FROM ZIGGY STARDUST TO TIN MACHINE: DAVID BOWIE COMES CLEAN
by Scott Cohen
David Bowie: Artist, stylist, mythmaker, innovator, manipulator. For twenty-five years David Bowie has remodeled himself and rock 'n' roll with restless, reckless brilliance. As his new band, Tin Machine, prepares to release its second album, he reveals for the first time the personal cost of being David Bowie.
It all started with Little Richard singing "She's Got It" in 1956, when David Bowie, who was then David Jones, was nine years old. "It was absolute magic. I couldn't believe anybody could make that sound," he says, rolling his eyes in wonder. "I immediately sent away to Star Pix, a newspaper that advertised photographs of celebrities. I must have waited seven weeks; when the photo finally came, it was torn. " Nevertheless, there was Little Richard with his big pompadour, eye makeup, and shiny suit, playing away on the piano, with the saxophones in the background. Bowie knew he could never be Little Richard. "But I thought I could be one of his sax players. So I got my father to loan me the money to buy a saxophone. That's how it al I started."
A few months ago, Bowie sat down with his idol for the first time. As they exchanged glances, each man saw his own reflection. David Bowie's mismatched eyes (the result of a teenage brawl) stared into a pair identical to his own. For all these years, the original rock 'n' roll wild man and the man who fell to earth had, implausibly, been looking at the world through the very same eyes.
When Bowie was thirteen or fourteen, living uneventfully in a London suburb, he saw the first coming of Britain's Mods. The big thing then, in 1960 and '61, was Italian suits, short boxy jackets, trousers tapered down to fourteen inches, and Chelsea boots. A few years later, around the time of Bob Dylan's first London concerts, Bowie saw the first flowering of the folkie-hippie-protest movement. Later, Bowie would present himself both as a Mod and a hippie folksinger.
When these early incarnations failed, Bowie put his foot to the floor and began reflecting trends so fast that he helped define them. Inspired by 2001: A Space Odyssey, he wrote "Space Oddity" and made an accompanying film, which showed him in a homemade spaceship. The record, released to coincide with Neil Armstrong's moon walk, became a novelty hit in Britain. Acting like a star, Bowie almost became one. "With his fanatical following, he reminds me of a prophet," one interviewer said. But there wasn't a fanatical following, just hype. In his next band, Hype, he wore a silver lame jumpsuit and cloak, a huge metal necklace, and a rainbow of scarves; the other members dressed as Hypeman, Cowboyman, and Gangsterman. They were like the Village People ahead of their time. In 197 1, Bowie arrived in America in a long-sleeve, full-length dress cut down the front. That year Hunky Dory unveiled a Pre-Raphaelite pinup for teenage girls and boys. Picking up on the pansexuality of the times, Bowie then bent his gender into the androgynous rock 'n' roll alien Ziggy Stardust. Ziggy's spiked carrot-top was a revelation, inspiring a whole generation of hairstylists. It was born one night in a South London hair salon. Three different issues of Vogue contributed to it: the top came from French Vogue, the sides and back from two German editions. The color came out of a bottle.
Dressing up in costumes, Bowie redefined fashion. Sequins, satin, and platform boots one moment; gray suit with baggy, pleated pants, flat shoes, and neatly parted hair the next. Here, he's an otherworldly, Cabaret-style M.C., his hair razor-cut, smoking Gitanes; there, his shirt collar's unbuttoned, necktie untied, jacket slung over his shoulder, Frank Sinatra-style. Though some called this posing, he seemed to be having a ball.
No one reads a moment better than Bowie. Or gives it a more dramatic interpretation. He dramatized an entire generation's feelings of boredom and alienation during the 1970s. He swept away the sloppy remnants of the '60s by filling up the void with something sleek and sharp and modern: himself. He made art seem epic and sexy, and his greatest, sexiest creation was his own myth. At a time when many of rock's pioneers were beginning to sell out, Bowie conspicuously refused to buy in. His relationship to rock 'n' roll was one of convenience, and he seemed prepared at any moment to dissolve the marriage. Blessed with an attention span even shorter than that of his audiences, he wasn't a rock star so much as an actor playing the role of a rock star. Had polka been the most popular art form of the last thirty years, Bowie would have played accordion.
