CHAPTER:14

CLAM CHOWDER

I decided to make a real solo album without a band and really express everything that was happening in my life, good and bad. I called it Greetings from the Gutter. I think the title aptly expressed how I was feeling at the time.

In the spring of 1994, I took up residence in the legendary Electric Lady Studios at 52 West Eighth Street in New York. It was the studio that Hendrix built. I’d always wanted to record in New York City and investigate Greenwich Village, which I’d heard so much about. I’d written a number of strange songs and chosen an even stranger crew of musicians to make the album.

For a start I had Bootsy Collins, Bernie Worrell and Jerome “Bigfoot” Brailey—all P-Funk stars and three of the funkiest guys on the planet. I also had the great engineer and legendary mixer Bob Rosa. I was definitely going to be “Experienced” by the time these sessions were over.

Before I left England, David Bowie came up to my apartment and listened to some of my demos, including “Greetings from the Gutter,” which was a humbling experience and a bit of an omen for how the album would sound.

Rolling Stone magazine noticed the effect in their album review:

On “Chelsea Lovers,” a stately ballad on his fine new album, Greetings from the Gutter, Dave Stewart creates an image of “stardust lovers in a Ziggy cartoon.” It’s a whimsical play on words and a telling one. As a singer, though, this musician’s musician seems most influenced by Ziggy Stardust’s creator. Stewart’s chalky baritone and sly, sometimes ominous delivery evoke David Bowie so strongly at points that it’s almost uncanny. The dreamy textures and often trippy lyrics on Greetings betray a nostalgia for the era in which Bowie first breathed life into his ill-fated leper messiah.

I felt like the man who fell to Earth.

Lou Reed lived within walking distance of Electric Lady, so we would hang out all the time. Lou was excited to show me around the Village, and we had breakfast at various interesting places and met up for dinner at some of his favorite restaurants. Lou and Laurie Anderson and I would often go out at night to eat, drink red wine and talk for hours. Lou ended up playing a great solo on the song “You Talk a Lot” and Laurie did a spoken duet with me on “Kinky Sweetheart.”

Siobhan came to visit, and I took her to brunch in the Village and to meet Lou Reed for the first time. Just before brunch we’d had a small disagreement and Siobhan was a big fan and extremely shy, so she was a little hesitant about going, but she came along. Later she laughed and told me that when I went to the bathroom, Lou said to her, “Isn’t Dave just the easiest guy to get along with?” We both laughed at the irony of it all.

I had several amazing guests on this album. Lady Miss Kier from Deee-lite sang backing vocals on all of the tracks. On the title track, “Greetings from the Gutter,” she sang an amazing ad-lib during the middle sequence, which goes through a lot of strange chord changes. Teese Gohl wrote incredible orchestral arrangements for the album and did a brilliant job on this song. It’s the opening of the album and the lyrics begin:

Greetings from the gutter

I’ve been here since yesterday

Sweet Dreams in the gutter

All the skeletons come out to play

And they did. I used every song as a cathartic release from the tension that had been building.

The album sessions became a happening, with people dropping in all the time. David Sanborn came by and played saxophone on “Oh No, Not You Again”; he had also played sax on Bowie’s album Young Americans back in 1975. Mick Jagger sang some backing vocals on the track “Jealousy.”

I was having the best time and loving every minute of it. It’s strange because while I was having such a good time, I was singing these very dark songs about death and depression. It was probably because I was singing about it that it made me feel much better.

It was like I’d flipped into that other sort of zone that Bowie inhabited, that juncture of British rock with New York soul. My music wasn’t like his music particularly, but I did tip my hat to him on the title song. I realized, while recording it, that it was a sound quite close to Young Americans. At the end of the song “Oh No, Not You Again,” I got Sanborn to play a long solo and then recorded him and Carly Simon having a huge argument, like a couple splitting up, over the top of a very complex jazz arrangement—like the score to my own life at the time.

Lots of people, I recall, upon hearing the album would say, “Wow, that’s—like a David Bowie record.” Ha. I wish. Truth is, when I sing in a certain way, it can sound insanely like Bowie. Although he’s an incredible singer and I’m not—it’s only in my lower tones. My son Sam, when he was fifteen, put together a whole track exactly like Bowie’s “Heroes.” He played every instrument on it, real drums, guitars and keyboards. I sang the lead, and, yes, it sounds exactly like Bowie.

