DANA GILLESPIE: Tony Defries would always say to us that really you can’t do anything unless you move to America. All of us. David, Angie, Ronno, me, everyone. He started to say if you want to go through life first class, you must live first class. So once David was up and running with the big RCA deal, MainMan opened its Park Avenue offices, and we all had secretaries and 24/7 limos and it was quite a wild time to be swanning around. Lots of coke, lots of sex. When we first went to New York, David and Angie would be in the Sherry-Netherland hotel, hanging out with Mick Jagger, behaving badly. We’d already had fun times when he had the house in Chelsea in Oakley Street, but New York was something else—life lived on the edge. When MainMan was up and running in New York I would see him on the odd days off but I wasn’t initially aware of the breakdown between him and Defries. He was having his wild period of life, and as I was friendly with Angie I could see the marriage breaking down and what had been a fantastic happy family became a disaster.
AMANDA LEAR: I followed David to New York, where MainMan decided to launch my career. They gave a great big lunch at the Four Seasons in New York, but the record never came out. They were too preoccupied with Young Americans, so in the end I got fed up, I split from them and I went to Munich, where I got signed by another label. When I went to Germany he was into his American trip and I didn’t really like what he became afterwards. He changed his look, got into drugs, left his wife. I dunno, he lived a strange life, always hiding away. I cherished these couple of years we were together because it was the days of Ziggy Stardust, he was this really weird person, and I admired him so much. I was very sorry that most of my friends didn’t like him at all. They hated him, thought he was too weird and that he was using me and even Salvador Dalí. I said to Dalí one time in New York, “Let’s go see David Bowie, I’ll introduce you to him, because he’s really great.” And Dalí didn’t like him at all, he thought he looked ridiculous with his sort of outfit that was made for him. And he was just, jealous I think.
David lived a very secluded life. He never went out in the day. Forget shopping or restaurants, he would only go out at night. So one weekend I took him to stay with some friends living in Sussex, and it was a nightmare, a disaster. I said to him, “You’re going to see cows, and fields and trees and green and flowers. Nature!” And he didn’t set foot out of the house all weekend. He stayed in and watched TV. I was so angry. What is the point? But he said he liked to stay in because the house was full of books. He loved all the pictures, and the TV. And he just stayed in his room. He didn’t want to go for a walk. He didn’t care about flowers or any of that. That really annoyed me. Perhaps he changed. He must have, because he spent some time in Switzerland. But in those days he wasn’t into nature.
JAYNE COUNTY: As a person I thought David was very mysterious, as if he was always keeping some dark secret or as if he was hiding something from you. We got along OK but no deep bond developed, that’s for sure. He was kind of hard to really get to know on many emotional and business levels, especially during the Diamond Dogs period. He loved my songwriting and he was amazed that I could pop them out like a ball out of a cannon. I gave him quite a few ideas. He was always on the prowl for new ideas, as he drew energy and brain waves from everyone around him, that’s why he loved being surrounded by talented, creative people. He had quite a selection of radical freaks around him at MainMan. Someone was always coming up with a new idea for him to try.
I remember once he seemed eager to find out what I thought of his heart-shaped shaved pubic hair, almost like a little boy trying to impress his favorite schoolteacher. It was at the refrigerator, while I was looking for some ice to go in my drink. It was in David’s hotel suite with just a few people over for a drink and a bump or two. He unzipped his pants, right there at the opened fridge door. I looked down and sure enough his pubic hairs were heart-shaped and dyed a bright pink. I said something lame like, “Wow that is so cool,” and his pants were slipping lower and lower and it became obvious that he was flirting with me. I could see the top of his Oscar Mayer. I made some excuse as I had absolutely no interest in David sexually at all and I think that that was one reason he turned against me.
It was pretty obvious that David was taking coke. He became very skeletal in his appearance and began rattling off speeches that sounded meaningless to the rest of us—strange things about witchcraft, demons, and sexual prostitution in ancient times, the Holy Prostitutes of Tyre and Sex Temples, weird things that made everyone nervous. He began to get paranoid and accusing people of ripping him off and stealing his drugs. He was always ranting about people’s teeth and dental bills! One night at Max’s he went into a rage that Marc Bolan was stealing songs from him. Finally, people began to be scared of him. One day it got out at MainMan that David was on his way there and he was raving about Leee Black Childers’s dental bills again and we all ran out of the building and went into hiding for the rest of the day. He had to have cartilage removed from one part of his body and put in his nose because the coke had eaten his nose cartilage away.
KEN SCOTT: When we were recording Diamond Dogs we worked on the song “1984,” and he was already referencing Barry White. He wanted the hi-hat and the strings to sound like they would on a Barry White record. He was already anticipating the sound of Young Americans. He had already moved on.
KEITH CHRISTMAS: In 1974, I got a phone call in a London flat owned by a French lady I was staying with. She said, “There ees someone on the phone oo sez ’is name ees Davvid Boweee.” I thought it was a wind-up from one of the London liggers I knew, so I said, “Tell him to fuck off.” She came back very insistent so I took the call and this distinctive voice asked me to fly to New York to try out as a guitar player for the Diamond Dogs tour. So I flew to the US on the last of the old Boeing 707s, which was more like a Cold War bomber than an airliner. I arrived in New York with just under £2 in my pocket and was met by an enormous African American man in a chauffeur’s uniform to get driven to a hotel in a limo. Next day I had to ask for an audience with Tony Defries, who was very unimpressed with me asking him for some expenses. When I met David it was like seeing a person transformed. He was absolutely fine to me, but it was like being in the presence of a sultan. I sat in the lounge of his suite of rooms, with David Cassidy and his girlfriend sitting there waiting to be taken to speak to him about the possibility of Bowie writing a song for him. They didn’t speak to me and they both seemed very nervous. I don’t know what came of it but the meeting didn’t last long. While they were in the other room I was chatting to an African American lady who was extremely feminine and buxom. That evening we were in a limo going to a club and David told me from the backseat that the lady was a man. He explained her figure as being down to large amounts of hormone treatment. He smiled and said, “They can be a lot of fun.” I didn’t get the job, but I was really pleased to get to visit New York.
GLENN HUGHES (MUSICIAN): In the summer of 1974 I was staying at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, as I was in L.A. making Stormbringer with Deep Purple. I was in my room with Ron Wood one night, and I get a call from Angela Bowie, who I had never met. She said, “My husband would really like to meet you.” I said “I’m in my hotel,” and she said, “I know, we’re on the floor above!” So I went up there with Ron and was blown away by how Bowie looked. Here I was in my bellbottoms and long hair, and there he is in a mustard-colored suit, pink shirt, and red hair. David was very tiny and very fragile, probably no more than ninety-six pounds. He came up to hug me and there was nothing to him. We sat down to talk, and all he wanted to talk about was R&B. He was about to record his blue-eyed soul record, Young Americans, and was getting a new band together around him, Ava Cherry, Luther Vandross, et cetera. He had seen me singing on TV and knew that really I was a black white man. He was fascinated by that. He was a great conversationalist, and after a while there was the two of us. We talked till about two in the morning, and he made me feel very comfortable. He was seven or eight years older than I was. I went to my room and tried to get to sleep but I was so blown away. I woke up midafternoon and he called me up and asked if I wanted to come and see his Diamond Dogs show tonight, which was extraordinary, full of costume changes, a real Broadway production. We soon became inseparable, and I hung out with him during the day and went to see the show four or five times straight. He would come to the studio and watch me record, sitting by me in the studio, not in the control room. A couple of my band mates didn’t appreciate that I was hanging out with David because they didn’t think it was right for us. We were seen together all the time, and they were worried this would be sending out the wrong signal. I was recording in the day with Deep Purple, finishing around seven, and would then go to the gig, sometimes with Iggy Pop. There were often other people around but we were with each other. I started to feel comfortable around him by night three or four. We just did coke. In fact my whole time with David was that way. He wanted me to sing on Young Americans, but after some rehearsals with Ava Cherry, Deep Purple had to go to Hawaii, so it never happened.
We never slept in the same bed, as we never slept. The love was what spurred us on, the love for music, and the love of drugs. Then when we were alone, we did become addicts. Cocaine is a demonic drug, although we did not need cocaine to have fun however. We argued like man and wife. About everything. He was very confrontational. He wasn’t physical but he was verbal. He was fucking smart, had incredible wit. But he was self-righteous and he was driven at the time by an obsession with the Third Reich, and he was viewing that shit at my house. He was so into the narcissism of Hitler. He didn’t want to be him, but he was fascinated by the Nazi movement. When you do cocaine it makes you very, very energetic. I would get out of the room when he would do this. You go into a trance on cocaine, and he would just watch reels and reels of film about the Nazis. He never did the arm-lifting thing, he was just fascinated.
He was also fascinated by black American music and the devil. He felt the pool in his L.A. home was haunted. He felt the devil was in the pool. We had been up for a couple of days, and the wind must have been howling because the water started to bubble in the pool. It bubbled like it was a Jacuzzi, and it was just me and him and I swear to you, I have a pool, and I’ve never seen it bubble before. But that fucking pool was bubbling. You might think, oh my God, these two fucking nincompoops. But on coke you could talk yourself into seeing anything. Do yourself a favor. Stay up for seventy-two hours and you will see shit move. You’ll see a box fall off your table, you’ll hear things. We were just so damn high.
We loved each other and we kissed on the neck, we held hands, we loved it. I didn’t even know David was bi; I didn’t know until about 1978. I wasn’t convinced. My dad was down the coal mine, I was from Staffordshire, I was as straightlaced as you could fucking get. I was a pub-going guy. David loved the fact that he was hanging out with what he called “a bigger star” than he was. That made me howl.
CHRIS CHARLESWORTH: On the 1975 tour I went to Detroit to interview him. Bowie would exaggerate situations to create headlines, and had become fabulous at manipulating the media. On this occasion he told me he was running out of money and the only reason he was on the road was to generate income because of his deal with Tony Defries. I didn’t know whether this was true or not but I printed it because it was a good story, just like when he told Michael Watts he was gay. At the time we all thought this was a bit rum because he had a wife and a son, and he was an incredible womanizer. He always had a different girl on his arm, and there was a girl at MainMan in New York who had a brief fling with him only to find out that he had slept with every other girl in the office. And I don’t mean that as a vague euphemism; he actually slept with every other girl who worked for the company. In New York he had a torrid affair with Cyrinda Foxe, a party girl who eventually married David Johansen from the New York Dolls and Steven Tyler from Aerosmith. She worked as a publicist for MainMan in New York and actually appeared in the “Jean Genie” video. She’s the “Lorraine” that Bowie mentions in “Watch That Man.” Anyway, we were in Detroit when he told me he was broke and that Tony Defries had stolen all his money, and that John Lennon had advised him to manage himself.
I was the American editor of Melody Maker, living in New York, and then I was offered a job working as a publicist for RCA. David used to joke that I now had to do as he said. As soon as I started working for the label, whenever I organized an interview with David, I noticed that he would ask the interviewer questions, acting as though he was actually interested in what they had to say. He’d ask if they had read any good books lately or seen any films or theatre or art exhibitions. He wanted to get to know who was interviewing him and figure out if they were an interesting person, and whether or not he should be wasting any time on them. If he thought they were smart he would give a much better interview. He could be incredibly loquacious. The thing was, he said he was broke yet had this huge stretch Mercedes 600 luxury sedan humming on the street outside. It was obvious he was on coke, as he was ridiculously thin, and quite distracted. Iggy was on tour with him, although just as a guest, and when he wanted to talk he just sort of dismissed Iggy, and told him to come back in an hour or two, so Iggy went wandering off. He was never aloof in person, only by reputation.
