David Bowie’s most frequent collaborator talks A Bowie Celebration 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 6. Mesa Arts Center, 1 E. Main St.,
The day he got the call to see if he could play piano on the Ziggy Stardust tour, Mike Garson says he didn’t have a clue who David Bowie was.
As a classically trained musician deeply immersed in the avant-garde side of the New York jazz scene, Garson didn’t bother much with rock.
But it sounded intriguing, he says. And the timing was right.
“I was getting a little frustrated on the jazz scene because I had practiced eight hours a day for so, so many years,” he says. “And I was starting to get calls for jazz gigs – with the best players in New York. But there would be three to five people in the club and I would maybe get five dollars. I thought to myself, ‘Something’s wrong with this picture.’”
It didn’t help that Garson had a family to consider.
“My daughter was 1 or 2 years old,” he says. “And I remember saying something like ‘I think I need to go out with a rock band.’”
He was giving a piano lesson, with his daughter in the swing beside him, when opportunity rang.
“This piano student, it was his first lesson with me,” Garson says, with a laugh. “I asked him to babysit my daughter, and I ran from Brooklyn to Manhattan, which was about 20 minutes, to RCA Recording Studios. And there’s Mick Ronson at the piano with David and the Spiders From Mars in the control room.”
Ronson sat him down at the piano with the chords to “Changes,” an iconic Bowie record he had never heard.
“And I played something, maybe eight seconds,” he says, with a laugh. “He said, ‘You’ve got the gig.’ And I was off and running.”
Garson would go on to be Bowie’s most-frequent collaborator, joining him on nine world tours, including his last, in support of 2003’s “Reality,” one of 19 Bowie albums to feature his piano work.
“Or maybe 20,” Garson says. “They keep releasing stuff that I was on.”
A legacy grows stronger
It’s been three years since Bowie’s death, and Garson is still out there bringing his vision to life on A Bowie Celebration: The David Bowie Alumni Tour.
Other alumni include Earl Slick, whose lead guitar can be heard on such classic releases as “Station to Station” and “Young Americans,” and “Let’s Dance” bassist Carmine Rojas.
“It’s a very, very good band,” he says. “Very tight. And it sounds like what I remember with David. So the audiences have been loving it. That’s why I do the shows, because they sing along to every song. That makes it all worthwhile.”
Somehow, in the years since Bowie’s death, his legacy has only gotten stronger.
“Everyone loves David,” Garson says. “Because he left amazing songs. And he was very influential for five decades, not only in singing, songwriting, producing and performing but in fashion, acting, philosophy. His sculpture was great. He was the editor of an art magazine. His artistry was incomparable.”
And that was obvious from their first meeting, Garson says.
“When I heard him sing in the first rehearsal, I thought to myself, ‘This guy’s a genius and he’s maybe the rock version of Miles Davis.’”
Meeting Bowie for the first time
Garson’s introduction to the Bowie camp came through another avantgarde musician.
“I had played a few months earlier on an album called ‘I’m the One’ by Annette Peacock,” Garson says. “And David and Mick Ronson were both fans of hers.”
Bowie initially offered the piano gig to Peacock.
“But she wasn’t interested,” Garson says. “She also didn’t have the same skills as me. She could’ve played basic rock but not really what he needed. She said, ‘You should go with this guy who played on my album.’”
Bowie knew what he was looking for and yet he “never, ever micro-managed,” Garson says, although he might suggest a broad idea.
Recalling the session for “Aladdin Sane,” the title track to his first Bowie album, Garson says, “I played a few passes that weren’t what he wanted. I played a blues solo, a Latin solo. He said, ‘Can you do something like you did on the jazz scene, more the avant-garde jazz of the ‘60s?’ I said, ‘Are you absolutely serious?’ He said, ‘Absolutely.’ I said, ‘That’s not why I’m not working on Saturday nights.’ He laughed and said, ‘Leave that to me. I’ll be able to frame it.’ And it was a one-take track. So it was his intent but certainly my playing.”
When he finished, Garson says, “There was shock and awe in the studio and I figured ‘They’re firing me or they love it.’ It turned out they loved it, but I didn’t know.”
Even now, that “Aladdin Sane” piano work remains a high point of not only Garson’s legacy but also Bowie’s.
“With the advent of the internet, as early as the ‘90s,” Garson says, “I started receiving probably an email every day about that solo. Every day, someone from somewhere in the world writes me about that. And I don’t understand it because I’ve played on thousands of tracks and it’s the only one anyone cares about.”
And then he laughs. “Aladdin Sane,” which also features “Time” and “Lady Grinning Soul,” remains his favorite of the Bowie albums he took part in making what they were.
‘It was so final’
Garson hadn’t been involved in Bowie’s pop ascendancy.
“When I joined him again in the ‘90s, he said he wanted to get away from what he called his period of time where he sold out and sort of lost himself,” Garson says. “He wanted to get all the best musicians who’d ever inspired him together