Spider from Mars Read online

  So after all the time and hard work we’d put in over the last couple of years, we had a single and an album in the charts . . . we’d arrived and kicked some ass along the way, at least in the UK. The dream was becoming a reality.

  7

  LET YOURSELF GO

  If we’d thought the British dates were big, we had our frame of reference completely reset when we went to America in mid-September 1972. It was the place we’d always dreamed of going to so we were hugely excited. I’d only seen it in movies. Up to then the extent of my overseas travel, aside from the trip to Cyprus, was a week’s holiday in Belgium with June when we were both eighteen. The highlight of that was dancing in an Ostend nightclub into the early hours to a DJ playing music by Sly and the Family Stone! Bowie travelled to the USA with Angie on the QE2 due to his fear of flying, while we flew to New York.

  I still remember the looks the customs people gave us when we landed. We weren’t wearing our full stage gear, obviously, but our hairstyles and glamorous street clothes definitely made us stand out from the crowd of business people and tourists who were waiting in the immigration queue alongside us. Mick had just got Suzi to add red, green and purple highlights to his already striking blond hair, which increased the impact.

  A limousine was waiting to take us into the centre of New York City. Staring out of the window, at first I thought yellow was the only colour Americans liked for their cars, until I realized these were taxis. I counted forty-two cabs sitting bumper to bumper in an uninterrupted yellow streak. All the streets were dead straight and seemed to stretch for miles in all directions. When the traffic stopped, twenty car horns immediately began honking, windows were wound down and abuse with an American accent added to the already chaotic scene. I remember thinking that New Yorkers didn’t have much patience but it was exciting and this city was alive.

  You had to get up to speed or you would get trampled in the rush – it was a long way from the polite London we’d left behind a few hours earlier. We felt as if we were in a movie but hadn’t been handed the script, not yet anyway . . .

  Looking up at the never-ending glass buildings that seemed to reach to the clouds, I couldn’t believe how high they actually were and wondered who would want to live up at the top. Turned out it was me – my hotel room was up in the sky!

  Nowadays the UK and America are much closer when it comes to things like culture, food and slang – but back then there was less crossover. We liked American music but we hadn’t met many Americans, Tony Visconti and Angie being the obvious exceptions.

  Attempting to recover from the aeroplane food the day before, Mick, Trev and I went to the hotel restaurant for breakfast. The menu offered ‘full English breakfast’ and I felt I needed a bit of home already. When it arrived it wasn’t quite what I expected. Along with the eggs, bacon, sausage and tomatoes was a skewer filled with strawberries, melon pieces and grapes! Now maybe it was my northern roots showing themselves but to serve me fruit with my fried breakfast just insulted my senses. I had to remove the offending articles before I could tuck into my ‘English breakfast’. That night we went back to the restaurant for an evening meal and I had a steak with all the trimmings, which was excellent. The dessert menu was exotic to say the least, and I just wanted some vanilla ice cream which wasn’t on the menu as a single item.

  I said to the waiter, ‘Can I just have some vanilla ice cream, please.’

  ‘Certainly, sir,’ said he. ‘What do you want on it?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I replied, ‘just the vanilla ice cream.’

  ‘I don’t think I can do that, sir,’ he said. ‘You have to have at least one other item with it.’

  I said, ‘OK, stick a sausage in it. You may as well, you brought me strawberries and grapes with my eggs and bacon.’

  He stormed off but did eventually return with just vanilla ice cream . . . It was my first rock star diva moment!

  While we were in the US our new single, ‘John, I’m Only Dancing’, was slowly climbing the charts back in the UK. We’d spent a few days in Olympic Studios, London, back in June, recording it. I was particularly proud of my tom-tom fills which definitely added dynamics to the arrangement. We were all in the studio recording backing vocals for the song when Rod Stewart and the Faces burst in through one of the doors. They were dancing about and singing ‘la, la, las’ until everybody cracked up laughing. Then one of them said, ‘See ya later’, and they exited through one of the other doors as quickly as they’d arrived.

