Frustrated by his stalled pop career and emboldened by the creative daring of the psychedelic era, David Bowie begins to embrace more experimental art forms. Mime, movement, avant garde theater and film acting all serve as fascinating artistic detours, and he expands his mind with Tibetan Buddhism. But his first heartbreak makes him feel more alone and adrift than ever, inspiring a song about an astronaut drifting into the black abyss of space. Fusing science fiction with his innermost feelings, “Space Oddity” became his breakthrough hit. But one of David’s biggest supporters — his father — wouldn’t be there to share in the triumph.
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Off the record is a production of I Heart Radio Darkness. That's how it always starts. Then from nothing, something, an idea, a notion, a concept. In this case, we'll call it a song. David Bowie is at the movies, the Modern Cathedral, Make Believe, where anything is possible. The sixties are drawing to a close, and he's staring mouth agape at two thousand one of Space Odyssey Standy Kubrick's groundbreaking special effects and made all the more mind melding by the drops of cannabis soil. David drills it on his tongue just before taking a seat. The images of outer space flicker before him, but he's fixated on inner space. Like the doomed astronaut in the film. He's adrift, isolated, and extremely lonely. David's life has gone off course. His music career is going nowhere. In nine years, he'd fronted eight bands and worked solo, yet each create a pursuit left him drifting further and further into the commercial abyss. He had been dumped by his label. Worse still, he'd been dumped by his girlfriend. The first woman he had ever loved, just left him for another man. Now she's gone living in Norway, of all places, to a poor, bummed out Londoner, Norway might as well be another planet. Almost in spite of himself, David starts crafting a song in his head. It's about a spaceman similar to the one on the screen. He calls his character Major Tom, and he calls the song Space Oddity. In later years, many would dismiss the song as a frivolous novelty number, a cross attempt to cash in on moon Manny is sweeping the globe thanks to Neil Armstrong's giant leap for mankind that summer, The Goofy title a playfu LaMarche Da Kubrick's overblown epic only seen the bolster their case. But these detractors missed the point. David Bowie spent the sixties chasing trends, trying to bandwagon up his way to the top of the charts, Rock R and B, psychedelic whimsy, what have you? When he sang, he opened his mouth, but not his soul. That changed with Space Oddity, which is less about an astronaut and more about himself. It's an emotional confession couched in the sci fi world that enthralled him as a boy. I am Major Tom, he would later admit, here, I am in my own cosmic space, and nobody can possibly understand what it's like to be out here. It's fitting that Bowie's breakthrough took the form of a schizoid space track. It kicked off a career long fascination with other worldly personas, informing songs like Life on Mars, Starman and of course siky Stardust. The lyrics read almost like a premonition, commencing countdown engines on. David Bowie was ready for blast Off. The voyage would send them very, very far from home and come at the cost of true love. Would the trade be worth it? Back at the theater, the movie was over, but David's story is just beginning. Hello, and welcome to Off the Record, the show that goes beyond the songs and into the hearts and minds of rock's greatest legends. I'm your host, Jordan Runtop. This season explores the life, or should I say lives David Bowie. In this episode, we're going to talk about Major Tom, the psychedelic spaceman that launched Bowie into orbit on June one. The music Press celebrated the release of Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts club band the Beatles Day Glows studio masterpiece that would come to define rock in the sixties. But elsewhere in the trade papers you might have noticed a smaller announcement. The man who would help to find rock in the seventies also released an LP that day, his first, but David Bowie's self titled debut did not have the impact of Sergeant Pepper. In fact, it was all but ignored upon its release and later disowned by Bowie himself, which is unfortunate because it's not bad. Sure, the cover arts a little stale, with a mods suited David peering out from under his page boy haircut like a heart throb and a teenbeat magazine, but the musical content is wonderfully weird enough to do the future Ziggy start us proud. When Sessions began in the fall of nineteen sixty six, David had a fresh sound. He'd stopped taking his creative lead from American R and B acts and their feeble British copycats. Instead, he made like many in Swinging London and embraced his own englishness. Bands were dropping their phony state side accents and writing songs steeped in the distinctly British brand of psychedelia that was coming to the Four Characterized by surreal sketches of childhood innocence faded at Wardian glamour and domestic eccentricity. The Beatles offered acid tinged memories of their adolescent haunts with Strawberry Fields Forever and Penny Lane, not to mention the wonderland whimsy of Lucy and the Sky with Diamonds. The Kink touted the Village Green Preservation Society and the dandie clothes horses of Carnaby Street. Pink Floyd even immortalized the local Panty Steeler with their debut single Arnold Lane. Always hip to the latest trends, David sensed the sea change and responded accordingly. He crafted songs in the British music hall tradition with a hint of hippie hipness for flavor. He dispensed with the time honored guitar, bass and drums set up that had served as the blueprint for British groups since the dawn of the decade. In its place, where brass bands and string sections performing offbeat arrangements and complex time signatures. Despite his lack of any formal musical training, David wrote the orchestrations himself, striving for the musical grandeur of the Beach Boys groundbreaking new album Pet Sounds. He patterned was singing after Anthony Newley, a singer, songwriter and actor who's a mainstay on the British stage and screen, and So I Must Go. David managed to pitch his vocal delivery and almost exact mimic of Newly stagey Cockney twang so dead on that Newly himself got wind of it and became extremely annoyed this new kid was stealing his voice. The released at the start of the Summer of Love, David's debut, is decidedly dark, loaded with troubling vignettes about lonely misfits and unsettled children's tales Please Mr Gravedigger, for example, as about as sunny as its title, taking inspiration from the real life murder of a ten year old Little Bombardier, is a portrait of an elderly alcoholic vet who forms a bond with two children until the neighbors accused him of being a pedophile and chase him out. Of Town, but there were also signposts pointing towards David's later work We Are Hungry Men, for shadows of dystopian themes of ziggy, stardust and diamond dogs, representing a future where racial purity is maintained through abortions. She's Got Metals, on