JoyZine - David Bowie
Interview by Joy Williams
In 1989 Bowie's new band, Tin Machine, released its self-titled 1989
debut. The band's music was termed "aggressive, direct and brutal," a
sound reflecting the explosive synergy generated by its four members:
David Bowie (lead vocals, guitar), Reeves Gabrels (lead guitar), Hunt
Sales (drums, vocals) and Tony Sales (bass, vocals). Written and recorded
in just six weeks, Tin Machine documented these four talented, very
different, yet complementary, individuals.
On Tin Machine the quartet's evolution as a musical unit is in full
evidence. While the album suggests the immediacy of Tin Machine's debut
effort, it's coupled with the ease of experience which the band has gained
in the studio and on tour during the last two+ years. Anchored by the
Sales brothers' steady, R&B-flavored rhythms, punctuated by Gabrels'
growling guitar and Bowie's expressive vocals, Tin Machine has harnessed
its early blistering noise experiments and streamlined sound, adding more
subtle textures and melodies, taking risks without compromising any of the
first album's breathtakingly raw energy. "I think we were so desperately
fearful of exactly what it was we were trying to write or produce, that
there was maybe an exaggerated urgency to what we were doing," David
recalls about the group's first recording. "I find that very satisfying,
by virtue of the fact it is a group's first effort. And I like the
abrasion factor." "The first album was groove-oriented, "adds Tony. "It
was right to the throat. Reeves called it 'pinstripes and purple haze.'"
One factor which influenced the band's approach to its new recording
was Tin Machine's brief world-wide tour. "On this album we had done twenty
live dates and we'd known each other for a couple of years," Reeves says.
"We kind of knew what we sounded like having played more together. "On the
first record it was a matter of 'How do you do?' 'Okay,' 'What do you
think of this chord?'" Hunt adds. "But now we've had some time to love
each other and hate each other. I think it shows on this record." Another
important element was recording the album in Australia. "We wanted to put
ourselves into a light that we did not feel entirely comfortable in," Tony
explains. "The unfamiliarity would make us work better together, since
there was nothing else for us to latch onto."
The basic tracks for the album were written and recorded in just over
three weeks in Sydney with Tim Palmer once again co-producing. While the
first album was all manic sparks, Tin Machine II reflects the band's
impressions of Australia's expansive landscape. "It may sound like a
cliché, but a lot of tracks have an openness to them," Reeves points out.
"'You Belong In Rock & Roll' and even 'Shopping For Girls' to a certain
degree, have a bigger horizon to them sonically, and I think Australia had
something to do with that. It's a place that moves slower and it's so wide
open, almost like Texas." Reeves and David continued to refine the album
during the Sound & Vision tour, picking up whenever David had a break.
"David would call up and say, 'I'm going to have a week off in Miami in a
month, if you want to meet me there, we can do more stuff,'" Reeves
explains. "For example, 'Goodbye Mr Ed' was just a rhythm track until we
got to Miami." The album was finally completed in England in the spring.
"Lyrically, especially, David really responds to what's going on around
him while we're doing it," Reeves adds. "Making this album was more of a
journey inside, thinking about relationships, the romantic side, instead
of trying to point out the problems in the world.
Although Tin Machine was formed only three years ago, the band's
origins can be traced to the recording sessions for Iggy Pop's landmark
1977 album Lust For Life. It marked the first time Bowie, who co-produced
that album as well as contributing keyboards and vocals, and the
incomparable Sales brothers, Hunt and Tony, had played together. "We
talked back then about the possibility of doing something else together
later," Hunt recalls. But it wasn't until Bowie met Reeves Gabrels in 1987
that the band that would eventually become Tin Machine really came to
fruition. Gabrels had been experimenting with different guitar sounds for
over a decade as a session musician and with groups like Boston's Rubber
Rodeo. Fascinated by innovators like Adrian Belew and avant-garde composer
Glenn Branca, Gabrels started to develop his own vocabulary for the
guitar, drawing on a multitude of styles from blues and R&B to country,
rock and jazz. The brothers Sales enjoy a remarkable chemistry. "It's
hard, crazed energy," David says about them. "They're not used to
sessions. They're not really used to recording studios. They're very much
a live couple, so there's a different approach to the studio than if you
ended up with session guys or young guys who don't know, who haven't the
wealth of experience playing in every conceivable format from Todd
Rundgren through.... Hunt was working with a soul band when he was 13!" He
was 15 when he and his slightly older brother Tony held down the rhythm
section duties on Todd Rundgren's first solo album. Tony played with Iggy
Pop's Stooges, with Bowie at one point, with many others, until he hit a
tree at 75 mph one night. "They found me basically dead, not breathing,
with the gearshift through my chest," Tony revealed. He was in a coma for
eight months. "And of all the people I'd known and played with, David was
the only one who came to the hospital during all that time."
