David Bowie: Man of a Thousand Phases
By Steven P. Wheeler
Today, June 11, marks the 50th anniversary of the release of the late David Bowie’s 1969 hit, “Space Oddity.” To celebrate, I’ve gone back through the tapes of my 1995 interview with the rock legend. Hope you enjoy this refreshed take on this special man (see “class act, gentleman”), who is still missed three years after his untimely death.
IF ever there was a rock star who epitomized the life of a musical chameleon, it would be David Bowie—not only in his art, but in his look and attitude. I had the pleasure of sitting down and speaking with Bowie, who was at the S.I.R. Rehearsal Studios in New York rehearsing his new band in preparation for his upcoming concert tour behind his just released Outside album.
Unlike his previous rock star roles, with Outside, Bowie took on not one, but seven new characters in this strange musical drama that documents the diaries of fictional detective Nathan Adler during his investigation of ritual art murders. At the time, Bowie spoke of possibly bringing this to a full stage production, which he described as “Nicholas Nickleby on acid,” however this idea was ultimately never to come to fruition.
As questionable as Outside was as a commercial venture, you would expect nothing less from a rock legend who in the past had duetted with a bizarre blend of performers, including Mick Jagger, Freddie Mercury and… Bing Crosby?
Throughout his 50-year career, Bowie shed his various personas like a snake abandons its skin, never content to expand on successful characters, instead choosing to move in entirely different directions at the height of his various stages of popularity—and doing it more often than lesser artists would dare.
From his early days as Davy Jones in the mid-Sixties (he would adopt the name Bowie when another “Davey” Jones gained stardom with the American TV group The Monkees) and his self-titled stage name debut in ’67 to his glitter-glam era as Ziggy Stardust in the early Seventies—Bowie mastered the value of shock-rock by playing up social taboos.
For example, in 1971, he made news during his first visit to the States after wearing dresses in public appearances, and then admitting his bisexuality a year later. Bowie actually posed in a dress for his now-landmark album The Man Who Sold the World, although his American record label nixed the dress pic and replaced it with a cartoon of a cowboy in front of an insane asylum.
Since that time, Bowie has been married a couple of times, including his final marriage to supermodel Iman, leading many to wonder over the years if he was merely using the earlier bisexuality angle for promotional purposes.
“It wasn’t a shock value thing,” Bowie told me. “It was just the way I was at that age. Frankly, I don’t think there was anyone else around working so provocatively at that particular time, but [bisexuality] was a taboo subject, and I felt that it was something that probably needed to be brought out.”
Unlike the commercial consequences that happened to Elton John’s career following his own bisexuality admission in 1976, Bowie’s commercial fortunes continued to soar, reaching new heights with The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars (#75), Aladdin Sane (#17), the Orwellian-influenced Diamond Dogs (#5) and the R&B-flavored sound of Young Americans (#9), featuring the chart-topping ode to hedonism “Fame,” co-written with former Beatle John Lennon, which perfectly encapsulated the excesses of the Seventies rock lifestyle.
During his brief stint as the Thin White Duke—a period which included his highest charting album, Station To Station—Bowie’s life in the fast lane was fueled by cocaine. He finally left the Tinsel Town in 1976 after being quoted at the time as saying that Los Angeles should be “wiped off the face of the earth.”
When we talked about this period of time, Bowie said that it was the hedonistic lifestyle, more than his often schizophrenic role-playing that led to his exodus and a new phase in his roller-coaster career. “I think my own personal life put me in some fairly chaotic and dangerous states in the Seventies,” he said. “But I had pretty much gotten out of playing characters in ’76, which is when I moved back to Europe—to West Berlin—and started to work with [producer/Roxy Music alumnus] Brian Eno. By that time, I was trying to approach things from a very different standpoint.”
The change was significant. Bowie and Eno would incorporate the European techno sound in a trilogy of albums—Low, Heroes and Lodger—three of the most influential albums of his storied career, whose impact on a new generation of musicians is perhaps even stronger today than it was at the time of their release.
