Bowie: A Biography (15 page)

While it certainly provided no real solace to anyone, Bowie’s half brother, Terry Burns, who was fast spiraling into permanent mental illness, was spot on, zeitgeist-wise. Terry frequently stayed with his aunt Pat. During this period, he tended to wander; he’d disappear and return days later, and he would be cleaned up and reassimilated into a fragile domesticity. One day in 1967, however, he returned from wandering to find Pat’s home empty. He went to see his mother on Plaistow Grove in Bromley and was informed that Pat and her husband had moved to Australia, pursuing a business opportunity. Pat wanted to warn Terry but did not know his whereabouts, which underscores just how erratic he’d become at that point. The information, relayed by Peggy with typical frankness, seemed to
snap something in Terry. He left the house on Plaistow Grove and walked alone across the train tracks to the neighboring town of Chislehurst, particularly to a series of caverns known as the Chislehurst Caves.

The Chislehurst Caves have a long and strange history. Man-made caverns of cretaceous chalk, according to legend they were built during the time of the Druids. The chalk had been mined since the 1600s. During World War I they’d been a place to store secret ammunition, and in World War II, they were designated an air-raid shelter. The caves had become a popular tourist attraction for collectors of fossils and local arcane tales of ancient fauna and magic mushrooms. By 1967, rock acts like Pink Floyd and Jimi Hendrix had performed concerts inside the winding maze. David himself had performed there with the Kon-rads and the Manish Boys. In 1972, the caves were the set for a
Dr. Who
special. In the eighties teens would play Dungeons and Dragons there.

“They were very dangerous,” Siouxsie Sioux, a onetime Chislehurst resident, says, her tone a bit more grave than I’d have suspected. “They used to cordon off bits you couldn’t go down. Kids would sometimes go down there and get caved in. It was very creepy.”

By the time Terry reached the entrance to the caves, he’d begun to hear voices. “I heard a voice saying to me, ‘Terry, Terry,’” he reportedly said, “and I looked up and there was this great light and this beautiful figure of Christ looking down at me, and he said to me, ‘Terry, I’ve chosen you to go out in the world and do some work for me.’”

For many with his mental affliction, hallucinations often take the form of a religious vision, a special message from either God or the Antichrist. Terry was convinced that Jesus Christ had selected him for a special mission. Christ was supposedly surrounded by a blinding light that forced the troubled man to the ground. When he opened his eyes again, he saw that he was surrounded by a ring of fire. Once the vision disappeared, Terry rose up and kept walking until he passed out. He was missing for eight full days and was finally taken into custody after wandering into a grocery store in a dazed and dirty state and asking for a piece of fruit. The police brought Terry back to Peggy’s house but soon he was back in Cane Hill Asylum, where he’d been committed earlier.

Cane Hill, which opened in 1883 and was, for the British, the mental hospital of the popular idiom, as Bellevue is to most Americans, always
loomed as a specter in both his life and the life of his family. When he was out, it seemed as though it was only a matter of time before he’d have to return.

Terry had been in and out of institutions and prescribed a variety of drugs, after various incidents of picking fights in bars or wandering off on his own for days, only to turn up disheveled and confused. Sometimes the drugs would work and Terry would enjoy periods of calm and functionality. Then he’d either go off them or they would cease to perform, and he would again be overtaken by demons whispering ideas he could neither communicate to others nor live with himself. During a good period, Terry even wed a fellow inpatient while both of them were confined to the premises. The Joneses hoped that he would one day be able to lead a normal life, but he could not hold a job or stay out of trouble for too long and always ended up back in professional care.

Bowie was devastated to be informed of Terry’s latest misfortune and seemed to internalize his pain. “Terry came home this morning,” he told Ken Pitt casually one afternoon. Despite having met and conversed at length with both David’s mother and father, as well as his new client, Pitt reportedly had no idea that David’s brother was mentally ill. “In my subsequent visits I would sit talking with him in what had become his bedroom cum music workshop,” Pitt writes, “and it was the noise of his late-night practicing that eventually caused his father some discomfort and eventually resulted in his move to a spare room at Manchester Street.”

Bowie was able to place a little bit of distance between himself and the raw, painful goings-on on Plaistow Grove as Terry’s illness built to a head. Terry returned to Cane Hill, where he was formally diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic. John Jones, who had warmed up to Terry in light of his illness, would lead family trips to the hospital. They’d bring fresh clothes and fruit and show him kindness and concern. It was all they could do.

