Spider from Mars Read online

  The 20 October concert was broadcast on FM radio, the band’s first live radio show in America. It became a quality bootleg album and, many years later, would eventually be officially released. A good mix of this concert was never done for either the bootleg or the official release but the recording did capture the energy and power of Bowie and the Spiders.

  After playing so many shows on the tour we had really found our feet; we were on peak form that night and the feeling was particularly magical. Lucky, really, because we didn’t actually know it was being recorded.

  I still remember it clearly: the introduction, the version of Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’ from A Clockwork Orange was played with the house lights down, and it was spine-chilling, helped by the breeze blowing in off the ocean. The venue was a massive aircraft hangar that was jam-packed with people and the atmosphere was electric.

  During the show there was some fuck-up with Bowie’s microphone. I seem to remember that it kept slipping down, and wouldn’t stay in place. Then a roadie came on with pliers to try and fix it, but it was taking too long, so Bowie just said, ‘Give them here!’ and the whole audience cheered. He took the pliers, fixed the mic and went into a stream-of-consciousness speech. The audience loved it, because he’d never said anything to them before, and I guess they didn’t know what it was like to be talked to by David Bowie.

  After Santa Monica, we had a couple of days off. Bowie went in to Western Sound Studios with Iggy Pop to re-mix The Stooges’ album Raw Power. He managed to finish writing ‘Panic in Detroit’ while in LA, too.

  We were staying at one of the world’s most iconic and best-known hotels, the Beverly Hills Hotel on Sunset Boulevard. It had a couple of hundred rooms and more than twenty bungalows, which is where we were staying. Each of these was painted in the trademark colours of the hotel, peachy pink and green. (A silhouette of the hotel and surrounding palm trees would be featured on the cover of the Eagles’ album Hotel California in 1976.) To us, feeling more and more like true rock stars by the day, this was the ultimate place to chill; we hung out by the pool, just drinking cocktails. We didn’t feel out of place there because they were accustomed to dealing with musicians and movie stars. Some of the hotel’s famous clientele had included Marlene Dietrich, Humphrey Bogart, Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack. Marilyn Monroe’s favourite bungalow was number 7 and John Lennon and May Pang had apparently hidden out in one of the bungalows for a week.

  Mick, Trev and I shared a bungalow which was basically a suite with three bedrooms, a lounge and a balcony. Elton John was in the bungalow next to us as I discovered when I walked out to have a cigarette and enjoy the view of the lush gardens. The first thing I saw was Elton on his own balcony.

  ‘The British are coming,’ he said, so I knew he recognized me. We then exchanged pleasantries about how different America was from the UK. He said he really loved Hunky Dory and Ziggy and how he’d been a fan of Bowie’s since the beginning. I told him I loved Madman Across the Water, which had come out the previous year.

  ‘You have to be careful when you’re ordering room service here,’ he told me. ‘I ordered several meals for a party I was having and ended up with a bill for seventy lobsters!’ After a pause he added, ‘If you fancy one, pop round.’

  We ran in to a lot more groupies when we stayed at the Beverly Hills Hotel. The tour personnel would ask me, ‘What kind of women do you want? Kinky? What are you into? Anything you want, we can get it for you – just describe what you want and we’ll get it.’ It was unreal. We were rock stars, and we’d started to behave like rock stars. Sex was available to us day and night and I assume drugs were around, although all I ever did was smoke a bit of weed. Booze was a different story, though.

  I drank a lot on this tour, which was a mistake, because I behaved badly when I was drunk. I was quite shy apart from when I was on stage and had a kit in front of me. But then every gig would have a rider, with the best brandy, and the best wine, and if it didn’t get drunk it would get thrown out, and it was free – so I just thought, ‘Fuck it, I’ll have one.’ Not that we drank before gigs, apart from a glass of wine each. Afterwards, though . . . How do you come down after playing for thousands of people? You’re still up there on adrenalin. With forty people on the crew we often occupied nearly a whole floor of a hotel; after the show it was one big party involving many rooms and many guests.

