Ziggyology

  Visconti had just such a secret weapon up his sleeve, one which anyone listening to BBC Radio 1’s John Peel Concert that New Year’s Day would have already heard for themselves. Marc Bolan had become increasingly amplified over the last year, taking sneaky lessons from Cream’s Eric Clapton, as his performance for Peel that Sunday made obvious. He ended his gig with a new song, ‘Elemental Child’, a typical Tyrannosaurus Rex chant about damsels and gemstones but violently electrified, his guitar disintegrating in a white hot climax of fuzz, feedback and the sort of fretboard voodoo a January 1970 audience would have expected only of Jimi Hendrix. Placed in a unique position as the producer of both David and Marc, it was Visconti’s brainwave to bring the two together on ‘The Prettiest Star’. The record was David’s baby, but Marc could rock it. Or so Visconti hoped.

  David was the least resistant. His was still the name above the title. And Marc had already been something of a lucky talisman for ‘Space Oddity’ thanks to the Stylophone.

  ‘OK,’ David told Visconti. He’d do it.

  Marc, on the other hand, was cagier. He didn’t like the idea of being anybody’s second fiddle. But, then again, it could be a chance to steal the limelight from under David’s nose. And, besides, it would only be a few hours’ work at most.

  ‘OK,’ Marc told Visconti. He’d do it.

  On the day of the session, David played the song to Marc, who very speedily improvised a guitar riff based on the main vocal melody. Marc’s soon-to-be-wife and manager, June Child, sat in the control room with Visconti. She hated the song and said as much. Marc seemed to agree, unwilling to share his precious ‘Elemental Child’s play on a slurry solo, the musical equivalent of a disinterested yawn.

  ‘That’ll do.’

  The tension fizzled with every minute that limped past, Marc and David reaching a non-cooperative stalemate where both somehow kept out of the other’s way. Visconti breathed a sigh of relief when Marc finally left after less than two hours’ non-graft. His guitar part was usable, but it stuck out on the record like a bent rusty nail in a varnished plank of wood, a spiky tribute to its creative unease. If Marc’s intention was to jinx David’s single, it worked. ‘The Prettiest Star’ sold less than a thousand copies.

  ONE YEAR ON from ‘Space Oddity’, David Bowie remained a one-hit wonder. The situation didn’t change with his next single, ‘Memory Of A Free Festival’, a rambling Ziggyish tease about communal love, spaceships and visitors from Venus. Nor the one after that, ‘Holy Holy’, a Satanic love song capsized by the lumpy arrangement of its producer and bass player, Herbie Flowers. It certainly didn’t help David’s cause that the week of its release in January 1971 Flowers was basking in his own number one success as the co-author of ‘Grandad’, a daft coffin-knocking pop novelty for Dad’s Army actor Clive Dunn.

  Yet for David, the failure of another single was the least of his worries. It wasn’t Flowers’ ‘Grandad’ being at number one that bothered him. It was the record at number two, one which had taken twelve weeks to climb its way within kicking distance of Dunn’s walking stick. The song was ‘Ride A White Swan’. The group was listed as T. Rex – Marc Bolan’s facelift for Tyrannosaurus Rex, his drug-ravaged sidekick Steve Peregrin Took last seen ‘in a wardrobe in New York looking for God’ and since replaced by smouldering new bongo devil Mickey Finn.

  Marc and David had both undergone a conscious electric transition in 1970. In David’s case, epic power jams about madness, despair, Aleister Crowley and Friedrich Nietzsche soon to be heard on his next album, The Man Who Sold The World. But in Marc’s case, amplification was the key to a magical new kingdom of sensation and simplicity. As a trial run, he cut a cathartic bubblegum stomp called ‘Oh Baby’, released under the pseudonym Dib Cochran & The Earwigs. A colossal flop sales wise but enough of a drag on the sweet cigarette of unashamed pop bliss to convince Marc that’s where he wanted to spend the rest of the decade.

  For Marc the future wasn’t about finding the right song but the right sound. And on 1 July 1970, he heard it ringing in his headphones as he stood in Trident, plugged in waiting for Visconti to roll the tapes. The producer had been playing around with the ambience of Marc’s guitar, adding a ricochet of reverb hiccupping all the way back to Sam Phillips’ Sun label. The tune was a simple rock ’n’ roll pattern shook up with some typical Bolan hippy jive about long hair and druids. There were no drums, just Marc, his guitar and Finn banging a tambourine. But with that chrome echo on Marc’s Les Paul the effect was hypnotising.