Shortly after Terry’s institutionalization, Bowie began to seriously consider leaving London and traveling north to a Buddhist monastery in Edinburgh, Scotland, where Zen master Dhardo Rinpoche lived and taught. He spoke frequently of giving up his pop career, shaving his beloved long hair and turning his life over to the abbot. Unlike his peers in the consciousness-expanding summer of ‘67, to Bowie meditation was
not a pop fad but rather a serious means of dealing with a cataclysmic world, his underperforming career and a series of private family traumas, which would build to a climax by year’s end. With stardom eluding him, Buddhism served to remind him that there were other goals than fame and material gain, and with its implicit dictums that nobody knows anything—each dizzying, new career strategy offered by London’s smug scene makers and record-industry power brokers seemed neutralized by chanting and meditation.

“As far as I’m concerned the whole idea of Western life—that’s the life we live now—is wrong,” he’d complained to
Melody Maker
the previous year, adding, “I want to go to Tibet. It’s a fascinating place, y’know. I’d like to take a holiday and have a look inside the monasteries. The Tibetan monks, Lamas, bury themselves inside mountains for weeks and only eat every three days. They’re ridiculous—and it’s said they live for centuries.”

“It was the lord Buddha that he turned to, temporarily, for guidance and inspiration,” Pitt writes. “My view is that he heretofore abjured all false finery and pride in his appearance and it was in this dressed-down state that he came to the office to meet a Buddhist dignitary who was to honor us with a visit. Our receptionist ushered in the notable, who to our astonishment was flamboyantly arrayed in voluminous saffron robes, flip-flops held to his bare feet by jewels between his toes and over all the strong perfume of sandalwood.”

In 1967 Tony Visconti, then a twenty-three-year-old Brooklyn, New York–born musician and producer, also wrestling with his attraction to Eastern spirituality and his love of Western rock ’n’ roll, was brought to London to work with the flamboyant Irish music impresario and producer Denny Cordell (who’d just had massive hits with the Moody Blues and Procol Harum and would, a decade later, discover Tom Petty and the Heart-breakers). One day Cordell brought Visconti into the offices of Essex Music, the firm where David was signed to his publishing deal. He had, like most people on the planet, not heard Bowie’s debut record. Many at Essex believed that Bowie was talented. They just didn’t know what to do with him and were hoping that somebody with Visconti’s instincts, an outsider with a fresh perspective but also a gifted pro, could help them figure it out. According to Visconti’s autobiography, he was told, “You seem to have a talent for working with weird acts. I’d like to play something for you to
consider. This is an album made by a writer I’ve been working with for some time. We were hoping he’d be right for the musical theater but he’s become something quite different since he made this record.”

Listening to the tracks, Visconti was impressed by the maturity of the teenager’s voice and the humor in his lyrics. In addition to the collected singles, “Rubber Band” and “Love You Till Tuesday,” the album contained lushly romantic ballads like “When I Live My Dream” (the Bee Gees meet Broadway), “She’s Got Medals” (which is more or less Love’s “Seven and Seven Is” in tempo and melody and indicated that Bowie could rock credibly), the Hammer Films–worthy “Please Mr. Gravedigger,” and the Peter Sellers–influenced “We Are Hungry Men.”

Visconti did not know that Bowie was there that day, waiting in the office by a piano, eager to give anything that might catch fire a shot. Bowie didn’t know much about Visconti, only that he was from New York City, from whence his new heroes the Velvet Underground hailed.

“I realized this casual encounter was a setup,” Visconti recalled. Bowie nervously shook hands with the American. By the end of the day they had warmed up a lot and realized they had a real musical affinity for one another. Visconti was impressed that Bowie was so well versed in rock ’n’ roll, R & B and soul, as well as music hall show tunes, West Coast “cool” jazz and Beat-generation novelty recordings like Ken Nordine’s loony
Colors
series of jazz poetry. It may be not be irrelevant to point out the timing of the Bowie/Visconti union in relation to David’s reaction to his older brother’s misfortune. Visconti was a tough, confident American, three years Bowie’s senior. While unable to replace Terry or heal the wounds that Bowie’s half brother’s illness was then inflicting, Tony Visconti would certainly take on an older-brother role in his life, and to fail to note the significant timing of their partnership and friendship would be silly.