  I remember the lyrics at the time seeming quite ambiguous to me. The song could be about a guy dancing with a girl and telling his boyfriend not to worry, he was ‘only dancing’, or he was talking to a friend whose girlfriend he was dancing with. Mick Rock had filmed us playing the track during rehearsals at the Rainbow and this footage became the video. RCA considered the song too risqué to release it in the US and Top of the Pops banned the video and refused to play it, the reason given that it wasn’t to the BBC’s taste . . . It was released on 1 September and by the time we’d got to New York it had reached Number 30 in the singles charts. It eventually peaked at Number 12 on 8 October. We were too busy in the US to think about the fact it wasn’t performing quite as well as ‘Starman’.

  Meanwhile, Tony Defries had decided to set up his own management company, MainMan, which Bowie duly signed to. Since he’d first met the Pork actors and discovered their connections, Defries had been constantly phoning them up and asking how he should break Bowie and the Spiders in the US. He even gave them a box of Hunky Dory albums to distribute to DJs and underground artists that they knew in NY. Now he recruited Tony Zanetta to head up MainMan’s US office and brought in some of the other cast members who would help organize our tour. There was Cherry Vanilla, who had played the title role of ‘Pork’, Jamie Andrews, who had played a character called Pall, and Leee Black Childers, who was the stage manager. It was comical because they were all extremely camp, the loudest people we’d ever come across and outrageous with it. This took a bit of getting used to for the Spiders. I’d met Cherry Vanilla earlier at the Sombrero club in London. She was sexy, outspoken but very easy to talk to on a one-to-one basis.

  ‘Is Cherry Vanilla your real name?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘Do you like it?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘it sounds cool. But why Cherry?’

  At this point she unbuttoned her blouse and exposed one of her very ample breasts which had a tattoo of cherries on it.

  ‘I see,’ I said, a bit lamely . . . If it wasn’t for the subdued lighting in the Sombrero, she would have seen my blushing face.

  We were rehearsing for the tour at RCA Studios in Manhattan and, having arrived in the US minus a keyboard player, we needed to find someone quickly as Bowie wanted to have the live performance as close to the recordings as possible. Mick suggested Mike Garson who had contributed piano to an album we’d all been listening to, I’m The One by an American left-field jazz artist called Annette Peacock. It had very cool jazz/funk beats and on some of the tracks she was singing through a synthesizer. We all thought it was amazing. There was some concern Mike Garson wouldn’t be up for playing with a rock ’n’ roll band, so Bowie had rung Annette to see if she would put in a good word for us. She agreed to and rang Mike and vouched for the musicality and credibility of the band. A few hours later Defries called him and he agreed to audition. He came down to RCA Studios and sat at the piano. Mick introduced himself and put the chord chart to ‘Changes’ in front of him.

  ‘What can you do with this?’ Mick asked.

  Mike began to play and immediately we knew were dealing with a highly competent musician who could handle tracks like ‘Life on Mars?’ He had the skills of Rick Wakeman but with a jazz slant, obviously. In Mike we had found a keyboard player who, although we didn’t know at the time, would add so much to Bowie’s future songs. I appreciated Bowie’s vision here: in recruiting him to our band, he’d brought a really talented avant-garde musician to the rock mus
ic field.

  Mike – who’d arrived for the audition in dungarees and a check shirt – was a bit freaked out by how we looked, as I recall. He got over it . . .

  I found it a little hard to get to know him at first, because he didn’t speak our language: he spoke jazz and we spoke rock. Also, we’d become a close-knit gang with our own sense of humour, so it took some time for us to open up to Mike, and for him to come out to us. At first he used to sit at the edge of the stage, in semi-darkness, but as time passed he came out of his shell and would take a more active part in the show.

  So now we had our keyboardist. We also had our own tech crew with us, i.e. roadies, lighting, sound and security, some of whom had been with us since the Rats days. Suzi Fussey was handling hair and wardrobe. We had the Warhol additions of Tony Zanetta as tour manager, and Lee and Jamie juggling hats wherever needed. It seemed like everything was in place for the tour, albeit with a slightly bizarre twist. We were ready to kick some American ass!

