Spider from Mars Page 16

  We only had three days in Yorkshire before we had to leave and head for Manchester for two gigs at the Hardrock, on 28 and 29 December. Just for a change we opened the show with our version of the Stones’ ‘Let’s Spend the Night Together’. It was the perfect start and definitely got the message across to a packed audience that it was going to be a great night.

  During the American tour we’d got into a routine, for safety and security reasons, of finishing the last song, then running from the stage to a waiting limousine and heading back to our hotel. We’d had several incidents on the tour where we’d been slow leaving the venue and found the limousine surrounded by huge crowds of enthusiastic fans.

  One night in particular we’d fought our way into the limousine and were sitting waiting to leave, but the crowd in front refused to move even though there was a cop trying to control the situation. There seemed to be hundreds of hands banging on the windows and we could hear them creaking under the pressure. It was quite scary. Bowie screamed at the driver, ‘Just drive, just fuckin’ drive.’ He did and unfortunately we ran over the cop’s foot. We later found out he had fractured a few bones.

  The crowd reaction in England was turning out to be just the same as in America: it was pandemonium after the gigs. As we left the stage in Manchester there were two lines of security guards holding back the fans and we had to make our way down the middle of them. Unfortunately the line didn’t hold and it felt like we were in a human tumble dryer. Although I understood the fans just wanted to show their love and appreciation, it added up to a very scary scene. I noticed a pair of scissors flashing their way towards Mick’s face, until a security guard caught the offending girl’s arm inches from Mick’s eye. She’d wanted a bit of his hair.

  Next was a ride up to Scotland, to the gig in Glasgow. Greens Playhouse had a reputation: if they liked you, it would be a great night; if they didn’t, they would certainly let you know. Although we were riding high and full of confidence, this did give us pause for thought. Thankfully the Glasgow audience absolutely loved it. For some reason we didn’t leave immediately that night and I went out the back to have a cigarette and cool down in an area with no public access. Mike Garson was with me and we were deep in conversation about touring in the UK as this was only Mike’s fifth gig in UK. Being American, he was still having trouble understanding the British accent. I looked up and was taken aback to see three well-built, tough looking Scottish guys approaching. I took them to be fans, as one was carrying a Ziggy album. They spewed forth what seemed like five minutes of anger and antagonism with furious arm and fist motions for emphasis. They spoke with the strongest Scottish accents I’d ever heard. The only word I could understand was ‘fuckin’, of which there seemed to be quite a lot.

  ‘Did they like us?’ Mike asked, under his breath.

  I replied in the same manner, ‘I’ve no fuckin’ idea.’

  We both breathed a sigh of relief when they finally extended their hands for a handshake.

  We did three more fantastic shows to end this mini tour by 9 January. The month was shaping up to be a busy one. On 17 January we appeared on Russell Harty Plus, a London Weekend TV show, to promote our next single, ‘Drive-In Saturday’. We brought along a French make-up artist called Pierre La Roche, who had worked for Elizabeth Arden, and Freddie Burretti to handle clothes. I had a new, more tailored jacket that Freddie had made, a black, white and red striped affair together with red trousers. It looked great but was almost impossible to play in, being too tight around the sleeves. It’s a good job we were miming! I also wore a shirt and tie. Mick had a new black satin jacket. Bowie was clad in a multicoloured suit with red velvet lapels, padded shoulders, a green shirt and metallic looking cravat and wore what has been described as a ‘chandelier’ earring on one ear. He’d also shaved off his eyebrows for this show so he looked even more alien than usual.

  We played ‘Drive-In Saturday’ and Bowie did a live acoustic version of ‘My Death’. Between the two numbers he was interviewed by Russell Harty who was – from today’s point of view, anyway – completely wrong for an interviewer who was supposed to be in touch with music that teenagers liked. I remember Bowie having to be on his guard during the interview. Harty was obviously trying to trivialize him, asking him pointed questions about the content of fan letters he received, which I thought created a slightly nasty undercurrent given that this was supposed to be an entertainment show.

  Bowie didn’t bat an eyelid, though, and when questioned about the shoes and tights he was wearing he famously told Harty, ‘Don’t be silly’ . . .

