“I SEE HUNDREDS OF FANS STORMING THE STAGE”
MIKE GARSON WAS THE MAN ON THE 88s WHEN BOWIE’S TOUR REACHED AMERICA IN AUTUMN ’72. HE TELLS MARK PAYTRESS WHAT HE SAW.
IN MANCHESTER OVER SEPTEMBER 2-3, 1972, FOR TWO shows at the newly opened Hardrock venue, Bowie’s manager Tony Defries sat the entourage down for a pep talk before taking the Ziggy show to the States later that month. “So far as RCA in America is concerned,” Defries said, “the man with the red hair at the end of the table is the biggest thing to have come out of England since The Beatles. You’ve all got to learn how to look and act like a million dollars.”
By September 17, David and Angie Bowie were installed in the Plaza Hotel on Fifth Avenue. Bowie albums were piled high in record shops, local radio was primed for when the Ziggy show hit town, and RCA prepared to foot the bill for a vast travelling circus.
Mike Garson was a classically trained pianist whose preferred medium was jazz but had backed ever yone from Mel Tormé to Martha And The Vandellas. Three days before the tour opened in Cleveland, Ohio, Garson was summoned to RCA’s New York studio to audition for an act he’d barely heard of. He’d hardly got through the opening flourish of Changes before Mick Ronson gave him the nod.
Garson, who’d previously gone out with Brethren on a Grand Funk Railroad tour, thought he knew what to expect from a rock gig. First night on the Bowie roadshow changed all that. “We finished the last piece and David and the Spiders took off through a back entrance at lightning speed. I’m gathering my music papers, and all of a sudden, I see hundreds of fans storming the stage. I had to get the hell out of there.”
Ziggymania only came to selected cities. In St Louis less than a couple of hundred showed up. Even in San Francisco, gay capital of the world, the usually thriving Winterland did poor business.
“It was a little scary on that first American tour because he wasn’t known,” Garson says. “He was kept in a vacuum to tr y and create myster y, so it was a bit of a gamble. But the fans who did show up, who knew his music, were very much into him.”
Sometimes, Garson got a glimpse of Bowie’s private world. “He invited me up to his room and showed me filmed performances of Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra. He could duplicate it all, the moves, the phrasing. It was frightening. He had the Midas touch. He had the ability to become anything.”
The US critical establishment was divided. Some, like Lillian Roxon for the New York Daily News, reprised the “A Star Is Born” line peddled in Melody Maker earlier that summer. Others, like the otherwise favourable Robert Christgau for Newsday, questioned whether the nation’s “jaded rock” audiences would ever appreciate songs about Andy Warhol written by a man they might regard as “some English fairy”. Hype concerned critics too. “The Spiders were going to the store in the Beverly Hills Hotel and coming out with cameras and fur coats,” says Garson. “I was ordering breakfasts for myself, my wife and my daughter, and the bill was $80. RCA paid for ever ything.”
Rolling Stone, which put Bowie, sans eyebrows, on its November ’72 cover, characterised Defries as Machiavellian and Bowie as cosseted, talented and – for a rock musician – oddly ambivalent about the direction of his work. But instability was all part of Bowie’s creative curiosity.
“He loved jazz, he loved classical and he loved avant-garde music, and that’s what my life was,” says Garson. “Plus, I was an improviser and he loved me playing the parts differently every night. I was the whipped cream on the cake.”
AS BOWIE BEGAN WRITING MATERIAL FOR HIS next album, a ‘Ziggy Goes To America’-style travelogue titled the travails, excesses and sheer zonedoutness of life on the road increasingly demanded a more widescreen musical approach. After winding up in the States in mid-December, the band played two homecoming shows at London’s Rainbow Theatre over Christmas before continuing work on the album at Trident Studios in mid-January. Garson was especially impressed by the studio’s Bechstein piano which The Beatles had used for Hey Jude. “You couldn’t play a wrong note on it,” he says.
Bowie wasn’t after wrong notes for the album’s chilly, precarious title track he’d written while reading Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies on the Atlantic crossing back home. But he did hope for something unexpected during the extended piano break, having rejected Garson’s blues then Latin-inspired try-outs. “I’d already told him about the crazy gigs I’d been doing in New York playing dissonant, atonal stuff and using my elbows. So he said, ‘Can you do something like that?’”
Garson’s scintillating free improvisation did much to define the follow-up album’s disruptive
“BOWIE SHOWED ME FILMS OF ELVIS AND SINATRA. HE COULD DUPLICATE IT ALL, THE MOVES, THE PHRASING. IT WAS FRIGHTENING.”
ambition. Still today, it remains a highlight in Bowie’s career and a masterclass in rock risktaking. And there was more. For Time, Garson drew on the Berlin theatre songs of Brecht/Weill as well as Cabaret, the hot film of 1972. Garson insists he “got lucky” on Lady Grinning Soul, the album’s quietly seductive closer. “It seemed to call for that very romantic, pianistic style of playing, lots of runs and notes almost like Chopin or Liszt.
“David didn’t micro-manage,” Garson explains. “He was looking for magic. He trusted me. He was like Miles Davis in that way. I just channelled things and people he loved.”
The second US leg kicked off on February 14, 1973, at New York’s Radio City Music Hall. After an encore of Rock’n’Roll Suicide, Bowie fell to the floor. Many assumed it was part of the act, some thought he’d had a heart attack, others insisted they’d heard gunshots.
“He fainted,” says Garson. “He wasn’t eating that day. He had make-up all over his body, so his pores had closed, and he was probably dehydrated too. We brought him backstage and I helped revive him before the nurse got there.”
Nevertheless, questions were now beginning to be asked about Bowie’s state of mind. “We were all a little concerned,” admits Garson, who’d lost friends in the jazz world to drugs. “David lost a bit of himself because he was so dedicated to the art. You get so into the role that your vulnerability ends up screwing you up. You either come back or you don’t. David was one of the lucky ones.”
But first he had to get Ziggy off his back. Having toured the States, Japan and, in early summer, Britain, Bowie was shagged out and wafer-thin. It was also time to move on. At the Hammersmith Odeon on July 3, 1973, he announced his ‘retirement’ from the stage. Garson, perhaps the only Spider who’d been tipped off, warmed up the crowd that night. “He knew that a lot of people would be there – The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, Barbra Streisand. He asked me to turn a few songs into a medley. It was like an overture to a Broadway show.”
Garson stayed with Bowie until 1974, hooked up again in the 1990s and accompanied the singer at his last public performance for an emotional Life On Mars? in 2006.
“Ziggy Stardust set him up for life,” he says, pondering the persona’s significance in the big picture of Bowie’s career. “I saw the trajectory of this guy’s life. Though it sometimes looked like it could have been a personality, or acting, it was none of that. This is who the guy was, and what he was painting. This was David Bowie.”