TONY ZANETTA: We toured nonstop for a year, and Defries was busy planning the third tour, which he wanted to be a 90-10 deal, with 90 percent going to the artist, and 10 percent going to the promoter, which was unheard-of at the time. He also wanted the expenses deducted from the promoter’s 10 percent. It was a greedy deal. You might have been able to do that with Elvis Presley, but not with someone of the stature of David Bowie, who still hadn’t sold any records. So Defries could not get anywhere with this tour.
The money didn’t really start coming in until the Diamond Dogs/Young Americans tour, and when it did, it all fell apart. These two men who were really quite different but who shared this common ambition accomplished the first stage of their ambition. Then they took a step back and looked at each other and decided they didn’t want to be with each other anymore. David didn’t really need Tony anymore. He took the stance that he had been ripped off, but actually there was a misunderstanding of the deal, where David thought he owned 50 percent of the company but actually owned 50 percent of himself. The deal hadn’t been besmirched. They’d split everything fifty-fifty after expenses, but they’d split fifty-fifty of David Bowie’s income after expenses. David didn’t have any right to any of Iggy’s income, or Mott’s income. But he was the only one who had any income and he was supporting a company that was out of control. They should have got an accountant.
David had moved out of Haddon Hall, moved to Maida Vale and then ended up in Cheyne Walk. He had been working nonstop for a year. And now he’s a rock star, hanging out at the Speakeasy with Mick, and this one and that one. Defries is now the successful mogul living in New York. He had got rid of our meager office in the little apartment in East Fifty-Eighth Street, and now had a suite of offices on Park Avenue. He had a driver to take him to a new rental mansion in Greenwich, Connecticut. He had become the mogul he always wanted to be, and David had become the rock star he’d always dreamt of being. And they’re not even in the same country. They talked on the phone but less and less. This is when Corinne Schwab was hired to work in the Gunter Grove MainMan office, as Tony couldn’t care less who he owed money to there. She spent all day fending off creditors. And David still had to ask MainMan for money. He also found out that this state of affairs was going to last until 1982, when the Defries contract ran out.
David came to New York in April 1974, ostensibly to put the Diamond Dogs tour together—which we called tour four even though tour three hadn’t happened. And he saw all this money being spent and he didn’t like it. So he starts planning the Diamond Dogs tour. This was going to be the next stage, something very formally theatrical. We brought in some Broadway people to help with the show but they were actually a lot less experienced than the rock and roll people. And the show was too much, a little too ill conceived. Expensive, expensive to put up, and a lot of technical parts that didn’t work. And Tony is not around. MainMan had Ava Cherry, Amanda Lear, Iggy, Freddie Burretti, Dana Gillespie, Wayne [Jayne] County, Mick Ronson, Mott the Hoople, a whole stable of stuff. Dana was actually taking a lot of Tony’s time, as she was his favorite. He certainly isn’t devoting 100 percent of his time to David Bowie. He is running his empire, he is fritting about with the other artists, and at the same time David is putting together this massive tour, which is out of control from the beginning. David is staying at the Sherry-Netherland hotel, spending thousands of dollars a week on room service, having to organize this tour by himself. Everything was very professional, with a real tour manager, and proper support, but as Tony isn’t there, everyone goes to David with their problems, and he’s pissed off. Also, David’s doing coke like there’s no tomorrow. He had not been involved in drugs before, but now he’s up for three days at a time doing coke. Coke does a couple of things: apart from ruining your body, it makes you feel omnipotent, like you’re the smartest person in the world. Defries, who barely drank a glass of wine, loathed drugs, and he loathed David on drugs, as then there was no chance of any communication at all. So in June, after the Madison Square Garden show, which was a huge success, I went out on the road with him to try and hold his hand. I ended up as a Ping-Pong ball between the two of them. Then, after the Universal Amphitheatre show in Los Angeles, David decides he doesn’t want the set anymore, and it morphs into the Young Americans tour. Defries was furious when he did this. This was what some people called the Black Show, with Luther Vandross and Carlos Alomar. It was a minstrel show, with David as a black man. Some people called it the White Show because the set was just a plain white background. It was a brilliant show, but from a manager’s point of view it was a disaster because Defries was still trying to establish David, and you had Ziggy Stardust turning into a black guy. It was like a really weird career move to make. In Tony’s mind David is completely out of control, and in Bowie’s mind Defries is totally useless. He didn’t need them anymore.
My last official encounter with David was on the last date of the tour, in Atlanta. Thanksgiving. To commemorate this I wanted to throw a little party for the band and the crew, a family party. We were staying at the Continental Hyatt House, but when I tried to book a room for the party I was told that everything was full because of the Thanksgiving weekend. I should have known right then that something was weird. They said we could have the party in a suite instead. We had every room on the floor, we had this extra suite in the corner, and David was in a suite on another floor. The only room we didn’t have was a suite right next to the one I had hired. I got a call from the front desk asking us to turn the music down, even though we only had a boom box. Soon there was a knock on the door, and all these vice squad cops burst out of the suite next to us. Everyone threw their drugs on the floor, and David even tried to get them to arrest him, but it was me they took, for possession of cocaine and six other charges. The charges were eventually dropped, but this was the last time I worked for MainMan. A short time later I went to visit him at his house on West Twentieth Street in Manhattan, where he was living with Ava Cherry; the baby, Zowie; and a bunch of others. I used to drink a lot back then, and had had a lot of brandies, but it ended ugly, and that was the end of it. I was also close to Angie, and toyed with the idea of managing her, even though she was totally unmanageable. I was marked by the Ziggy Stardust experience, and in a way we all were. He became a star, Tony became a mogul, and here I was, with nothing.
TOMMY HILFIGER: I saw him in the back room at Max’s Kansas City, back in the ’70s, 1974 I think. He was with Lou Reed and David Johansen from the New York Dolls, and it was a scene. Max’s was a real scene then, but it was a scene every night. You couldn’t move for people around him. He was like the king. Glam rock was at its height, and there was a scent of punk in the air. People wore velvet suits, snakeskin boots, shag haircuts, glitter. Hippies had cleaned up and gotten dressed up. And everything came from London. The bells were wider, the jackets were more fitted, with higher shoulders, the lapels were more rounded. The shirts were either floral or printed. Or shiny. Guys were wearing eye shadow, sequins. Dangling earrings, a real femininity and androgyny about the place. And David was leading the charge.
ANGIE BOWIE: David and I were happy for about eight or nine years. We became unhappy, or I did, when I thought that the areas of his life that he was not sharing with me were not joyous. They were drug-orientated. I was called out on many occasions across the world. I mean, four or five planes later I would get somewhere and have to deal with many situations, which were very worrying. And I thought I was not equipped to deal with him. They were all to do with madness, craziness, and paranoia. I worried for him. It was a situation where you really are not equipped. I think the reason now why there are so many drug counselors around is that so many people went through it, and the only way they survived was that these people who they talked to all became drug counselors themselves. I mean, I don’t know what else it could possibly be. It was almost like, if you haven’t been there, you can’t bring someone back. I took drugs sometimes but I didn’t have an addictive personality like he had. And David would never persuade me to take stuff. It was the privacy of it that made me fear the danger. There was nothing sociable about it—this was a deep, dark pit.
Late 1974 was a tumultuous period for both Bowie and Iggy Pop. Not only was cocaine having a more than corrosive effect on Bowie’s psyche, but Iggy was so out of his mind that, following an altercation with the LAPD in which he was barely ambulatory, he had been admitted to the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute.
MICK ROCK: David got Iggy out of the loony bin in L.A. He was very compassionate. As much as he had to be self-consumed, he was very alert to what was happening to his friends and associates. He empathized with people.
NICK KENT: On The Dick Cavett Show he looked like a man who had taken a lot of cocaine. The paranoid eyes, the chewing, the hollowed-out cheekbones. He was the same on The Russell Harty Show. He had been cocained.
DICK CAVETT: [David was] nervous before the show. It was a little off-putting, and I got a lot of credit for getting through that interview, but he got better, and he settled a bit. He had a bit of the sniffles, as hip people pointed out, but he’s a great, great artist, and that made it a happy experience.
ANGIE BOWIE: Our marriage was a partnership to accomplish making David a worldwide star. In the meantime, we also had a love affair which was very nice, and a child, which was even better. So that’s what we did. I fell in love with him but I fell out of love with him and became more business orientated after about 1975. I think for a while he was tortured. I think he was trying to figure out what it was. I watched a lot of people take advantage of him and it hurt me, but I also didn’t want to be a part of it. We had done a deal originally, when we got together. Not only that we would have an open marriage but that first we would work on his career and then we would work on mine. And that when we had finished those two jobs, we would both be successful and we would both be satisfied that we had done the best for each other. So I worked very hard on his career. Then at a certain point I said I’m going to do this, I’m going to take risks, I’m going to go to these classes. And he was fine, no problem whatsoever. But another point I said OK, well now, I need to actually perform. And I did The Mike Douglas Show, singing “I’ve Got a Crush on You.” And David was so astonished that he wrote “Golden Years.” But nothing happened. By the time we had helped everyone else, he didn’t have any time for my career. He had forgotten those promises. It wasn’t his job, it was my job to do on my own. It really pissed me off. Oh it got me so angry. I wasn’t in it because I needed to be recognized as some strange intergalactic star. I just needed to be allowed to write.
Tony Defries tried to get MainMan employees like Tony Zanetta and Cherry Vanilla to devise a way to get David to divorce me. It was just awful. Ten executives! There were ten of them and he said find a way to get David to divorce her. He couldn’t handle me, and he knew I could see right through him. And I hated that he made David work like a dog. He wasn’t scared of me though; he wasn’t scared of anyone. But David did get rid of him. David said to me, “You’re right, he’s gotta go.” Otherwise he was working to support an entire entourage. David didn’t like confrontation. He didn’t care for it at all; he would always rather leave. It was pointless trying to fight with him, as it was like fighting with a blancmange. There was no resistance. You felt like you were torturing a child. But I said to him, I think that you’re being taken for a ride by all these people that you’ve been supporting. And I said, when I ask you for something, I feel like I’m in a long line of people with their hands out. I said we shouldn’t feel like that. So that was my appeal to him to save himself from being worked to death.
David took so many drugs because he was working too hard. David was supporting the entire MainMan company that Tony Defries had set up in New York. But there were 100 or 150 people living off David’s sweat. Even the most chilled person would have turned to some sort of relief. He got better, you know, he fired Defries, he changed his tune, he said he was going to move, he said he was going to divorce me. I got out of the picture, and he was still not completely better until well into the ’80s. He was still wrestling with his demons.
DANA GILLESPIE: MainMan ended badly, as I think we all knew it would. There was a very strange atmosphere towards the end, as bills weren’t being paid, telephone calls weren’t returned, it was odd. Now, I had started going to Mustique again as I had been I going there when I was younger with my parents. I introduced Tony Defries to the island, and this was back when there were only a few houses on the island, and long before Mick Jagger coerced David into buying a house there. In those days, and this is 1975 remember, you had to plan a phone call two days in advance, actually book it. And I was with Defries on the island, and he was saying that he was going to have to have this difficult call with David. And I was there when Defries ended it. I was sitting outside but I could hear everything through the slatted windows. He told David that he couldn’t continue to be involved, and that he didn’t want to work with him anymore. It was a very heavy conversation. I distinctly remember him saying, “It’s over.” It was the end of a chapter. I moved back to England when MainMan collapsed, but I couldn’t record for anyone else for five years because of all the contractual disputes. It was very raw. I continued to see Angie, but I didn’t see David again. Everyone was frozen out, something that I know Ronno took very badly.