  Sometimes we would go out to a club and because the club owner had been at the concert he would say, ‘The drinks are all free.’ At twenty-two years old this seemed like a great perk. After a few drinks I had no inhibitions. I would go and sit at tables where I didn’t know anybody, and pick up people’s drinks and start talking at them, which isn’t great when you’re chatting up someone’s wife. I was lucky I never got beaten up. I always knew I had Stuey, close by, which actually made me worse as I trusted him to handle any trouble I got into.

  I was definitely drinking far too much – even though I knew I was a pain in the arse when I was drunk. It really made no sense.

  After leaving the ‘Pink Palace’, as the Beverly Hills was affectionately called, we headed for San Francisco, minus the flowers in our hair. There we shot the video for ‘The Jean Genie’ which Mick Rock filmed and directed. He used live footage from one of our recent gigs and the rest was shot that day in a studio he’d hired. It also featured Cyrinda Foxe, a friend of David’s who was now an employee of MainMan and who had also Monroe character and she fitted the bill. There was a rumour among the crew that she and Bowie were having an affair and had spent several nights together earlier at the Plaza in New York. I knew Bowie was fond of her as he told me she was really good fun to hang out with. When I saw the three of them together Angie didn’t seem to have a problem with it. I think she got on with Cyrinda as well.

  A week earlier I had bought a book on kabuki theatre and one section had cartoons showing some of the different poses the actors used to portray emotions. One – with the hands making inverted spectacles – looked quite alien to me so I showed David how to do it a couple of days later. He used this in the video and it became a part of the live act, now affectionately known as the ‘Ziggy Mask’. Jean Genie was one of the first videos made for music TV.

  We played the Winterland Auditorium the next night, which was not as well attended as Santa Monica and then from San Francisco we took a train down to Phoenix, Arizona, where we had another couple of days off. The hotel had an outside swimming pool and the desert heat was unbearable so we hung around the pool quenching our thirst on tequila sunrises. It got so bad that Mick and I decided to go for a swim but I guess us northern boys weren’t used to the relentless desert sun. By the time we got back to the hotel room Mick looked like a lobster and I wasn’t too far behind. The next morning we freaked out: the chlorine in the pool had turned our hair peppermint-green! Wardrobe disaster . . . so Suzi had to come to the rescue. It prompted much piss-taking from the crew, with comments like ‘Here come the green genies!’

  Some parts of America were dangerous in unexpected ways. For example, back in England I’d always wondered what it would be like to go into one of those classic American diners, where you sit at the bar and drink coffee and order food. In November 1972, we were travelling through Georgia on the bus and we decided to keep an eye open for one of those places. Sure enough, one came along and we pulled over.

  We walked in, the Spiders and half the entourage, and the atmosphere immediately became a little tense; we looked outlandish, to put it mildly, with our bleached hair and bright clothes. We all sat at the counter, and the waiter walked over to me, pointed at Stuey and said, ‘Whadda ya want? I ain’t servin’ the nigger.’

  I asked, ‘What did you just say?’

  He repeated, more loudly this time, ‘I ain’t servin’ the nigger.’

  Everybody in the diner could hear this, but no one said a word or even looked up.

  We all looked at each other in shock for a second. Then we stood up, said, ‘Fuck you!’ to the waiter, and walk
ed out, giving him the finger. At the time, we thought the civil rights struggle was over; we hadn’t encountered any racism of this nature before.

  Another time in one of the Southern states Mick, Trev and I were in our hotel suite and there was a knock at the door. I opened it and there were two cops standing there.

  ‘Are you going out on the town tonight, sir?’ said one of them.

  ‘Probably,’ I said. ‘We were thinking about it.’

  ‘We’ve come to advise you that it’s not a good idea. You should stay in the hotel, sir,’ he said.

  ‘Why is that?’

  ‘A hippy was shot a few days ago just for having long hair. We heard you guys were coming to town so we wanted to warn you that if you go out looking like you do, you won’t last the night!’

