirty years,” says Mick Rock. “And I remember Lou Reed once saying, ‘David doesn’t seem to do any exercise, but I never hear of him getting sick.’ Many people in the music business during those manic and innovative and experimental years had gotten seriously sick and not a few died, but of course in the end David did get himself in a weakened state and had to take time out from the frenzy of it all.”

In 1995, Bowie complained to Moon Zappa during an interview for hyper-stylized, Moon Zappa–employing and now defunct (although I am not suggesting these are related) music magazine
Ray Gun
, “I think it’s so totally unfair that we’ve got to die, and I’ve lived a lot of my life kind of thinking that.”

Short of assuring people that he was on the mend, Bowie, Iman and their family closed ranks after the episode. “He was really private about it,” says neighbor Moby. They began to spend more and more time at their property upstate. Bowie grew a beard and began restructuring his diet and exercise routine. Any semblance of the rock ’n’ roll lifestyle was chucked out. Three decades after announcing his false retirement from the stage of the Hammersmith Odeon, it seemed like the real David Bowie was done. David Jones’s circulatory system had demanded an actual and substantial hiatus. Bowie being Bowie, however, he could not sit still very long.

With no album or tour, Bowie seemed to be in a position to pick and choose where he would pop up next, as though he was functioning as his
own curator. He filmed a cameo as genius inventor Nikola Tesla opposite Christian Bale and Michael Caine in Christopher Nolan’s
The Prestige
, a surprise box-office hit. This, as with much of his
post-Labyrinth
film work, like
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, The Linguini Incident, Everybody Loves Sunshine
and
Mr. Rice’s Secret
, was a mere blip on the culture radar. A pair of cameos in 2007 that actually had more impact, given their circulation on the Web, gained more attention than most Bowie albums since the early eighties had. Both relied on his eternally underappreciated sense of humor. Bowie had long been a huge fan of the British version of
The Office
and eagerly accepted an offer to appear opposite
Office
creator Ricky Gervais in an episode from season two of the comedian’s HBO series
Extras
. Gervais, who plays a sitcom actor, encounters Bowie in the VIP section of a cocktail party and complains about the “riffraff everywhere.” When Bowie, with expert timing and an enviable poker face, confesses that he’s unfamiliar with Gervais’s sitcom, the latter launches into a tirade designed to align himself with someone of Bowie’s artistic integrity. “The BBC have interfered,” he gripes. “Lowest-common-denominator catchphrases and wigs. It’s difficult, isn’t it? To keep your integrity when you’re going for that first—” Bowie cuts him off and takes to the piano, struck by the muse …

“Little fat man who sold his soul. Little fat man who sold his dream. Chubby little loser—No … not ‘chubby little loser.’ ‘Pathetic little fat man.’ Nobody’s bloody laughing. The clown that no one laughs at. They all just wish he’d die. He’s so depressed at being hated, fatty takes his own life. ‘Fatty’? ‘Fatso’? Yeah, let’s go with ‘Fatso.’ He blows his bloated face off.”

Purported to be a window into Bowie’s songwriting process, it’s actually the sharpest bit of self-deprecating humor quite possibly ever once it’s known that the lyrics were actually written by Gervais and not Bowie (“Little Fat Man’s” haunting melody, however, is all Bowie’s). The clip was a viral sensation before it ever ran on the cable network.

“I sent the lyrics to him and he put the music to it. When I phoned him up, I went, ‘Hi. It’s Ricky.’ He went, ‘Umm, sorry. I was just eating a banana,’” Gervais says. “For some reason, just the idea of Bowie eating a banana is weird, because still in my head he’s got platform shoes on and orange hair and he’s got the Spiders from Mars sitting around and he answers the phone and he’s got the
Aladdin Sane
stripe and it’s still 1974.
And he answers the phone, ‘Allo. Oh, sorry, I was just eating a banana.’ And so I told him for the song that we’d like something quite retro, like ‘Life on Mars?’ And he says, with his dry sense of humor, ‘Oh, yeah. I’ll just knock out a “Life on Mars?” for you, shall I?’ And he came and it was great. And he knew what he was doing because he gave us David Bowie. He gave us the version of David Bowie from the horse’s mouth and it was great. It was brilliant. It was slightly different than the other guest spots. We didn’t deconstruct Bowie or make a fool of him. And it was also the most surreal moment we ever had. It’s an original song that David Bowie sings that’s meant to be ad-libbed in this strange club.”