Bowie understood from the very beginning that, under the media's spotlight, every public personality has a limited life span. So he publicly paraded a series of counterfeit personalities and retired them before they overstayed their welcome. Not even Madonna has manipulated the media better. In his first important American interview, Bowie, pictured in a silk dress, is quoted saying, "Tell your readers they can make up their minds about me when I begin getting adverse publicity; when I'm found in bed with Racquel Welch's husband." When a writer asked him if he was gay, Bowie responded, "Yes, of course," but with a sly smile. The statement stunned his friends, especially the girls who had slept with him.
On his second U.S. tour, Bowie told writers he was going to be starting in a movie, Stranger in a Strange Land. Although this wasn't true, it was printed anyway, and the scripts began pouring in. Before long Bowie was staring in movies, even though he usually made the wrong choice of movie to star in. His very worst choice was Just a Gigolo, in which he plays a shell-shocked gigolo employed by Marlene Dietrich. It was, he says, "my thirty-two Elvis films, all rolled into one. "
FROM ZIGGY STARDUST IN 1972 TO YOUNG Americans in 1975, Bowie held the world in thrall. Among his many talents was an uncanny ability to anticipate and inspire his audience's fantasies, to celebrate with them the narcissistic pleasures of being David Bowie. Predating Madonna, Prince, and Michael Jackson, Bowie had the first completely modern rock 'n' roll career.
The first indication that being David Bowie was neither as easy nor as enjoyable as it appeared came with Station to Station. Recorded in Los Angeles after Bowie had finished filming The Man Who Fell to Earth, the LP continued the exploration of American soul music begun on Young Americans; but this time, the music's dance grooves became a receptacle for his own gloom and cocaine-induced despair. Reports out of the studio suggested a mounting identity crisis: slipping in and out of his past characters, Bowie had lost track of his own. The accompanying tour unveiled the Thin White Duke, an alienated and alienating neo-Nazi pop star bathed in banks of pure white light. At the time, it was unclear whether his pain was real or a pose. But after the tour - which he claims to have no memory of - Bowie disappeared to Berlin and lay low. Those who saw him there recall a distanced, melancholy recluse, sitting alone in cafés, drinking and chain-smoking; on one occasion he was seen with his head in his plate, crying out, "Please help me."
In a studio overlooking the Berlin Wall, Bowie set about recording Low with Brian Eno. A collection of fragmentary songs and haunted instrumentals, Low sounded like a diary of human disintegration. Upon its release, Bowie announced that he no longer cared if his records sold, a statement that was both prophetic and smart. Neither Low nor its successors, Heroes and Lodger, sold well. But by taking up residence in the avant-garde Bowie neatly sidestepped the punk onslaught, his mystique intact, while his contemporaries were dismissed as old fans. Perhaps it was the breadth of their scope. They wanted to be the toast of their peers; Bowie still wanted to be the toast of the Universe.
His ambition found a home in the early 1980s. He began the decade as a Broadway star, in The Elephant Man. He then took the part of a British POW in Nagisa Oshima's World War 11 drama, Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence. The film was shot on a remote island in the South Pacific. The only music Bowie took with him was James Brown, Albert King, Johnny Otis, Buddy Guy, and some R&B from his teenage years.
His next record, the very danceable Let's Dance, was his most straightforwardly commercial album, and the Serious Moonlight Tour that followed was his most accessible. It had few props and one costume change, from peach suit to blue. Bowie had become a well-dressed, fashionable arena attraction, a rock 'n' roll Sinatra. Of course, he was always well dressed and fashionable, but now, without the drugs, costumes, and kinky sex, he was middle-class. It was his most shocking image yet.
