Bowie: A Biography (9 page)

To David Jones, now sixteen, the blues boom raised his hopes that a suburban outsider could find a thriving scene in the city, make a living, meet girls and mates, and feel, for once in his life, like he was a part of something massive and growing, rather than some marginalized art school pocket. “You’d have lots of people who’d come around the stage at the end of our shows, from Bromley or Sidcup Art College. Lost souls who, like us, thought they were weird and different and yet, when they were in a place where music was played, suddenly said feel such a weirdo,” Phil May, the Pretty Things’ lead singer, has said.

“The clubs were all full,” Joe Boyd, the legendary producer (Pink Floyd’s “Arnold Layne,” Nick Drake’s
Pink Moon
album) and author
(White Bicycles)
, says. At the time, Boyd, an American, brought many of the original blues artists over. “The kids cheered Muddy Waters when he played. They knew all about him. There was a way bigger catalog of blues and jazz in British record shops than in the U.S. shops.”

While you won’t find a more American form than the blues, the new breed, unlike their Teddy Boy subcultural predecessors, did not dress like Americans. Instead, they fully embraced the sharp-edged, fine sartorial traditions of English tailoring. The mod aesthetic was all about slim and sleek lines as opposed to a conglomerate of shapes and materials. The trousers were skinny and the jackets were three-buttoned, with each of them pulled in tight. The ties were narrow. The hair was spiky but neat. Whereas the Teds were hard men, the mod boys were androgynous. It wasn’t necessarily a sexual thing. They used eyeliner and pancake makeup to extend the sharp lines of their clothes to their facial bone structure. If the Teds were purists, happy to preserve and protect an idealized “cats and chicks” version of postwar youth, the mods, true to their nickname (short for “modern”) flipped over anything new and fluid, heading for tomorrow.

“By the time we’re buying you, you’ll be going off in one of these,” Tom Courtenay’s boss tells him in John Schlesinger’s 1963 film,
Billy Liar
. Billy Fisher works in a funeral home, and the partially bemused, partially terrified older man is holding up a sleek plastic coffin. “You see,
people don’t realize it’s all clean lines nowadays. All these frills and fancies are going out. It’s all old.”

An organized and disciplined reaction to the staid, gray, sugar-and butter-free England of the immediate postwar years and early fifties, mods made and spent money like no youth movement before it. Anything that smacked of the fast (scooters, speed, jerky dancing) and new (existential French lit, the films of Fellini and Antonioni in Rome or Godard and Truffaut in Paris, the pop art of Warhol and Lichtenstein and the high-style advertising and fashion design coming out of New York and London) was appealing and quickly consumed.

Mod was a movement
made
for David Jones. The speedy drugs and vast consumer ambitions synonymous with mod (not to mention the idealistic thirst for the “new”) hit David right when you want to be hit by such things: at fifteen or sixteen years of age. He took to mod fervidly, and the ethics of the movement also have a lot to do with his lifelong compulsion to be creative and always seek out the new style. In his teens, he began to refer to his type as a “raver” because of the logorrhea that went hand in hand with the speedy drugs and the excitement of each new discovery. Since his time in Owen Frampton’s art room, David maintained an intense interest in painting and would learn as much as he could about the lives of painters and sculptors, and imagine that one day he might live in a garret in a dirty smock. He continued to create his own paintings and was almost never without something to sketch on. But the immediacy of the fast-developing rhythm and blues and Northern Soul scene was hard to resist, and the portability of a horn or guitar seemed to make sorties into London easier and quicker.

The wit and flash of the new wave of British cinema, fully informed by the mod movement by the early sixties, provided an epic, painterly, visual stimulation anyway. David and his friends could now see themselves in the new breed of working-class movie heroes, from Terence Stamp to Richard Harris to Peter O’Toole and Michael Caine. Even Sean Connery, in the very early Bond films
Dr. No
and
From Russia with Love
, had a certain mod appeal.

Musically, by trying to copy black soul music, many of the English mod combos invented something entirely new: maximum R & B, with England’s contribution being speed and volume. The mods did not have
the chops and the flow of the Americans, so they distorted the amps. Using attitude and style to compensate for limited instrumental and vocal ability, these acts soon discovered that a five-year-old Chuck Berry tune could sound entirely new.

