Spider from Mars Read online

  As we rose up to stage level on the platform various words of abuse were still flying back and forth. Somehow we managed to curse each other without moving our lips, only stopping when Bowie began the count. During the first song after the intermission he made his way to me in front of my drum kit and with a big grin on his face said, ‘Fuck you.’ We both cracked up.

  On the first night we were at the end of the last song, ‘Suffragette City’, when a fan managed to get up on the stage and grab hold of Bowie who collapsed on the floor and had to be helped from the stage. At the time I wasn’t sure if this was a part of his theatrics but I later found out that he had been diagnosed with exhaustion and ordered to rest in bed the next day, which he did. He looked much better when we saw him and was able to pull off the evening show as expertly as he always did.

  The two gigs at Radio City had been a resounding success. We even had the artist Salvador Dalí in the audience and I remember wondering if, with all the new stage outfits, especially Bowie’s, he was sitting there thinking that one of his paintings had come to life . . .

  We moved on to Philadelphia, to the Tower Theater where we’d had such a great time on the first leg of our tour. We were doing seven shows in four days there. We weren’t too sure about doing matinees followed by an evening show on three consecutive days, especially not knowing if Bowie was over his exhaustion, but in the end we just said to each other, ‘Fuck it, let’s just do it and make sure every show is good.’ It was incredibly hard physically but really good fun!

  Though the shows were amazing and received so well by the crowds, and it felt like rock ’n’ roll history was being made, cracks were starting to appear in the established relationship between Bowie and the Spiders. He’d started to go to the venues in a separate limousine whereas previously we’d all travelled together. On several occasions he even stayed in a different hotel from the rest of us.

  I remember one time we were all sitting in a dressing room with lots of the crew milling around. Bowie put a cigarette in his mouth and looked directly at the three of us and snapped his fingers, indicating that one of us should jump up and light his cigarette. We’d just been chatting up to this moment and none of us said a word, but gave him a look that said, ‘You must be kidding, fuck off.’ We carried on talking while two or three of the crew scrambled to put lighters in front of him.

  We made many attempts to communicate with him at various times on the tour but he would just look you straight in the eye and completely blank you. I remember once asking him if he’d seen a particular film. He didn’t answer and I thought maybe he hadn’t heard me, so I repeated the question. He looked straight at me and blanked me again. His behaviour was definitely changing.

  On the earlier tours we’d watched him get into his character of Ziggy Stardust prior to a performance. But the minute the show was over he would drop the character and you could have a laugh and a joke with him. I started to notice that now he seemed to be Ziggy most of the time and I tried to figure out why his attitude and demeanour had changed so drastically. I put it down partly to the fact that as well as all the performances he had to do as Ziggy, he also had to undertake vast numbers of interviews for radio shows and music magazines, national papers, etc., and from my observation the majority of the journalists and DJs didn’t seem to want to talk to David Bowie, they wanted an interview with ‘Ziggy Stardust’. Bowie seemed to be obliging and I felt that he was like a method actor in a film who couldn’t throw off his character.

  I guess that along with all this change of behaviour it became clear that Bowie was now separating himself from the band. There were no more meals together prior to the shows. Sometimes we didn’t even see him until he arrived for sound-check. Even the soundchecks weren’t fun any more, with hardly any social interaction. We obviously understood that Bowie was the star of the show, but we’d come this far as a ‘gang’ and now it seemed it was being broken up.

  Of course, Bowie’s real problem at the time was drugs, as has been widely documented and as he later openly admitted himself.

  A new guy had joined the crew at the beginning of the tour. I had never seen him moving equipment or doing anything else, and when I asked what his job was, I was told he was the coke dealer. I was surprised as I’d never seen anybody do coke all the time I was in the band. In fact, the truth is I’ve never seen anybody do coke at all, apart from in movies! I assumed the coke must be for the crew, who often had to work all night and then travel to the next gig. Mick and Trev certainly never did coke, as far as I knew.