Maybe Bowie made a big mistake. With Let's Dance he got the huge global stardom he wanted, but it seemed to leave him with nowhere new to go.. His next two albums bombed, and when he tried to combine his new, populist persona with his old, arty tricks for 1987's Glass Spider Tour, it came off overblown and bombastic.
For the master of the grand gesture, Tin Machine seems to be a deliberately small one. Wearing the black suits, white shirts, and ties he and the other members-Hunt and Tony Sales and Reeves Gabrels wore on the sleeve of their first album, Tin Machine, they looked I like rock 'n' rolI accountants. Musically it was very much in-your-face, all the time, which was the idea. It was meant to be an affront. Some records are studio-pure. This was studio impure. It was rock with a twist. Their new record, Tin Machine II, is just as impure and twisted, but more R&B and less abrasive. By aligning himself with the Sales brothers, he's found a couple of do-or-die rock 'n' rollers who don't care about tomorrow. Now he's a tin man; maybe he's got it right again.
Hunt Sales (drums): Me and my brother, Tony, first met David in the back room of Max's Kansas City when we were working with Todd Rundgren in the ill-fated Utopia. David had come over to our table to say hello, possibly because Tony had pink hair and I had black hair with a white stripe down the middle, like a skunk. David gave us some passes to see his Ziggy show at Radio City, and I thought it was amazing. I didn't see or speak to him again until '75 or '76. I was laying around in L.A. when I got a phone call from lggy Pop, whom David had scraped off the street. Iggy and I once hung together in L.A., and he thought of me and my brother when he got a shot to make the record with David. So we made Lust for Life with Iggy and went on his world tour. David had stepped down from being Bowie the leader to being the piano player in the band. My first experience with David was us working together as players. It's always been working with him instead of for him. Tin Machine is an extension of that.
Tony Sales (bass): We're buddies. It's not the Monkees, it ain't the Beatles, thank God, but there's history in this band.
Is everyone in the band really equal?
Tony: That's psychologically impossible. Nothing's equal. That's the problem; everyone's looking for equal.
Reeves Gabrels (lead guitar): Like in any situation, you have to deal with the outside perception of it. You got somebody who's got twenty years of megastardom behind him.
Which Bowie character did you relate to most?
Gabrels: Probably Low, Heroes, Lodger and Scary Monsters. The more experimental ones. He was looking in more, which I feel is the function of art. I don't think there was a persona on Low. That was more of a search for something than a presentation of something. Ziggy was more pop.
Tony: He was looking out to look in. That's the character he was when we first met, but I've known him through all his major changes.
Was his personality consistent throughout?
Tony: No, but neither was mine, and I could relate to that. He kind of mirrored how I felt.
When did he mirror you most?
Tony: During Lust for Life, in Berlin. That's when I realized it didn't matter which character I wanted to be; I couldn't get out of who I was. I saw him doing that, too. We all reached a low point together, but when I saw I wasn't alone, it made me feel better.
THE FOURTH MEMBER OF TIN MACHINE arrives just a little late. It's not his grandest entrance-no dry ice, no dimming of the lights-but considering that this is the new, low-key David Bowie, and bearing in mind that he has a number of similar entrances to make this afternoon to promote the new album, it's not bad. It begins at the door and ends at a black leather sofa, onto which he collapses. Although he's only minutes late, he apologizes as if it were hours. Considering all the drugs and makeup he's abused, he looks remarkably well preserved-the mannequin who fell to earth. The office, which currently is serving as his Los Angeles business quarters, is large and impersonal, and it doesn't look like much work gets done in it. Presumably it's his office, but there's no proof. The other Tin Men are doing their interviews in other, much smaller offices that definitely aren't theirs. Throughout the conversation, Bowie is chatty, charming, and quite philosophical, like some cosmic game-show host who's been through this many times before. He seems entirely comfortable within himself. Almost happy.
Bowie: No, no, happy's the wrong word. That's an unstable frame of mind. I'm content. Not necessarily self-satisfied, but certainly content. I'm deriving a great deal of fulfillment from working with Tin Machine.
Is your life like your songs?
