Guitar World
March 1997
Ziggy Plays Guitar...
...and so did Mick Ronson, Robert Fripp and Adrian Blew. David Bowie and current axeman Reeves Gabrels discuss what it takes to play guitar for the Man Who Fell to Earth.
by Chris Gill
"That’s it!" says David Bowie, eagerly pointing at a television screen filled with the video image of Toni Braxton. "I want to be a 30-year-old black woman and look like that!"
Shocking words - if they’d been uttered by almost any other middle-aged English gentleman. But coming from Bowie, who changes identities more frequently than most people change their underwear, it seems an eminently reasonable proposition. Bowie, who has been spending the morning gathering ideas for the video he plans to make for the first single from his new Virgin album, Earthling, is relaxing in a reception room of Right Track Studios. His expressed desire to be a comely young black woman notwithstanding, Bowie’s impish grin suggests that he won’t be sashaying about in a full-length, cleavage-revealing evening gown anytime soon.
"I definitely don’t want the clip to have that scratchy, Eighties-industrial look, like some Marilyn Manson video," says Bowie. Right on cue, Manson’s pale, emaciated mug glows on the screen. "Speak of the devil . . . literally," he laughs.
The room is positively charged with Bowie’s workaholic buzz. He chain smokes and sips dark, potent coffee as he surveys several sketches of potential album covers spread out on the table in front of him. Abruptly, he rushes down to the studio’s control room to get a DAT of unmixed tracks for Earthling, returns and pops it in the deck with a boyish gleam on his face. "The Battle for Britain (The Letter)" comes on, and Bowie laughs almost maniacally at keyboardist Mike Garson’s melodramatic piano flourishes. "Listen to Reeves!" he shouts as "Looking for Satellites" blares from the speakers. Bowie’s lips crack in a toothy smile as he points at guitarist Reeves Gabrels, who is seated across from him. Gabrels smiles in acknowledgment, like a son who has just been praised by a proud father.
Bowie has been possessed with enthusiasm since last summer, when he stripped his touring band down to a five-piece consisting of himself, Gabrels, Garson, bassist Gail Ann Dorsey and drummer Zachary Alford. The move, says Bowie, led him to rediscover the joys of playing with, instead of simply fronting, a band again. As a result, Earthling is a band-oriented release in which the musicians are given plenty of room to let their own personalities emerge.
"This band is not like some group of musicians that just helps me with my songs," says Bowie. "This is a fantastically creative and enthusiastic unit. And unit is the right word, but not in a cold, sterile way. It’s like this organic, writhing ball of energy. It has its own identity."
Bowie’s last band-oriented outfit, Tin Machine, didn’t fare so well, dying a prolonged death in the early Nineties that was made all the more painful due to the drug addiction problems of the band’s rhythm section, bassist Hunt Sales and drummer Tony Sales. But the positive side of Tin Machine was that it brought Bowie and Gabrels’ creative forces together. For the first time since he worked with Mick Ronson in the Spiders From Mars, Bowie has found a sympthetic sidekick who is as much an inspiration as a conduit for his ideas.
Although Earthling is Bowie’s first self-produced album since Diamond Dogs (Ryko, 1974), Gabrels and engineer Mark Plati share co-producing credits and are largely responsible for the album’s techno-centric bent. Gabrels also shares several songwriting credits with Bowie, and his instrumental contributions are especially out in the open. Gabrels returned the favor by encouraging Bowie to play more guitar on this album than he has in the past.
At first glance, the manic, energized Bowie and the laid-back, reserved Gabrels may seem like a mismatched pair, but like two trouble-making adolescents, they both get a thrill out of seeing how much they can challenge the other.
Guitar World: David, when did you start playing guitar?
David Bowie: In the mid Sixties. The first grown-up thing I ever learned to play on guitar was shown to me by Jimmy Page when he was a session man. I was doing a session with one of the many bands that I had then. He showed me this riff: [plays an alternating F# barre chord to open E string, G chord to open E riff] I thought it was so cool! And I wrote a song out of it. I played it over and over. I used that same riff on "Battle for Britain," one of the first riffs I ever learned. It was just opening up that E string. That’s made me so aware of keeping the E’s open and taking chords through it. And it was because of Page. So he probably started me off on "Space Oddity" without realizing it. I’ll probably hear from his lawyers tomorrow.
GW: Why do you keep returning to that lick?