  We watched him perform ‘My Death’ on one of the studio monitors and for me it was probably his best ever version of it. Unfortunately London Weekend managed to lose the recording. That said, our performance on this show was probably responsible for ‘Drive-In Saturday’ remaining in the charts for ten weeks after its release in April, peaking at Number 3.

  That same month we went back to Trident Studios with Ken Scott to complete Aladdin Sane. In loose terms it was Ziggy in America. ‘Panic in Detroit’ was written in Los Angeles during the period when he was re-mixing Raw Power with Iggy Pop. It was the one and only time Bowie had a firm idea of what he wanted from the drums. He’d played the song to us during the tour so I had an idea of the structure and had worked out almost a hard-rock beat for it, very John Bonham-influenced. When we started running through the track in the studio, with me playing the beat I’d worked out, Bowie stopped everything.

  ‘Woody, just play a Bo Diddley beat, on your tom-toms,’ he said.

  ‘Anybody can play that, isn’t it too simple?’ I said.

  ‘I don’t want fucking Buddy Rich,’ he answered.

  This did piss me off as I’d worked out some cool drum fills with my beat that I hadn’t played yet. We started playing the song again with me playing the Bo Diddley beat and immediately I knew he was right. It felt great to play and fitted the song perfectly. This was the only time he ever told me what to play.

  ‘Watch That Man’ and ‘Cracked Actor’ both reminded me of Stones songs. Kind of a heavier version of some of the songs on Exile On Main Street, just good, straight-ahead rock tunes with a honky-tonk piano and wailing backing vocals supplied by Linda Lewis. The lyrics were very Bowie, though, ‘Watch That Man’ suggesting to me a decadent, anything-goes-type party, and ‘Cracked Actor’, about an over-the-hill Hollywood star who had managed to pull some young chick who mistakenly thought he was a drug connection. So I had a no-nonsense approach to both these songs: no frills, just a good rock beat that sounded exciting.

  As a genuine nod to the Stones we again did our version of ‘Let’s Spend the Night Together’. As a result of our time in America the overall sound of the band had got heavier and Mick’s guitar sound had naturally got dirtier than it was before. This really helped bring those tracks to life.

  The influence of Mike Garson showed up in particular on ‘Aladdin Sane’, ‘Lady Grinning Soul’ and ‘Time’. On ‘Aladdin Sane’ Bowie wanted a piano solo in the instrumental section, which consisted of just two chords. We were playing straight-ahead rock ’n’ roll through this section. Mike first did a bluesy solo and on hearing it Bowie said, ‘No, that’s not what I want.’ He then tried a Latin approach.

  ‘No, that’s not it either,’ Bowie said. ‘You do this avant-garde jazz, do that.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ Mike asked. ‘You might never work again.’

  So Mike went to town with no holds barred. It was weird and wacky, bordering on ‘insane’, and at the end of the song we all said, ‘Fucking hell, that was amazing.’ That first and only take was the one that ended up on the album.

  ‘Time’ featured Mike again with kind of avant-garde cabaret piano. When Bowie recorded the vocal on this song he stopped the whole studio with the line ‘falls wanking to the floor’ . . . We were all busy asking each other, ‘Did he just say wanking?’ ‘It sounded like wanking to me!’ At the end, when he’d finished the song, someone asked him if that
’s what he’d actually said and he just rather coolly replied, ‘Yes.’ At the time we thought, ‘Can you actually sing that in a song?’

  ‘It’s definitely not going to get played on the radio, is it!’ I said.

  ‘Lady Grinning Soul’ was a love song Bowie had written for someone. I always thought it was for Cyrinda Foxe but I can’t confirm that. This track definitely meant a lot to Bowie as it was the only one where he insisted on being in the studio when Ken mixed it, to make sure it sounded the way he wanted it to.

  So with the tracks we had already recorded in America during the tour we now had the album. The title Aladdin Sane was a take on the phrase ‘a lad insane’.

  For the album cover RCA employed a company called Duffy Design Concepts, with the legendary photographer Brian Duffy, and Celia Philo, who directed the album cover shoot. Both had worked on Pirelli calendars, and you can see this influence on the inside sleeve. Duffy called in Pierre La Roche for the shoot. I’m pretty sure the inspiration for the ‘red flash’, which would later become one of Bowie’s most iconic images, came from Bowie noticing that the symbol was always present on high-voltage machinery. It was Pierre’s idea to put it on Bowie’s face, though.

