IN MEMORIAM,
or The time I asked David Bowie what he put in his red mullet
The news that David Bowie died on Sunday at the age of 69 didn’t come as a shock — nothing much does that anymore — but it was a surprise. Now people are writing articles — in the New York Times, no less — entitled “Mourning David Bowie,” which I should think involves getting a proper suit, a pounding disco-beat, a bunch of “pretty people,” some controlled substances, and party down.
I was never a huge Bowie fan (not like our old friend and colleague Julia Goldberg, say), but he was always someone to keep an eye on for consolidating unknown trends and revealing them as full-blown aesthetic concepts before anyone else did. Fashion, cinema, music — every discipline the guy touched, he tweaked just a bit and put his own chic, elegant mark upon it. A slightly dangerous, slightly more dubiously sexualized Fred Astaire.
And if you can get a dollar for every time you’re going to hear the term “transcended boundaries” used to characterize Bowie’s oeuvre, you would do very well.
For various reasons not important to this short tale, but no less interesting, I knew a promo guy at RCA records in Chicago and, one autumn day of 1972, just before the Nixon-McGovern election, he lays two tix on me for Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust show in Chicago, the middle of his first U.S. tour. I knew Bowie from his critically important, non-selling LP “Hunky Dory” — how could an album with tunes like “Changes,” “Life on Mars,” “Oh You Pretty Things,” “Andy Warhol,” “Song for Bob Dylan” et al. fizzle? It did.
Now, however, Bowie/Ziggy was getting some sizzle with an odd concept album about getting away from Earth (Bowie had this THING about space and aliens), and what-all, and here are two tickets for the show and a reception with the Man Himself afterwards.
Since you can look everything up online, note that it was October 7, 1972, when Ziggy and the Spiders from Mars — Bowie (guitars, vocals), Mick Ronson (guitars!!!!), Trevor Bolder (bass), Mick “Woody” Woodmansey (drums), Mike Garson (keyboards) — played Louis Sullivan’s venerable Auditorium Theater downtown Chicago. I had a camera, of course, and when Ziggy and the Spiders hit the stage to a pulsing beat and intense strobe lights, I started shooting and hustled to the front, crouched in the aisle. Within a minute, no more, a security guy comes up, takes me by the arm, and out. No photography, Ziggy’s orders, and he would relieve me of the camera now. There was a bit of an argument about that, but relinquish it I did with assurances and a receipt, and then back in to witness a most startling, wildly staged and choreographed ROCKING rock musical.
Afterwards, I met the great, but as I recall, very small, almost delicate artist and his then-wife, Angie (see, tune of same name, some years later, by Jagger-Richards), decked out as androgynous (had to get that word in there) twins, red mullets, silverysparkly bodysuits of some sort, shoes with 2-inch soles. (I see now online that the aptly named Suzi Fussey was in charge of wardrobe, makeup and hair for that tour.)
As my companion that evening recently recalled, “Bowie graciously talked to many people milling around at the reception, warm and sweet to talk to. He had impeccable Brit manners.”
She asked him a very good question.
Where was the horn section, so very important to his sound?
Ah, alas, the record company (my friend at RCA!) would not pay the extra expense to bring them to the United States. I asked him a dumb question. What was that in his hair? Henna?
No, it was something else. (Did he say “Georgette?”)
Why did that guy take my camera away (and leave that roll of film in when he returned it?, I didn’t say.)
Well, Bowie expressed regrets — a very nice guy, as I say — and explained that it was his first time in the United States and he was mindful of the very good possibility of imminent violence and assassination, and he was, well, just a bit worried about that sort of thing, don’t you know, and so he had forbidden any picturetaking or coming down to the front of the stage. (Obviously only desultorily enforced, judging by the vast number of Ziggy Tour photos available online.)
I think he said they were traveling by bus and train — the whole lot of them — because he, or she, or both of them were afraid of flying. (Odd, I thought, but only for Freudian reasons.)
Anyway, I got 20 shots and only a few were any good. Here’s one for your viewing pleasure.