Bowie: There’s a certain enthusiasm of that moment when you learn to play something that never gets lost. It’s become the core of who I am and what I do. Whenever I want to bring back that enthusiasm, I dust off that lick.
Reeves Gabrels: A similar thing is happening for us with computers. Someone shows you a quantizing trick and it becomes your new lick that you try on every sequence you write after that.
Bowie: You learn a completely new vocabulary. You make all these marvelous mistakes wehn you’re learning a language. Everybody says, "Oh, that’s so cute! Did you hear what he said?" It’s like talking in pidgin English and saying, "My hat has big tits." Then people say, "Don’t tell him that’s not right." It’s great to do that musically. You’re playing something, and people go, "Wow! That’s so funny."
Gabrels: The next thing you know is that people who can speak the language fluently are using that phrase. Then, four years later, your grandmother says, "Remember when you used to say, ‘My hat has big tits’?"
Bowie:"Boy, that used to shock people in those days. And the funny thing, now they have big tits. That Gaultier, he learned a lot from you."
GW: You’ve started playing guitar on stage again.
Bowie: I played some on the album, too.
Gabrels: There are a couple of sampled bits. David is well represented in the chorus of "Seven Years in Tibet." When you want that 19-year-old-guy-with-a-guitar enthusiasm, it ain’t me.
Bowie: Absolutely. It’s similar to the approach I used in "Boys Keep Swinging". I made everybody swap their instruments, so everybody naturally went to the instrument that they’d always wanted to play. And suddenly everybody became 12-years-old again. "Yeah! This is great!"
GW: Your music has been very guitar-oriented from the beginning, and it continues to be. Why are you so attracted to the guitar?
Bowie: Probably because I played tenor saxophone. Like everybody else in music, I couldn’t avoid the potency of the guitar. It was such an expressie instrument of my generation when I was growing up. It had all the elements of the rebelliousness and sexuality that you want to represent yourself with when you’re 19 years old. It said, "Yes, I’m this powerful, sexually potent, rebellious, outside-or-society figure."
It’s interesting how the guitar’s potency died off in the Eighties, but it reasserted itself again. That’s because it reasserts itself in periods of economic deflation. It seems that when there’s economic growth, the guitar doesn’t seem to have the same force. It’s really a working-class instrument. Its roots are in black America. It was first an instrument of the cotton fields and then big city blues life. It was never really considered an instrument of the orchestra. The electric guitar was as illegitimate as the saxophone was in classical music. It never had a place there. And it only sort of had a place in jazz. It was a rebel instrument.
Gabrels: But the guitar becomes devalued in that arc after it makes its comeback and starts to decline in popularity. It stops meaning something as a sound periodically, like it did in the mid Seventies until punk brought it back. Then, in the mid Eighties, it came back as metal, and then it dipped a little while and came back again in the early Nineties when alternative music went mainstream. Right now the guitar is devalued again. It’s at a point where you can hear that sound of outrage in a commercial, like Nike using the Stooges’ "Search and Destroy." What does it mean anymore? We’re trying to put it back into a context where it has the original intention of what rock guitar was. We’re giving it meaning by recontextualizing it against jungle and dance rhythms.
GW: What new areas are you exploring?
Bowie: Reeves sampled a lot of the guitar stuff onto a keyboard and then he played his own lines as if they were keyboard lines. That way he could play a recurring line the same way each time. That immediately distances you from the old-style fluidity of guitar playing.
Gabrels: In "Little Wonder," the guitar hook line is actually randomly looped. I sat with a DAT for about 40 minutes and played a bunch of stuff that I liked to play or stuff that I thought sounded cool in an abstract way. Then I threw it all onto a sampling keyboard so I could access all of the stuff that I played. I messed around with that until I found something. It didn’t take very long. A lot of it is pretty random. The guitar hook in "Little Wonder" is three different samples that I played.
When we started doing "Little Wonder" live, I actually had to figure out how to play what I had sampled. It was really educational. To a small degree it changed how I look at my actual real-time playing, which is a cool thing. It makes me concentrate on using the guitar as more of a sound object than on figuring out how well I can play a certain line. It makes it more purely musical, in a way. A lot of what is happening with this record is we’re making music out of sounds. The source of the sound is not necessarily the issue. Guitar is such a rainbow of color in its own right that it’s a great sound source.
GW: On this album, it’s difficult sometimes to tell where particular instruments begin and end.
Gabrels: The line is definitely blurred. We also treated a lot of the instruments after the fact - like taking something Mike Garson played on keyboard and running it through an amp or SansAmp of a distortion pedal. I played many of the pure synth sounds using the guitar as a controller.