Role-Playing & Artistic Freedom
Bowie’s penchant for role-playing remains unparalleled in rock history, but the ever-changing rock star says this was the only way to guarantee him artistic freedom: “As an artist, I was never interested in developing and having a continuum in style. For me, style was just something to use. It didn’t matter to me if it was hard rock or punk or whatever, it was whether or not it suited what I was trying to say at a particular point in time.
“It has always been essential to me that my public perception was such that I’d be left free to kind of float from one thing to another. That’s just how I work. I’m not a guy who learns a craft and then refines that craft over 25 or 30 years. I’m not that kind of artist. Maybe it sounds pretentious, but I feel that I’m much more of a post-modernist than that.”
(interview by Steven P. Wheeler)
Of course, the other side of the music “business” is occupied by those suit-and-tie folks wanting to maintain a successful formula, something that Bowie has had to battle throughout his storied career: “It’s extremely hard to have somebody from a record company continually coming into the sessions and meddling about. I really can’t work under those circumstances,” he says, before adding with a hearty laugh, “That’s generally what leads to my breakdowns: record companies.”
Film vs. Music
In addition to his recording career, Bowie was also one of the first rock stars to dabble seriously in film. His fascination began in 1969 with a 30-minute promotional film, including the then-yet-to-be-released single, “Space Oddity,” with its lyrical tale of a man detached from society, desperately trying to get in touch with those who control his destiny. It was pure Bowie, and it set the stage for the otherworldly image that would dominate his early career.
During the late Seventies and early Eighties, Bowie took his film desires to a new level, bringing his knack for characterization to the Silver Screen and receiving positive reviews for his performances in such films as The Man Who Fell To Earth, Just A Gigolo and The Hunger, as well as taking over the lead role in the stage version of The Elephant Man, where he would gain critical acclaim while breaking box-office records. Bowie also played Andy Warhol in 1996’s Basquiat, a film starring Gary Oldman, Christopher Walken and Dennis Hopper.
But the renaissance man notes that he was never in danger of actively pursuing the thespian life: “No, I never thought about giving up music for acting,” he said. “Acting is not on my list of priorities. It’s actually extremely boring. I can’t understand how actors can do it; it’s so vegetating.”
As for his role as the iconic Warhol in Basquiat, Bowie did meet the real Andy, but there wasn’t much there for him in terms of researching the character: “I met him five or six times, but I can’t say that I knew him. It was more like [imitates Warhol’s whispery voice], ‘hi…..great,’ and that was kind of the depth of our dialogue over the years [laughs]. But I kind of got a vibe of what he looked like and how he sounded and that sort of thing.”
Still, many felt his film and stage career had been to the detriment of his recording career, although 1980’s Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps) would help re-establish Bowie on the American charts.
New Highs & New Lows
In 1981, Bowie teamed up with Queen to score a hit with “Under Pressure,” but the best was yet to come. In 1983, with a new label in tow, EMI America, he released his commercial blockbuster, Let’s Dance. Its three hit singles—the #1 title track, “China Girl” and “Modern Love”—solidified the return of one of rock’s most flamboyant personalities, proving that he had not forgotten how to make great accessible music.
The subsequent Serious Moonlight Tour would be Bowie’s biggest and most successful of his career to that point. Incidentally, a remastered two-CD recording from the tour, featuring 21 tracks, was finally released just this past February.
The follow-up, Tonight (featuring the Top Ten hit “Blue Jean”), kept Bowie alive on the charts, as did his Top Ten duet with Mick Jagger on their revival of the Martha & the Vandellas classic “Dancing In The Streets,” which they recorded for the famed Live Aid concerts in 1985.
However by the late Eighties, Bowie’s career took a commercial dip, and his 1987 release, Never Let Me Down, became his lowest charting album in a decade.
Ironically, critics and fans alike seemed surprised—strange as it may seem considering this musical Lon Chaney’s bizarre past and multi-faceted career. Such changes would seem expected from a man who discovered stardom by following his artistic instincts rather than trendy mass mentalities that drive most rock stars.