CHRIS CHARLESWORTH: When Defries locked up all his money, shall we say, Bowie went pleading to Ken Glancey, who was the president of RCA, and begged for a loan. So RCA bankrolled him to the tune of half a million dollars.
TERRY O’NEILL: I didn’t really like his music as I was more of a jazz fan, but he had a great mind and was really good company. He was always polite, and it was a pleasure to work with him, as opposed to the lads from Liverpool or the Stones from South London. So I’d always be willing to do jobs for him because he was so nice. A year after Diamond Dogs I was in L.A. and Tony Defries asked me to come and photograph the show. The next day I get a call from Elizabeth Taylor, who I’d got to know, and she said, I’d love to meet David Bowie. She wanted to cast him in this film Blue Bird she was making. She asked me to invite him to her house in Beverly Hills on Sunday, as she was having lunch with George Cukor, who was going to direct it. So I did. I turned up on the day, and Bowie hadn’t arrived. Then it’s two o’clock, then three, then four, and he still hadn’t arrived. Five o’clock comes and there’s still no Bowie. This was crazy because it was usually the other way round, as Elizabeth had a habit of keeping everyone else waiting. So we’re just about to pack up and go home when he arrived with Cherry Vanilla, who he was seeing at the time. In fact it was probably Cherry Vanilla’s fault that he didn’t turn up. He was very fond of her. He charmed everyone, and we started taking some pictures, and Elizabeth and him got on great. But he was out of it. No one had ever made Elizabeth Taylor wait for five hours before, but he was quite wasted when he pitched up. Tony Defries later asked me to shoot him with William Burroughs too. I also shot him at Peter Sellers’s birthday party in L.A., when he played saxophone in an impromptu band with Bill Wyman, Keith Moon, Ronnie Wood, and Joe Cocker. He was like David Niven.
ALAN YENTOB: David had seen a small documentary I’d made for the BBC in 1974 called Profile of a Monster, a parody of how people make profiles on television. I got a call from Tony Defries who said that David had liked it, and so I went to New York to meet him. And David boldly said, “Would you like to make a film about me?” So I did. I was surprised by the calculated side of him. He was about go on tour with the Diamond Dogs show, and as it was this extraordinary spectacle, he wanted it documented. The next time I met him was in L.A. I decided I was going to call the film The Collector, because David was a person who collected characters, and also because he was sort of propelled by curiosity. In his early life he didn’t quite know what he was going to be, and he was pursuing all kinds of things. He painted, he sang, he danced. He had collected all of these characters and he was going through a period where he was disposing of them—Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane. So I wanted to make a film about his personality through the songs.
The first thing I asked him to do was to make a death mask, which is the first scene in the film, and surprisingly he did. He was obviously preoccupied with these notions of mortality, as so many of his songs were about that—“Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide,” “Aladdin Sane,” Jacques Brel’s “My Death.” He had suicide in his family, he had a schizophrenic half-brother, he was surrounded by trauma, and so this side of life was something he was well aware of. But he had this imaginative gift, so every minute he had he wanted to use effectively, creatively. He was interested in visual representation, in mime, in theatricality. You could tell by his tone of voice that he was preoccupied with these things. I went and found a cameraman in L.A., as I didn’t know how long the film was going to take, I didn’t know what time of day or night I was going to be shooting. I actually found the cameraman in Malibu, and when I went to his front door I was greeted by this completely naked man, as he had just got out of the swimming pool. It was already a weird trip. From then on we just went on the road, and it got weirder and weirder.
I was surprised by the amount of access I got, and I was surprised by how open he was with me, and how he talked to me in confidence. I had to pinch myself sometimes. We didn’t share cocaine, but when you see him in the back of the car, or being interviewed, you can tell what condition he was in. He was very thin, eating very little. And he had a very demanding show to do night after night. There was a scene where he was clearly being followed by a police car, and you can see that he’s worried. He’s talking about arriving in L.A. when there’s an earthquake, and he was on edge, worried that the police were going to catch up with him and say that he’d taken some cocaine. He was pretty fragile at that time. He later told me that at the time he was “so blocked, so stoned, it was quite a casualty case, and when I see that film now I cannot believe I survived it.”
With the film he wanted to put on record what he was doing. The point about the Diamond Dogs tour was that it was very extravagant; every sequence was different, every character was reimagined and developed, so it wasn’t like a normal concert. He didn’t sit there and sing the Hunky Dory numbers, he reenacted them. That was what was so special about the show. So my view is that he didn’t want me to capture his collapse or his psychological state, he wanted me to capture the stage show. He felt the show was saying goodbye to all these characters and he wanted it to be put on record. But what emerged was something else, as at the time he was this very troubled, very fragile guy who was rethinking his career and where he was going. And going through a difficult period.
So most of the interviews were either in the backs of cars in the early hours of the morning, or very late at night. There is that line in the film where he says that he never wanted to be a rock and roll star, “Really guv, I never did…” He was conflicted. What’s unusual about the film is that it’s only him and the fans, no one else. It’s entirely about the songs. What I loved about it was when you listen to those songs, whether it’s “Changes” or “Life on Mars?” or “Oh! You Pretty Things” or “Space Oddity” for that matter, they’re all about vulnerabilities, they’re all about these kids who might identify with him because they come from a similar kind of background, who come from a provincial place who don’t quite know what they’re going to do with their lives. He was brought up in a place that wasn’t quite inside the city. The fans aren’t necessarily talking sense, but they have been given this lifeline by him and his songs. They were offered an escape, an escape into imagination and other places. He was in a continual conversation with them. He had a psychological insight into people’s moods, aspirations, and vulnerabilities, which all came from his childhood.
He was clearly thinking about the next stage in his life, Philadelphia, Carlos Alomar, Luther Vandross. He was about to become a soul singer. He was on a transformative journey. By the time he got to Philadelphia he was far more up, as was the music. He’d already moved on.
EARL SLICK: Being a blues player, and having to make a living in New York City, I was already doing Sam and Dave, James Brown, Wilson Pickett, and all that shit, I was playing the real thing. So Young Americans wasn’t a stretch for me. But he’d brought Carlos Alomar in, who was more from the pop R&B area. I was more of the Memphis shit. So the album was more of a Carlos thing, rightfully so, for what David needed. He was ruthless with people, especially musicians, and I was surprised I was kept. What happened was, when we finished Diamond Dogs, there was a break, and during that break, I was told that David had got another guitar player and that I was out of the picture. So I just went about my business. I was a little pissed off, because of the way it was done, and then out of nowhere I get a phone call: can you fly to L.A., like, now? So I was back. That was when we did a kind of a hybrid of the end of the Diamond Dogs tour going into the next phase, so this is September 1974. But by then Carlos was the musical director so I was a guitar for hire. We went from doing a lot of stuff from Ziggy, Aladdin Sane, and Diamond Dogs to doing versions that were less rock and roll, and went through a few different rhythm sections in the interim. We were also starting the Young Americans record, so it didn’t feel that great. I have to be honest with you, it really didn’t. Everything was disjointed. But Young Americans was a Carlos record and he did a great job.
CARLOS ALOMAR (GUITARIST): He came to America after doing the Spiders from Mars, and during that time it seems that he had contracted this situation with Lulu, to do some tracks, including “The Man Who Sold the World.” I was a session musician working at RCA, working in Studio A, Elvis Presley’s studio. Tony Silvester, who was one of the singers of the Main Ingredient, told me there was a shot at this gig. I really wanted to meet Lulu. I’d seen To Sir with Love, and she was this blue-eyed soul singer, I said, “Yeah!” But when I turned up at the session, she wasn’t there. Who was there? David Bowie. He was using words like “Hey man,” and “That’s cool,” these phrases that were typically American, but sounded so weird coming from a Brit. Brits used to study Americans, and they knew their Bo Diddleys and their Chuck Berrys. He was such a sweet guy. He had a vast knowledge of African American music, R&B music. I cut the gig, my guitar playing was very good, and he was impressed with that. But then I told him, I said, “Man, you look terrible. You look like shit, you need to eat some fucking food.” Those were my actual words. I was always very forward with David. I said he needed to eat, and so he came in his limousine to visit me and my wife, Robin, in our house in Queens.
I offered to take him to the Apollo Theater, where I was playing with the Main Ingredient. I also played in the house band there. He’d always wanted to go, and loved it. He had this orange hair and his big-rimmed fedora hat and he was not only the only white person there, he was whiter than white. He is probably the whitest white guy I have ever seen. Imagine stepping out of a limousine looking like that and walking into the Apollo Theater in front of a line of black people all lining up, waiting to come in. He just strolls right in and gets a front-row seat, he was in the lap of luxury. I introduced him to Richard Pryor that night, who couldn’t make him out at all. He said, “What’s this white dude doing in my dressing room?” David was fearless, he didn’t care. I’m a Latin guy, Puerto Rican, although everyone thought I was black, so I took him to all the Latin clubs, and we hung out. He tried to hire me three times before he could afford me. I was already married to Robin, so I was already answering to a higher power. So Young Americans, here we come! That album, self-labeled in his own right as plastic soul. I defy that and say that it was a true, authentic soul record; he had the formula 100 percent. You’ll hear a lot of people try and sing “Fame” and “Young Americans,” but when it comes to the other songs on the record, they can’t touch him. He had falsetto on top, and massive bottom on the bottom. I had been working with the O’Jays, the Ohio Players, so I knew. He knew exactly when he heard what he wanted, that Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes thing that he knew. He knew when he heard the Wes Montgomery guitar sound that he wanted, and when Luther started singing those background vocals, this became a real album. We did one song a day. Boom. Sometimes we did two songs a day, and David didn’t even have the words written. He had to run home and stay up for four or five days just to match the moment.
Ultimately, as a man’s man, you’ve got to have a sense of humor and you’ve got to be who you are from the beginning. I’m not one to kowtow, I’m not one to kiss ass, I’m not that kind of guy, and David Bowie respected men who knew what the hell they were doing. I’m a minister’s son, and all I want to do is have a good time and hold on to my happiness. When you are a musician, you have to develop a great personality, a great disposition, or else why would anyone want to go on tour with you? I think that’s why we clicked. I’m the guy that never brings problems. I ran a very tight ship, and he knew he could count on me. This is how we had a relationship that lasted all those decades.
MIKE GARSON: When we were recording Young Americans he couldn’t really get his creative thing going until two or three in the morning, until the cocaine arrived. So consequently I’d be the only one awake, as I never used any drugs in my life. At six in the morning he’d be very wide-eyed and on top of things. It didn’t matter what state he was in, we never argued; in fact in thirty years we didn’t argue once. He was always so focused, always professional, always smiling. He relied a lot on David Sanborn and Luther Vandross on that record, because so much of the structures were complex, and the vocals were incredibly complicated. My continual joke was, when is it my turn [to get fired], because I managed to stay the course, whereas everyone else eventually got fired. But then he made The Man Who Fell to Earth and he didn’t need me anymore. We’re in the Plaza Hotel in New York, around Christmas time in 1975, and he turns to me and says, “Mike, you’re going to be with me for the next twenty years.” And the phone rang approximately twenty years later, asking me if I could be in New York the next day. I think he may have called me a little earlier if he had known that I had quit Scientology in 1982, but there we are. He used to call me Garson the Parson.
Scientology had a terrible reputation in Britain, and it had big problems in the psychiatric world, and his brother Terry obviously had a lot of problems. So David already had a very bad opinion of the subject. At the time I was drinking the Kool-Aid. I later changed my mind, but at the time I thought there were certain things about Scientology that worked. I was good at differentiation and I could take that 10 percent that I thought was very powerful and use it. But there were lots of things on the organizational front that didn’t feel good to me, so I eventually left. I actually got Woody [Woodmansey] into Scientology, so when I left in 1982 he stopped talking to me, and we were best friends at the same time. And he hasn’t talked to me since.