GW: What inspired you to use the guitar more for sound effects and textures, rather than playing lines?
Gabrels: What has happened from rap records and hip hop and things like that is that people’s ears are a lot more open to things that don’t necessarily exist within the diatonic eight-tone system or the western 12-tone system. The average listener is more open to weirdness than they used to be, which is a challenge. When I first started doing stuff in the recording public eye in the late Eighties, it was easier to push the envelope because the envelope was much tighter. Now it’s more of a challenge because it’s more open, but it’s also more freeing.
My playing is a lot more microtonal now. My rule of thumb is if I like it, then I want to use it. My ears may be a little more bent than a lot of other people’s, but at a certain point you do it for yourself. With David producing and Mark Plati and me co-producing, if the three of us feel like it works, then it works. Then you put it out and see what the rest of the world thinks. I’m not interested in making records for guitar players. I’m more inclined to make a record for myself or for people who just want to listen to music.
GW: Yet a lot of what you play requires a significant level of technique.
Gabrels: I think the idea of having technique is still very cool. I never in a million years would put a guitar solo on "Looking for Satellites." But David said, "I think we should have a guitar solo on that song." I said, "Really?" And he said, "Yes, but on that first chord you can only use your low E string; the second chord you can only use your low A string; the third chord only the D string and the fourth chord on ly the G string. And you’ve got to play constant 16th notes." If I didn’t have some level of chops, I wouldn’t have been able to do that.
By being put in that box, stylistically, you’re defined by your limitations. The arbitrary limitation of that approach made me do stuff that I normally wouldn’t hav edone. It’s actually one of my favorite guitar solos that I’ve recorded. The overall arc of it has this nice sex-like, orgasmic form. It has a nice starting point, a plateau stage, a peak, a climax and its resolution. In a way, it’s a statement of dick control.
Bowie: I had the idea of doing something that moved into a crescendo but started on the minimum amount of strings. Just how many notes can you play on one string before you have to move up to the next one? I thought Reeves would be an interesting guy to ask to do that.
Gabrels: At the very end of it you can hear me trying to kick out the walls of the box. I was going, "Fuck this!"
Bowie: Yeah. It’s a strange way to get up there.
GW: When did you start experimenting with this kind of creative concept?
Bowie: Probably when I was working on Diamond Dogs by myself. I created little exercises. When I was making that album, Brian Eno was next door making Here Come the Warm Jets (EG, 1973). We never actually had any contact at that time, except when passing each other in the hallway. I think we both caught a snatch of what the other was doing. I know how I heard his, and I know he heard mine because he would come in and lean on the door post.
I was working with an engineer named Keith Harwood, who unfortunately is no longer with us. He died in a car crash going home from that studio, hitting the same tree that Marc Bolan did.
GW: They should cut that tree down.
Bowie: The British would never do that sort of thing. "That tree has been there for 500 years -- killed a couple of rockers . . ." Keith said, "Shall we go and hear what Eno is doing?" I said, "Yeah. All right." So we took some of his master tapes when he had gone home one night and listened to them. We isolated his guitar tracks, and we started cracking up. It sounded so extraordinarily absurd in a solo context. But when the whole thing is meshed together it has this bizarre, ethereal, gnatty, cricket-like quality, which was the Brian Eno sound.
That was the first time that I was aware that Brian and I were going off into different worlds from what we had done before. When he was in Roxy Music and I was doing Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars we played together a few times on the circuit. It was quite evident that we both had some intentions of going off dissimilar ways. I was more into the William S. Burroughs cut-up thing and that more American approach, and Brian was much more European than me at that time.
Diamond Dogs was the beginnings of the musical experiments for me. Then it moved on more radically into Station to Station (Ryko, 1976), when I was really getting under the influence of the Germans, the Dusseldorf thing. I had gotten into the idea of a kind of minimalism but it was my way of doing it, which was to take one theme and repeat it, which showed itself in things like "Station to Station," where I used a real archetypal Chuck Berry riff in the song and had Early Slick play it over and over again through the guitar sequence. He was playing that riff on all the wrong chords, but it makes sense and creates an incredible tension because you expect the riff to change but it doesn't. I started becoming interested in those kinds of areas. I guess that's why I ended up doing things like telling Reeves, "This is the box. Find your own way out."
GW: You've worked with many great guitarists -- Mick Ronson, Robert Fripp, Adrian Belew, and so on.