Tin Machine Project
But no one, least of all his label, EMI America, could have expected what came next. The ill-fated Tin Machine project surely had EMI executives biting their tongues and scratching their heads as Bowie approached them with tales of his new band—one in which he was merely a member and no longer the star.
EMI released the band’s self-titled debut in 1989, and it proved to be a major commercial disappointment. Bowie left EMI for the greener pastures of fledgling label Victory Music, which released the band’s equally unsuccessful sophomore effort.
With his solo career in limbo and his last two projects having bombed, Bowie—who had previously been able to hit paydirt throughout a majority of his various incarnations—had finally raised questions within the industry as to whether or not he still had what it took to capture the public imagination in America.
“The Tin Machine project more or less broke down any context about who the hell I was or what I was doing and kind of left everybody wondering, ‘What the fuck is he? Wasn’t he the bloke in a suit in 1983 [laughs]?’”
(interview by Steven P. Wheeler)
For the man himself, he noted that it was just another necessary move to find a new muse: “For me, when Reeves Gabrels and I started Tin Machine, it was a very freeing process. The Tin Machine project more or less broke down any context about who the hell I was or what I was doing and kind of left everybody wondering, ‘What the fuck is he? Wasn’t he the bloke in a suit in 1983 [laughs]?’ It was just a great way to move forward and get back the excitement that I was missing within my own writing in the mid-Eighties.”
1993’s Black Tie, White Noise didn’t change anyone’s mind either. Bowie, having left Tin Machine behind, signed a solo deal with a new label, Savage, then watched as the new album sank without a trace in the U.S. (although it reportedly sold more than a million copies internationally). Savage eventually closed its doors, almost at the time of the album’s stateside release.
Was it fate or was David Bowie’s career in the U.S. just snakebitten?
Whatever the reason for the U.S. failure of Black Tie, White Noise, one would expect this to be the time for Bowie to return to the mainstream, to recapture the glory days of the Seventies or even the commercial blockbuster era of the early Eighties.
The Eno Reunion
So what does the former Mr. Stardust decide to do?
He reunites with the most eccentric of his former collaborators, Brian Eno (their first reunion since 1979’s Lodger) and Tin Machine guitarist Reeves Gabrels, and releases Outside. And if you were expecting a return to the pop sounds of Let’s Dance, you would have had to raid the classics already housed in your CD collection, as there was no joyful pop to be found.
This musical reunion came about in the strangest of ways, as then-groom David Bowie laughingly recalls: “We had hardly been in touch throughout the Eighties, but I invited him to my wedding in 1992, and he came with his wife, and we spent most of our time at the party afterwards talking about what we were both doing musically.”
The two men soon took over the DJ booth as well, probably to the chagrin of his new bride: “We were going back and forth to the DJ putting on different tracks that we were both writing [laughs]. It almost became a listening session, with people dancing until the record was taken off, and then another one would go on.
“But from that meeting, we determined that we both still had very similar musical ideas, so it was obvious by the end of that day, that it was time for us to start working together again—although it wasn’t until February or March of ’94 that we actually entered the studio.”
Is this any way to re-capture old fans and win new ones?
The answer to that question was what Bowie had always done. Challenge old and new fans alike, even bringing in Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor to remix the album’s first single, “The Hearts Filthy Lesson,” which put him back on the American Singles Charts after a long stateside drought, while continuing his British success.
Europe vs. America
As for the different successes in his two homelands, Bowie said: “I’ve always been aware that in Europe I’ve carried a certain amount of weight and I kind of know what my contribution to European music has been over the last 25 years. But in America, I’ve never really been sure. It’s always been fairly ephemeral. I sort of come over and do a tour and go away again. You never hear people say, ‘Oh yeah, Springsteen, Pearl Jam and David Bowie’ [laughs]
“You don’t think of me and American music. It’s only since the late Eighties that a new generation of bands has seemed to hone in on a lot of what I was doing—things as varied as the Scary Monsters album to the Aladdin Sane and Diamond Dogs stuff, and the trilogy I did with Eno.”