AVA CHERRY: Paul McCartney was staying at the Plaza in New York, and David and I went up to see him. Linda McCartney opened the door and we said hello, but Paul was not really friendly. So we sat down across from them on opposite couches. And I could tell David felt a little uncomfortable. They offered a drink and I had some water or something. But they just sat looking at us like we were under a microscope. Paul was staring at David and didn’t say anything. So David said: “Paul, I met with John,” and started talking about John, but when he asked Paul a question he didn’t answer. Linda answered instead. Then he looked at Paul again and said something else to him and she answered the second time. So David got angry and said, “Paul you can’t answer your own questions? You can’t speak yourself?” Paul said something smart, and so David looked at me and said, “We’re going.” And we got up and walked out. And that was it. It was really bizarre. I remember another time we were at this party with Bob Dylan, Ronnie Wood, all these stars, and they were all being a bit frosty to David. We walked in and there was a very chilly atmosphere, like: Who is this glam-rock guy? Bob Dylan said, “Who does this guy think he is?” And David said to me, “Who do I think I am?” They tried to make fun of him, and seemed like they were jealous of him. There were lots of people like that. At a party at David’s apartment once in New York, Jimmy Page spilled something on one of the silk pillows. And when David saw it he wanted to know who had done it. He thought I had done it. He stood there chastising me about the pillows. So finally someone says it was Jimmy. So he looks over at Jimmy and says, “You had me blame Ava for this? And you didn’t say anything?” Then they exchanged a few negative words and Jimmy said, “Well, I’m going to leave,” and David said, “Why don’t you take the window?” I think the reason Jimmy Page was there was because David was obsessed with Aleister Crowley, and so was he.
When Bowie moved to the United States, he had initially stayed in a variety of hotels before renting apartments on West Seventeenth Street and West Twentieth Street. In March 1975 he swapped coasts and moved his base to L.A., while his cocaine addiction coarsened into an inevitable chore. Having stayed with Glenn Hughes at his house in Los Feliz, he then lived with his manager Michael Lippman for a brief period in Hollywood, before renting a bungalow with an indoor swimming pool at 637 North Doheny Drive, on the perimeter of Beverly Hills, and just around the corner from the Troubadour, and then a much larger house on Stone Canyon Road in the woods above Bel-Air.
AVA CHERRY: There was so much going on at that time. When David realized that he had had so much money stolen from him he just collapsed. His management company were basically spending all his money, taking trips back and forth to Paris and staying in the most expensive hotels, and just doing stuff and spending the money. I was living with a friend in Laurel Canyon, and David had just moved to Doheny Drive. I called him up when I moved there and an hour later he was at my door with a suitcase. He was not in a good way. Then we lived together in Century City for a while. L.A. was his next big adventure. David was the kind of person that when he was ready to go to the next experience, that was it, he was off. And L.A. was like that for him. Maybe you might be put on the shelf for a later date like Iggy or somebody like that, but if it was time for you to dissolve in that moment then he’d finish with you. I saw him a couple of times over at Herbie Hancock’s, as Herbie was a Buddhist at the time. And then there was one time where he was staying in Marilyn Monroe’s house. He told me it was haunted. Things were so awful during that drug period. I saw a little bit of it but not too much. It was devastating for him. I tried to stay out of it, because it made me feel depressed. When he was with me it was controlled to a certain point and then when he went off on his own it became something totally different. I still loved him and cared about what happened. I did find consolation in friends like Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. They tried to make me feel better about what was going on.
HARRY MASLIN (PRODUCER): When I first met David, I suppose I was a bit of an outsider. I was called in as the engineer on Young Americans, and then took over the production when David started working with John Lennon [Tony Visconti had already been released from the project]. It was rather bizarre for me, as I came into a scene I wasn’t used to and I had people like Mick Jagger hanging out in the studio, and John Lennon in the control room, looking at what I was doing. It was a little disconcerting for the first week or so. I was at home having a traditional Thanksgiving dinner with friends, blasted out of my mind—on alcohol, nothing heavier—when I got a phone call. It was David, and he said, “You have to do me a favor, my booking is up at Record Plant and I need additional time to continue my work.” I replied by assuring him that I would do my best to get the additional time. He then hit me with the zinger: “You have to do me another favor, you have to produce the rest of Young Americans.” And I kind of took the phone away from my ear and thought, Oh really? A favor? I said, “Well, David I think I can do you this favor.” The original reason why the Record Plant—where I was working at the time—put me on his project was because I was kinda the R&B guy, and Young Americans was an R&B-influenced album, so we started on the new songs, and he took me into the inner circle, so to speak. He was very kind. He knew that I was still walking on eggshells a little bit, but he also trusted me and my musical intent and my engineering prowess, for lack of a better word. I remember specifically mixing “Fame” and being completely paranoid after the first mix, thinking that I could do a better one than the one I turned in to RCA, but then I had people like Carlos Alomar come up to me and tell me what a wonderful job I did on the mix, and I started to calm down a little bit.
AVA CHERRY: Young Americans was amazing because at that time David was one of the first white artists they’d recorded at Sigma Sound Studios in Philadelphia. David was immediately accepted by the black community. Before he arrived I’d heard that some people were sniping about him coming to the city, but I never saw anything like that. I heard there were some players who didn’t want to be on the record because David was white, but I don’t believe that. David had already mapped exactly how he wanted to do it. He had met Carlos Alomar, and he didn’t really care if there was a stigma. We went in there and just played away. David was very detailed about everything that he wanted to do. He would be writing it down and he would write in a diary and write different things every day, all the time. He knew exactly what he wanted to do and was not ruffled by any of those things. We went in and it was great. He also did a show at the Tower Theater in Philly, and that was a huge thing for the city. That’s where he recorded David Live. It was great singing with Luther Vandross, as he was such a great singer, such an accomplished arranger, and our voices melded together like magic and butter.
LUTHER VANDROSS (SINGER): My friend Carlos [Alomar], whom I had grown up with, got a job playing guitar for David Bowie. Carlos invited me to the studio. He and his wife, Robin, had gotten married a couple of years before and she is also a singer. As a matter of fact, Robin is one of the girls with whom I used to sing in the hallway. I stated making little vocal arrangements and showing them to Robin. I didn’t know that Bowie had overheard all this. He was sitting right behind me at the board, and he said, “That’s a great idea. Put that down.” So I put it down and next thing you know one thing led to another, and I was doing the vocal arrangements for the whole album. I wrote one of the songs on the album. Bowie overheard it and said, “I want to record that. Do you mind?” When I did it, it was called “Funky Music.” Bowie changed it to “Fascination.” He said he didn’t want to be so presumptuous as to say “funky music,” since he was a rock artist. He said, “Do you mind?” And I said, “You’re David Bowie, I live at home with my mother, you can do what you like.”
AVA CHERRY: I was there the day David brought John Lennon into the studio. He actually wrote a diary entry that day where he says, “January 30th, introduced Ava to a Beatle.” We were going in that day to record “Fame,” and before the session David was freaking out because he was so nervous. He really admired John Lennon, and that day David was like a little kid. And then John comes in the door and John had those granny glasses on, right? And David looks and me and says, “He really does wear those granny glasses!” He really liked the fact that Lennon had the whole Lennon look. What you imagine John to be is exactly how he was: charming, funny, and they both hit it off immediately. They became really, really good friends. It was only me, Carlos, John, and David in the studio—and I think Geoffrey [MacCormack] might have been there. Yoko came and brought us some sushi and then she left. She was very sweet. I liked her. She was not how I imagined her and how the Beatles said she was. John was sitting there at one point with his twelve-string getting ready to play “Across the Universe,” and he looks up and says, “Are we having a good time?” We were all so happy that John Lennon was so relaxed. David was just over the moon. He drew David a caricature of himself. And David put it in this solid gold frame. He really loved it. I didn’t think “Fame” would turn out the way it did. I thought because John Lennon was on it that he was going to get lots of critical acclaim, but it was just a James Brown groove at one point.
DAVID BOWIE: I spent quite a lot of time getting to know Lennon, and I do remember we went to a lot of bars together. We spent hours and hours discussing fame, and what you had to do to get it, to get there. If I’m honest it was his fame we were discussing, because he was so much more famous than anyone who had been before. I remember that Carlos and I were working on this riff, and I remember than it was John who started riffing on “Fame,” screaming at the top of his voice in the studio. He was screaming, I was writing the lyrics, and Carlos was crashing through the riff. It all came together so quickly and so brilliantly. It was an incredibly intoxicating time and I can’t quite believe that we didn’t try and write more things together, because just being around him was breathtaking. He had all this energy, which I suppose I didn’t expect when I first met him.
HARRY MASLIN: John happened to be in the studio [Record Plant] with me one day as I was working on “Fame.” I decided to start the record off with a backward piano chord leading into the downbeat of the song. Without telling him my motive, I asked John if he would be so kind as to go out to the piano and just hit one chord when given the appropriate cue. He agreed and sat himself down at the grand piano. In preparation, I proceeded to take the multitrack tape I was recording on and give it a backward/upside-down wind, my usual technique of recording something backwards. I recorded some snare rim hits as a cue for John. He was waiting patiently through all of this but as I got on the studio talkback to explain what I needed him to do, he gave me a bit of a puzzled look. John hit the chord perfectly (of course) and it came off exactly as planned. He came back into the control room and as I was turning the tape over to hear the desired effect for the first time, his curiosity got the best of him and he asked me what I was doing. I then explained to him what I was trying to achieve. He followed up with a statement that could have been devastating to me had it not been that I knew he meant no harm. “The Beatles never did it that way,” he said. Crushing! Trying to save myself from humiliation I said in a bit of a sarcastic, mimicking voice, “OK John, how did the Beatles [with emphasis] do it?” He told me that the Beatles would have just recorded the chord directly to a piece of quarter-inch tape in a normal manner, given that tape a backward wind and then “fly” it on the multitrack, which would be running in the normal direction. Trying to save my ass and professional self-esteem (and with a smile) I told him that of course I had considered that technique but due to the precise timing I was looking for, had chosen the alternate method.
So we did well with the album, although at that point I didn’t know if I was ever going to hear from David again.
JOHN LENNON (BEATLE): [Rolling Stone said I was “playing second fiddle…” but] that’s garbage. What second fiddle? I’m not playing second fiddle to Ringo when I play rhythm guitar. It’s all right for me to play rhythm guitar in back of Ringo’s record, but if I play rhythm guitar in back of Elton’s record, or in back of David Bowie’s somehow I’m lowering myself….I think they are good artists. And they are friends of mine, and they asked me to go and play. It’s like in the old days. Like Brian Jones is on a track of the Beatles years ago. And he played saxophone. In those days you weren’t allowed to say, the record companies wouldn’t allow it. So it was never mentioned. Everybody used to play on each other’s sessions, but nobody ever said anything. Nowadays it’s always said. And Elton asked me to play on “Lucy.” He said, “I’m gonna do this song. I’d love it if you came and played.” He was too shy to ask me. He got a friend that we both have to ask me…and I said, “Sure I’ll come.” So I went to play and sang chorus or some garbage. Why is it not belittling for Mick Jagger to sing in back of Carly Simon? Why am I some kind of god that isn’t allowed to do anything?? It’s bullshit.