"I met David about a year before he even knew I played guitar,"
Reeves recalls. Gabrels' wife, Sara, had worked with Bowie on his Glass
Spider tour, eventually offering David a tape of her husband's work.
Several months after the tour ended, Bowie called Gabrels and said,
"You're the guitar player I've been looking for!" "Tony, Hunt and I had
been talking about a similar kind of music we'd heard in our heads and
wanted to play," David asserts. "When I met Reeves he was saying the same
things. Tin Machine kind of evolved as we realized we all wanted to play
the same kind of music." Bowie and Gabrels first took their collaboration
public, performing together at the 1988 Institute of Contemporary Arts
(ICA) benefit concert in London. "That was the first time the sound really
happened," Reeves admits, "but what was missing was Hunt and Tony."
Several months earlier, celebrating the close of his Glass Spider tour,
Bowie had encountered Tony at a party in Los Angeles. "I hadn't seen David
since the US Festival in 1983," Tony recalls. "But when we met that night
he raved about this guitar player he'd found, and pretty soon the four of
us were starting this thing up."
The band members received their first formal introduction to each
other just prior to recording the first Tin Machine record in Montreaux,
Switzerland. "I had just met Hunt and Tony the day before we went into the
studio," Reeves recalls. "I was still having trouble remembering which was
Hunt and which was Tony and they were probably having trouble remembering
what my name was, but there we all were, playing together!" More than
anything else they have in common, the quartet shares an adventurous
spirit despite the group's apparently simple musical line-up of guitar,
bass, drums and vocals. "We wanted to have that connection, that
intimacy," Tony says. "With something as simple as this you've got to
focus. You’re drawn in by everybody. When you've only got four or five
guys onstage, everybody is pushing and pulling so quickly that it's really
exciting. It's more stimulating than being in a twelve-piece band."
"It's a commitment to real writing and real expression of form,"
David adds. "It's still a simple structure, but I think we've moved quite
a long way forward on it." And beyond that, "It's a fun band to work in.
Reeves and I are the serious ones, I guess. Around Hunt and Tony, we
supply the straight lines."
Watching Tin Machine play, as I did at the Hollywood Palladium, is
persuasive evidence that it is possible for a star of the calibre and
charisma of David Bowie to submerge himself in the machinations of a
traditional rock’n’roll band -- previous depositions from Paul McCartney &
Wings, Todd Rundgren's Utopia and others to the contrary.
The return of the Thin White Duke in the non-theatrical guise of
T-shirted lead singer for just another loud quartet strikes some as yet
one more chameleon pose in a decades-long string of them. And not without
good reason. When fellows of a certain age who've delved into every rock
genre decide to simply let it rip, there's an element of calculation
seemingly present. Then again, so what? Tin Machine, which has no
pretensions toward an especially youthful image, also presents a
convincing case that reckless abandon in playing isn't synonymous with
youthful zeal. There's a knowing maturity here -- a dignity and a
seasoned-ness -- that doesn't spoil, but rather manages to somehow
complement the roughhouse nature of the thing.
Live, Tin Machine is anything but a star turn for Bowie, and not
because Bowie was unduly humbling himself in the service of band
democracy. Rather, the quartet sounded like an honest unit committed to
kicking each other's musical rears while staying in tight step. And this
seems very strange, that a star of David Bowie's magnitude -- one of the
most influential rock musicians of all time, a legendary icon -- would
insist on being "just one of the boys"; in a democratic band.
Because he was extremely sick with the flu and had to sing that
night, my interview became restricted to a requested "less than 10
minutes," so I decided to cut the small talk and go right to the big
question:
Q: So, what’s with this, "I'm just a member of the band," routine?
DAVID: It's just one big family. I think we have really succeeded in being
a BAND. How it's received by others is literally their problem.
Q: No, no... good frontmen -- and you're certainly one of the all-time
best -- can control the audience.
DAVID: It's their choice if they're going to do that or not. It's my
choice not to.
Q: It hasn't always been like that, though, has it? It seems like you've
perhaps let go and submerged yourself in the band.