  The album had advance orders of 150,000, which made it the biggest advance sale since the Beatles. It would be released on 13 April 1973 and would become our first Number 1 album, staying seventy-two weeks in the UK charts and reaching Number 17 in the US charts.

  Recording was followed by rehearsing for the second US leg of the tour. We went back to the Royal Ballroom in Tottenham until 25 January. Bowie was keen to change things up a bit. He wanted someone else to play the acoustic guitar, because that would free him up to do more visual things. He had started to incorporate mime into the act at the end of the UK tour: this was unique to Bowie and had certainly never been seen in a rock ’n’ roll band before. Even though I never got to experience this the way the audience did, from my vantage point on the kit I did see their reaction. It caught them by surprise and they loved it. It was another art form he excelled in and it fitted perfectly within chosen sections of the show. He also wanted to add extra dimensions to the sound, and include new songs from Aladdin Sane, which meant he needed some more musicians on stage. Because our profile had risen in America, we were playing bigger venues and people expected more from the show and he definitely delivered. However, as soon as the additional musicians were announced, the press got in a froth and said, ‘Bowie’s adding new Spiders!’ He dismissed that in an interview with Charles Shaar Murray in the NME on 27 January 1973: ‘I’d like to get one thing straight: these aren’t additional Spiders. The Spiders are still Trev, Mick and Woody. We’ve got some back-up men on tenor saxes, piano and voices . . . It’s three Spiders, back-up musicians and me.’

  So we took on two session musicians, Ken Fordham, a sax player, and Brian Wilshaw, who played sax and flute. We were also joined by Bowie’s old school friend Geoff MacCormack on backing vocals and percussion, and John ‘Hutch’ Hutchinson, who had played with him in the sixties, on rhythm guitar. Rehearsals went well and after a couple of run-throughs of the show it was obvious it wasn’t going to take too much work to get it sounding good.

  Bowie left for the US on board the QE2 from Southampton, travelling with Geoff MacCormack, and arriving in New York on 30 January. The rest of us arrived in America in early February with more rehearsals booked at RCA Studios, from 6 until 12 February. Our first gig was to be at Radio City on Valentine’s Day. One night after rehearsals Mick, Trev and I decided to go out on the town. We had heard about some of the clubs in Harlem and how they had great music, so we decided that’s where we would go. I think Hutch and one of the road crew came with us. We’d flagged down a couple of cabs to take us there and the response had been the same – ‘I don’t do Harlem.’ We thought they were just being awkward New York taxi drivers, but alarm bells should have rung when a third guy said the same thing. However, he agreed to take us to within a few blocks of Harlem and we walked the rest of the way.

  Almost immediately we saw a club sign and heard, drifting up from the basement, music that sounded good. We went down the steps, not thinking twice about the fact that we were dressed in pretty far-out clothes and, more importantly, that we were white. As we walked in the entire place went quiet; the band stopped playing and everybody in the room turned to look at us. We were the only white guys in there. We were used to being stared at, of course, but some abusive language was shouted in our direction and the atmosphere was definitely edgy and dangerous. It felt like we might not get out alive.

  A guy came up to us and snarled, ‘What the fuck are you doing in here?’

  ‘We heard the music and wanted to come in and listen,’ I answered.

  He obviously noticed the accent and asked, ‘What the fuck are you doing in New York?’

  I told him we were playing Radio City Music Hall and that we were a band with David Bowie called the Spiders From Mars. He turned around to everyone else and shouted, ‘It’s OK, they’re in a band’, and gave us the thumbs up. Then he told us, ‘If you hadn’t been in a band, you might have been killed. White guys don’t come to this club.’ I never knew if he was joking or not . . .

  Later I got up and played drums with the house band, just to prove that we weren’t lying. It felt like a good move and the audience showed their appreciation. So apart from our initial entrance, we ended up having a great night.