the other hand, is a jaunty tune about a woman who downs men's clothes to fight in the war, a precursor to the gender bending motifs of Bowie's early seventies personas, but his most infamous recording of the Air. It was the album's lead single. It's Very titles enough to inspire fear and loathing in the heart of nearly every Bowie fan. It's called The Laughing Gnome. To be fair, it made a certain amount of sense when it was released in April nineteen sixty seven. The rediscovery of JRR. Tolkien's The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy in the late sixties led to a spade of songs about fairies, wizards, goblins, and other mystical creatures. British psyche bands like Pink Floyd and Tomorrow also made gnome centered contributions to rock, but There's were sober and serious. David's ditty about a little old man in scarlet and gray fell somewhere between novelty number and full blown parody. The penny lyrics were bad enough, especially with the joke about a band called the Rolling Gnomes, but the addition of a shrill Gnome voice achieved through sped up tape made the song sound like a stoned outtake from one of the Chipmunks sessions. For all of David's trouble, the Laughing Gnome became his eighth consecutive single that failed the chart. Even worse, it became a liability in light of David's more mature to come. The Gnome duet frequently resurfaced in opportune times throughout his career, like an embarrassing naked baby photo. His feelings about his debut disc weren't much warmer, how cringe e he moaned when asked about it. In later years, The critics, at least the ones who bothered to review it, were a little kinder. Upon its release, a trade paper called The Disc and Music Echo called it a remarkable creative album by a nineteen year old londoner. Here's a new talent that deserves attention. Try David Bowie, He's something New. Unfortunately, few tried David Bowie and the album sank like a stone. The failure was made worse by the personal tragedy that loomed back home and his parents house in the London suburb of Bromley. David's beloved half brother, Terry, his hero and mentor, who had freed his teenage mind with beat literature and experimental jazz, was sliding further into the grips of mental illness. Eleven years older than David, Terry had struggled ever since returning from the army in the late fifties. Now it's psychic episodes were becoming more frequent and more disturbing. David realized the extent of the problem in February seven when he took Terry to see a concert by Eric Clapton and Cream. It started off as a nice night. Terry had been the one who introduced David the Soho's jazz clubs as a wide eyed schoolboy years earlier. Now David was thrilled to reciprocate by taking his brother to his first psychedelic rock and roll concert. But the ear splitting music had a profound effect on Terry, the kind David couldn't have predicted. The pole setting vibrations from the power trio tore a hole in Terry's fragile reality, and his body began to vibrate like a human tuning fork. David realized something was badly wrong and hustled his brother outside. Terry immediately collapsed on the sidewalk, his world of dangerous and chaotic jumble. The ground appeared to open up, spewing fire and smoke into the night. Terry gripped the asphalt with all his might, certain that forests were trying to suck him into the sky. David watched helplessly as Terry stared a new abyss that only he could see. The storm and Terry's mind eventually passed, but David was horrified. He wasn't sure how to react. Mental illness was hardly discussed, much less treated with a degree of compassion and understanding that we strive for today. Those suffering in the sixties were usually denounced as mad and sent to asylums, which were almost indistinguishable from prisons. Overwhelmed by the gravity of his brother's condition, David simply pushed the thoughts from his mind. But Terry's problem grew worse. He started going off on walks without a word to his family, disappearing for days as he followed visions of Christ. Once he was missing for more than a week until authorities found him in a grocery store, filthy and starving, politely asking for a piece of fruit. Terry stayed with his parents until permanent care could be arranged. This made the Jones modest house in Bromi even more cramped than it already was. Da of it hated the place at the best of times, but the presence of his troubled brother made the bad vibes even worse. So. In the summer of nineteen sixty seven, twenty year old David Bowie moved out of the family home. He was taken in by his new manager, Ken Pitt, a man who would more or less become a second father to David Urbane. Educated and a consummate gentleman, Ken was a show biz veteran had represented the likes of Duke Ellington, Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland and even Anthony Newley. He had initially passed when asked to manage David. Then Ken Son performed and quickly changed his mind. David was equally taken with Ken and his impressive credentials. Most British pop up starts were managed by fly by night hucksters and wheeler dealers. Ken had genuine stars in his orbit, and David wanted to fly among them. He arrived at Ken's elegant London apartment with a little more than some records and clothes. Soon the two settled into a comfortable bohemian routine. Incense and half finished songs wafted from David's room. The smell bothered Ken, but David's habit of strolling nude through the apartment definitely did not. In his memoir, Ken remembers David, in his words, loping around the flat naked, his long, weighty penis swaying from side to side like the pendulum of a grandfather clock. In case it's not already obvious, Ken's interest in David was a little more than musical. Many close to the pair believe Ken loved David in a more than a client kind of way, but David's feelings are less clear and likely more complex. He was a well documented sexual opportunist, willing to do whatever with whoever if would help him get where he wanted to go. But it's clear he regarded Ken is more than just a step on a ladder, though some have speculated it's unknown if they ever cemented their relationship in a physical way. As Ken noted in his memoir, David was a tease. Considering the many hours David spent split out naked between a pair of Hi Fi speakers in their living room, this is something of an understatement. Like Terry before him can act is David's cultural mentor, whisking him around the West End theaters and encouraging him to scour through the many bookshelves that dominated their flat. David devoured works by Oscar Wilde, Evelyn Wall and William Butler Yates, and poured over collections by the German expressionist Egon Shield and printmaker Eric Gill. Ken also provided a master class in the art of press relations. David, the son of a PR manager, took to it very quickly. Never argue with an interviewer, but tell them exactly what they want to hear, he said, consider the outlet and tailor your responses to their readers. You're speaking to them. On more than one occasion, Ken caught David poking through letters on his desk. We're listening in on telephone calls, all in hopes of