  As Bowie refused to fly we would be travelling throughout the tour by bus. His reflections on American life would inspire Bowie to start writing songs, many of which would be featured on the forthcoming album, Aladdin Sane.

  The tour opened at the Cleveland Music Hall on 22 September. The venue held 3,000 and had sold out in two days thanks to Denny Sanders, musical director, and Billy Bass, programme director at WMMS Radio, who had played Hunky Dory and Ziggy Stardust tracks repeatedly, introducing the area to our music and creating an enthusiastic fan base. We were already the talk of the town by the time we got to Cleveland.

  We began the show with ‘Hang On To Yourself’ and the crowd loved it. Bowie had done a press conference earlier that day and had been a bit withdrawn, but by stage time he’d shed any inhibitions and stalked the stage like a madman. We did more or less the same show as we’d done in the UK and if I remember correctly we included ‘Lady Stardust’, one of the few times we played this song live. The experience we’d gained on our UK tour, plus the addition of Mike Garson, really helped us find our feet and the sound of the band and the performance seemed to have moved up to another level. It was exciting and the audience let us know it was the same for them. At the end we received an ovation that lasted about ten minutes. We’d done our first US concert and it had gone down amazingly, the perfect start to the tour.

  Bowie loved all this. He was still in control of the Ziggy persona at the start of the first US tour and was able to adopt and discard his onstage character with relative ease. He’d wanted to be famous for years, and had worked incredibly hard to achieve it – and here he was, the biggest star of the hour.

  The next stop on the tour was Memphis, Elvis Presley’s home town, which obviously made it even more exciting for us. It was another sold-out show and again the audience was at fever pitch and incredibly loud. This was another great confidence boost ahead of our debut gig at Carnegie Hall in New York a couple of days later. On the way to Memphis, during an impromptu guitar jam at the back of the bus, the seeds for what would become ‘The Jean Genie’ were sown. I think George Underwood was playing around with chords that were very similar to the Yardbirds’ cover of Bo Diddley’s ‘I’m a Man’. Mick was also playing guitar. The whole bus was singing ‘We’re bus, bussing, bussing along’, something banal like that, and it kind of summed up the general feeling. The melody and phrasing was not too dissimilar to the part of the chorus in ‘The Jean Genie’.

  The show at the prestigious Carnegie Hall was an important one for us. The Beatles had played there twice in 1964 and to succeed in the US rock market it was important we were a success in New York. We definitely needed to deliver the goods on the night. Working against us was the fact that Bowie had caught flu the day before and he had had a pretty sleepless night. He wasn’t sure if he could muster the energy or even if his voice would hold out.

  As our limo pulled up before the show we saw a giant searchlight outside the hall, which moved around lighting up the clouds and the tops of the skyscrapers, creating a Hollywood premiere feeling. It was a sold-out show and the guest list included Truman Capote, Todd Rundgren, Andy Warhol, Alan Bates, Tony Perkins and about a hundred British journalists plus US press.

  We were all a little nervous before the show but we walked on after our usual Clockwork Orange intro tape to a standing ovation, which was a fantastic start. It looked like the biggest gig we’d done to date. This could have been due to the number of balconies, five in all, above the main seating area. We all rose to the occasion, including Bowie, despite his flu, though before one of the acoustic songs, Jacques Brel’s ‘My Death’, he did warn the audience he might not make it to the end vocally. Suffice to say, he did a great version of it. The show really rocked and the audience were with us all the way. Before returning for an encore of ‘Round and Round’ we received a five-minute standing ovation. The reviews were all positive and, because of the success of this gig, more concerts were added to the tour.

  We moved on through Washington and Boston and then slipped back to New York as we had a few days off to record ‘The Jean Genie’, which Bowie had now completed. We went into RCA Studios on 6 October. It took about a day to get the basic track down plus some overdubs, then a few more overdubs the next day. It’s a great song, simple but full of energy with that huge guitar riff of Mick’s, held in check by me and Trevor. I love the famous fuck-up in it where Trevor goes to the chorus too early. He pointed it out to Bowie at the time and Bowie said, ‘Leave it in, I like it.’ When we played that song live, Bowie told Trev to repeat the mistake. It was mixed in RCA Nashville, Studio B, and was to be our next single.