  In retrospect, it explains so much but at the time I really didn’t have a clue what lay behind Bowie’s behaviour. It was much later, after the UK tour, that I found out he was doing coke throughout this period.

  And so the touring continued . . . to Nashville, Memphis, on to Detroit.

  I met some great people on the road, and attention from female fans and groupies continued to be ever-present. This reached a logical conclusion when a female member of the crew would fill the bus with girls after a gig. It would be driven back to the hotel and we’d meet them in the bar. It was like having our own private harem; we knew if they’d got on the bus they were into sleeping with members of the band. Sometimes I’d single out a pretty one and we’d spend the night together. At first the bus was filled with girls only every now and then, but then it became more regular. Beautiful girls would ask for my room number and I’d happily give it to them. I was selective, though; I didn’t sleep with hundreds of girls. I guess we looked at it as one of the perks of being in a famous rock ’n’ roll band.

  In the morning, we were nearly always woken up by Jamie Andrews who would more often than not have obtained a master key. He would open the door to our suite and call out in his camp voice, ‘Woody, Trevor, Mick’, followed by a string of obscenities. It was a real circus. He was just so bloody loud and we never quite got used to it. It was hilarious to see the confused expressions on the faces of our ‘guests’; they weren’t quite sure who they had been sleeping with . . .

  Something out of the ordinary seemed to happen every day when we were touring.

  One day Mick, Trev and I were sitting in our suite at a hotel when all of a sudden the door opened and Tony Frost entered accompanied by a woman in a green dress. She had long black hair, black evening gloves and was wearing high heels. In one hand she had a long cigarette holder; over her other arm was a black handbag. She was also heavily made up.

  ‘Have you met Gloria?’ Tony asked. ‘Can you give her a light?’

  As I looked into her eyes, I noticed the different-sized pupils and realized that Gloria was in fact Bowie in drag.

  ‘It’s nice to meet you, Gloria,’ I said politely, as I lit her cigarette, trying not to smile. This was ridiculous. I didn’t object to Bowie dressing up as a woman, if that’s what he wanted, but I felt it was pretty stupid that I had to pretend not to know who he was. If anyone else in the band or crew had done this, it would have been just for a laugh, but Bowie took this stuff very seriously.

  Mick and Trev gave ‘Gloria’ a polite nod as she turned round and headed for the door. Before she reached the door I quickly whispered to both of them, ‘It’s Bowie.’ The look on their faces was priceless.

  Another time, after a gig in San Francisco, the three of us were getting some air outside at the back of the venue. We’d changed into our street clothes and were sitting on a bench just cooling off when three guys stopped in front of us. They were all on roller skates and wearing full-length dresses and with beards that had been sprayed silver. Their faces were fully made up. One of them said in a Southern drawl, ‘You guys are so fuckin’ weird.’

  The band was now so big in America that I could easily have lost my head. I’d walk into a place and there would be literally hundreds of people dressed like us. It was quite unnerving. So much adulation is hard to take; I hadn’t banked on that happening. There were mad moments when we thought we were the best thing since sliced bread and that no other band co
uld touch us. The audiences validated those feelings every night, because they went nuts when we played. Even between gigs we had Warhol’s lot around us, and everything they said and did was eccentric to say the least. The only people I could communicate with on a real, down-to-earth level were Mick and Trevor and some of the crew. We all managed to stay pretty well grounded, considering. Even though there was now more distance between us and Bowie, I think we still helped anchor him and keep things real. Perhaps it was because he knew we wouldn’t accept certain things, so he could only go so far with us. Maybe it was a case of ‘I’ll try my ideas on these northern lads, and if they can take it, maybe the audiences will too.’

  We’d sit down and have a laugh about how far we’d come since the Rats, and that helped us get through it. The northern way of dealing with these things was always to laugh at them and take the piss, so that’s what we did. It helped us stay relatively sane.