picking up more tricks of the promotional trade. Once he took David to a glamorous party featuring a venerable who's who of the British entertainment industry. Rather than mingle, David made a scene by passionately snogging a woman in the middle of the room. This wasn't the sort of network and Ken had in mind. I thought they were going to copulate in front of the British music industry, the scandalized manager later wrote. But there was nothing, no party, no book, no theatrical premiere that would equal the impact of a record Ken gave David in the fall of nineteen sixty six. He picked it up during a recent business trip to New York, just one of the many discs shoved into his hand by over zealous label Exex. It was a test pressing of a new album by a group of Low Reastside proto punks called the Velvet Underground. Ken gave it a spin, but the atonal shriek of Heroin and the sado massochistic themes of Venus and furs left him cold. He was more of a Judy Garland guy, so he passed it to David, making one of the first people in Britain to hear it. Just as a Little Richard's Tutti Fruity had a decade earlier. The record changed his life, imprinting itself permanently on David's Psyche. Lou Reed Street Poetry conjured the dark edge of humanity in a way seldom done on a major label record, plus a boast of the artistic degree of the band's patron, Andy Warhol. The primitive beat of Motucker's drums, the howl of John Klee's viola, and the wash of lou Reed and Sterling Morrison's guitars blared from David speakers. To him. It was a declaration of independence from boring top forty decorum pop music wanted to make you feel good. This music just wanted to make you feel anything. David would later say, the music was savagely indifferent to my feelings. It didn't care if I liked it or not. David recorded a cover of the Velvets I'm Waiting for the Man, but it was deemed too uncommercial and shelved This was the fate of nearly all the demos David recorded during this period for his label. The songs bounced from genre the genre, and idea to idea with a manic abandoned that bordered on incoherence. David was desperate to prove his adaptability and find a voice that fit. So far, it wasn't Lou Reid or Anthony Newley. I was trying to be a one man revolution, he would later say, but mostly he just confused people. David's label was at a loss for what to do with him, so in a classic act of delegation, they made the new guy deal with it. Tony Visconti was a twenty three year old Brooklyn kid who just arrived in England. He was gearing up to produce David's old friend and rival, Mark Boland. Then a label big shot called him into his office. You seem to have a talent for working with weird acts, the exact said, before playing him David's debut LP. Tony dug it right away and what was obviously a prearranged set up, David was also casually waiting outside the office. When the listening session was complete, he and Tony got the talking, and well, it doesn't take long for one music never to recognize another. Soon they were trading lines from Frank Zappa songs and Continental art films. They talked until the office closed for the day. Then they went for a walk and talk some more. They parted company later that night as firm lifelong friends. Within weeks, Visconti oversaw production of a new Bowie song called let Me Sleep Beside You. The results were stronger than any of the songs on David's debut album, but it too was deemed unacceptable by the label, who feared that the title was too risque. Even in swinging London, let Me Sleep Beside You was just too hot. His compositions were offered to other artists like Judy Collins, Peter Paul and Mary big Brother in the Holding Company and the Jefferson Airplane to record, but they all opted the pass. With his music career stalled, Ken Pitt suggested David try is handed acting. It was a good idea. David had spent years pretending to be other people, both on stage and off, why not get paid for it. In n s seven, he bagged his first role as a painting that comes to life in a short film called The Image. But if David dreamed of Hollywood glamour, he was in for a rude awakening, and a wet one at that. The film was shot on location in a dilapidated house. One scene required David to hang from a second story window sill without a harness while stage hands doused him with buckets of cold water to simulate rain. Kempitt recalls on returning home that night looking like a dre ound mouse and complaining bitterly to make matters worse, The fourteen minutes silent film had a very select appeal. In other words, it was an even bigger flop than his debut LP, But hey, at least he got some badly needed cash for the Ordeal. Despite the rough star, David learned that he really did like acting. This realization sent ken Pitt's old school managerial brain in the high gear. Who needs pop music? That's kids stuff. He'd moved David into the realm of all around entertainers. Like David's hero Anthony Newley, Ken envisioned big plans, TV appearances, theatrical showcases, supper club cabarets. David had a different and slightly less mainstream idea mine. You know, quiet guy with face paint trapped in an imaginary box, that sort of thing. Though outwardly supportive, Ken was less than thrilled as David ventured down one of the least commercial artistic avenues known to man. But in a way, it was his own fault. Ken had sent copies of David's debut LP had dozens of his contacts in the entertainment community. One of these wound up in the hands of Lindsay Kemp, a renowned mime and performer had once studied under Marcel Marceau. Working as an occasional support act with some of the more open minded rock bands of the day, Kemp was best known as one of London's most flamboyant bohemian bon vivans. I like to do everything fully, he once boasted. I drink until I'm drunk, I eat until I'm full, frequently until I'm sick. I don't fancy people. I fall in love with them. Lindsay fell in love with David Bowie from the moment he first saw him on the album cover. He was struck again when he actually played the disc. The buoyant theatricality of the music lent itself perfectly to his own stage work, and he began playing the album during the intermission for his one man show. Word got back to David, who returned the compliment by attending when A Kemp's performances. Once the thrill of hearing his record in public war off, he grew intrigued by the possibilities and potential of mime. After curtain call, even went backstage to introduced himself. Campbell's floored by the side of David in the flesh, he would recall, it was like the archangel Gabriel standing there. He was in a beam of light, glowing beautiful, clearly. Kemp nine years David Sr. Was smitten. David asked if he could study with him. Lindsey suggests that he dropped by his Soho flat the next day to talk it over. For David, it was like walking into a velvet underground song. Lindsey's home was a hub for strippers, hookers, pimps and junkies. It was David's bohemian fantasy brought to life. He felt right at home. Over breakfast, the pair bonded over their shared love of musicals, expressionism in the circus. Lindsey turned him onto the two gens Jeanelle and Cocteau. Bowie turned