  We felt like rock stars, but, now I look back on it, it hadn’t really sunk in because while some gigs were phenomenal others would be only a third full. The phenomenal ones indicated what it could be like all the time, though, especially when we realized that on our next American tour all the venues would be full.

  Every now and then I’d take a moment to consider how far we’d come since the Three Tuns, which looked packed out if it had forty-five people in it. Playing for venues full of thousands of people was like being on another planet. From New York we went to Chicago, then Detroit and over to California.

  By now, we were getting cockier. Before this, we’d always gone on stage thinking, ‘I hope they like us. I hope the music goes down well.’ As time passed we thought to ourselves, ‘This is fucking good! They will like it.’ At the same time, all it took was a friend of the band, or a roadie, to say, ‘You played that song better last night’, or ‘It didn’t look so good when you did this tonight’, and it fucked with our confidence and our understanding of how to play the show that night. As with any venture where there are lots of people involved, there were always opinions flying about. Bowie came up with the idea that no one should get near him or the band before a gig.

  When we considered how to implement that, given that we had a road crew of forty or more, it was decided we would take on a chef whose job it was to find the best restaurant in each city, so that we could eat out and have time alone before the gig, with no distractions. This was a little extravagant but it gave us breathing space, so therefore was well worth it. We were totally separate and it really worked. Very occasionally Angie was there, but usually it was just the four of us in isolation. At those times we were the kings of our world; no one else could touch us. Occasionally we’d talk about the show and if anyone had any ideas on how to improve it we’d discuss it. In general, though, the conversation was just mates’ banter with some dirty jokes thrown in.

  One of the strange things about touring is that you begin to feel as if you’re living in a bubble. This is mainly due to the fact that so much time is spent travelling the vast distances between cities, then, when you do finally arrive, you go through the same routine before every concert. Lunch, soundcheck, dinner, get dressed for gig, play gig, back to the hotel, sleep, wake up, more travel and on and on . . . What makes this even worse is that you’re often booked into a chain of h
otels like the Holiday Inn so you leave your room in the morning, go through the same old routine, open the door to your next hotel and the decor is the same as the one you just left the day before, right down to the pictures on the wall. It definitely feels like Groundhog Day! And in the seventies there were obviously no mobile phones, no laptops, no internet, so you were definitely cut off from the world for the length of the tour.

  On top of all this, on the financial front no one carried cash . . . or very little anyway. There were no bank cards or credit cards back then either. Defries had arranged for RCA to book all the hotels for the tour; he then instructed the whole entourage to charge everything, including meals, to room service and told everyone to act like ‘superstars’ to give the impression that Bowie and the Spiders were already huge. Part of the Defries masterplan! Of course the crew soon mastered the art of spending and would use every service the hotels had to offer, including beauty salons, spas and boutiques.

  We rocked St Louis on 11 October, even though it was not a ‘Ziggy and Spiders’ city; in fact, only a couple of hundred people showed up to a venue that held over 10,000, but Bowie turned it into a very intimate gig by inviting everyone down to the front. Then it was Kansas City where we did the show in our street clothes after the stage clothes failed to arrive on time. Then things changed again.

  We rolled into Los Angeles for two sold-out shows on 20 and 21 October at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium.

  Legendary DJ and Anglophile Rodney Bingenheimer had a glam rock club on Sunset Boulevard called Rodney’s English Disco. I first met him when he dropped in during the recording of Hunky Dory in Trident Studios. He was a very friendly guy and a total fan of Bowie and the band. He would continually say, ‘You guys have got to come to the US, you’ll be huge.’ He’d done everything he could to create a buzz for us, so we did have a huge following by the time we got to LA. Without his help we certainly wouldn’t have had the double sell-out shows.