  We were living every young rock musician’s dream, but the communication gap between Bowie and the rest of us continued to grow. However, lots of other things were going wrong for him at this point. He was exhausted, and the pressure of coming up with music for a new album must have been considerable. Writing songs while touring, as he’d done for Aladdin Sane, is tough, and he also had to do the interviews. Travelling when you can’t fly is time-consuming, too. The cracks were getting wider.

  A massive, third American tour was now being considered, but it was never booked. Bowie was even talking about taking the Ziggy show to the USSR, Europe and China, but in retrospect I don’t think he could have got through it and kept his sanity, with all the drugs as well. I think his way of dealing with the success that he’d been trying for so long to achieve was to do coke, but that just complicated things.

  By the spring of 1973, I had started to realize that I didn’t enjoy some parts of the rock ’n’ roll life that up to then I’d revelled in. I remember looking up at the ceiling, while a groupie was bouncing up and down on me, and thinking, ‘I’m the one being used here’, which was weird because I always thought that if anyone was being used it was them. It was fun to experience all this, but ultimately I came to understand it was something I didn’t want as part of my life. Perhaps I was growing up a bit, and realizing that you need to be a bit responsible in life. At the same time it was hard to keep any kind of mental clarity, because touring was so exhausting.

  I’d now been in a bubble for 180-plus gigs, and it was getting both surreal and unreal. A day off doesn’t feel like a day off in that situation, because you’re in tour mode and you can’t snap out of it just like that. It felt like being wired on life, while not being connected with the world because you never get a chance to watch the news on TV or read a newspaper or do anything normal.

  I can understand why so many touring musicians resort to drugs to deal with all this, because in such a situation you’re either exhausted or too wired to sleep, not helped by all the adrenalin peaks and troughs from the shows, the long journeys and the jet lag. We were either playing a show, sound checking, filming, getting fitted for clothes or travelling somewhere. Drugs just weren’t for me, fortunately, but the drinking was becoming a problem. As I mentioned earlier, it had started with all the free booze that was available at the gigs, clubs and parties. For a young bloke like me this was another of the fantastic perks of being on the road. Often the road crew would have six tequila sunrises lined up for me at the bar at a club. That would be just for starters. The next day I’d have no memory of what else I’d drunk. Sometimes one of the crew would say, ‘That was a great night last night’, and I had to take his word for it. I guess such nights were becoming a bit too frequent and the novelty of all the free booze was beginning to wear off, so I made a decision to curb the drinking, at least to excess. In retrospect, it had partly been an attempt to escape my shyness. I’d just turned twenty-three and I was having to make some big decisions.

  I was looking on the whole Ziggy experience as the conclusion of a journey that I’d been on for a few years. As a teenage musician who had been new to the industry, I had concentrated on learning my craft, going to gigs and watching bands. All I really had at that point was a desire to play. Then I’d played in bigger bands, first on the local circuit, then at universities, and I’d honed my skills. All that was sheer pleasure. Then I’d met Bowie, who was always a man on a mission, from the word go. He was willing to do and say anything to get him where he wanted to be. I admired that.

  From that point on, I knew that unusual things could and would happen, but I never knew how big it would be, and neither did Bowie, to be honest. Now he was having a hard time with the monster he had created and he was losing control of it, because Ziggy Stardust was more powerful than David Bowie. At least that’s how I saw it.

  Sadly, relations between the Spiders and Bowie continued to deteriorate during this second American tour. As musicians, it pissed us off that we still weren’t allowed to do press, because we wanted to talk about how we created music. The previous year, when we’d first been banned, I understood it and I let it go, but the Spiders were well-known musicians by now, so a lot of journalists wanted to interview us. That never sat well with me, and I could never get a proper explanation of why it wasn’t allowed from Angie or Defries.