Greetings from the Gutter was the first album I did that doesn’t feature a band. It’s just me. Not Dave Stewart and the Spiritual Cowboys. Not Eurythmics. Not the Tourists. So Greetings from the Gutter was actually my first real solo album. I wanted to do whatever I wanted to, experimentally. On that album there are tracks—like on “Kinky Sweetheart”—where there is a conversation between Laurie Anderson and me against a weirdly angular sound track.

Staying at home

Plugging it in

Kissing the screen

Being a god

I thought about it in the Galleria

Liquid crystal like a Man Ray tear

A shiny surface, velveteen queer

Bailey contrast, a Lucas idea

I’ve seen your setup and it’s perfect in form

Let’s call somebody to connect both our arms

You bring the orange I’ll bring the clock

We’ll pay the dream police to circle the block

“Kinky Sweetheart” is very trippy, and I encouraged the band to play free-form. Bernie Worrell is just on fire all over the Hammond organ. It’s a strange and cool experimental track.

When we recorded the track for “St. Valentine’s Day,” I wouldn’t tell the band the chords and then they had to follow me. They made some mistakes, and instead of fixing them, I had the mistakes orchestrated by composer-arranger Teese Gohl—with a full orchestra playing all the errors the band had made. I had never heard of anybody really doing that before. It’s quite a startling and interesting effect, this dissonance that is so wrong, compared to normal pop music, yet so beautiful.

I played this very strange song to Damon Albarn and Alex James from Blur in my apartment one night, after stumbling around the streets of Soho with them. They were already huge in the UK, and their album Parklife was number one at the time. They both listened very intently until the end; then Damon slowly turned and said, “It’s good but not as good as Blur.” Then we went marching back out into the streets again, with Terry Hall joining us, to another private club for a drinkfest. I couldn’t keep up, as Damon and Alex were as high as kites and looking at the stars while I was still in the gutter.

Every experiment I ever really wanted to do, sonically and musically, I tried at that moment. I just said, “Fuck it. I’m going to do it.”

I wanted to make a real disco-type song, so I wrote “Heart of Stone,” which I fleshed out with harmonies from backing vocalists from Harlem and Lady Miss Kier. The whole album was a kind of party. It was really great fun because it was just my decision to create something and have the ability to record it with amazing players, and if I didn’t like it, I could just throw it away. I went deeply into the crazy experiments, and if they didn’t work out, I would try something else. Though for me making this album seemed like the most luxurious time, in actuality I was only there for two weeks. The whole album was done in that short space of time.

Before I left London to make Greetings from the Gutter, I became great friends with Damien Hirst, the now world-renowned artist. I asked Damien if he would create my album artwork. He agreed and would come by the studio while I was recording for inspiration. Damien has the most brilliant mind of anyone I have ever met, and it’s hard to believe he actually created my album artwork.

The designer Laurence Stevens and I would visit Damien at work, where he was creating a whole art installation called Greetings from the Gutter as well as individual art pieces for each song. It was like watching a modern-day alchemist at work. The images he was creating were so simple, and yet they made you have an instant reaction. “Jealousy,” for instance, is a shelled hard-boiled egg with sewing needles and black thread stuck in it. He had it photographed so sharply, in such ultrahigh quality, that it looks like you could touch it. The work he put into it was extraordinary. Everything he did was out of this world, and he is such a perfectionist.

I remember a very drunk and heated discussion among myself, Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson one night, trying to persuade Damien not to have his hands surgically removed from his arms, then sewn back on for an art piece.

At the time of making Greetings, I was under the influence of the whole British art movement, and I filmed and photographed constantly in a Warholian style. So much so that one night, walking home from dinner behind Lou and Laurie, I was filming their silhouettes lit by the streetlight glow, and Lou turned around and said, “Hurry up, Andy. You are lagging behind!”

The album artwork became so valuable that years later it was worth the same amount as having an album sell almost as many copies as Sweet Dreams. Who would have known? Er . . . me.