  They sounded deadly serious and needless to say we took their advice. It definitely brought us down to earth for a while. I’m pretty sure they visited David’s suite too and told him the same.

  On a lighter note . . . one day I was sitting in the lobby of one of our hotels with Mick and Trevor. There were many conservative looking business men there, too, with their wives or secretaries. I’d noticed a few giving us condescending glances but we’d got used to that by now. In fact, some of the funniest times were after concerts when we left the stage, jumped in a limo and headed straight back to the hotel. The four of us would get in the lift looking like four versions of technicolour Alice Coopers with sweat and mascara running down our faces. There would often be around ten other hotel guests in the lift already; you could cut the atmosphere with a knife.

  Back to the lobby story . . . Leee Black Childers was heading out of the hotel and caught sight of us.

  ‘I’m going shopping, boys, can I get you anything?’ he called over in his usual camp voice.

  Raising my voice so that it could be heard over all the conversations going on, I asked, quite innocently, ‘Can you bring me some fags?’

  The whole place went deathly quiet.

  ‘I thought you’d never ask!’ he yelled mischievously, clearly relishing the moment.

  Elsewhere in the world, at the beginning of November Ziggy Stardust was released in Japan and towards the end of the month ‘The Jean Genie’ was released in the UK. It would eventually peak at Number 2 in the charts – our bestselling single to date. By then we’d seen concerts in Dallas and Houston cancelled (Texas wasn’t a Ziggy state, it seemed), played places like New Orleans and Florida, and had worked our way across country back to Cleveland, Ohio. Only this time we played at the bigger venue, the Cleveland Public Hall, which had a capacity of 10,000, and due to our growing popularity it sold out for two nights. This was our biggest gig to date. I clearly remember Mick, Trevor and me taking a sneaky look through the curtains at the packed house.

  ‘Fucking hell, that’s a lot of people,’ Mick said, a note of apprehension in his voice.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I told him, ‘when the lights go down we can pretend we’re at Beverley Regal’, a reference to a Yorkshire venue that held a couple of hundred people and where we’d played many times as the Rats!

  Cleveland was one of the most exciting and loudest audience responses we’d ever had.

  It was around this time, towards the end of the tour, that we found out that Mick and Trevor had been getting the back-up vocals wrong in ‘Changes’. We thought Bowie was singing ‘Turn and face the strain’ during the chorus, until one particular soundcheck when he stopped them halfway through the song.

  ‘What are you guys singing?’ he asked. ‘It’s fucking “strange” not “strain”.’

  He looked over his shoulder at his own arse, to demonstrate what that meant. We all had a good laugh about this, including Bowie.

  The famous Tower Theater in Philadelphia was to be our final venue on this first Bowie and the Spiders US tour. We had sold out the first two dates and a third had to be added, which also sold out. We played three blistering shows in a perfect finale to the most amazing three months of my life so far . . .

  But unbeknownst to me there was a cloud on the horizon. Things were about to change.

  8

  IT AIN’T EASY

  On our arrival back in New York at the end of the tour we headed over to RCA Studios where they had arranged a press conference for us. Bowie led us out to a room full of journalists and we took our seats. He introduced us individually and then said, ‘These are the Spiders From Mars and I am David Bowie.’ I remember it being a bit of a non-event really. It’s very obvious how it felt for us if you see the photos taken by Mick Rock. What followed were banal questions like ‘What brand of hair colour do you use?’ and ‘Is it a rinse or a dye?’ which I don’t remember Bowie even answering. Someone asked Mick, ‘Why are you the only one wearing a hat?’ to which he answered, ‘I didn’t have time to wash my hair this morning.’

  As no intelligent questions were forthcoming, Bowie announced his second US tour would open at Radio City on Valentine’s Day and that he was currently working on a new album that featured songs he’d written while touring America.