DAVID: It's not a question of submerging myself, it's that my
responsibilities are different. When I do solo performances I endeavor to
create some kind of concept, some kind of show that's entertaining within
the values as a solo artist. But with this particular band, it doesn't
call for theatrics. It's very much about the music we play rather than the
visuals in the music, which a lot of my solo work has been.
Q: Is that a relief for you, then?
DAVID: No. It's just a different form. If you've done something once, why
do it again?
Q: You're focusing differently.
DAVID: Yes, at the moment. And at the moment I'm enjoying what I'm doing
with Tin Machine an awful lot. On the other hand, I'm also working on some
solo things parallel with it.
Q: So, Tin Machine is a project that satisfies certain…
DAVID: Certain needs in music.
Q: You wrote or co-wrote everything on the album. Someone said to me, "Why
is Bowie sounding like this?" But if you wrote it, it means you chose to
sound like this.
DAVID: It mainly had it's roots in the very late seventies. All The Young
Heroes, Scary Monsters and, to a certain extent, the melodic structures.
Reeves Gabrels, by the nature of his playing, has a fair bit of both Fripp
and Adrian Belew.
Q: What I think is unusual about you is that a lot of people are either
glammy -- showy, visually-oriented -- or seriously musical, but you like
to do both.
DAVID: Hunt [Sales, the drummer] has got enough charisma, or attitude,
whichever way you want to look at it.... There is no small amount of
personality in the band. There are radical guys in this band. Everybody is
terribly focused on trying to make something of their lives. And I don't
mean in the career fashion, but trying to find out what their lives are
about. I think that's also something that drives this band very much.
Q: I think that happens to a lot of people at some point, especially
artists. You spend all this time just thinking. And some of it is about
yourself.
DAVID I think as you get older, you apply more and more to yourself rather
than looking for immediate gratification or quick responses to daily
situations.
Q: What is it about music for you? You've got more like an actor
personality than most rock musicians, who typically spend their lives, at
least professionally, with one image.
DAVID: Oh, God. I think it doesn't help having the ability to write in so
many styles.
Q: Why? Because the critics get upset?
DAVID: No, no, no! It has nothing to do with them. For me, myself. I mean,
I like so many kinds and styles of music myself, as a listener, and I
unfortunately have the facility to write more or less any style that I
tend to like. So, it's not like I'm forced into one style of music because
that's the [only] kind of music I write.
Q: I can just hear people out there saying, "Oh, I should have this
problem."
DAVID: No, it's not a good problem to have. Believe me, it really isn't.
Because you find you have to be careful. If you start doing that too much,
you kind of end up floundering. So, I keep pulling back in again every few
years, and I come back to a smaller sound and then start expanding again.
I find it no trouble at all to go from some slushy ballad to kind of a
heavy, heavy rock piece, or kind of a dance thing. It's all just music to
me, and I love writing it and I love playing it.
Q: When did this start? You're one of these people about whom somebody
else will say, "One day when I was 12 years old I saw David Bowie on TV.
That was it. I knew. This was what I had to do for the rest of my life"
DAVID: Actually, for me it was Little Richard.
Q: Well, you certainly had your flamboyance there!
DAVID: Oh, he was everything. I mean, I just wanted to be the sax player
in his band.
Q: And you never became a minister.
DAVID: No! No, I stayed away from that one! I'm spiritual, but not that
spiritual!
Q: What are your memories of Russia?
DAVID: My biggest disappointment was having to step over drunken people
lying on the pavements at night in Moscow.
Q: Or even in the streets
DAVID: Yeah, they're just about anywhere after a certain time in the
evening. I haven't been to Russia since 19… Let's see, when was the last
time I went? Probably 1981? Something like that. I only went in the cold,
heavy years. I know nothing of Russia under the Gorbachevs and the
Yeltsins. I bet it's a total change. When I was there, it was Brezhnev and
Andropov and those guys. It was very, very heavy. I couldn't go anywhere
without this guy following me. I had to have this guy on my back and it
was really hard. I guess the outlands haven't changed much.
I went right through on the Trans-Siberian Express into Moscow, which
was just sensational. On the positive side, I found everybody I talked to
eager to exchange information on art and music. It was just wonderful.
When you can get through the language barrier, it gets quite easy to
converse and compare things. I had books with me where I would point to
illustrations and paintings
Q: Well, you should go back now.
DAVID: Yeah! I can't wait to go back. It would be nice to see what it's
like now.
Q: It's going to be a painful birth. But right now, if you like lots of
strange, exotic adventures, it's certainly the place to go.
DAVID: Oh, absolutely.