Bowie: You can tell I was terribly unhappy in the late '80s, and I was invigorated in the early '70s and again in the late '70s. That's the advantage of a long career you can see your personality and your life and your emotional and spiritual world recorded through a bunch of material.
People complain that your songs lack emotion.
Contrary to public opinion that my material is pretty cold and indifferent, the subtext of most of it is very emotional, even if the manifestation is more aloof. Maybe it's just my way of doing things. "Lady Stardust," for example, is uninhibitedly romantic. That's a thread that runs through my work.
What are the other threads?
"Suffragette City" had an aggression, a flirtation with insanity that resurfaces on my other albums. Another thread is obviously "Space Oddity" and "Ashes to Ashes," which are bookends. When I wrote "Ashes to Ashes," it was as if I knew I had reached the end of that particular period, a very experimental period. That energy was certainly submerged during the rest of the '80s, when I made my commercial debut with Let's Dance. That colored things for me for the rest of the '80s. I was in that netherworld of commercial acceptance. It was an awful trip. Nineteen eighty-three, '84, '85, '86, '87 - those five years were simply dreadful.
Which were your best years?
Artistically, from '77 to '81 was absolutely dynamic. I was discovering things about myself as a musician. There was a lot more freedom in me than I realized. I was allowed to lower my musical defenses, and that was because of my collaboration with Brian Eno. He's the Guardian of Hip. He treats the studio in a way no other person has. He works it like an instrument, which is actually quite the thing now, especially in dance music, but at that particular time no one else was doing that except for a couple of Germans. He really hipped me to the potential of arranging musical accidents. That whole period with him was a joyride and concluded with Scary Monsters. Then began the Let's Dance thing, which covered Tonight and Never Let Me Down, where I thought I was almost treading water.
Really?
Not Let's Dance; that was a rediscovery of white English ex-art school student meets black American funk, a refocusing of Young Americans. But the two after that had good songs that I mistreated. I didn't really apply myself. I wasn't quite sure what I was supposed to be doing. I wish there had been someone around who could have told me.
It seems that after Let's Dance there was nowhere left for you to go.
The truth is, there was nowhere I wanted to go in terms of characterization. As far as I'm concerned, I dropped characters after the Thin White Duke, in 1976. Everything I did subsequently onstage was as near as you can get to a guy who was just presenting his songs-interestingly as they probably were. The suits might have been interesting, and the staging was interesting, but there was no character. It was as much as I could conceivably do to present myself as a singer.
Were those characters different sides of your personality?
I think I was always one-sided. I was somebody who battled very arduously to block his emotions on al levels to the point where, until 1988, I didn't even know how I felt.
When did you start blocking them out?
I was cut off from my feelings since I was maybe four years old. It's not until you start redressing your life, or reevaluating it, that you become aware that that's what you've been for many, many years.
Where did these characters come from?
Obviously, on a psychological basis, they sprang from a deep need to protect myself. I just picked up the Zeitgeist of what was happening, the general feeling that was in the air. It was like doing a painting. The characters just happened to be right for that period. They represented something that was happening socially, either wittingly or subconsciously Is this what your true talent is? I'm not a good finger wagger. I'm not a good moralist. What I'm much better at doing is conjuring up atmospheres that the audience will recognize and be able to associate with, not necessarily on a narrative level, but definitely to feel it as a description of their pain and hopefully their joy.
How in touch are you with you feelings now?
Pretty much, but it's not fun. I did a twelve-step program. There was a Zen master who called the twelvestep program the dharma of the West. What I love about it is that you're not locked into some school or sect. My whole life is less planned now. A day at a time. That serves me very well. I think it's the greatest principle of all. When I first heard that phrase, I couldn't believe how close it was to the Buddhist principles. I can quite understand why that Buddhist master said it was the Zen of the West.
Has it given you answers?
Dealing with my life is not a task to be completed, it's a process. I was always thinking, I got to get this done and then everything's O.K. Or: When I meet that person, my life is going to change...
Like who?
