Diamond days on tour with Bowie
When Bowie asked Earl Slick to join his band, it was a dream come true. However, ‘Slicky’ tells MICK WALL that life on the road with the rock legend was never straightforward
GUITARIST Earl Slick is recalling New York in 1974, the year he was hired to join David Bowie’s new band and his life changed for ever. “It was a really cool period of time.you’d go out to Max’s Kansas City nightclub. David Bowie would be there, Lou Reed and Andy Warhol would be there. It was that whole artistic glam rock scene.”
It was the kind of seedy glamour that only grew out of the gutter, he reflects, with New York in the mid-1970s teetering on bankruptcy.
“There was something about that dirty, filthy, crime-ridden New York that really created something. There were muggers and drug dealing and gangs,” he says.
“And there was something to be said about what it contributed to our community.they seemed to feed off each other.”
He flashes a lopsided grin and reaches for his cigarettes. Sitting indoors in his snap brimmed trilby hat and tinted rock star glasses, you get the feeling Earl Slick wouldn’t have had it any other way.
“When I got the gig with Bowie, my hair was really long. I had velvet pants.
“Then David is putting me in a pleated suit with old man’s shoes and cut off all my hair. I’m going, ‘I finally make the big time and I look like a bloody accountant’.”
In fact, 22-year-old “Slicky”, as Bowie always called him, had just signed on for what is now thought of as one of the most theatrical shows ever staged in rock: the 1974 Diamond Dogs tour.
The show would feature a number of elaborate props, including a giant mechanical hand which hoisted Bowie above the audience while crooning Space Oddity.
Slick and the band were almost viewed as an inconvenience. “We weren’t behind screens, which I’ve read, but we didn’t have an official photographer.that was the worst documented tour David did yet one of the most important.”
When Bowie broke off halfway through the tour to record his next album – Young
Americans – he hired Slick to play on the track Fame, which would become Bowie’s first and only US Number 1 single.
John Lennon was at the session too, although when Slick found himself hired by the former Beatle years later to play on what would prove to be his final album, Double Fantasy, he was embarrassed to admit he couldn’t remember meeting Lennon before.
Recorded in Los Angeles and released in 1976, Station To Station is the album Bowie fans most associate with Slick, with its sizzling guitar and special effects.
The link is something underlined by the white-red-black graphics on the cover of Slick’s new memoir, simply titled Guitar, which echoes the album cover precisely.
Featuring another giant hit, Golden Years – originally written for, but rejected by, Elvis Presley – Bowie later claimed he was so frazzled on drugs he couldn’t even remember recording it.
By 1975 there were also occult rituals, the teachings of the Kabbalah and the grimoires of Aleister Crowley. How much of that side did Slick encounter during his time with The Thin White Duke, as Bowie had begun styling himself?
“If you’re talking about all that insane **** about demons, then no. He kept it pretty under the radar, all that crazy stuff.”
Nevertheless, a fall-out over contracts meant it would be almost a decade before he appeared on stage again with Bowie, on his Serious Moonlight tour, in 1983.
“There are very few things, including some whopping mistakes I made, that I would change, but that’s one. I was 23 years old, thinking I’m a rock star, and the ego made a shambles of it.”
His other major regret is that he never got to work more with Lennon and Yoko.
Having completed his work on Double Fantasy, Slick was back home the night Lennon was shot and killed outside his New York home in December 1980.
Lennon had planned to tour in 1981. His last words to Slick: “See you soon.”
The 1990s were lean times for the guitarist and he found his “worst nightmare coming true” when he was forced to “get a proper job for the first time in my life” – selling timeshares. It was Bowie who came to his rescue again when, in 1999, he invited Slick to rejoin his band.
He held the position through three more Bowie albums, including his penultimate release in 2013,The Next Day.
One of the touching parts of Slick’s Guitar book comes when he is recording with Bowie again, 30 years on from Diamond Dogs, and they are both sober.
EACH morning Earl would arrive with a box of brioche from a nearby bakery and Bowie would start making double espressos “and smoking probably 100 cigarettes”.
The book is especially poignant as he recalls those final weeks on tour, when a heart attack on stage in Prague, 2004, put paid to Bowie’s touring career.
He recalls the singer “sitting in a chair backstage with his eyes closed. He looked like a bat the way he was all folded up”.
The last time they spoke was in September 2015, when he asked for Bowie’s blessing to do a brief tour with former Suede guitarist Bernard Fowler, performing Station To Station in full.
“He said: ‘Great idea, Slicky. Have fun’.” Bowie died from cancer in 2016 – Slick’s face falls at the memory. As it was for so many fans, Bowie’s death felt like part of his life had ended, too.
“One thing about David I picked up from the very beginning was there is nothing permanent around the Bowie camp.at any minute you could be gone, the tour could get cancelled, the record might not happen. You didn’t really know what was going on.”
He smiles, shrugs and lights another cigarette: “I kinda liked it that way.”
Guitar by Earl Slick & Jeff Slate (Penguin Books Ltd, £25). www.express. bookshop.com or call 020 3176 3832.
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