DAVID BOWIE: I guess he [John Lennon] defined for me, at any rate, how one could twist and turn the fabric of pop and imbue it with elements from other art forms, often producing something extremely beautiful, very powerful, and imbued with strangeness. Also, uninvited, John would wax on endlessly about any topic under the sun and was over-endowed with opinions. I immediately felt empathy with that.
The seductive thing about John was his sense of humor. Surrealistically enough, we were first introduced in about 1974 by Elizabeth Taylor. Miss Taylor had been trying to get me to make a movie with her. It involved going to Russia and wearing something red, gold, and diaphanous. Not terribly encouraging, really. I can’t remember what it was called—it wasn’t On the Waterfront anyway, I know that.
We were in L.A., and one night she had a party to which both John and I had been invited. I think we were polite with each other, in that kind of older-younger way. Although there were only a few years between us, in rock and roll that’s a generation, you know? Oh boy, is it ever.
So John was sort of [in Liverpool accent], “Oh, here comes another new one.” And I was sort of, “It’s John Lennon! I don’t know what to say. Don’t mention the Beatles, you’ll look really stupid.”
And he said, “Hello, Dave.” And I said, “I’ve got everything you’ve made—except the Beatles.”
A couple of nights later we found ourselves backstage at the Grammys where I had to present “the thing” to Aretha Franklin. Before the show I’d been telling John that I didn’t think America really got what I did, that I was misunderstood. Remember that I was in my twenties and out of my head.
So the big moment came and I ripped open the envelope and announced, “The winner is Aretha Franklin.” Aretha steps forward, and with not so much as a glance in my direction, snatches the trophy out of my hands and says, “Thank you everybody. I’m so happy I could even kiss David Bowie.” Which she didn’t! And she promptly spun around and swanned off, stage right. So I slunk off, stage left.
And John bounds over and gives me a theatrical kiss and a hug and says, “See, Dave. America loves ya.”
We pretty much got on like a house on fire after that.
He once famously described glam rock as just rock and roll with lipstick on. He was wrong of course, but it was very funny.
Towards the end of the ’70s, a group of us went off to Hong Kong on a holiday and John was in, sort of, house-husband mode and wanted to show Sean the world. And during one of our expeditions on the back streets a kid comes running up to him and says, “Are you John Lennon?” And he said, “No, but I wish I had his money.” Which I promptly stole for myself.
It’s brilliant. It was such a wonderful thing to say. The kid said, “Oh, sorry. Of course you aren’t,” and ran off. I thought, “This is the most effective device I’ve heard.”
I was back in New York a couple of months later in Soho, downtown, and a voice pipes up in my ear, “Are you David Bowie?” And I said, “No, but I wish I had his money.”
“You lying bastard. You wish you had my money.” It was John Lennon.
BOB HARRIS: I interviewed John Lennon in 1975 and he went into great details about the recording process of “Fame.” He said that it developed from a simple riff, layering up and up in the studio, really building up from nothing. He said that as he was always in New York, and rarely left it, when the British guys came into town, they called him up and asked him to show them around. I remember John saying, “They don’t need me, but it’s nice to hang out.” David had done the same thing, coercing Lennon into the studio to try and work on some tracks. “We were in the studio, and this riff started coming out, and we worked on it for three or four hours until the song was written.” And it sounds like that, as it has that lovely loose spontaneity to it. And that was what John said: “It just sparked.”
JOHN LENNON: [How do I feel about people like Elton and Bowie doing covers of all those old Beatles songs?] I love it. I was thrilled he [Elton] was doing it. People are afraid of Beatle music. They are still afraid of my songs. Because they got that big image thing: You can’t do a Beatle number….You can’t touch a Lennon song; only Lennon can do it….It’s garbage! Anybody can do anything.
DAVID BOWIE: John Lennon was good at telling people off, but not me.
OLIVER JAMES: Bowie didn’t do narrative like Lennon. He wasn’t explicit. Bowie was genuinely an artist who wanted to get to the truth, but through the manner of the expression of what he was trying to communicate. He was making art, not telling a story. It’s like Nic Roeg, and him and Nic were like the perfect match I suppose. I said to Nic once, “Why don’t you make documentaries?” And he said, “Oh no I couldn’t do that, I couldn’t reveal that much about myself.” As though his films hadn’t done that already! The reason why art is so great is because it’s not just describing the problems that the art is trying to express, it becomes art in the process of creating it, and then producing it. David was reaching out to the truth, but there was obviously a part of him that didn’t want to confront the truth, which was his family.
PAUL DU NOYER (JOURNALIST): Bruce Springsteen wrote “It’s Hard to Be a Saint in the City” when he was unknown; it became the closing track of his 1973 debut, Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. Though its hoodlum street-poetry sounds overripe, it impressed David Bowie. He’d already seen Springsteen play a New York club. Now, in the first flush of fame, he recognized the Jersey kid as a contender. Perhaps Bowie liked the urban dread: “After I heard this track,” he said later, “I never rode the subway again….That really scared the living ones out of me.” I think there is an echo of it in Bowie’s apocalyptic Diamond Dogs. Bowie attempted “It’s Hard to Be a Saint” in 1974, while recording Young Americans in Philadelphia. And Springsteen dropped by the studio. The pair got along OK, but they were not soul mates. Besides, Bowie at that point was fundamentally off his cake. (Keepin’ it real, Bruce wore a dirty leather jacket and arrived by public transport. Bowie, on the other hand, wore a bright-red beret and yapped about UFOs.) The track was abandoned, then revived a year later when Bowie was making Station to Station. Once again it failed to make the cut and has only appeared, since then, as a bonus outtake on sundry CDs. (He also tried Springsteen’s “Growin’ Up,” and ditched that too.) From that point on their styles diverged entirely: Springsteen went from Byronic grease monkey to plain-speaking Everyman. Bowie’s next stop was austere European art-noise.
DAVID BOWIE: I was in Hong Kong on holiday with John Lennon in the late ’70s. We’d been drinking and we were trying to find a place to eat monkeys’ brains. We actually found a place, but fortunately it was closed. However, we saw the tables with the holes in them—they put the monkey through the hole, whip its skull off, and eat it like an egg. But we both lingered and a couple of guys recognized Lennon. They took him in a back room, and he came out and said, “God, I’m high as a kite.” They’d made him drink the blood of a snake. I guess it was a Triad thing, but it made him very stoned. Anyway, he went off and then came rushing down the road a few minutes later saying, “Open your mouth!” And he shoved this thing in my mouth—it was ghastly. I asked him what it was and he said, “Swallow it.” So I did. And he said, “That’s a thousand-day-old egg cooked in horse piss.” I said, “You bastard!” They cook it in horse urine, then cover it in layers of different kinds of manures, and bury it in the ground. I think they probably bury it only for a few days, but they call it a thousand-day-old egg. They dig it up again and then you eat it. It was horrible.
Most people think that Lennon was trapped in America during that time, but it’s not true. He used to carry a briefcase with just his wallet and a T-shirt in it, and he used to travel like that all the time. When he got to a new place and his T-shirt needed washing, he’d give it to the waiter or the bellboy. He’d sign it for them and then buy another one on the street. He’d get everything else from the hotel—a razor or whatever he needed. He would say, “That’s how you travel.” I suppose the period when he was going abroad a bit was when he had that strange thing going, when he wasn’t really with Yoko. But his son Sean was with him. He took a nanny with him as well, but John was with Sean an awful lot in Hong Kong—except we used to go out at night and get raving drunk. One time we ended up at a strip club where beers were served at a round table, with a naked girl sitting in the middle of it and spinning around slowly. John was getting quite verbose because he had really put away quite a few, and the owner of the club asked us to leave. So we were thrown out by these, presumably, lesser Triad members. We’re on the sidewalk, and John is frothing at the mouth and shouting, “Let us back in! We’ve paid our money, we want to come in and finish our drinks!” And they said, “No, you fuck off.” And he said, “Do you know who I am? I’m a fucking Beatle!” I said, “I don’t believe that. Say it again.” He said, “I’m a fucking Beatle. I’m a fucking Beatle!” and we started laughing. We were just on the floor, it was so funny. And then we went to a street market and they were selling Beatle jackets, and I got him to put one on. I took a little Polaroid. It’s so lovely. Just John and his Beatle jacket. “I’m a fucking Beatle!”
CARLOS ALOMAR: When we first went out on tour, I wasn’t just going on tour with David Bowie, I was going on tour with my wife, with my best friend, with my cousin who worked in the wardrobe department, with the people who were already in my band. I gave him my whole life and then we all went on tour. It was a lot of fun. I was twenty-two years old! He was breaking out into a whole different David. He’d finally kicked off Ziggy. He was finally breaking, he was doing “Young Americans,” he was on Soul Train, he was representing.
DAVID BOWIE: My Young American was plastic, deliberately so, and it worked in a way I hadn’t really expected, inasmuch that it really made me a star in America, which is the most ironic, ridiculous part of the equation. Because while my invention was more plastic than anyone else’s, it obviously had some resonance. Plastic soul for anyone who wants it. We really worked hard to make that record come alive.
Psychologically, this was the start of Bowie’s very worst period, a time when his cocaine psychosis affected everything he did. He never looked less than extraordinary, though. He was invited to the Academy Awards in 1975, and could not have looked more strange. He was wearing a huge Spanish black hat, a cape, and carrying a cane. His old friend Gus Dudgeon was there, the man who produced “Space Oddity,” and he couldn’t believe his eyes: “He looks fucking dramatic, like the ultimate gigolo. He’s surrounded by eight tons of charisma and everyone is gasping.” Dudgeon hadn’t seen him for six years, but when David sees him he walks over, the mask drops and he says, “God, bloody hell, how are you?” Gus says, “The Thin White Duke disappears and a completely different bloke appears. He gives us a hug and a kiss, sits and talks animated for fifteen minutes, and when he gets up to leave, on goes the hat, here comes the charisma and he’s immediately the Thin White Duke again. What a star!”
GLENN HUGHES: This was his dark year. Everyone in L.A. did coke at the time but he did more than most. He did more than anyone. It was the year that cocaine damn near killed him. And it was the year pretty much spent with me. I saw him go through so many paranoiac moments. My house was literally half a mile away from some of the Manson murders, and one night David came to me in the middle of the night and said, “Where are your guns and knives?” I wasn’t going to tell him where my guns were because they were really hidden, because when you’re doing that much cocaine, you become extremely paranoid. You think someone’s going to come and shoot you. It wasn’t my gun, it was left by one of my close friends whose dad was in the mafia, and I hid it. But David went into the kitchen and got all the sharp steak knives and the butcher knives, and he hid them. When I came down in the morning I said where are all the knives? And he said it’s just in case the Manson family—who by now were all in jail—came to get him. He was ninety-five pounds, and he was doing mass quantities of cocaine. I would say we were probably both doing seven grams a day each. And that is a lot of cocaine to snort. And we had an endless supply of cocaine. Knowing now what I know about cocaine, one of us should have died.
There was no security in the rooms with us. It was me, him, a keyboard, a book. He was making Station to Station, and he was writing the lyrics at my home. He wrote that album totally addicted. I was watching him going about the writing process. He was cutting and pasting his lyrics, he would write lyrics out and then cut the lines up and then jumble them up. Line one, two, three, four. He would have made line five, line two, and line seven, line three. That happened on two or three of his songs and it worked incredibly well. And he was drawing, with magic markers. He was about to start The Man Who Fell to Earth, and as he was getting into this role, he’s drawing stars falling from the sky and humans falling from the sky and I’m thinking, “Am I going crazy? Or am I going to sit back and watch the show?” So I did watch it but it did freak me out. At the time he thought he was possessed by the devil. But when you stay up for three days straight, you’re going to start seeing things. We stayed up almost four days without sleep. I had the intercom outside my house and I had it on twenty-four hours a day. One day it was pretty windy and he and I were sitting in the middle of my house and I could swear somebody was calling us. Or maybe he was hearing it. He was hearing “Glenn, Glenn” from this bloody speaker. He got me convinced that someone was outside calling us, and that’s when I got the gun out. I got the gun, and David said, “What the fuck is that?” and I go outside, it’s dawn, and the guy living above me was an elderly actor from the ’20s, and I’m thinking, he’s going to call the cops. He couldn’t see the gun as it was in my underpants. You gotta laugh, because David is in a kimono, I’m in my underpants. Now, the sun is coming up, and I’m on the roof, David’s freaking out. I could hear the police sirens coming up the hill, and I’m going, “Oh my fucking god.” We had been up for like eighty-four hours.