  After the first take, Visconti wasn’t sure if it was what Marc was after. ‘Thank you, man,’ Marc assured him. ‘I want that sound!’

  They continued layering overdubs, double-tracking Marc’s vocal, adding bass, backing harmonies and some group handclaps recorded using the natural resonance of the studio toilet. Visconti’s polishing Midas touch was grafting on a string section, fanning the melody ever higher into the heavens. Listening back, Marc knew nothing else had ever sounded like ‘Ride A White Swan’ before. It was a sound that was intoxicating, colourful, elusive and glamorous. Yes, glamorous. The sound of glam rock. The sound of the Starman.

  Except it was coming from the wrong Starman. A sudden crisis in the cosmos. A missed stitch in the fabric of space and time. An administrative mix-up in destiny’s sorting office had accidentally delivered the sound of Ziggy Stardust to another human vessel. It was an easy mistake to make for a package marked ‘1947 London boy, ex-mod, pseudo-hippy, fancy second name beginning with B’.

  But where the hell did that leave David Bowie?

  FIFTEEN

  NAMING BABY

  IT LEFT DAVID Bowie feeling sick but relieved. Sick with fear to be on a plane hurtling towards take-off on Heathrow’s runway. Relieved to be leaving ‘Holy Holy’, Clive Dunn and T. Rex behind him, their painful memories instantly wiped from his mind in the rush of foggy whiteness through the cabin window.

  With his curly nemesis pirouetting at number two, the last week of January 1971 was a good time for David to get out of England. His label had decided to send him on an overseas trip to promote his new album, The Man Who Sold The World. A trip to the promised land of Sal Paradise, Elvis Presley and Little Richard. At the age of 24, David was finally going to America.

  Angie, now his wife, was five months pregnant and unable to travel. In any case, Mercury were only prepared to pay for one ticket. So when the plane landed at Washington Dulles Airport, David stepped off alone, golden tresses down past his shoulders, eyelids faintly dabbed with shadow and shielded from the winter in a blue fake fur coat. A look in keeping with his latest metamorphosis from the cosmic hippy of ‘Space Oddity’ to the cross-dressing Graham Garbo of his new album sleeve. But nothing like the ‘David Robert Jones’ it said on his passport. After an hour of intense questioning, the immigration officers were unable to find a decent reason not to allow their limey transvestite freak into the country. With a look of disgust and a begrudging entry stamp, they sent him through border control where his panicking US press officer, Ron Oberman, was there to greet him. ‘For some reason, they seemed to think I looked strange,’ shrugged David.

  The schedule of press and radio interviews began the next morning, moving up the East Coast until, on his fourth day in America, David finally set foot in the hallowed ‘frosty fagtown New York’ he’d been fantasising about since he was twelve years-old. Mercury booked him into the midtown Holiday Inn, a few blocks away from the corner of 54th and Sixth, home to a blind middle-aged busker with a wizard’s beard and horned helmet. He was born Louis but called himself Moondog. Because of his costume locals nicknamed him ‘The Viking of Sixth Avenue’. He’d been making records since the fifties, some of the earliest issued on the short-lived jazz label Mars, summoning exotic sounds on homemade instruments as he sang sad songs of isolation. ‘All Is Loneliness’. ‘Death, When You Come To Me’. Moondog was just the sort of crazy David liked, Vince Taylor meets Odin, a self-made creation with a name that literally howled with the won
der of outer space.

  On first impressions, New York was as wild and frantic as David had always imagined lying in Bromley listening to the sound of The Velvet Underground. It only got better when he discovered yet more Velvet Underground. A local journalist named Ed Kelleher introduced him to Loaded, their latest album, currently unavailable in Britain. In the lazy sneer of ‘Sweet Jane’ and the gospel of ‘Rock & Roll’, songs of riding Stutz Bearcats and lives saved by the radio, he felt a fresh twist in his star-shaped ignition. A twist which intensified when he learned the Velvets were actually playing downtown that weekend at the Electric Circus, formerly The Don where Warhol first staged his ‘Exploding Plastic Inevitable’. Four years after his manager had visited New York on his behalf and returned with a test pressing of their debut album from the clutches of Lou Reed, he was finally going to get to see his beloved Velvets sing and play in the flesh.