(interview by Steven P. Wheeler)
Across the pond, he senses more artistic freedom for artists in general, pointing to some of the artists who were making noise in the Nineties. “In Europe, it has really become a stylistic free-for-all,” he says, “which I find incredibly exciting, especially with bands like Portishead and Tricky and PJ Harvey—artists who move around virtually anywhere they want. It feels like they’re my children [laughs].”
Additionally, Bowie’s continued influence over bands in the States cannot be overstated and he is quick to note how much he was not only surprised but incredibly grateful. “Starting with bands like the Pixies and moving through bands like Stone Temple Pilots and Smashing Pumpkins, I started reading a lot of interviews with these bands that were sent to me by my PR firm, and these bands were citing me and my music as being an influence on what they were doing.
“Then the Nirvana thing happened where they covered ‘The Man Who Sold The World’, and then I read a piece on Nine Inch Nails, where Trent was saying that my album, Low, was sort of his morning listening before he went into the studio when he was recording The Downward Spiral. I must admit that my ego was massaged like you wouldn’t believe.”
The Burroughs’ Effect
Probably no other literary figure in history has influenced as many rock musicians as one William Burroughs, and no artist as much as Bowie. One of the primary central figures of the Beat Generation, the influential author of the 1959 novel, Naked Lunch, had a profound impact on Bowie, especially in his bizarre lyric-writing method which he never stopped utilizing.
“As a lyricist, I chop up all my ideas in the typical William Burroughs way that I’ve been utilizing since the Seventies,” Bowie explained. “I guess I used this process for the first time on [the 1974 album] Diamond Dogs, because I was—and still am—a real fan of William Burroughs [who passed away in 1997].”
“I used to do it with scissors and glue—cut and paste—but this time I had a computer program to do it, which makes it a lot faster than doing it by hand. So the computer contributed an awful lot to the lyric writing.
“I would type in three different subjects into the computer, and then the computer has a randomizing program, and it would take each sentence and divide it into three or four and then remix with one of the other sentences, so you get an extraordinarily weird juxtaposition of ideas.
“Some of the sentences that came back out were so great that I put them straight into the songs, and some of them just sparked off further ideas. There would be some weird reverberation that I’d feel from one of the sentences, and I’d just fly off on that.”
(interview by Steven P. Wheeler)
Around the time of his Ziggy Stardust days, Bowie actually did get to spend time with his literary champion. “Yeah, I got to meet [Burroughs] in 1972, and he became my mentor,” he says with a fond smile. “I just felt that he was so stylistically important to the end of the 20th Century. Frankly, that’s where my fondness for trilby hats came from [laughs]: Big Bill in his suit and tie and hat and that crazy mind inside. I always found that kind of character really appealing.”
Legacy & Tributes
One thing that never happened during Bowie’s lifetime is that he never endorsed a proper tribute album of songs from his extensive catalog, recorded by other artists. Something he fought against at the time of our interview. “Not if I can help it [laughs], and believe me that many-headed Hydra has come up quite a few times.
“Funny enough, I got a report back from my publishers just last week, and in June alone I had eighteen covers, which is extraordinary to me because I thought they were kind of hidden from the world. But recently, that’s been changing. Dinosaur Jr. even did ‘Quicksand’ [laughs]. It’s really odd to suddenly see all these songs getting another life in another area.”
As for another honor, induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, Bowie said he had absolutely no interest in becoming an inductee. “It doesn’t bother me at all, not even faintly. I’ve got too many other things to do to even think about that situation. I look at that place as just another institution, nothing more than that.”
Ironically, in 1996, one year after my interview with Bowie, he was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. And true to his word, Bowie did not attend the ceremony nor did he even issue a statement in acknowledgement of the honor. Instead Talking Heads’ leader David Byrne handled the induction speech and Madonna accepted the award on Bowie’s behalf.
David Bowie was always true to his word and his art. And while we need more like him, there will never be another. RIP David.
For a Laugh
Last thing I’ll say is that David Bowie was truly a class act, a gentleman with a contagious laugh and a quick wit, who didn’t take himself too seriously. I am thrilled that I did get to share some laughs with him, if even for just an hour. A true honor. Here are just a few vids for some laughs…