If you listen to “Station to Station,” and the line, “It’s not the side effects of the cocaine…” he was always talking about the side effects of the cocaine. Sometimes we would have limos and go downtown and hang out and we’d end up in some strange places, and feel weird after an hour and leave and end up going home. He talked and talked and talked. I never ever saw David sleep. Ever. I never saw David eat much; he just drank a lot of milk. And after spending some time at my house, he found a home in L.A. two miles from my house. He moved there and I would go over there and hang out with Corinne Schwab. Without Corinne, David would have not been alive in the last ten or twenty years. She warded off all the wrong people. And you know, David and I were toxic. Cocaine is the devil’s drug. There was a moment when we were getting high, and David started to bleed from his eye, actually bleeding. It was getting really bad, and then he went off to Mexico to shoot The Man Who Fell to Earth.
ALAN YENTOB: When he’s in the back of the limo in Cracked Actor he says this line that many people now know off by heart. In fact, I remember Kate Moss repeating it to me word for word. These were also the lines that appealed to Nic Roeg, who got in touch with me after the film was screened. Bowie is drinking from a carton of a milk, and when I ask him about being in America and soaking up all the idioms and culture there, he says, “There’s a fly floating around in my milk. There’s a foreign body in it, you see? And it’s getting a lot of milk. That’s kind of how I felt. A foreign body. And I couldn’t help but soak it up. I hated it when I first came here, I couldn’t see any of it. Look, there’s a wax museum! Fancy having a wax museum out in the middle of a bleeding desert. Think it would melt, wouldn’t you?” That was basically his screen test for The Man Who Fell to Earth. The notion of this Martian let loose in America is of course what Nic Roeg was thinking of as well. This enigmatic figure wearing a big hat in the back of a car is where he got that idea from. The Man Who Fell to Earth is almost a documentary. It was a big risk that Nic took, and he obviously needed to sell him to the studios, as no one had ever heard of him. He was an unknown, and certainly hadn’t acted before. But Nic liked the sense of isolation, the fragility and the way in which he was like a stranger in a strange land, and that all convinced him that he was the right person. It was a very intriguing film. Bowie was never an actor per se, but because he inhabited the role himself, it worked.
PAUL MAYERSBERG (SCRIPTWRITER): I had worked with Nic Roeg on a couple of scripts which didn’t get made, and The Man Who Fell to Earth was the third one. It was given to him by David Cammell, the brother of Donald, and had previously been optioned by a company called Canon. They were going to make a TV series like The Fugitive or The Invader, one of those things where he comes back every week. And in this series he was an alien from outer space, who turns up in America and every week nearly gets discovered and has to run away. But the series never got made and it got picked up by Columbia in Hollywood. After the success of Don’t Look Now, Nic was offered a three-picture deal at Columbia, and one of these films was The Man Who Fell to Earth. That’s how it started, and I wrote that with him in 1974/75. In my first draft I had used some lyrics from “Space Oddity,” “Changes,” and so forth, almost as an accompaniment to the script. The last scene had “Rocket Man” by Elton John, “Till touchdown brings me down.” So there was a pop aspect to it. In a way it was natural that Bowie got involved.
We wanted to cast someone who could conceivably not be of this Earth, who wasn’t a known actor, which is why we thought of Michael Crichton. He is very tall, almost seven foot, so he might have looked like someone from outer space. But I think that was a passing fancy, not a real casting idea. We had some trouble persuading people about Bowie. The producer Michael Deeley had some trouble with it because he doesn’t sing in the film. And also, how do we know he can act? In America, Columbia, who eventually passed on the film, couldn’t understand the script. Also, as Bowie didn’t sing and it wasn’t a musical, they thought, what’s the point? It wasn’t an expensive film, maybe one million, but even so, it was a question of what we could afford. We’d seen Cracked Actor, which alerted us to Bowie, but I wasn’t worried anyway—because a performer is a performer is a performer. That’s it. Anyway, it wasn’t my decision, but it never struck me as a worry in any way. David wasn’t a great actor; he was an extremely talented amateur. Film isn’t undermined by that, just look at Mick Jagger, and Nic was always very keen on using people who could perform, whether it was Mick in Performance or Art Garfunkel in Bad Timing.
The filming actually happened very quickly. After being stopped and stymied, it then gathered speed and the money came quite quickly. I made various changes to the script when we were in New Mexico, but I didn’t change one line for Bowie, not one word, and he didn’t change anything either. He never changed his movements, and was almost like an automaton. I think he was probably afraid to do anything differently. He improvised absolutely nothing. Would never think of it. There were scenes when he would do things three or four times exactly the same for retakes. He was quite remarkable in that way. He was very keen to put himself in Nic’s hands. He was having a lot of difficulty with MainMan at the time, and that was a real worry for him. So I think the film became a relaxation, and also I think he was pleased to be away from England. That’s the impression I got. He seemed to me to be in a transitional state, but then maybe David was always in a transitional state, I don’t know. He was away from home, and curiously was quite similar to the character in the film; in other words he’d come to a strange place.
In his music I liked the fact that he seemed happy with a state of unease. That was unusual. They were unresolved stories, and he didn’t seem to mind that. There was a search for something. And the sort of weird ecstatic calling, like a preacher or a bird. Looking for ecstasy, looking for something really wonderful. We first screened it, for friends, at British Lion, or maybe it was Shepperton, but it was not received with thrilling admiration, by any means. Even at the press screenings there was quite a lot of doubt about its ability to be successful. It opened the same week as The Slipper and the Rose, directed by Bryan Forbes, and that got the lead reviews everywhere. And in America it was a disaster, completely recut.
NIC ROEG (DIRECTOR): I saw Alan Yentob’s film Cracked Actor. Casting is strange. Usually an actor comes for a part but on other occasions the part seems to just go towards one actor. That was the case with David and The Man Who Fell to Earth. I went to see him in New York. Our appointment was for seven in the evening. He eventually turned up at four in the morning. We only talked for about fifteen minutes. He didn’t fuck around with compliments. He said, “I’ll be there.” I said, “You have to let me have more than that—for producers, for the studio.” He said, “I’ll be there.” Some people doubted him because he was from the music business, but he was very professional. Peculiarly prepared. He arrived on location in New Mexico two days before we needed him and he was always very pleasant to the cast and crew. But in the evening he always went off alone. What had appealed to me about him was that he never really consolidated a position where people could put him in a box. He couldn’t be pigeonholed. What I found difficult was that he was so hard to reach—not emotionally but on a purely physical level. There are barriers, a filter system, around every star, of course, but they seemed particularly strong around Bowie. I told him that it would take him a long time to get over the film. Originally he was going to do the soundtrack as well, but it proved too difficult. We all had pressures, deadlines. Eventually we brought in John Phillips to do the score. Then six months later David sent me a copy of Low with a note that said, “This is what I wanted to do for the soundtrack.” It would have been a wonderful score.
CANDY CLARK (ACTRESS): I was part of the casting process. Nic Roeg and I went over to [Bowie’s] house, a rental on Doheny Drive, and he was very agreeable, he wanted to do the film. It was a huge part, and who wouldn’t? He accepted it right there and then. He wanted to be in the film. I was pleased, as he certainly looked the part. So when I met him it wasn’t like I was a super fan, we were just going to make this movie. I wasn’t apprehensive about the movie, as I knew he could do it. He didn’t show any apprehension. He promised Nic Roeg he wasn’t going to do drugs on the movie, and he seemed sober to me. When you look at him in the movie, his eyes are soft, he’s paying attention, he can hear you. He wasn’t congested. He seemed like a man of his word. He wasn’t jittery like he was on some of those chat shows. He was always on time, always available to run lines, and I attribute that to being a musician and always rehearsing and playing the same songs. A lot of actors don’t enjoy the repetition of running lines, but he loved it. There was a lot of dialogue and it was good dialogue so you didn’t want to be winging it. He came to New Mexico with a trunk full of books—he really read a lot.
But then he had an entourage to keep him clean and pressed. He lived in a house, while the rest of us lived in a hotel. He had a few keepers, including a lady called Coco. I never got invited out to the house. Once shooting was finished, his driver Tony would take him home. After he was done for the day there seemed to be a veil of other people in the way. It was strictly a business relationship. He wasn’t the life of the party on the set. He was great in the role, and I could see it right in front of me. He could act. Very accomplished, full of empathy.
DAVID BOWIE: I’m surprised how good The Man Who Fell to Earth is still, it really stands up. Nic Roeg was a master, and I feel extraordinarily privileged that I got the role. It’s hazy, but I think he was about to cast Peter O’Toole, but then he saw me in the Omnibus documentary on the BBC [Cracked Actor] and obviously changed his mind. I think there was some sort of audition or meeting in New York, which I was probably late for. But he was very determined, very patient, and obviously a very good director, to be able to get that performance out of me.
CANDY CLARK: The Christmas after the movie came out, my doorbell rang at my little house in Los Angeles and David was at the door. There was a limousine waiting outside, and he had bought me a little rhinestone pin. It was so unexpected. How did he even get my address? In England they ran the director’s cut in the theaters, but in the US they got a commercials editor to take twenty-three minutes out of it so it didn’t make any sense and didn’t make any money. I was meant to go out and support it but I just couldn’t do it because the distributors had ruined it.
CHARLES SHAAR MURRAY: I saw him in L.A. once when he was recording Soul Train and the Cher show, and I’ve never met anyone who hated the city more. He was very open about his absolute loathing for Los Angeles. Also, Bowie was trying to manage himself at the time, but he wasn’t very good at it. While Jagger can spend the whole day negotiating with people, having people come up and ask for decisions, and then go on and do his show, David couldn’t do that. He didn’t delegate enough.
TRACEY EMIN: I once asked him what it was like making The Man Who Fell to Earth and it turned out he didn’t remember most of it. I quoted the line where he says to his driver, “Slow down, Arthur,” and he said there was a time when he had no recollection of saying it. At the time he was on uppers, downers, a concoction of drugs just to keep going. When I asked him if being “out of it” adds to the creative process—Van Gogh and absinthe, Victorian writers and opium, rock stars and cocaine—he said “having experienced drugs, the work is never the same again. Station to Station was a drug album. Low and Heroes were not. Never Let Me Down was. It’s all contradictory.”
DAVID BOWIE: I’ve never really thought about whether or not a person can be too thin. Well, I certainly was at one point, back in the ’70s, when I just ate peppers and drank milk. I have various photographs of me looking skeletal, which remind me how badly behaved I was back in the ’70s. They’re Polaroids as well, which makes it even worse because they’re badly lit. I occasionally look at them and think, “How did I ever get to that state? How did I ever survive it?” So yeah, you can be too thin! I know some of those outfits, and some of those characters were iconic, and I know the image was enhanced by my skeletal nature, but I wouldn’t recommend it as a process, I wouldn’t recommend it as a career template.