Lindsay on the Buddhism. These converging Eastern and Western philosophies yielded their first collaboration, a mind piece called Perot and Turquoise. David dressed and it was the Bethan rough and caked in white face paint, played Cloud, a beautiful young muse of of the clown played by ken Case. You couldn't tell. The pieces somewhat autobiographical. In exchange for contributing songs to the production, David attended Lindsay's dance and Movement class is free of charge. There he studied the finer points of my avant garde theater and commedia dell Artetill clumsy at first, he absorbed the lessons like a sponge. This was more than mere stagecraft. David was perfecting methods to present persona in a physical way through minute manipulations of his hands and face. Lindsey had a word for it, exteriorizing, exposing his soul to the world. He encouraged David to be fearless and continually toyed with the audience's expectations. The stage became a training ground where he could experiment without fear of consequences. Lindsey called it the hypnotist. In the Casanova technique, you have to hypnotize an audience to enchant them, but then you have to make them love you. David at a head start on the casanova part. The women in his movement class fought for the privilege of being his scene partner, improvising scenarios that nearly always involved rolling around with him on the floor. But if the students had a crush, the teacher was full on infatuated. Lindsay regularly took David back to his flat tom as he called it, muck about. Their affair didn't lack for passion, but it hit a snag when the production of Paroh and Turquoise hit the road for a brief tour in early David got cozy with the costume designer, a glamorous woman named Natasha Korlinov, who happened to be Lindsay's best friend for a time. Natasha and David carried on their tryst in secret, but hotel walls can be thin. One night, Lindsay heard banging, thumping, and the unmistakable sound of David's grunts coming from the room next door the betrayal of Lindsay. Heartbroken, he resolved to end it all in a way befitting his status as a professional dramatist. He'd hurl himself into the ocean. Unfortunately, the ocean was far away, so he considered biking into the sea until the waves overtook him, but then he couldn't find a bike. Plus it was kind of cold out, so he slid his wrists. Nothing major, just a flesh wound to make an impact. He awoke to the sound of music and thought he'd arrived at the Pearly Gates, but no, he fainted. It was now on the floor of his dressing room, covered in blood, while dress rehearsal for Pero and Turquoise continued without him. The hospital stits him up pretty good, but not good enough. That night, he dramatically bled through the white silk of his costume, earning a roar of applause from the impressed audience. Natasha's reaction to David's betrayal was less visual, but equally theatrical. She took an overdose of aspirin, which yielded a little more than an upset stomach. She and Lindsey both gave David a well deserved cold shoulder, and for a time he was banished to sleeping on a chair in the hotel hallway. This love triangle played out while David was still living with Ken Pitt. He also enjoyed intermittent flings with all manner of people and all manner of genders, and one of his first interviews, David bluntly outlined his views of monogamy. I do not believe in love in its possessive form, he said, Hey, it was the sixties after all. Eventually, Lindsey forgave David and hired him to perform in a television play he was choreographing for the BBC called The Pistol Shot. But while on the set, David's care free world of wanton no string sex would come crashing down around him for the first time, twenty one year old David Bowie would fall hopelessly head over heels in love. David Bowie was in love. Her name was Hermone Farthingale, or at least that's what she called herself. Her real name was a closely guarded secret to shield her well to do family from her hippie goings on. Her exquisitive beauty, on the other hand, was no secret. Her Money was an elegant English rose, with rich red hair, fair almost translucent skin, and a slender dancer's build, the result of her extensive ballet training. She and David were initially acquainted through Lindsay Kemp's movement class, but the romance blossomed in January on the set of a BBC television play called The Pistol Shot. Kemp had been hired to choreograph a ballroom sequence, so he cast several of his students as dancers. In the costume drama. David and Hermony had a brief scene together, performing a minuet and powdered wigs and satin breeches mid eighteenth century frippery. Half a century later, Hermony would say it took maybe five minutes maximum for them to fall in love. David, never overly sentimental, would call her Money the real first love of my life. It was certainly the first time he been ruled by his heart instead of his ambition or libido. Even the possess of Lindsay Kemp, who still carried a torch for David, recognized their instant connection and backed off slightly. Things were more complicated with Ken Pitt, David's manager, with whom he shared an apartment and sometimes in bed. David lied to Can about his first few days with hermony, claiming he was going to Hampstead Heath to look for UFOs, perhaps the most sixties excuse of all time. Soon he moved out of Ken's apartment and into the three story Georgian house Hermione rented with other striving artists in London's leafy Kensington district. The tasteful home they shared was decorated in what could be best described as rich hippie chic. The pair spent hours discussing art and philosophy, or cooking simple macrobiotic meals. On weekends, they ventured out to the country to commune with nature and sunbathe in the nude. David's friends had never seen him so content. They too were enchanted by this talented, refined, sensitive, and intense young woman. She brought out David's fun, loving spirit and sense of humor. They even looked similar with their delicate, almost elfin features, but the similarities were beyond the superficial. They described one another as twin souls. It was the happiest time of David's life with Hermione as his muse, music poured out of him. Songs like in the Heat of the Morning London by Tata and Karma Man We're All written in the early days of their courtship on David's Gibson twelve string. He'd moved on from the hippie vaudeville sounds of his debut and instead embraced the stripped down confessional style of emerging singer songwriters like Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen. Together, the two lovebirds formed a performance troup called Feathers. It was one of those experimental collectives that could have only come about in the late sixties. Feathers fused David's spacey folk tunes with poetry, recitations and offbeat mime work. This wasn't exactly Marcel Marceau. For one routine, David mind an old man hunched over with a crooked back. Then he finds a joint on the ground, which he gleefully smokes. Soon he's standing stick straight. A highlight of their set was the childlike ching a Ling, a singalong jug band tune about azure clouds Crystal Girls another far out