After recording Greetings from the Gutter, I went on the David Letterman show. Lou Reed came along to play rhythm guitar, with Bootsy Collins on bass, Bernie Worrell on keyboards—my crazy, mixed-up band of all-star friends.

The day before Letterman, I was getting ready in my hotel room in New York. The ever-present Tony Quinn, my personal assistant then, was in the room next door as usual. Tony had become irreplaceable, as he was so good at everything, and boy, did I throw every kind of situation his way.

Just the day before, I’d said to Tony, “Look, I want to set up a camera and take a picture of everybody walking down West Eighth Street, in New York City’s Greenwich Village.” Tony said, “Um, okay.” I had a flash outside, tied to the street lamppost on a delay setting, and I was using black-and-white PolaGraph film, which I could develop myself back at Electric Lady Studios. It was very complicated, because there were a lot of dodgy characters on the street, and I remember it being one of the first times I’d seen Tony get really stressed out.

Ultimately, we gave up and went back to the hotel. You know, when you’re in a hotel and you decide, “I think I’ll order room service,” and then you go, “Oh, I’ll have a quick shower before they deliver it.” They always ring the bell just as you are getting in the shower, and even though they usually say that it will take forty minutes, for some reason, when you take a shower, it only takes fifteen minutes.

I looked at the room service menu, and for some reason I ordered Manhattan clam chowder, which I’d never had before. I went in the shower, and of course, ding-dong. The guy’s there at the door with a table ready to wheel in. It’s a round table with leaves that they put up. I was standing there, wet, with my towel on, signing the bill. I was starving, so I sat right down on the edge of the bed and pulled the table toward me. The towel was a bit tight, so I undid it. After all, there was nobody around.

I went to put my spoon in the soup, and the leaf of the table fell down, and the boiling hot, sticky clam chowder fell on my balls and my penis. The whole bowl. You can imagine. Clam chowder is the stickiest thing you can possibly order and it was like steaming-hot glue.

This is where Tony Quinn becomes even more heroic. I was trying to sort of claw the chowder off because it’s so hot it felt like ice, and in the worst possible place. I was thinking, Shit, this is really dangerous, like third-degree burns. So I dove to get the phone, and I rang Tony’s room in a panic.

He said, “What is it, Dave? What’s wrong?”

I’m yelling, “Ah! Fucking hell! Come to my room quick!”

So he came to the door, and by then I had a towel on, but he could see my face was all red and exploding. I lay down on the bed and said, “Get my Polaroid camera!” I pulled my towel off and said, “Quick, take pictures of my penis and everything now!”

Poor Tony!

Can you imagine any job description that would include that? Taking photos of the boss’s genitalia after he was scalded with chowder. Tony took photos of the whole area, still covered in clam chowder, and all red and burned. I was in such intense pain, I didn’t care. He stood back on the bed, taking pictures in close-up. I was thinking, Oh my God, what has it come to? I had the photos taken just in case we ever had to sue the hotel, so we would have proof.

Of course I didn’t sue the hotel. I just got the hotel body lotion and applied it after soaking in a cold bath to calm down. I had to play Letterman the next day, and I could hardly walk. I told Lou, and even though he was sympathetic, he couldn’t help bursting out into spontaneous fits of laughter.

After that, on the way back to England, Tony put the Polaroid evidence into his passport for safekeeping. I was in the passport queue behind him at the airport when Tony handed over his passport. All the Polaroids of chowder-covered-burned sex organs fell out. I’ve never seen a look on a guy’s face so confused and worried as on the face of that immigration officer. Tony turned bright red. I was wetting myself, trying to not laugh at Tony, who was glowering at me. I felt so bad, I had to turn away while the officer was looking at my penis and balls, all bright red, with clam chowder all over them. He must have thought, What the hell is this guy doing? What kind of pervert is this?

It’s another one of life’s great lessons. I was feeling on top of the world. I’d made a great album, Greetings from the Gutter. I’m about to go on Letterman. Lou Reed’s going to play rhythm guitar, Bootsy Collins is on bass, it’s a crazy great band, and God is telling me again, just like he did with the flying plum, “Don’t get too excited. Here comes the clam chowder.”