Gervais was one of the headliners of the Bowie-curated High Line Festival, a purported annual event in the spirit of the UK’s Meltdown festival in which one artist curates a multimedia bill centered around New York City’s then unopened elevated rail line turned park. Bowie had experience with such a role, having curated the Meltdown in 2002—headlining with a full performance of
Low
and
Heathen
over some of his favorite younger acts like Peaches, FischerSpooner and Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Bowie invited the French electronic duo Air, the beat-era poet Ken Nordine, the Polyphonic Spree, Deerhoof, Daniel Johnston, and the Arcade Fire, and selected a series of Latin and Spanish films.

“It’s quite another stamp of approval, you know, ‘Bowie likes you. He really likes you,’” Gervais says of being asked to perform, echoing the sentiments of every baby band who ever welcomed him to sample from their backstage crudités. Initially it was announced that Bowie would perform as well, but short of introducing Gervais (in full formal wear) at the latter’s Theater at Madison Square Garden show, Bowie opted to let the selected artists represent themselves. There is no plan, at the time of writing this, by the way, for a second High Line festival, so who knows if the experiment worked at all?

In the fall of 2007, Bowie dove a bit more wholeheartedly into his next nonmusical project. Bolstered by his then seven-year-old daughter’s love for the program, he accepted an offer to loan his voice to a character on the massively popular Nickelodeon cartoon
SpongeBob SquarePants
. Bowie’s turn as the Lord Royal Highness of Atlantis drew a record nine million viewers to his Bikini Bottom antics, rivaling the
Sopranos
finale for most-watched cable program of the year. In the episode, a mini movie,
SpongeBob comes into possession of a magic pendant that unlocks the secret of the lost continent of Atlantis (where Bowie’s Lord Royal Highness keeps the peace). Atlanteans, like Bowie, are, we learn, “eons ahead of their time” and have developed a machine that turns ordinary household items like hair combs into ice cream. All the while, Bowie uses a dead-on parody of monarchic English (“pee-yound” rather than “pound” notes).

“We’d done the episode and they were suggesting some celebrity casting for that role and they had all these names that were just sort of run-of-the-mill, John Cleese—nothing against him but it just didn’t seem fresh or original,” explains Paul Tibbitt,
SpongeBob’s
producer and show runner. “So my first thought was, ‘If there was a British person that I would want to meet and work with, who would it be?’ And of course it’s David Bowie. I’m a huge fan. I’ve been a fan all my life. My parents were Bowie fans. He’s been a big part of my life. So it was very selfish of me to suggest him. So I put the name out and everyone was like, ‘Oh, that will never happen. He’ll never do it.’ And I thought it didn’t hurt to ask. Luckily he was happy to do it and he was a fan of the show because he watches it with his kid.”

His Lord Royal Highness was originally going to be rendered as a giant brain, but as he was sketched out, he began to take on a more classic Bowie look, complete with one dilated pupil. “The little touch of the eyes came from our colorist, Teale Wang, who is a huge Bowie fan too. She just thought, ‘Wow, it’ll be real subtle.’ He didn’t really want to draw too much attention to it.” The voice, an almost unrecognizable upper-crust lilt, was all Bowie’s idea. “He showed up and he’d been trying out all of these different voices and he was really excited about it,” Tibbitt explains. “He said, ‘Well, I’ve got these ideas.’ And he performed them for me. The one that we used was the one I liked the best. It was very surreal. He had like three different voices that he’d been trying. He had one he based on Prince Charles. They were all really cartoony. They were all really silly. To have him standing there doing voices for me was so bizarre and surreal and amazing for me as a fan. I was just flattered and surprised that he’d even taken time to think about it. You could tell he was really excited to do it, to have that experience with his kid.”

There were other cultural touchstones that were fully Bowie inspired that he had nothing to do with, such as the BBC’s
Life on Mars
television program and its spin-off
Ashes to Ashes
, both of which featured a protagonist
trapped between two planes of existence (in 1973 and ’83, respectively) adapting to the sudden change as he strains to restore himself to right. A good Bowie metaphor, and with regard to both shows, an excellent soundtrack array: Elton John for
Life
, Ultravox and Visage treasures for
Ashes
. Visage’s Steve Strange even plays himself in a cameo in the eighties-set show. In July of 2007, New Zealand hipster comedy duo Flight of the Conchords paid tribute to Bowie with dead-on style parodies (that’s what Weird Al calls them, anyway) in an episode of their hit HBO show. The episode, entitled “Bowie,” features Jemaine (the one with the glasses and no beard) as Ziggy, “1980 David Bowie from the music video ‘Ashes to Ashes’” and
Labryinth-era
Bowie, appearing to a depressed Bret (the one with the beard and no glasses), who is having height-related body issues.