imagery. The Whole Feathers project was indicative of David's short attention span and artistic confusion, but also his frustration with the mainstream record business, said stonewalled them over the last five years. Now he was going against the hit parade and expressing himself through any medium he liked. It may have been creatively fulfilling, but he was hopelessly broke ken. Pitt did his best to chart a course back to commercial viability. He persuaded David the film of video Showcase to pitch the television networks, and even coughed up the money to produce the project himself. Music videos were certainly cutting edge, but the songs themselves were not. He was early nine, and the trippy Anthony Newley influenced music hall ditties from two years earlier now sounded hopelessly passe. David's candy striped boter blazer made him look more like a psychedelic sized ice cream man on a pop star called Love You Till Tuesday. A highlight of the twenty eight minute film was a mind piece called The Mask. It's a revealing and early prescient critique of fame and the high price that comes with it. The piece begins with a boy who steals a mask, which he uses to amuse his friends and family. The mask catapults the boy to start him, transforming him into a addy egomaniac. Then, before a packed audience, he discovers that he can't remove the mask has become a part of him, and he suffocates on the stage as the lights dim on his lifeless body. The narrator solemnly speaks. The papers made a big thing of it. Strangled on the stage, They said funny, though they didn't mention anything about a mask. It was rock and roll suicide three years early. Even in nineteen sixty nine, David Bowie was under no illusions about the perils of his chosen profession. Despite Ken's efforts, every network passed on the special, but a crueler rejection was on the horizon for David. Her money was offered a role as a dancer and The Song of Norway, a big budget MGM musical extravaganza starring future Brady Bunch mom Florence Henderson. The shoot required her money to live in Scandinavia for seven months. She knew she had to take it. David knew their relationship was over. It was just a formality when she called a short while later to tell David that she's met another man, a fellow dancer on the set, and that was the end. There had been signs there always are friends, witnessed the increasingly frequent quarrels David could be demanding, wanting dinner on the table, shirts freshly ironed that sort of thing. Hermione, who was just as headstrong as he was, wasn't going to put up with that for very long. David would admit that the romantic reverie was ruined by his own hand, or rather another part of his anatomy. I was totally unfaithful, He'd later say, and couldn't, for the life of me keep it zipped. I'm sure we would have lasted a good long time if I'd been a good boy. It was David's first and pretty much last romantic rebuff. Love is something that breeds brute anger and jealousy, he said, while still reeling from the pain. It rotted me, drained me, and it was a disease. Heartbreak was a new sensation for David, and he thought soul was an impressive number of beds, but he quickly realized that sex did little dull the pain of loss. He poured his feelings into his music, crafting some of the most intensely personal songs he'd ever write. In an occasional dream, David poetically recalls the time they spent together and the future that would never come. The past we talk with our eyes of the sweetness in our lives and the tomorrows of rich surprise, some things we could do in our madness. Letter to Harmony is even more direct, taking the form of a love note, never sent with words filled with regret and all the things that had gone on said. I care for no one else but you. I tear my soul to cease the pain. I think maybe you feel the same. What can we do? I'm not quite sure what we're supposed to do, so I've been writing just for you. They say your life is going very well. They say you sparkle like a different girl. But something tells me that you hide when all the world is warm and tired. You cry all in the dark. Well so do I. No concepts, no characters, no artifice. His feelings aren't hidden in dense thickets of imagery, but laid bare for all the Sea and simple heart rendering verse. He'd never write another song like it again. The pain stayed with him for the rest of his life, so did Harmon's letters, which he treasured to his dying day. There would be love in David Bowie's future, but no one would ever wound him in quite the same way. Bad news started to pile up in early After months of rejecting song after song, David's label, Decca, decided not to renew his record contract. David broke down and cried when he heard the news, and supposedly through a chair through a plate glass window. Ken pitt fielded increasingly anxious letters from David's father, John, wondering when his boy might reach anything that slightly resembled financial stability. To feed himself. David took any odd job he could that still allow out of the flexibility required for a struggling creative. He briefly worked at a photocopy agency near the London High Court, and for a time he even scrubbed people's kitchens. An audition for the musical Hair led to nothing, but he did land apart in a thirty second TV commercial for Love ice cream, directed by an up and coming filmmaker named Ridley Scott. When he was offered two days work at a magician's workshop. David needed alone for the railfair. Out of desperation, Ken helped him assemble a cabaret routine incorporating Hackey props like a laughing Gnome hampuppet and homemade cardboard cutouts of the Beatles. The act was dead on arrival. David began to seriously think about chucking it all and becoming a Buddhist monk. He had been fascinated by the religion since his days is a budding beat Nick in school. Now he was regularly attending seminars at nearby temples and even joined the local Tibet Society. Looking beyond the material world helped him cope with the fact that he wasn't doing particularly well on that department. Maybe he should just shave his head and take his vow. Then he took a trip to the cinema and caught Stanley Kubrick's two thousand one, a Space Odyssey. The film had opened in England in the spring of night, attracting the hip his heads in London. John Lennon was rumored to watch it once a week If David was looking for escapism, he definitely picked the wrong movie. The bleak, unsettling imagery that unspooled at a glacial pace was like a portrait of his own psyche. This was space, not the beautifully star flecked variety, but inky, black emptiness without harmony. His world was just as dark and cold. David had deviated from his flight plan, the one that all little British boys his age have been issued at birth. Keep your head down, get a good job, make some money, don't make waves. Now he was on his own, off course, beyond help, seemingly condemned to float aimlessly, waiting for death. So he put it in a song. The jokey title belayed the serious emotions that went into it. Space Oddity was a self portrait. There was something about it that touched areas of my own insecurities. He later explained, this feeling of