David Bowie & the Story of Ziggy Stardust Page #6

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which you don't get any better than

Chateaux Marmont really in Hollywood.

But, no. I'm on the phone and I said, this won't

do we have to stay in the Beverly Hills hotel.

Room service, for one room,

was about 12,000 or was it more

than that? I don't know.

Perhaps that was just me!

Everything we wanted we just signed for. I think we

spent something like 40,000 or something like that.

I don't know what we spent it on!

But it went!

And we stayed there for six weeks.

Not only the whole band,

but all the roadies,

all the... everybody. Iggy was there.

All on RCA's money and, by this time, RCA was

so far in debt that they couldn't get out of it.

It sounds really, you know,

hippy dippy

but it just worked beautifully

it really did.

This fantasy lifestyle gave

the Spiders the impression

they were going to be very rich.

A chance conversation

between drummer Woody

and new boy Mike Garson

put an end to that theory.

I was sitting

on an airplane with him

and I was reading a magazine.

And there was a Lamborghini in it

and I went, "Oh, that's nice."

And he went,

"Why don't you buy one?"

And I went, "Yeah, I wish."

And he went, "Well,

you must be able to afford one."

And I went, "Well, actually no."

I was getting a salary

and it seemed fair,

and I just assume that

the other guys were getting more

cos they were there several years.

I went, "What do you think I get?"

You know.

And he went,

"Well, I know what I get."

And I went, "What do you get?"

He told me and it was like

three times what I got.

We went to Bowie and said,

"Look, you know,

"unless things change and you give us

some money, we're going home."

Kind of the final straw was really

De Fries saying to us,

"I would rather pay

the road crew more than you."

Right? And I just went,

"There's no game here."

The Spiders eventually

renegotiated their contracts,

but the whole saga tainted

their relationship with Bowie.

As the tour continued

around America,

the news coming out of Britain

was Glam Rock had exploded.

# Oh, yeah, yeah! #

The previous year, Marc Bolan

was the leader of the scene,

having chalked up

four number one singles.

By 1973,

the balance of power was shifting.

Bolan opened the door

for the whole Glam Rock thing

and Bowie just took it

completely somewhere else

and turned it

into kind of like an art form.

And Roxy Music, of course,

were part of that as well.

They, again, were very original,

with a sci-fi and '50s glam mix.

I think the whole three of those

together were the real kind of core

of what Glam Rock was about.

Everything else was just something

that came in on the bandwagon.

# We just haven't got

a clue what to do. #

When you saw bands like The Sweet,

who kind of had that great '70s,

lorry drivers, dressed in drag,

kind of feeling.

# Be my baby. #

There was a couple of quite good

records, as pure records.

But they were not that interesting.

My brain was full up

with Baudelaire, Byron and Shelley

and all these, you know,

lunatic poets, artists.

And Gary Glitter and Slade,

you know,

I couldn't see any link there.

Whereas with David,

you could see a clear link

in the sophistication

of what they were doing.

In January 1973,

Bowie returned to Britain

as Glam Rock's leading light,

performing a brand new song

on Top of the Pops.

# The jean genie lives on his back

#The jean genie loves chimney stacks

# He's outrageous

He screams and he bawls

# Jean Genie, let yourself go. #

Something about that rock attitude

and that blurring of sexuality

is very, very alluring

to young people,

especially teenagers

with the confusion of growing up.

I think there was a very sort of

urban, working-class male-dominated

love of the Ziggy look

because who's going to argue

with a bloke who looked like

that who was pretty tough?

You are taking your life in your

hands to wear mascara to school

in Liverpool in 1973.

Or dying your hair bright red,

you know. My parents were horrified.

You know, "What have I done

"to deserve this walking freak show

for a son?" You know?

Aladdin was more in the area

of Ziggy Goes To America.

Here was this alternative world

that I had been talking about,

and it had all the violence

and all the strangeness

and it was really happening.

It wasn't just in my songs.

# Let me put my arms around your head

# Gee, it's hot, let's go to bed

Don't forget... #

Ziggy And The Spiders

next TV appearance was

on the Russell Harty Show,

performing another new track.

Drive-in Saturday was taken

from Bowie's next album,

Aladdin Sane,

which had been almost entirely

written and recorded in the USA.

It's the perfect example of how

Bowie's American experience

influenced his songwriting.

You could feel him absorbing it.

Many times I was in the limo

with him and he'd be working

on the music, working on the lyrics,

listening to great American music.

But I never expected the album

to come out so soon.

And it just shows his prolificness.

I think that is the genius of David,

he could write and play

and travel all at the same time.

It did feel still like Ziggy,

but it was a much more exotic album.

I always think of Aladdin Sane

as Ziggy Stardust on tour

and these are my postcards home.

This is what I've seen

when out there -

the madness,

the wild excesses of America.

He can see the glamour, but he can

see the horror underneath as well.

# He laughed at accidental sirens

That broke the evening gloom

# The police had warned

of repercussions

# They followed none too soon. #

Bowie took ideas from everywhere,

something he's done

throughout his career.

He called me in to listen

to some songs.

I said,

"That's a Jayne County lyric."

And he said,

"Oh, yes, isn't it nice?

And I said, "David, you know,

it's not yours, it's Jayne's."

And he said, "Well, no, everything

I get is from someone else.

"What I do is I know

which things to steal."

He is an incredible magpie,

and a lot of people think that is

a huge negative,

because he cherry picks.

He cherry picks ideas,

people, clothes, everything.

But I think it is

extraordinarily clever.

Bowie had seen something he could

cherry pick from Mike Garson.

The session musician had been

brought in to play keyboards

on the first American tour and

Bowie thought his jazz background

would be perfect for Aladdin Sane.

For me, Mike Garson's piano was

what lifted that above anything

anyone else was doing at that time,

made it exotic, made it decadent.

Musicians like Garson

were playing jazz stuff

that isn't written

on the chord sheet for the song.

Garson's playing is eccentric

and wild and beautiful

at the same time.

They showed me songs like,

for example, Time.

You know,

David was looking for something that

was from the 1920s, but twisted,

like he does with his songs.

So I go...

You know, something like that.

Or Lady Grinning Soul.

He wanted this more romantic thing,

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