“There was more blues being played in 1963 in Kingston in Surrey in England than there was in Chicago,” says Tesser. The best of these acts avoided simply trying to sound “black” and tried to use the lyrics and phrasing as a way to articulate their own feelings. Some of the original intent was, of course, lost in translation. “When a downtrodden black southerner sang ‘I’m a man’ he meant ‘I’m a human being,’” says Napier-Bell. “When Mick Jagger or Eric Burdon sang it, they meant ‘I’ve got a hard-on.’”

The other foundation of the mod sound was the Stax and Tamla Motown hits that were played on “pirate,” or non-BBC-regulated, radio stations that were broadcast in the early sixties with strong enough frequencies to pick up a clear sound and a beat. English kids would go out of their way to become pen pals with American kids in order to get the latest to play live at parties. Soul music, unabashedly emotional, hit a chord with the mannered but incredibly frustrated British youth. Soul songs about unrequited love or blues men singing about oppression and a hidden voodoo was the right message at the right time, and the new youth were feverish.

By 1963, George and the Dragons had mutated into a more professional outfit known as the Kon-rads, augmented by Dave Hadfield on bass, Rocky Shanahan on guitar and Robert Allen on drums. They eventually added background singers Stella and Christine Patton for local gigs. Their new name was derived from one of these performances. The group, used to any pickup work, was backing up a local pop singer named Jesse Conrad. According to legend, he introduced them as “my Conrads,” as a play on “comrades,” and the name stuck. The hyphen was added as a pure flourish. One of Bromley’s go-to bands for fetes and functions, they worked up a large repertoire on the bar mitzvah circuit, thanks to endless requests for the pop songs of the day, from Cliff Richard’s “The Young Ones” to the Champs’ sax instrumental “Tequila.” They rehearsed on campus and had a small coterie of loyal but local fans, but at the end of the day, they were a hopelessly suburban venture.

Flush with the excitement of mod culture, David, who was then flirting with the stage name “David Jay” (tellingly, inspired by a similar but
much more successful act, the Jaywalkers), felt constrained by the Kon-rads’ gray corduroy suits and rote “bread gigs.” His ambition once again put him at odds with the others around him.

“The Kon-Rads played the school fairs, or fetes, as we called them,” Frampton says. “I remember just being awestruck by them, seeing someone I knew like that onstage playing sax. He was good straightaway. He had it. He knew he had it.”

David wanted to be a full-time star and sensed that this combo might not be able to keep pace with him on his way toward making it happen. David was about to inform his mates that he was moving on when the Kon-Rads caught a break. In the late summer of 1963, the band caught the attention of Eric Easton, the Decca records agent who had recently signed the Rolling Stones. Easton had seen the band play a youth club fete and invited them to audition for the label. On August 30, the band carted their gear into the label’s studios in West Hampstead for a session. They recorded an original composition entitled “I Never Dreamed.” David cowrote the track but can only be heard singing harmony on the backing vocals. The band was terribly excited to find themselves in a professional studio, listening to the playback of the track on the highest-tech hardware in the word. It seemed, for a few minutes, anyway, like they’d made it.

Decca turned down the option to record the Kon-rads, as did legendary producer and tragic cult figure Joe Meek, who was highly sought after thanks to his international hit “Telstar,” and shortly thereafter David left the band for good. Underwood followed soon afterward. The Kon-Rads continued on without him for a while, opening for the Rolling Stones on their 1965 tour and issuing the single “Baby It’s Too Late Now” that same year on CBS Records before vanishing into obscurity.

“I Never Dreamed” lives on, however. It’s noteworthy among David Bowie’s compulsively bootlegged recording output for its scarcity. “‘I Never Dreamed’ has become the Bowie fan’s holy grail,” Nicholas Pegg writes in
The Complete David Bowie
, an encyclopedic guide to his music, tours, film appearances and videos.

By the time David Jones parted ways with the Kon-Rads in the early fall of ’63, the Beatles had performed for the Queen and scored three number one UK singles. They were rapidly demonstrating just how far a
rock and soul–reared combo could go with the right chemistry, timing and drive. David would spend the rest of the 1960s trying to master this combination.