HARRY MASLIN: David was managed at this point by Michael Lippman, and one day I got a call from Michael saying that David would like me to work on the next album. I was surprised and happy and shocked and said sure.
I was still in New York at the time, so I flew out to California just to scout out studios, and wound up at Cherokee Recording Studios. Cherokee was a very new studio at the time. They hadn’t had any big hits to my knowledge, and were still trying to figure out who they were. But I chose it because it was quiet and because it was new. I felt we would get less paparazzi and less glamor from the media and I think I was right.
BRUCE ROBB (CHEROKEE STUDIOS): We had established ourselves as a studio out in the country, in Chatsworth, working with everyone from Little Richard to Steely Dan, and then we moved into Los Angeles, on Fairfax Avenue, to the old MGM studio. This was in 1974. One day in 1975 I was in one of the smaller studios and I get a call from the front desk. “David Bowie is here and he’d like to see Studio 1.” He walked around the studio, which was a big beautiful studio full of colored lights, and then walked over to the piano, played one note, and said, “So this is Cherokee. I’d like to do my record here.” And I thought, That was quick! You could tell that he was a serious musician, he was proper. You wouldn’t start an album with a song like “Station to Station” if you weren’t serious.
HARRY MASLIN: So after selecting Cherokee, we planned some instrumental rehearsal time, and David and I ran through the tracks just to get the basics down, just getting the feels together. Most of the lyrics hadn’t been written yet. Some of the music hadn’t been written yet either. It was kind of expected that David would come through by the time we got in the recording studio. Which he did. He was famous for going into the corner or going into the men’s room and writing some lyrics, which is what he did on “Golden Years.” He literally went to the bathroom and came back with the lyric, went to the mike, and did the song in one take. I was blown away. He told me that he didn’t consider himself to be a vocalist, but I told him that that was one of the most amazing performances I had ever seen.
CARLOS ALOMAR: There are not that many songs on Station to Station, and the intro to “Station to Station” itself is over three minutes long. We mashed all these songs together. It’s not really a rock and roll record. “Golden Years” was kind of David’s version of “On Broadway,” but I told him he had to be careful, so I came up with a new riff for it. Earl Slick and I work in different ways, and while I would record something and just put a holding part in, he would then come in and make it all his own. My line was the inspirational line, his was the real line. His sound was very close to Mick Ronson, which David loved, and he was able to create a link. Sure, “Station to Station” and “Stay” are experimental records, but the rest of the album is medium poppy. David was on it. If you need to have fifteen cups of coffee, or whether you want to buzz around on coke, people do what they have to do. I do not condone being so out of it that you don’t remember anything, but the fact that you are able to rise to the challenge at the moment, that’s the challenge.
BRUCE ROBB: He was partying, having fun, but then during that period everybody was doing coke. It was unbelievable. He wasn’t close to the worst of the lot. I mean, I worked with Harry Nilsson for thirteen months, and that was tough. He was just doing what everybody else was doing. He was such a gentleman. He’d even pick up the trash after his sessions, which I’ve never seen another artist do, especially one of David Bowie’s stature. He would say it was his session so he should clear it up. He’d send Christmas cards every year, which looked like he’d made them himself.
HARRY MASLIN: He was doing a lot of drugs at that time. As he said himself, he was very much dependent on cocaine at the time. And at times, it was difficult to deal with it. Not that he lost his charm or his ability to be gracious or polite, but being so out there on another planet sometimes, it was a job to bring him back down. It was also my job to keep up with him, so I’m in a very precarious situation here; I’ve got to do a little cocaine just to stay up with him. If you’re working with somebody who wants to work eighteen hours a day, there’s not much else you can do other than caffeine pills to keep yourself up. David was in a situation at that time because of who he was; he didn’t have to seek the drugs, he would have people who would come over and want to be part of the crew. Some of whom were doctors or dentists. And he would be supplied lots of pharmaceutical cocaine: pure, crystal, in a bottle, sealed. Which probably was the best thing he could be doing if he was going to do cocaine. At least he knew that it wasn’t cut with anything that was dangerous. And I felt the same way about that.
On the other hand, it was so readily available that he overindulged. And there would be times where he would not show up, and I would get very irritated. Mostly because it was my responsibility to [control] the budget. So if I had a studio that I was paying maybe a couple grand a day for, and my artist didn’t show up, it went against me. So I had talks with David about being responsible and showing up. There was one time where he didn’t show up for about a day and a half, and I actually went up to Stone Canyon and started banging on the door. I was worried about him too and wanted to wake him up and make sure he was OK. He opened the door and he was a little out of it and tired more than anything else. I said this can’t go on. I can’t be responsible for this situation. And of course David being David, we agreed, but while it carried on to a certain extent, I don’t think I ever had to go up to the house again. There remained times in the studio however where he’d be so out he’d be seeing colors and talking about his son and how his son also sees colors and talks in colors and he was just really out there. He was very frail, he had been up for a couple days, Angie was in the outer studio, and I remember going up to her and saying, “You have to get him out of here. He is completely dependent, he is somebody else, he is so out [of it].” I was very worried that we might lose him, to be completely honest with you. I certainly didn’t want to be the one that was responsible or held responsible for the situation, and I was a little forceful with Angie because she was basically scared of him. Angie didn’t know how to handle him either. I forced her to take him out of the studio, and they called a car and got him out.
CARLOS ALOMAR: A man is the architect of his own design and the architect of his own demise. What I did know was that he rose to the challenge regardless of what state he was in and for that you have to respect the man. Many situations that we deal with allow us to see, like a Billie Holiday situation—we know you’re on drugs, but damn can you play! Miles Davis—dabble if you want to, but damn can you play! I’ve noticed in my history [of] R&B and jazz, and the other things I grew up with, you could see anything from a junkie to a pimp to anything. It didn’t really surprise me. I wasn’t there to judge him; I was there to support him. And as long as I supported him, as long as he didn’t fall, he was handling it and anything I could do to help him, that’s what I was there for. I remember a lot of it was basically, “Do you ever eat? I’d go to his room and see a lot of food but I’d also see a lot of uneaten food. Many times he’d say, “Don’t ask me, Carlos, I don’t remember anything.”
BRUCE ROBB: The sessions went so smoothly and so quickly. It was a very friendly studio, and people used to walk in and out of the rooms; Jeff Beck would come in and do a solo, Bonnie Raitt would be sitting out on the back stairs because nobody would hire her. A while after Bowie started, Sinatra’s people came in and said that Frank was going to come in and record, as the arranger Don Costa had originally used one of the studios as Frank’s strings room. Don said he was going to bring Frank in, but that we weren’t to talk to him, and that we had to call him Mr. Sinatra and don’t ask him to do a mike check.
Sinatra had a reputation but I think he just liked to fuck with people, he liked to fuck with what he called the establishment. When he was amongst other musicians he was a musician. A singer. And there were so many similarities between him and David. They were inquisitive about one another, and they were intrigued. One night Sinatra said, “You’ve got this Bowie guy in here. How is he?” And we told him he was really good. Then Bowie would say, “Oh my God, Sinatra’s here. I’d love to meet him.” So we set up a dinner with the two of them. Sinatra had an Italian restaurant he liked up near Robertson and Beverly, so we booked them a table there. They came back to the studio in Sinatra’s limo and at that point it was pretty obvious that they were becoming fast friends. There was a good deal of respect. Sinatra expected that kind of respect, because he was one of our first musical superstars. He didn’t know who David was, but after meeting him, they got on. They visited each other’s sessions. He heard some of the Station to Station playbacks, and he liked Bowie’s version of the Dimitri Tiomkin and Ned Washington song “Wild Is the Wind.” David even sang a harmony part on one of Sinatra’s songs. It was a Christmas album. So it went on that way and they became kindred spirits. Way apart in years, but that hardly mattered.
HARRY MASLIN: The best thing about working with David for me, apart from all the negative stuff with the cocaine, was that David was a true artist. He would be willing to try anything. Many artists you have to convince to try a particular part, a part on the piano, a string part, a vocal part, whatever. David would try anything without question. He would not necessarily approve of everything or like everything but he would give it a go. In fact at the beginning of “Golden Years” there’s this harmonium thing that starts off with just three notes. And he played it and played it out of time. And he said, “Oh, should I do that again?” And I said no. It’s perfectly out of time. I told him to trust me on this one. And we left it like it is and to this day it’s one of my favorite things.
EARL SLICK: Station to Station is undoubtedly his best record. There were very few of us in the studio. There was me, David, Carlos, George Murray, Dennis Davis, and I brought in Roy Bittan, who happened to be staying in the same hotel as me, and who was playing with Bruce [Springsteen] at the time. For some reason Michael Garson was out of the picture at the time. On that record I spent a lot of time with David. We were really out of it, but for some reason communicating really well, probably because we were both in exactly the same mind space. He was able to drag some stuff out of me. He was in a worse state than he was on the Diamond Dogs tour, and I don’t know how he was functioning, but he was. I don’t know how any of us were. Maybe it’s because we were in our twenties, I don’t know. Don’t try this at home, kids, but I think had we not been in that state of mind, that record would have never sounded like that. Staying up for two days at a time, and half out of our minds, just loosened us up to the point that we would do or try anything. We were focused as shit. I love that record. There were things that I could do that I didn’t know I could do that David knew I could do, and he figured out how to drag that out of me. It took over two months to record, which was a long time in those days. And then I quit.
HARRY MASLIN: Station to Station was a big “mix” album. After we got the basic tracks it was up to me to put the thing together. A song like “TVC15” was recorded in many sections, and so after the recording he basically wiped his hands of the album and started painting up in the hills in his house, and sent me back to New York to mix the album.
I brought it back for David to approve, and I went up to the house, and he was actually painting whilst we listened to the final mix. When I asked him what he thought, he just said, “Good job! You did great.” Jumping back a little bit, we had all the guys from RCA come down to Cherokee to hear the album for the first time and it was quite an experience because they were all basically suits at the time, I knew they weren’t going to understand what they were going to hear. Because it was quite different from Young Americans, and it was quite different from what had gone before. And they sat on this couch in front of the console, said “That’s just marvelous.” They didn’t know what else to say. They knew that “Golden Years” was a potential single, but I don’t think they understood or appreciated anything else.
At the time we were making Station to Station I was living at the Hyatt House on Sunset, or the Riot House as it became known, the rock and roll hotel. I had one groupie come to my room one day, and she just knocked on the door, and when I opened it she said, “Are you anybody?” And I said, “Well, I think I’m somebody, but maybe not the person you’re looking for.” That was the sign of a true groupie hotel. But as I said, I had to go back to New York at the end of the album and do the mixing at the Hit Factory. I was actually a bit shocked at the time, as I recall it, David didn’t want to be involved at all. Because with Young Americans when we mixed it, David literally had his hands on the console, I had to slap his hands a couple of time and be like, “Get off the console, David!” When you listen to “Fame” and you hear the reverb go up on it in different places, that’s David cranking it up. And I’m like, “Get away from that!”
When David wasn’t there I did a little bit of everything. Working with Slick or working with Carlos or doing the percussion stuff that I wanted to do. But David was involved pretty much on a daily basis. It was rare that he wasn’t there. We worked together in collaboration. “TVC15” has the both of us playing saxophone on it; he played tenor and I played baritone.
BRUCE ROBB: David was after feel, and sometimes he would spend a whole day doing finger snaps, just to get what he wanted. Dressed in his linen shirts and his baggy pants. Sometimes it happened quickly, and sometimes it took a while, but it was all about feel. He could hear what wasn’t there.