  As the tour had been extended we were a little behind on recording so Ken Scott flew over to join us in RCA Studios to get some tracks in the can. We recorded ‘Drive-In Saturday’, which Bowie had written somewhere mid-tour and had already performed acoustically at one of our concerts. It’s one of my favourite Bowie songs from this period. It tells of a time in the future where people have lost the art of making love and have to resort to reading books and watching films to remind them. We also recorded ‘Prettiest Star’ and a version of ‘All the Young Dudes’.

  With those tracks finished we flew back home on 10 December. Bowie sailed back on the RHMS Ellinis with some of the entourage.

  I had about ten days off which was fortunate as June was heading down to London and was moving into the flat with me. Ann, Trev’s wife, and baby daughter Sarah had already moved into our flat in Beckenham.

  June had been working as a window dresser in a big store in Hull and when I met her at King’s Cross station she was standing on the platform with a trunk full of her possessions and two three-foot-high cut-out Disney characters made out of some kind of foam. One was Thumper the rabbit and the other was Figaro, a black and white cat, both from a display she’d done. Being made of foam they were very delicate but somehow she’d managed to get them to London without them being damaged! She was going back to clothes designing, which, apart from her brief time as a window dresser, was what she’d done since school. She’d be working with some friends in London and would go on to sell to Harrods’ Way In and other boutiques in South Kensington.

  I got June, Thumper and Figaro settled in to the flat and then we went Christmas shopping as we knew I’d be busy later in the month, getting ready for two gigs at the Rainbow. We also planned to spend Christmas in Yorkshire as I hadn’t seen my family for a long time.

  ‘Space Oddity’ was reissued in mid-December, just in time for our two shows at the Rainbow on 23 and 24 December. Less impressive in production terms than the previous Rainbow shows that summer, the two gigs were still packed with fans who gave a roar of appreciation when we walked on stage.

  Bowie asked the crowd to donate money to Barnardo’s, the British charity founded to care for vulnerable children and young people. David’s dad had worked for the charity until his death in 1969. There was also a piece in Melody Maker making the same request. A two-page ad read: ‘David Bowie and the Spiders wish everyone a Happy Christmas and request that those attending the Rainbow Concert on 24 December bring a children’s toy to be donated to charity.’ So truckloads of toys arrived and were duly distributed.

  The magazine also cited Bowie as ‘THE main man of 1972’ and he dominated the issue. Bowie was voted Top Vocalist of the Year (ahead of Rod Stewart and Elton John) while Ziggy Stardust was the critics’ choice for pop album of 1972.

  After the second Rainbow concert June and I jumped in a limousine and headed up to Yorkshire, arriving at my parents’ h
ouse in Driffield in the early hours of Christmas morning. It was good to see them after so long, and to catch up with my sister. They brought me up to speed on what had been happening with the rest of the family while I told them about the American tour and how great the audiences were.

  I also described what it was like staying in places like the Plaza and the Beverly Hills Hotel, and even how amazing the food was. I should have noticed sooner that I’d gone too far. Mum unfortunately took this personally. While we were talking she’d been busy preparing a meal in the kitchen. Now she walked out with a plate full of food and said, ‘You won’t be wanting this then.’ ‘Oh, shit,’ I thought. Diplomacy has never been a strong point of mine. It took some clever talking to convince her that no one made a fry-up like she did and that I’d actually missed it.

  Even though I’d just toured America and been on TV and in the newspapers the conversations soon got back to: ‘How long is it all going to last? When are you going to get a proper job?’ There was still nothing I could say that would be satisfactory answers to these questions.

  My parents did come to one gig up in Yorkshire, when we played the Bridlington Spa. After the show my dad came up to me and said, ‘Bloody hell, lad, you can play them drums’, which was a 100 per cent acknowledgement by his standards. That was the one and only time they ever saw me play. Later, my mum told me that my dad had been out with a bunch of his workmates and one of them said to him, ‘Your lad’s a gay guy in a band, isn’t he?’ My dad grabbed him and beat the shit out of him. He would rarely compliment me, but he wouldn’t let anyone say anything negative about me either, and, back then, being gay was thought of as negative (to put it mildly) in places like Driffield.