isolation I had ever since I was a kid was really starting to manifest itself. He initially intended the song to be a Simon and Garfuncle style duet with his friend John Hutchison. He and hutch recorded a demo version soon after New Year's nineteen sixty nine Sitting face to face on the edge of David's bed, hutch sang the part of ground control while David played major tom naturally for another worldly edge, he played a stylophone, a small electronic keyboard given to him by his friend and sometimes rival, Mark bolan Ken. Pitt immediately noted the hit potential of space oddity and launched in the full managerial hype mode, But then they hit a snag. John Hutchison opted to move back to his hometown to be closer to his wife and child. David now had the tricky task reviving his solo career with a song intended to be a duet, but he had a new partner, albeit one of her romantic variety. David was playing music at a friend's house one day when the sounds from his guitar attracted their downstairs neighbor, Mary Finnegan. Rather than complain as most neighbors might, Mary liked it and invited David in for a cup of tea. Being nine sixty nine, the tea came with a dash of cream and cannabis soil. By the time the cups were cleared, David had accepted Mary's invitation to move into the spare room of the apartment she shared with her two young children. The crumbling Victorian wasn't much the look at, but he needed to move on from the home he chaired with her money and staying with his parents was no longer an option for the twenty two year old. No matter how broke he was. To David, Bromly represented semi death. David was far from a model tenant. He rarely paid rent, and cleaning was a completely foreign concept. However, the transition from lodger to lover happened quickly. One night, Mary arrived home from work to find an unfamiliar sight a tidy apartment David had laid out an elegant candle at dinner. After the meal, that retired to his room, where he'd arranged the nest of cushions on the floor. Kneeling before the altar of his stereo, David played Mary some of his favorite songs, selections from Hendrix, Pink Floyd, and Jacques Brel. For a poor artist, sharing music was the most precious gift he could offer. He and Mary stayed up late mulling over their individual philosophies. David was constantly torn between his Buddhist leanings and show business aspirations. Wouldn't it be great to wed art and spirituality all while still making some badly needed cash on the side. This let them open up their own venue, the Beckenham Arts Lab. It was a suburban version of the alternative creative center springing up around central London. A sort of psychedelic sized youth club. My music, poetry, puppet shows, Harry Krishna, Chance anything went Every Sunday evening. David and Mary transformed the dingy back room of the Three Tons Pub into a mini hate Ashbury. The tobacco stained walls were decorated with day glow posters straight out of San Francisco. The sticky, beer soaked floorboards were covered with cushions in Indian bedspreads. There was no stage to speak of. David just sat on a stool in the corner, strumming his acoustic twelve string Gibson colored lights projected onto a white bed sheet, where the extent of their special effects about People turned out for opening night on May four nine. The next week, attendants had doubled. By week three, the excess crowd flowed out into the pub's garden. There happening was a hit. David relished his role as a hippie pie piper, leading the parade of local freaks to the Straighter than Straight Tutor pub to hear his songs. Each week, the publicity blur for the beck in the mart's labs summed up the sheer groovy nous come for the fun of it and for the instant identification with the vibrations cos me. David continued to embrace the free love philosophy, not that Mary knew anything about it. He spent several days a week in London, staying with an assortment of friends and lovers. Easily the most colorful of these was Calvin Mark Lee, a San Franciscan ex pat whose doctorate in pharmaceutical chemistry no doubt proved useful in the drug filled music industry. Employed as the insistent head of Mercury Records European office, the flirty and flamboyant Calvin was famous for his love jewel, a glittering plastic, red and silver prism displayed on his forehead, later co opted by David in the waning days of Ziggy Stardust. Calvin was one of the few impressed with David's debut LP and Son I'm a fan letter in the summer of sixty seven. David didn't get many fan letters, and certainly none like Lee's, which included passionate pledges of love. The inevitable affair soon began, How could it not, Calvin was smitten. David's interest was more casual, some might say opportunistic. He was chiefly attracted to Calvin's position at a major label and his superhuman talents as a networker. The Mercury Exect was friends with Acid King stan Ousley, Mike Nesmith of the Monkeys, and even Jimmy Hendrix. David hoped to meet such luminaries, but Calvin's most influential production was with a headstrong American woman. She wasn't famous, but she'd helped chart David's artistic pat and become his first wife, Mary Angela Barnett, better known to the world as one Angie Bowie. David used to say that he met his first wife when they were quote screwing the same bloke. It sounds like a clever party joke, but that's pretty much how it happened. Their courtship is one of the raunchier meat cutes in rock history. Calvin Mark Lee was the man who brought the star crossed lovers together. In addition to wearing a prism on his forehead, one of Calvin's many eccentricities involved displaying a photo gallery of all of his sexual conquests above his bed. It was a hall of fame for him and also let his sex partners know they were in good company. Once. At some point during their affair, Angela became fixed at it on a picture of David shirtless. Calvin, the consummate networker, promise to make an introduction, andree is a roar shock test when it comes to Bowie fans. To some, she's the woman behind the curtain, the manic muse, the master manipulator, the mastermind who engineered David's assent to the highest reaches of pop cultural significance by crafting his look, his deals, and his ever changing personas. To others, she's the worst thing that ever happened to him. Whatever the case, there's no denying that this larger than life whirlwind made an oversized impact, and that's just how she likes it. Andre was born in n nine on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus, to an American colonel who left the army to open a mining company. Her complex attitudes the sex were shaped early. At age seven, her dad caught her kissing a boy next door, a harmless write of passage for most kids. His response was to beat her relentlessly with a camel whip. She'd have an equally traumatic experience while enrolled at Connecticut College when she was expelled for having an affair with her fe mail student. Both of these incidents made her wonder, what is the problem that everyone has with sex? Her lust for stardom was equally intense. It began on a transatlantic cruise when she happened to bump in the Liberacci a fellow passenger. An