Well, at one time, obviously Melissa, my previous relationship of four years. It didn't work out. It wasn't a relationship that was built, at least not from my side, on honesty. My present relationship with Iman... We've gone through a lot of very similar experiences. The fact is that ever since she was eighteen she's traveled the world, met certain kinds of people, traveled in circles I've traveled in, too.
Wasn't she a sheepherder in Africa who was discovered by a photographer and brought over here to be a model?
That's just a story told to the press. She comes from a diplomatic family. She's gone through the same ups and downs I have. There's a common ground there.
When you meet people, do you think they think you're being honest with them?
That's not in my control. In the past I cared a lot more about what people thought. I stopped caring in the mid '70s, when I realized that no matter what I said or did, people were going to interpret it in their own way, but I didn't replace it with anything helpful. Finally, by the end of the 1980s, I started to care about what I think about things, and that's been the big change.
Did you try to be misunderstood?
I quite liked being misunderstood. I was quite happy to be the Marcel Duchamp of rock. I waved such a flag for Duchamp when I was a kid. He was everything because he said that art is dead. That was such a brave thing to say.
What about Nietzsche saying that God is dead?
I've never believed that. Ever since I was very, very young I've searched for God. It's the one thing that I've always known would be my real search in life. I've flirted with Buddhism and the Cabala, gone through periods of just disbelieving and then coming back and discovering I had found them again. That was one eternal truth. "God is dead" is just a silly, huge joke. But "Art is dead"-I buy that one hook, line, and sinker.
What else have artists said that inspired you?
Frank Stella said: If you don't get my work in the first fifteen seconds, then it's obviously not for you. But that's why I like Jackson Pollock better. There's real pain in his work. I do like to see a drop of pain.
Where's the pain in your work?
There's oodles of pain in the Low album. That was my first attempt to kick cocaine, so that was an awful lot of pain. And I moved to Berlin to do it. I moved out of the coke center of the world into the smack center of the world. Thankfully, I didn't have a feeling for smack, so it wasn't a threat. In fact, I found the city itself to be wonderful. It's never been the same since they took the Wall down. Everybody there says the same thing.
Did fame cost you anything spiritually?
Yes, but the food was very good! It's a terrible cliche, but my presumption is that the cliche came about because it's so very true. All I got was a better table in a restaurant.
But what did it cost you?
A lot. Even contact with people. I was so terribly aware that people would approach me in a different way than they would approach the next guy. It was always such a joy to go someplace where I wasn't particularly well known and meet somebody who had absolutely no perception at all of what I did.
Who doesn't return your phone calls?
I can't think of anybody.
If you were a lady, who would you be like?
I was already Lady Stardust. That will do.
What have you done with all those costumes you no longer wear?
I've kept everything I've ever worn since 1971. I have the original pair of platform shoes, the first to appear in the West, designed by Kansai: they're up in an attic in a house. I have all of Ziggy's clothes. Everything. I had to get rid of some of my street clothes because they were taking up space.
Did you donate any of them to a thrift store?
Most of them I signed and gave to auction. Both me and Eno-because he has some extraordinary clothes that he used to wear in Roxy Music-were asked to put our stuff in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. I was quite willing to loan them, but they said you have give them away.
Who's your definition of cool now?
Paul Smith. He's a great British designer, but I also like his attitude about himself. He's very modest and full of grace. There's Something clunky about English fashion that I like. It's not as svelte as the Italians. Only the English can wear it well. I used to think Armani was terribly unhip, but now I think he's very hip. Jack Kerouac was terribly cool; the younger William Burroughs - he's worth a night. And Brion Gysin - there's a man who's ultra-cool. He was such an inspiration to so many. And he was so at ease with himself, so at case with the idea that life is terminal. When I was younger I thought Jack Bruce was very cool. Miles Davis tries too hard to be cool; I guess he's overcool. Overcool starts to become gawky. It starts you thinking that maybe (he person isn't playing with a full deck. I'm not sure insanity's cool anymore. I used to think insanity was it. If I made any deals in my life, it was with insanity. Now I think it's just potty.