  When I look back, I understand that they probably wanted to keep the mystique alive, and also they didn’t want us doing what Mick had done and potentially saying things at odds with whatever Bowie was saying, but it was still incredibly annoying. Plus there was the possibility that our position was going to be reduced as time went on: Bowie told us that he eventually wanted to play funk music and have us dressed in black, so no one would really see us. I wasn’t keen on that, obviously, and I thought, ‘No way – that’s not going to happen.’ In retrospect, I don’t think Bowie had expected that the Spiders would have a high profile, just as he hadn’t expected Ziggy to be such a huge phenomenon.

  More seriously, I found out how poorly we were being paid compared to the extra backing musicians. At that point on the second American tour we were still on a pathetically low salary. I was sitting with Mike Garson one day and I saw an article in a magazine about Lamborghinis. I remarked how nice they were, and Mike said to me, ‘You can buy one after the tour.’

  ‘Yeah, I wish!’ I answered. He seemed surprised.

  ‘You could buy one of those, couldn’t you?’ he asked.

  ‘Fuck, no!’ I replied. ‘They cost $20,000.’

  ‘But you’ve been with Bowie right from the beginning!’ he persisted.

  I asked him how much he thought I earned.

  ‘Well, I know what I’m on,’ he answered. It turned out he was earning ten times as much as me. I then checked with the other backing musicians and found out they were getting almost double what the Spiders were getting.

  I couldn’t swallow that. I felt I had to do something about it, so Mick, Trevor and I got together and discussed the fact that we were getting screwed. We hadn’t expected this to happen: a while back, Bowie had taken us to a club one night and told us, ‘I really want to prepare you for what’s coming. You’re going to be millionaires, and you need to be prepared for that.’ He wasn’t bullshitting us; I could tell he was absolutely serious.

  I know it sounds really naive to say that we hadn’t been doing it for the money; the purpose of it all for us was to be out there playing music. We literally never thought about money, because we were working all the time, and anything we needed was paid for. We got the best of everything that existed, plus a bonus cheque after the tour. I wouldn’t even pay that cheque into the bank; it would stay in my drawer at home and be joined by another cheque after the next tour. I had enough money to live on, so I never thought about it. It was all done on trust, and we weren’t businessmen.

  Mick, Trevor and I decided to take care of this. What would happen to us if it all stopped tomorrow? We hadn’t done any interviews in the press so although we had a certain profile simply from being Bowie’s band membe
rs, we didn’t feel our futures were secure.

  Mick said he knew someone at Lou Reed’s management, and had a word with him. The guy came over to our hotel and said to us, ‘Look, you’re in a brilliant position. You’re Bowie’s band, the musicians who have put him up there. He wasn’t selling any records until you guys came along.’ The next day he came back and said he’d been talking to the record label CBS, who had offered us a hundred grand to give them first refusal on a record deal for the three of us as the Spiders From Mars. The money wasn’t even for signing the deal – it was just for giving them the first option.

  Unfortunately, one of the roadies overheard this discussion and went to Defries and Bowie and told them about it. They called us into Bowie’s hotel room for a showdown – and, man, that was a heavy scene. Bowie was sitting there, expressionless. We knew this wouldn’t go well.

  Usually Mick was the spokesman in these meetings, but that day it was me rather than him, and I couldn’t figure out why. So because he wasn’t saying anything, and because Trevor was quiet at the best of times, I told Defries, ‘This is not right. The new musicians are getting more than us, even though we’ve been here all the time.’

  Defries said, ‘I’d rather pay the road crew more than you.’ He was serious.

  I was really shocked to hear him say this and I was half expecting Bowie to come to our defence. But he just sat there, still expressionless.

  ‘In that case,’ I said, ‘I’m off the fucking tour. I’m not doing the remaining dates.’

  That was it; as far as I was concerned, I was out. I was partly bluffing, in that I was hoping it could be sorted out, obviously, but I felt a drastic statement was needed to match Defries’s insult. I looked at Bowie and said, ‘What do you think about this?’