  The tour had been streamlined, under RCA’s instructions, to only include venues in areas where there had been good record sales, giving us sixteen dates to play. I thought this was a good idea as it guaranteed that we would be playing to sold-out shows everywhere. What obviously influenced this policy was the amount of money that had been spent on the first tour, which RCA had underwritten.

  To incorporate the extra musicians into the show visually Freddie Burretti had been busy designing and having outfits made for them. June had made Mike Garson’s outfit prior to the tour. It was a light-coloured jacket with tails and trousers and a bright shirt, to complement his flamboyant piano playing. All these additional musicians were mostly out of the spotlight at the back of the stage but they still needed to look good.

  David’s new costumes had been designed and made by Kansai Yamamoto. Two trunkloads of the new designs were waiting for him when he arrived at his hotel. These were to become an integral part of Bowie’s concept for the forthcoming shows. The outfits themselves were sensational without the added bonus of being part of a rock ’n’ roll show. One of these outfits was a knitted, multicoloured, one-legged jumpsuit with huge matching bangles for his wrists and ankle. On top of this outfit Bowie would wear a huge, full-length white satin cloak with red and black Japanese characters emblazoned on it. During the show the two wardrobe girls, dressed in black, would come on stage and rip the cloak off to reveal the outfit underneath. There were about four Japanese kimono-style outfits that reached the top of Bowie’s thighs, one in white satin with a Japanese design embroidered on it. With this outfit he wore white satin knee-length leggings.

  Freddie had also been busy supplying Bowie with various new Ziggy-style outfits, one of which, in red plastic, had huge shoulder ‘wings’. Freddie had made new things for the band but I’d had June make me some outfits that would enable me to have freedom of movement when playing drums. One was like a spacey, white Hell’s Angels outfit open down the front with chains across the chest. Another was in a green, crocodile-skin-patterned fabric, a two-piece suit with a bomber jacket and skinny trousers. I remember thinking during rehearsals, ‘If they don’t like the music, they might get off on the fashion show.’

  Since working with Pierre La Roche, Bowie’s make-up had become more conceptualized to fit in with this bizarre wardrobe. He was quite an expert in applying his cosmetics, which he said was partly due to his time spent with Lindsay Kemp. For this tour he adopted kabuki-style make-up. A friend of his, Calvin Lee, a Chinese American professor who I’d met around the time we recor
ded The Man Who Sold the World, had been involved in inventing a hologram-type of paper with patterns in that was popular in the 1960s. He used to wear a cut-out one-inch circle of it on his forehead which looked like a ‘third eye’. Bowie adopted this idea and had a gold circle surrounded by small diamante in the centre of his forehead.

  We went over to Radio City for a day of rehearsals before the Valentine’s Day gig. Bowie had seen a show there the previous night and during it one of the performers had been slowly lowered from high above the stage in a cage that had lights on it, giving it the appearance of a kaleidoscope. It was part of Radio City’s stage equipment, so he decided that was how he wanted to open the show, him being lowered in this cage. During rehearsals I noticed a trapdoor at the front of the stage and asked the house manager if it still worked. He confirmed that it did. I pointed it out to Bowie and said how cool it would look if the four of us ascended to the stage via the trapdoor with the whole venue in darkness, each of us lit by a separate light beaming down from above. He said, ‘That’s a brilliant idea, let’s do it’, before realizing we now had two potentially great entrances to the start of the show.

  ‘We have to do both,’ he said. ‘We’ll have an intermission in the show, then we can use both ideas. I’ll start the first half descending to the stage and then the four of us will come up through the trapdoor for the second half. They won’t be expecting that.

  ‘When our heads arrive at stage level don’t smile, just keep as still as you can, looking forward. I’ll count to four under my breath and, on four, head for your places on stage.’

  We rehearsed both entrances so that everyone knew exactly what was happening. Needless to say, during the show both entrances received rapturous applause from the audience. What they didn’t know, as Ziggy and the Spiders were so dramatically spot-lit, was that Bowie and I were in the middle of a fairly heated argument. It had started during the intermission over a new outfit that Freddie had made me. Bowie was insisting that I wear it that night and I was refusing, having tried the outfit on earlier. It was striped with extremely wide shoulders, and I thought I looked like Lurch from The Addams Family crossed with a deckchair.