up close audience with this paragon of show business access was enough to get her hooked on the very idea she would be a singer, or a model or something, as long as it was grand. She'd work out the details later. By nine sixty six, she moved to the newly swinging London to study marketing at a local college. She continued the dream of fame, but her reality was much more modest, living in a cramped room above the travel agency where she worked. Then she met Mercury Records chief Lou Reisner in the elevator of an ultra k hair salon. That's when things started looking up for Angie. They became an item. Then Lou made the mistake of introducing Angie to a second in command, Calvin Mark Lee. Then they also became an item. Has made Calvin rather unpopular in Risinger's office. Whenever Calvin tried to tell the label head about his talented friend David and his great new song about a spaceman, Lou was only too happy to ignore him. Angie first laid eyes on David in the flesh when Calvin took her to see a Feather's performance at the Roundhouse Club. She could take her leave the whole multimedia mime thing, but that frontman. He was hard to forget, Andie would vividly recall her memory of David that night. His steel blue eyes burned with mystery that defied the searching spotlights. His whole performance exuded in eroticism. They met for real a few months later, in the spring of nineteen sixty nine, when Calvin Invita heard a third Wheel of Chinatown dinner date charged to his Mercury Record's expense account. By now, Angie had grown infatuated with the photo of David hanging over Calvin's bed, she showed up to the Dumpling In restaurant dressed to kill in a three piece pink and purple pants suit with matching silk tie. Such masculine attire was unusual for a woman in sixties London, and David was intrigued with their slight build and short cropped hair. They almost looked like twins. They also shared open attitudes to sex. Over dinner, she told David about her physical relationship with a woman, a revelation that had brought her public shame at college. David couldn't care less, He told her, you only did what you felt. That's how love is. With that, their destiny was sealed. After dinner, the trio dropped by a record release party for King Crimson at the Speakeasy Club. David asked Angie to dance with the immortal pickup line do You Jive? Before long, they wound up at Angie's flat above the travel Agent. She had some constructive criticism for his love making. He was a stud, not a sensualist, she later said, but they were bonded by more than just sex. They fed off each other's ambition. It was the first time that David had met someone has driven as himself. The fact that she was a sexually aberrated live wire was just a bonus. They spent a few nights together in London before David headed back to the home he shared with Mary and Beckenham. But Mary was out of town, so when David came down with a cold, he called Angie to come nurse him back to health. When Mary arrived home, she knew instantly that something was different. The smell gave it away. Instead of the usual aroma of stale takeout food, cigarettes and sweaty socks that lingered when David was around, her nose detected furniture polished, disinfected, and poshed notes of Chanel perfume. She found the place immaculate. The last time this had happened, David had prepared a romantic neil. This time, he was nowhere to be found. She patted into his room to find a woman's kimono draped over a chair. The kimono didn't belong to her. The notebook on David's desk was opened to display a half written song called Beautiful Angie. That's when it finally dawned on Mary that David might have kind of, sort of been slightly less than monogam us. Shattered, Mary retreated to her own bedroom to make sense of the betrayal. She awoke hours later to the smell of cooking. A cheerful American woman greeted her in her own kitchen. Hello Mary, she said, in her mini mouse voice, How wonderful to meet you. David's told me so much about you. Mary wanted to be angry, but she just couldn't. Obviously, David had some nerve bringing his new lover into her own home without even having the good grace to break up with her first. But Aie was just too charming. She was generous, cooking lavish meals and planning fun group outings. She was bright, well read, and highly cultured. She had Mary delighted in speaking French together, which had the added bonus of making David supremely uncomfortable. David had been kind of a jerk, but Mary thought Angie was great. Almost in spite of herself. Mary aloud Angie and David to rent a room in her home for the next few months. Of course, there were times when Angie could be a self centered drama queen throw hissy fits for the Ages. The relationship was technically an open one, but David's new partner was still prone to the odd fit of jealousy. Once early in their courtship, David informed her that he was going out, Andie responded by hurling herself down the stairs. David barely reacted, coolly stepping over her body on his way out the door, and she became a crucial supporter of David's musical career. The hippie dippy arts lab thing with small potatoes, she had bigger ideas she continued her relationship with Mercury Records chief Lou Reisner and pestered him to sign David Calvin mark Lee continued the lobby for David as well, but Lou wouldn't hear of it. It was bad enough that Calvin was sleeping with his girlfriend, but now David too. No chance for all of lose misgivings. Calvin New Space Audity was a hit, The song itself was great, and the Apollo eleven Moonshot scheduled for that summer, presented a golden marketing opportunity that was just too good to pass up. The countdown was on so Calvin went behind Low's back and financed the demo recording. The results were fantastic, and when Angie threatened to stop seeing Lou if he didn't sign David well, that helped to George Martin was the first choice to produce Space Oddity, but the Fifth Beatle wasn't a fan of the song and said no, and irate Ken Pitt scribbled George Martin is fallible in his diary. Then he placed to call the Tony Visconti, David's close friend had produced his last sessions. Unfortunately, Tony also didn't like the song. He thought it was too gimmicky, a cheap way to cash in on the Lunar landing. Instead, he pawned the job off on his former engineer, Gus Dudgeon, who was more than happy to oblige. Recording began at London's Trident Studios on June nine, the day David inked his deal with Mercury. Cutting edge instruments were used for that spacey otherworldly impact. David played his style a phone and they also rolled out a melotron, a primitive synthesized or popularized by the Beatles on Strawberry Fields forever to play it. Dudgeon tapped future prog rock god Rick Wakeman of Yes then still enrolled the music College. It was the second recording date he'd ever played, but he nailed the meloitron keyboard part and just two takes. Some of the effects were less high tech. Guitarist Mick Wayne dragged his chrome cigarette lighter up the neck of his guitar to simulate the dramatic rocket lift off. The result is a masterfully cinematic piece of folk rock. From the ominous, barely