Bowie: I've been very lucky.
GW: How does Reeves fit into the picture?
Bowie: Reeves is almost a summation of all their parts -- guitar parts, anyway. Melodically he's as fluid as any of the melodically oriented guitar players, and as an expressionist he's as, if not more, adventurous than people like Adrian. He really is an extraordinary player.
GW: What does Reeves add to your musical legacy?
Bowie: His insistence on not playing very well. He's still in that state where he'll play anything to annoy his mother. Whatever intellectual crap he'll giv to you, he's not about that at all. He used to say, "Will my mother be able to recognize me?"
Gabrels: It's the Les Paul quote: "Can your mother recognize you on the radio?" I actually used to say that.
Bowie: And I realized that he actually meant it. He thinks a lot like me. It's like any good relationship. A sense of humor will keep a relationship really fresh, healthy and exciting. You keep trying to outscore each other. You want to get points from each other all the time, and it's fun. Relationships that don't have that stagger to an end. It's a cold and hostile thing when there's no humor there. We can be enemies, but with a joke we can sort out our problems.
Reeves is one of the few guitar players to have said to me, "I want to get off the guitar. I want to get this stuff onto a keyboard instead because it would be more interesting if I didn't have to play the damn thing all the time." I don't know any other guitar player who would ever say that. It's that kind of idiocy that I empathize with. "What is the most disastrous thing you could do to your career?" I know exactly that feeling.
Gabrels: The hardest thing about playing with David was the fact that most of my favorite rock guitarists played with him. Most of my source vocabulary, apart from Holdsworth and Beck, came out of Ronson, Belew and Fripp. I've always had to fight what was some of my natural playing inclination because I didn't want to be too derivative. Yet I felt like there was a tradition, like there was a tradition with Miles Davis, in whatever David did. There was a tradition and avocabulary that I wanted to refer to, but I wante dto make it my own. I've always struggled with that.
Bowie: What makes Reeves different is that we think in a way that is far more similar than myself and any of the other guys that I've worked with in the past. They've all had something that was truly unique and marvelous. But somewhere along the line we would run out of steam with each other, because there would be a place where they would level out and they wouldn't go past that point -- with the exception of Fripp, but Fripp thinks very differently from me. We do not have an actual empathy. Fripp is far more focused on a very particular, well-ordered approach to his avant-gardism. Reeves and I tend to be a lot more reckless. That's something that I haven't really found in the guitar players that I've worked with. Reeves has all those great attributes -- he's virtuoso and all that crap, but fortunately he doesn't flaunt it. He has a unique approach to the fun side of what you can do with music. That's why our relationship has carried on for so long -- so far.
Gabrels: See, what David is saying is that I'm willing to put on the high heels.
Bowie: Hey! So was Ronson. Don't give me that! And that was a tough more for him, believe me "I look like a fuckin' woman!" I said, "Yeah, but Mick, you watch. You'll really get the girls." Then he started getting them and he was going, "Hey, this stuff works!" I kid you not. That was basically how that scam worked. To get the band into that stuff I had to tell them the girls would really love it. Thank God it paid off, because they did it. I didn't know. I was expecting audiences to leave in droves. They never had so many women in their lives and so they got tartier and tartier. And the crap they put on!
GW: David, Diamond Dogs was really your album as a guitarist.
Bowie: "Dave plays for young lovers." I'll tell you why I did that. It was out of ignorance of my own bravery and embarrassment at my own abilities. I had dispanded the Spiders, and I knew what I wanted to do. I knew how it had to sound, but I was a bit too embarrassed to work with other musicians -- I wasn't at a stage where I could do so comfortably. I always felt slightly awkward telling musicains who played so much better than I did what to play. In those days I was very anal about what I wrote; I knew every note that I wanted to hear. Rather than have to tell these people who knew how to play really well what to play, I did it myself.
It was easier with Mick Ronson and the guys in that way because ther was camaraderie. I was quite slow to camaraderie -- it would take me quite a few months to get to know somebody well. And I was much quieter than I am now. So I took on that task [playing guitar] as a result of those social problems. But drugs helped an awful lot. By the time I was in America and in the days of things like Station to Station, I'd tell anybody what they should do -- not only in music but in their real lives as well.
Gabrels: That's another thing with computers. You don't have to tell people what to play.
Bowie: You can just let them play, and then when they've gone home you can make it play what you wanted it to in the first place. Look what we've done!