According to Visconti, after leaving Essex, the pair went to a revival screening of
Knife in the Water
, the 1962 art-house hit by Polish director Roman Polanski. Though stark and disquieting, Polanski’s film features a jazz score at turns sultry or bebop influenced and manic, composed by the cult Polish jazz artist Krzysztof Komeda, and the two fast friends set about deconstructing the film and especially its soundtrack as the theater let out.

Their first recorded collaborations included the Bowie original “Karma Man,” recorded on the afternoon of September 1, 1967. The guitar
and strings are strange and thrumming. The verses are verbose and Dylanesque, reflecting the songwriter and the producer’s shared affinity for Eastern spiritual guidance: enlightened souls, “clothed in saffron robes.” The song’s chorus, “Slow down, slow down,” among Bowie’s catchiest, was more or less directly ripped off by Suede for one of their Britpop-igniting singles “The Drowners” in 1992.

“Let Me Sleep Beside You” is fairly self-explanatory, with a nifty chorus come-on and a fuzz guitar riff that nearly achieved what Woody Allen’s Alvy Singer would have called “heaviosity.” Visconti was a Beatles obsessive and you can already hear him connecting with his inner George Martin. On the records Bowie sounds stronger, clearer and more alive than he ever did on the Shel Talmy–produced garage rock or the horn-driven Tony Hatch–produced pop kitsch. In the cooling weeks following the summer of love, as everything around him with regard to his family seemed to be violently dislodged, Bowie seemed to finally be settling into his own sound. He still borrowed. He sometimes even stole. But Visconti was now there to help make David Bowie records finally
sound
like their own statements somehow.

Also in 1967, David Bowie would meet another powerful collaborator, one who would help him connect with his
physical
vision. “I taught David to free his body,” Lindsay Kemp boasted to
Crawdaddy!
magazine in 1974, and he was telling the truth. Kemp was a controversial dancer, choreographer and movement instructor. By 1968, he was already getting a reputation as a master provocateur, having set classical dance techniques on their ear with his touring company.

His father was a British naval officer who was killed in action. Kemp, openly gay like Pitt, was a misfit driven toward the performing arts at a young age. “Of course, I’ve always been very fond of the service, but actually joining it was out of the question. I wanted to dance and sing and swing through circus hoops even more than I wanted to sail the seven seas. Now, by being a mime, I can be a sailor whenever I choose to be—and I can be the sea too.”

Kemp didn’t fare well at school and had to rely on his wicked wit to get by. “It was a very rough school and I wasn’t a very rough person, so I found that the only way I could survive was to make the other boys laugh. I was like Scheherazade, telling them the most amazing stories night after
night to ensure my survival. I amazed and dazzled them—like a bright light trained in wild dogs’ eyes.”

After attending the Bradford School of Arts and Media (then already over a century old, it also produced David Hockney), Kemp tried his luck as an actor in the West End but found difficulty standing out. He was balding and pixie-ish, and his features without makeup, feathers and wigs seemed small. Kemp really found his voice when it came to mime. In his twenties, he moved to Edinburgh, Scotland, and studied with the famous French mime Marcel Marceau. Marceau bolstered his confidence and showed him how to use his body effectively. When he returned to London, Kemp founded his own performance troupe. He saw staid and joyless productions and decided that they were ready for a little camping up. He’d see the dancers chain-smoking and cussing offstage, but when they were onstage, they’d pretend to be sculpted and angelic and sincere.

“Camp sees everything in quotation marks,” Susan Sontag wrote in “Notes on Camp” in 1964. “It’s not a lamp but a ‘lamp,’ not a woman but a ‘woman.’ To perceive camp in objects and persons is to understand Being as Playing—a role. It is the farthest extension in sensibility of the metaphor of life as theater.” Using this sensibility and combining it with real diligence as far as the body and utter commitment to the performance, Kemp and his collaborator Birkett torpedoed the highbrow dance recitals with bawdy humor and pieces based on edgy literature like Jean Genet’s homoerotic Parisian novel
Our Lady of the Flowers
. By the time he encountered Bowie, he was already equally reviled and renowned for his work and his accelerated and archly bohemian approach to life and art.