audible introduction to arranger Paul Buckminster's chilling orchestral conclusion as Major Tom's spacecraft tumbles into the ether. It's a decidedly downbeat comment and what was intended to be the decades crowning achievement, Space Oddity offers a cold, hard look where all that technological no how has gotten us estranged from fellow humans and focused on the superficial, like the shirts one wears. Ironically, the only way Major Tom breaks free of his existential despairs that's attached completely from human end himself. Bowie Ever, the Buddhist later explained at the end of the song, Major Tom is completely emotionless and expresses no view at all about where he's at. He's fragmenting, his mind is completely blown. He's everything. Then Mercury worked overtime to ensure that the song was in shops before Apollo eleven's launch date. Calvin Mark Lee waited at the studio to personally whisk the final takebox over to the pressing plant. On July eleven, only three weeks after the recording session, Space Oddity hit the shelves. Nine days later, a somewhat larger milestone occurred when Neil Armstrong walked on the Moon. The BBC used the song during its television coverage. Presumably the producers didn't pick up on the song's catastrophic conclusion. The BBC radio were a bit more cautious and refused to play the song until the astronauts were safely back on Earth. Unfortunately, this delay had a disastrous impact on the chart success of Space Oddity. Ken took the time honored approach of paying off a chart rigger to elevate the ranking, but the investment only goosed the song up to number It was a slow burn, but that November Space Oddity finally peaked at number five. David Bowie had his first bona fide hit, but one of his biggest supporters wouldn't get to share it with him. In August, David went abroad with Ken Pitt to compete in the Malta International Song Festival think Eurovision, but d list clad in the pastel boaters Jackety wore. In the ill fated Lovey Till Tuesday TV special, David performed when I Lived My Dream, the track from his debut album. Was a bit stale at that point, but it earned a strong response from the middle of the road crowd. It even netted David an award for Best Produced Song, not exactly a Grammy, but it was the first professional accolade that David had ever received as an artist, and he couldn't wait to show it off for his father John. He arrived back in England and learned the news. John was gravely ill. A heavy smoker, John Jones often complained of lung ailments, but while David was away, these pains grew serious and John collapsed in the street. David's mother, Peggy, hoped that some good old fashioned bed rest would solve the problem, but John's fever quickly escalated in a critical condition. David rushed to his bedside, still clutching his statuette. It wasn't a major award, but that didn't matter. He wanted to repay John for his faith and support, and the small success was a down payment. He needed his father to know that he wasn't a loser, that he was going to be okay, more than okay. He was going to reach the top, and he was going to do it for them both. John saw the trophy and managed a weak smile before fading into unconsciousness. He died two days later, on August five, nineteen sixty nine, of low bar pneumonia. He was fifty six. David was in the midst of a recording session when he got the call telling him that his father was gone. There was some quick tears, but then he got right back to work. It was the best way to honor his father. The album in progress, alternately titled Space Oddity, Man of Words, Man of Music, or simply David Bowie four Scars of the Twin Tragedies that threatened to overwhelmed David. In the second half of nineteen sixty nine. Hermione's unhappy departure cast a shadow over several songs but the searing unwashed and somewhat slightly dazed is on another level. The visceral imagery is uncharacteristically grotesque and tortured. I'm a foulus in pigtails, and there's blood on my nose, and my tissue is rotting where the rats chew my bones. My eye sockets empty, see nothing but pain. David loathe giving straight answers about the genesis of his songs, but he was explicit about this one. He'd say that Unwashed and somewhat slightly days captured the mailstrom of anguish and confusion. In the weeks after his father's death, David was racked by regret about all the things that have been left unsaid between them. For years. He'd call for career advice or visit home to get his laundry done, but David rarely tried to engage on a deeper level. The familial chilliness he'd experienced since childhood had hardened into an impenetrable frost, and communication was difficult. I could never ever talk to my father, he'd later say. I really loved him, but we couldn't talk about anything together. As David matured in adulthood, he started to reach out in small ways. He just died at the wrong damn time. He'd say, there were so many things I would love to have said to him, and asked him about all those stereotypical regrets when your father dies and you haven't completed your relationship. I felt, damn wrong time. Not now, Not now. David didn't cry at his father's funeral. Friends and family praised him from taking the loss like a man. It's doubtful that he shared the macho sentiment. The pain was simply too painful the process. However, he took solace in a series of early morning phone calls he received in the days after John's death. Whenever David answered, he heard only silence. David took it as a sign, telling a friend, I just knew it was my dad seeing if I was all right. Five days after he buried his father, David played the biggest show of his life. He'd been planning the Beckenham Free Festival for months along with his arts lab cohorts. They're hard work paid off as five thousand people turned out to enjoy music, puppet shows, astrologers, tarot readings and Tibetan crafts. It was Augustine. As usual, his timing was impeccable. Just as David released his debut album on the same day the Beatles released Sergeant Pepper. He made his festival debut the same weekend as Woodstock Half a World of The weather was beautiful, but David's mood grew cloudy minutes before he was due to perform. The torment of the prior months, coupled with about a stage fright, hit him all at once, and he grew testy and withdrawn. He traveled so far already, and many loved ones were left behind. His father, Hermione, his brother Terry, They were no longer by his side. What did he have? The show for? It all? A prime slot at a free festival in a backwater British suburb, A cooler received novelty record, an LP that was all but ignored. Was this as good as it gets? Was this all? There was a voice called out to David. It was time to play. All the doubts were set aside as he started to sing for a few thousand people, for David Bowie, the show would go on off. The record is a production of I Heart Radio. The executive producers are Noel Brown, and Shawn Ty Tone. The Superbusting producers so Taylor chicogn and Tristan McNeil. The show is written and hosted by me Jordan run Tug and edited, scored and sound designed by Tristan McNeil. 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