Gabrels: Well, we haven't done anything to anybody that we wouldn't do to ourselves.
Bowie: That's true.
GW: Do you use the guitar to write songs?
Bowie: I work on everything. A lot of the time I work on guitar and piano. They're the primary instruments that I work with, but sometimes I work with saxophone. I'll play something on guitar on the studio and then put a top line of saxophone on it and then take the guitar away. That will just leave me the saxophone, and then I'll use that as the starting point instead of the guitar, which is interesting because you start going into areas that you didn't expect. A useful practice for writing is to lay down what fundamentally you believe is a foundation, start creating work over the top of that, then take away the foundation instead. You're forced into situations that you otherwise wouldn't be in, "Where the hell am I now?" situations.
GW: That keeps you removed from the obvious approach.
Bowie: You fall into cliche an awful lot if you get too comfortable with what you're doing. You kind of know what chord structures work really well at a sort of pedantic level. You're continually searching for ways to break down your own inhibitions about freeing everything up. The hardest thing to do in the studio is to shake off the feeling of judgment, whether it's self-judgment or other people's judgment. If you can elude that state, then you're opening things up a lot wider to accidents -- what Eno would call "planned accidents." You keep taking things away and supplanting them with something else. Somewhere in that forest you develop the perfect tree. I'm sorry about that. It just slipped out.
Gabrels: Some of these songs started as sequences that I had written onthe computer without guitar or without a conventional keyboard. David and I would sit down with these Fernandes ZO-3 travel guitars and an open mic in the room, and we'd jam out a song written in a very conventional manner against the sequence. Then we'd lose the guitar once the song was done.
Bowie: Other than the initial loops that Reeves and Mark put togther, the majority of the songs came together in about 15 minutes. They lyrics were stream-of-consciousness lyrics I sang onto the tape, of which I kept about 50 percent. I started doing that years ago. I'd say, "I'll put some lyrics on just for now to show the place where the lyrics should go." Then I get used to them, and a week or two later I start thinking, "I don't want to replace that. That sounds pretty good." I'd squeeze out the first thing I could think of over the real time playback of the song, and they'd actually become the lyrics for the song. The majority of these songs took only 20 minutes to write. We wrote the entire album in 12 days.
Gabrels: The loop stuff was very catalytic. It was like a good jump start. You fel tlike there was already a song at work. You eliminated the dead air of a few people sitting there and going, "Okay. How do we start this?"
Bowie: What it does is provide you with an immediate environment. There's a sound environment. You're given a landscape, and you have to put buildings on it. That's what happens when you work with a loop. It's a real useful trick for writing. It really prompts you into an atmosphere.
Gabrels: On days when we had nothing, the first thing we would do is make loops. When there was nothing lying around that we felt we could use as a starting point, we still pursued the same mode of writing.
GW: You really cleaned the slate when, during the Sound and Vision tour, you retired all of your biggest hits from your live performance repertoire. How did this move affect your creativity?
Bowie: I felt I needed a break. If I was going to progress creatively I would not sit back at home and go into the Vegas thing or whatever the replacement for that is these days -- the hit circuit thing. I had to do something drastic like that. I'm sure I'll go back on my word one day, but not yet. I can see the positive results of making that decision. It's been great for me. It means I can't rest. I really have to be in there kicking and with a purpose. If I'd been left with no enthusiasm and going, "What am I going to do now?" I would have known it was time for me to quit. But knowing that I've still got all this interest in the thing that I chose as a career, that's really exciting. There's no other prop there. I've got to be really into my music.
Gabrels: Was that another function of Tin Machine?
Bowie: As soon as I formed Tin Machine, I knew that I had to move away from my old songs in order to progress forward. And Sound and Vision gave me the perfect opportunity to make that decision public knowledge. I really fuckin' painted myself into a corner. Now I've got to live with it or drop out. This is it. The next few years are really gonna let me know if I've had it as a creative force. This is the only way to find out.
It's easier to get away with it if I trot out there and do "Space Oddity" and "China Girl." I can get by for years on that. The way I'm not going to be able to get by is when I haven't got any of that. What am I left with? Well, let's see what I'm made of. You have to do that in life. You have to keep saying, "Okay. Let's see what I'm made of. Let's take all the easy stuff away. Who am I now?" That was a good thing. It's taking away the thing that you are supposedly best at doing and seeing if there's anything else left inside of you, or if it has become a facade. If nothing is left, then it's time to quit.