  The band who walked on stage at the Electric Circus that night looked a bit different from the one David had seen in photos, apart from the unmistakably androgynous Moe Tucker. But to his ears they still sounded stunning, especially when they played his favourite, ‘I’m Waiting For The Man’. Not long after the Velvets finished their set, David nervously banged his fist on the backstage door. It opened ajar. Softened by his English accent and intrigued by his appearance, they welcomed him through into the dressing room. David immediately gravitated towards Lou Reed. He told Lou he’d been a huge fan of his work for many years. Lou seemed a little embarrassed. David continued praising the songs. Lou grew more fidgety until eventually he cut David off mid-sentence.

  ‘Er, look, buddy,’ said Lou. ‘I’m not Lou Reed.’

  Because he wasn’t Lou Reed. He was somebody else called Doug Yule. He’d been in the band since late 1968 after Lou ousted co-founder John Cale. David didn’t even know that Cale had left, never mind that Lou himself had since quit forcing Yule to take centre stage in a desperate attempt to keep the name of The Velvet Underground alive. For the last fifteen minutes, David had been talking to the ‘wrong’ Lou Reed.

  David was mortified. Then amused. Then, the more he played it over in his mind, quite fascinated. As far as he was concerned, he had seen and met Lou Reed. Yule had played the role so brilliantly.

  What must that feel like, he wondered. Going on stage, pretending to be a completely different character? Doing it so well that everybody in the audience truly believed you were someone you weren’t? Hadn’t he mentioned something similar in the press five years earlier?

  ‘I think it takes a lot to become somebody else.’

  Yes. That was it. To become somebody else.

  ‘It takes some doing …’

  BEFORE HE BECAME somebody else he was plain old Norman Carl Odam. He was born the same year as David and Marc, 1947, in the Texas town of Lubbock, and went to the same junior high school as Lubbock’s most famous son, Buddy Holly. Norman was an extremely quiet boy who rarely spoke. At the age of six he began fantasising about what it must be like to visit the planet Mars. By seven, he’d convinced himself that one day he was going to be famous, by whatever means necessary. And so Norman started making up songs, singing them in the street and around the school playground. Only he couldn’t sing to save his life. So, instead, he learned to whoop and holler like an Indian brave and built up his own peculiar bag of bird calls and animal growls, ungodly noises which became his lyrics.

  Norman tried to learn guitar so he could look like Elvis Presley and impress the girls. He wasn’t much of a guitar player either. The girls ignored him but Norman kept trying. He tried teaching himself to play the bugle, the harmonica and the drums. He couldn’t even master the kazoo. It didn’t stop Norman. He continued to strum and scream outside school, in parking lots and standing on car bonnets at the local drive-in. He was, if nothing else, determined.

  Then, one night sitting in his backyard staring up at the Texan twilight, Norman had a brainwave. He loved cowboys and he loved outer space and started to wonder how he could maybe squeeze the two together. He came up with a name. The Stardust Cowboy. It sounded, he thought, ‘like a living legend’. And so that night Norman Odam from Lubbock, Texas ceased to be and became somebody else. The Legendary Stardust Cowboy.

  Norman customised his car, a Chevy Biscayne, painting the sides with the words ‘NASA presents The Legendary Stardust Cowboy’. He grew his hair long and cultivated a chunky pair of sideburns. He’d turn up uninvited at traditional honky-tonks and try singing to crowds who only wanted to lynch him. He was a legend, all right, but for all the wrong reasons. A tone-deaf, shrieking buffoon. A magnet for abuse, bottles and threats of violence. Until one day a woman strode right up to him and stamped her boot straight through his guitar. Heartbroken and humiliated, he decided to quit his job at a factory drill press and leave town.

  Norman headed west, taking a bus to San Diego, then moving on to Hollywood. He still believed himself to be a Legendary Stardust Cowboy and bought himself a buckskin coat to prove it. But Tinsel Town quickly chewed him up and spat him back to Texas.

  Norman next thought about heading east instead, to New York, where he hoped to convince the producers of Tonight With Johnny Carson to put him on national television. They’d recently done the same for Tiny Tim, a long-haired ukulele-plucking ghoul who crowed old music-hall tunes in a queer, spinsterish wibble. Norman knew that, given the chance, he could be ‘the next Tiny Tim’. With $160 in his pocket he loaded his new guitar in his painted ‘NASA’ Chevy and headed towards New York. He never got there.