Everybody in the British music industry knew that the Beatles began as a rough-and-tumble, leather-jacketed quartet, and that after they were cleaned up by their manager, Brian Epstein, the masses were able to appreciate their good looks, quick wit and talent. They’d become a perfect product and were endlessly marketable. Timing and fate played a role in their breaking America as their first three singles had flopped here in 1963. Beatlemania offered a powerful balm to a nation traumatized by the assassination of President Kennedy in Dallas on November 22, 1963. It was only one bleak holiday season before their storming
Ed Sullivan Show
appearance in February, of ’64. Of course, nearly a half century on, nobody in pop has accomplished anything close to what the Beatles did, but in ’63 and ’64, who was to say that any cunning manager couldn’t have a Beatles of their own? “Why was Epstein so special?,” they surmised. “All you needed was the right face, the right angle and bit of good luck.” As Tin Pan Alley understood it, it was all about publicity. Suddenly the song pluggers switched to a Mersey beat and A & R men signed any act with a northern accent and every London band with a mop top, and the publicists attempted to exploit the post war culture shift. It was into this marketplace that David Jones entered, searching for a break that would put him on the same mantel as John, Paul, George and Ringo.

The Soho rhythm and blues clubs like the Flamingo, the Craw-daddy and the Marquee became places where a clever manager or label rep could scout at both midday and evening showcases. The crowd was overwhelmingly teenage and hormonal, amounting in theory to a contained focus group for selecting the next Beatles or Stones.

“Soho was one part of London then that you could go to and you didn’t think you were in England anymore,” Greg Tesser says. “It was because all the smells, every restaurant or café, was either Greek or Italian or French or Indian. It was something; it was like an international zone. The club itself was extremely sweaty. And lots of people had obviously been taking Purple Hearts.” David Jones knew that the Marquee and the neighboring coffee bar, the Café Giaconda, where kids also mingled with industry types, had officially become the center of the universe, and
he buzzed around this stretch semipermanently, even sleeping in a van outside the Marquee at one point. To his parents’ great concern, he left his “junior visualizer” post at J. Walter Thompson and committed to pursuing a career in music full-time.

For a matter of weeks, David and Underwood formed a blues combo (with Viv Andrews on drums) called the Hooker Brothers. “We would try and copy John Lee Hooker,” Underwood told me. “Of all the blues records, his was the one we had the most success with. So much so that we called ourselves the Hooker Brothers for a short while, did a couple of gigs, then went on to something else.”

For the King Bees, his next outfit (named after the blues track “I’m a King Bee” by Slim Harpo, later covered by both the Rolling Stones and John Belushi, the latter on
Saturday Night Live
while dressed in a bumblebee suit), David formally gave himself a professional, buccaneer-themed stage name: Davie Jones. With the exception of Underwood (now a student at Ravensbourne College, studying art but happily back for a second shot at Beatles-style fame), the King Bees (also featuring Roger Bluck on lead guitar, Dave Howard on bass and Bob Allen on percussion) were all Londoners. They’d met in the capital at a hairstylist’s, according to the band’s bio. Although band bios are almost never accurate and always exaggerated to suit an image, the band certainly fed far more off the energy of the London scene than the Kon-Rads ever did or could.

The Beatles success and their appeal was apparent even to those of David’s parents’ generation. On the advice of his father, David sat down one afternoon and he wrote out a persuasive letter to the wealthy and well-connected Jewish washing machine impresario John Bloom. Bloom had become a society columns figure. The Beatles had attended cocktail parties in his Park Lane apartment.

“I had been reading a lot in the papers about John Bloom,” David is quoted as saying in the band’s early promotional material. “So I put pen to paper and wrote him a letter.” David told Bloom that he had a chance to back one of the most talented and up-and-coming groups on the pop scene. All he had to do was advance the several hundred pounds required to outfit a pop group with the best equipment.

Bloom, of course, declined to invest in an unknown act but admired the “cheeky” quality of the pitch and passed them on to an acquaintance
named Leslie Conn who had solid music business credentials. Conn, who was affiliated with Doris Day’s publishing company Melcher Music, was a colorful character who once described himself as “the only guy in the music business who started at the top and worked my way to the bottom.”