HARRY MASLIN: It’s such a diverse record. With “Wild is the Wind,” for me that really did come out of complete nowhere. I was surprised rather than shocked that he wanted to do it, so I was like, Let’s do it! And actually that is one song which I did do a technical fuck-up when I had some of his vocal leaking into the main acoustic guitar track, which is a real no-no. But when I put it together for the mix, it actually added to his vocal sound, and I thought, You know what, I’m not gonna fix any of this because it sounds really cool. So I just left it as it is and people loved the sound of it and I was quite pleased that they did. There were times though when he was doing so much cocaine that he would come into the control room, and he’d have a bottle of pharmaceutical coke with him, and he’d pour out a pile, on my side of the console, then he would pour out a pile on his side of the console, then he would go out to the piano and pour out a pile, then he would go to the music stand where the vocal mike was hanging and pour out a pile, so he never had to move to take another bump or another hit of cocaine. And we’re talking piles, we’re not talking lines. And again I was very, very careful not to do what he was doing because I had to be in charge. The only time I would do some was when I had to literally keep up with him in the sense that I didn’t want to go to sleep. That’s how crazy it was. But we made a great, great record, and one that I am enormously proud of.
Musically, David allowed me a lot of freedom. As an example, I wanted to put some percussion on one or two of the songs. Well in those days, the electronic drum machines were very new and very limited as to what they could do. The main drum machine had a mono output, which to me was very limiting. It meant I would have to do twelve takes if I wanted to do a part. So I took the thing into the shop and I ripped it apart, and I made it into a multiple-output machine, and we did all this percussion stuff and David was cheering me on about it and saying it was great. At the beginning of the song “Station to Station” there is a lot of Earl Slick feedback, and Slick was out there with the amps and the guitar, and David was out there with him, and I was egging David on, and David was egging Slick on, and we got what we were looking for. Slick was looking at both of us like we were out of our minds. But Slick is a very underrated guitar player, he’s very creative and he would do whatever we wanted to do, but in that instance he probably just thought we were crazy.
I really don’t remember ever thinking, We have to make this album a particular way, and that’s why the songs are so different. We didn’t try and keep consistency. Young Americans demanded consistency, and it had a very R&B feel and we wanted to maintain that throughout with the mixing and whatever else we did. But with Station to Station he was open to suggestion and experimentation. I think that’s how we approached it, musically. David would play a feel that he had, and they’d run through it, and Carlos would help and everyone would contribute, which is how it would usually work. And I would oversee the whole thing, and give any suggestions about the feel and whatever. But nothing was honed to perfection in SRI, it was all honed to perfection in Cherokee.
I thought David was an extremely complicated person. Usually, people in the arts are either visual or aural, and David was both. He saw things differently from most people. Obviously one can see that from the personas he had at the beginning of his career. And we dealt with that in the studio. That duality of visual and aural, I think you can see it in something like “TVC15” for instance, and even “Station to Station,” where he wanted the train sound at the beginning. He said, “Wouldn’t it be great if it moved?” That to me is all visual. Even the feedback to me is more visual than it is aural. He’s seeing that sound. It may sound crazy but I truly believe he’s seeing the sound.
I can’t speak for the other people, but with me, he was always extremely open. I mean, I’m not somebody who sits back and doesn’t put my input. I suggest constantly whether it’s technically or musically, as I grew up being a musician and a technical person simultaneously. And that’s why I think we came out with a unique album. It was a collaboration. And that interchange between energies and imagination was wonderful.
NICK KENT: Bowie was red hot up until Station to Station, and then he became white hot. It’s his most fucked-up record in terms of his personal lifestyle, but it’s fantastic.
When Elvis Presley died in August 1977, Bowie briefly considered recording a tribute album, arranging classic Elvis songs for Iggy Pop to sing. He had been a fan all his life. Bowie’s first performance, aged eleven, was an Elvis impersonation for an audience of Boy Scouts in Bromley. Years later, he would paint Elvis’s TCB (“Takin’ care of business”) lightning bolt logo onto his face on the cover of Aladdin Sane. His Ziggy Stardust concerts usually closed with the melodramatic “Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide,” which Bowie sang wearing an Elvis-style jumpsuit—copied by Bowie’s designer friend Freddie Burretti from one of the King’s—before departing the stage. This was immediately followed by the announcement, “David Bowie has left the building.”
A year earlier, Bowie had even tried to get Elvis to record “Golden Years,” only to have it turned down. Bowie was so keen for Elvis to record the song he even sang a little like him on the verses, pitching his voice as close to the King’s as he could (“channeling the spirit”). For Bowie, Elvis was the consummate blueprint. Bowie himself has said that his debut album “seemed to have its roots all over the place, in rock and vaudeville and music hall. I didn’t know if I was Max Miller or Elvis Presley.”
When he was quizzed back in 1972 about the number of glitter-eyed young boys who were seen at T. Rex concerts dancing with each other in the aisles, Bowie said, “What about Elvis Presley? If his image wasn’t bisexual then I don’t know what is. People talk about fag rock, but that’s an unwieldy term at the best of times.”
HANIF KUREISHI: He said that during his cocaine period in L.A. he nearly died several times. Your blood pressure drops terribly. Once he overdosed and only survived because someone put him in a warm bath.
GEOFF MACCORMACK: L.A. at that point was a strange place, especially when you think to walk anywhere was considered weird at that time. The first thing that happened when you met someone was not a handshake but a spoon in your nose; it was a very different place. The situation was unreal so our existence was unreal. I think David actually wanted to experiment, he wanted to be weird. I don’t think it was a suicide run, he just wanted to see what it was like. He was a bit of a playactor, and used to do things for effect, that was part of him. One night in his house on Doheny Drive we were both pretty wired, and we came up with this game where we had to list three objects that weren’t in the house, a kind of extrasensory perception test using me as the medium. I came up with a list: pyramid, windows, children. Then we went through the house looking for them, and obviously couldn’t find anything. In the last drawer we looked in was an old Christmas card in the shape of a pyramid covered with little windows and the faces of some children. Weird, really weird.
That night we were listening to a DJ on the radio called the Shadow, who was playing the Goons and Monty Python records and talking about Shakespeare’s birthday. So we found a book on quantum mechanics or something, and re-covered it and called it The Complete Works of Shakespeare. We drove down to the studio to give him the book, at around five thirty in the morning, when there was nobody up but Mexican gardeners, and as we got out of the car, the DJ was playing “Young Americans.” He couldn’t believe it. We gave him the book and it freaked him out. He went back on the radio to say, “You will not believe this. Ladies and gentlemen, David Bowie has just walked into my studio and given me a book on William Shakespeare…” And of course no one believed him. That’s the kind of thing we did. That was our own black magic. He looked his absolute best when he was taking too many drugs, but he was still taking too many drugs.
GLENN HUGHES: At the time he fired Tony Defries, Tony was still hanging around and David was freaking out paranoid. In the spring of 1975 I get a call from David, and he said, “Glenn, I gotta escape my manager, Defries, I got to get away from him. I’m going to come to you on the train.” Not only did David never travel on planes, but he never got in elevators. He hated tall buildings and had terrible vertigo. I once got him to come with me to the Rainbow Room in New York to go to a party and he was scared to death because it was on the nineteenth floor. So he wanted to change his management but he didn’t know how to do it. He came to me because he was looking for shelter, someone trustworthy. He knew that I was loyal.
Sex was his great escape. I know that he had sex with as many women as I’ve known. It was nonstop. Probably in the thousands. There was every color: Japanese, Chinese, Americans, black girls, Greeks, girls, girls, girls. There were girls going in and out all the time. Dozens of them. I saw a lot of gay guys hitting on him too. I think behind closed doors he was pretty fucking wild. He was sexually draining. There were so many girls coming and going one by one, nonstop. He was almost like a vampire looking for…not blood but sex. I think he had a sex problem, and he may have had a disease caused by cocaine addiction that was turning into a sex problem. The amount of sex he had increased in accordance with his cocaine addiction. I knew the girls he was having sex with. In hindsight I think he would have liked me to have been involved. I mean he loved me. He genuinely loved me. I’m not saying he wanted to be with me, but I know that he loved me and he held my hand…we were very close. We were very sensual guys. I’m not bi, I’m not gay, but we would walk around kissing and holding hands. He would call me “Old Bighead.” I have a very big feminine side, and that’s what Bowie loved. He threw away all of my bellbottoms, all of my high-heeled shoes, all of my rock-star clothes. He cut my hair. He said, “This has got to stop, you have to change, you can’t follow what everybody else is doing.” In 1974 I looked like a girl, with long hair. He had no problem walking around in the nude in front of me. Oh, I was so damn naïve! David and I fell in love because of music but then we found out we were both addicted. It was Romeo and Juliet. We were dying. It was amorous. I loved him, not sexually, but I adored him.
NICK KENT: There was a ritual when Bowie took cocaine, as he liked to use the cover of the first Average White Band album, which was completely white. He would snort the coke from this cover. This would be how the evening would progress.
GLENN HUGHES: Oh my, the orgies. Back in London I had two rooms at the Hyde Park Hotel. I had a room with Angie there, and I also had a room with David. Bowie had a mansion on the heath, I stayed there too. So one of the nights I decide to leave Bowie at the house and go and stay with Angie instead. I have a key to the room and I go inside and I kid you not, there were at least seven or eight couples, going at it. All having sex. And Angie wants me to come in and join them. And this is the only time she really tried to get me involved with others. Now I wasn’t angry, I kind of felt hurt in a way. She wasn’t my girl, she wasn’t mine, but I felt hurt. It wasn’t just a ménage a trois, it was like a fucking gang bang for god’s sake. They were all fucking going at it. I couldn’t stay in that suite, not with that going on.
HARVEY GOLDSMITH: He was quiet, considered, and didn’t have any airs and graces. There was never any fuss, that’s just how he was. Even when he was strung out he was polite. But then he was shielded from a lot. Coco was always very protective of him, and he relied on her for everything. Before Iman she was his rock, although she could go over the top sometimes. I remember backstage at the Empire Pool gigs in 1976, everyone came to see him—Eric Clapton, Mick Jagger, Pete Townshend, George Harrison—but Coco had given instructions that no one was allowed to go backstage, and so nobody was. I went backstage after the gig, and the corridor outside his room was like a morgue. He asked me if there was anyone in the audience that he knew, as he was surprised that nobody had come back to say hello, and I told him that the biggest stars in the world had dutifully lined up to pay homage, but that they weren’t allowed to see him. He went ballistic.
HUGH PADGHAM (PRODUCER): Coco used to tell us stories of David’s bad coke years in L.A., when she used to go round to check on him, and he would be lying on the floor. She would get the coke mirror and hold it up to his nose to see if he was still breathing. I think David was the love of Coco’s life and she never got over it. She was resigned to the fact that she could be with him, but only as a PA. There were times when she seemed like a bit of a Yoko, a bit of a pain, but I remember her quite fondly.
CHARLES SHAAR MURRAY: One day in 1976 Bowie’s mother called the NME and said she wanted to speak to someone. Now, I would never ever have thought of originating something like that, we didn’t call her, she simply called the paper and said she wanted to talk to somebody about her son, said she had some things she wanted to get off her chest, wanted to get a message out to David’s fans, blah, blah, blah. I told Nick Logan and said I felt a bit weird about it but he said I had to go down and see her. She still lived in Bromley I think. She didn’t really have anything to say other than that she felt lonely and neglected by her son. I sort of felt I’d been suckered into it. I didn’t want to write it up but Nick insisted. We used this satirical headline, “A Mother’s Anguish,” which of course everybody took totally seriously. David was a bit pissed off but I think he eventually forgave me. You expect to be manipulated by people in the industry, but not by somebody’s mother.