  Norman never even made the Texas border. He’d pulled over for gas in Fort Worth, where his customised car attracted curious locals who invited him to a music club. After loosening their jaws with a typically tuneless Legendary Stardust Cowboy routine, instead of running him out of town Lubbock-style that same night they ran him into the studio of local producer Joe ‘T-Bone’ Burnett.

  By dawn, Norman had cut his first single. It was called ‘Paralyzed’ and sounded like the dying confession of a man under Gestapo torture, a hyena in a wheelchair falling down a fire escape, and the rodeo delirium of Slim Pickens astride the falling H-bomb at the end of Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove. All at the same time. Two minutes and 17 seconds of blasting blue murder.

  To Burnett’s surprise, the AM radio station upstairs from his studio played it straight away. Listeners were shocked but captivated. It was so abysmally weird they asked to hear it again.

  To Burnett’s even greater surprise, after Norman paid for five hundred copies to be pressed on his own ‘Psycho-Suave’ label, the song’s cult infamy caught the attention of Mercury Records, who agreed to distribute it nationally. Somehow ‘Paralyzed’ screamed and spluttered its way inside the Billboard top 200 singles chart.

  In November 1968, Mercury managed to squeeze Norman a cameo spot on NBC’s new hit sketch show Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In. Maybe not the dream of Johnny Carson he’d hoped for, but if it was good enough for Tiny Tim, already a regular of the show, then it was good enough for The Legendary Stardust Cowboy. Wearing a white ten-gallon hat, his beloved buckskin jacket and bright yellow chaps, he was introduced by Dan Rowan as ‘the discovery of the week’. As he sang ‘Paralyzed’ – barking, whooping and bouncing around like a frog on a hotplate – co-host Dick Martin stood beside him mimicking his funny dancing. The audience laughed. They asked him if he wanted to play another. Norman launched into the single’s equally demented B-side, ‘Who’s Knocking On My Door’. The show’s ensemble cast of comedians joined in, pretending to dance to its irregular rhythm and drowning out Norman’s screams with their own crude imitation. The audience laughed louder. Finally, Norman gave up in frustration and slunk off set. The first television appearance by The Legendary Stardust Cowboy, and also the last.

  Mercury persevered with Norman for another couple of singles. They managed to curtail his screaming but his singing voice remained a slurry off-key honk. The best of them was ‘I Took A Trip On A Gemini Spaceship’, a lovesick cowpoke’s groan ech
oing among the stars. A bit like ‘Space Oddity’ sung by Hank Williams during morphine withdrawal. But neither it nor the dreary ballad ‘Kiss And Run’ matched the freak novelty of ‘Paralyzed’. Inevitably, Mercury dropped him. They assumed Norman had returned to Texas in his beat-up ‘NASA’ wagon. Somebody heard a rumour that he’d been arrested for vagrancy. Nobody knew for certain. But every once in a while, his name would creep up in conversation.

  ‘Oh, man! Remember The Legendary Stardust Cowboy?’

  Ron Oberman remembered. Mercury’s head of press still held back copies of Norman’s three singles. Sometimes he’d pass them on to people he thought might dig them. People like David Bowie.

  Ten days into his press trip, David reached Chicago where Oberman brought him into Mercury’s headquarters, housed in a 1920s skyscraper overlooking the river with a domed restaurant atop its forty storeys, once a speakeasy in the days of Al Capone. On his way inside, David stopped to admire its ornate clock mounted on the north-east corner, crowned by an imposing sculpture of a winged Father Time carrying a scythe and hourglass while below each of its four clock faces yelled the simple, stark insignia: ‘TIME’.

  Up in Oberman’s office, David mentioned that he liked listening to ‘weird shit’. He was immediately handed the complete works of The Legendary Stardust Cowboy.

  ‘This is the weirdest shit we’ve got,’ said Oberman.

  David had to agree. The first, ‘Paralyzed’, wasn’t so much music as contained anarchy. But somewhere within its calamity David could still hear a soul. ‘I Took A Trip On A Gemini Spaceship’ was even more impressive. There was a touching loneliness in its obvious lunacy. He especially liked the bit where he drawled, ‘I shot my space gun, boy did I feel blue.’ Oberman told him about the Laugh-In incident, how Norman had gone on television in all earnest only to be made a fool of. It touched David, who’d had enough jeers in his 24 years to know exactly how that must have felt.