David Bowie Biography
The cliché about David
Bowie says he's a musical chameleon, adapting himself according to fashion
and trends. While such a criticism is too glib, there's no denying that Bowie
demonstrated remarkable skill for perceiving musical trends at his peak in the
'70s. After spending several years in the late '60s as a mod and as an
all-around music-hall entertainer, Bowie reinvented himself as a hippie
singer/songwriter. Prior to his breakthrough in 1972, he recorded a proto-metal
record and a pop/rock album, eventually redefining glam rock with his
ambiguously sexy Ziggy Stardust persona. Ziggy made Bowie an international star,
yet he wasn't content to continue to churn out glitter rock. By the mid-'70s, he
developed an effete, sophisticated version of Philly soul that he dubbed
"plastic soul," which eventually morphed into the eerie avant-pop of
1976's Station to Station. Shortly afterward, he relocated to Berlin, where he
recorded three experimental electronic albums with Brian
Eno. At the dawn of the '80s, Bowie was still at the height of his powers,
yet following his blockbuster dance-pop album Let's
Dance in 1983, he slowly sank into mediocrity before salvaging his career in
the early '90s. Even when he was out of fashion in the '80s and '90s, it was
clear that Bowie was one of the most influential musicians in rock, for better
and for worse. Each one of his phases in the '70s sparked a number of subgenres,
including punk, new wave, goth rock, the new romantics, and electronica. Few
rockers ever had such lasting impact.
David Jones began performing music when he was 13 years
old, learning the saxophone while he was at Bromley Technical High School;
another pivotal event happened at the school, when his left pupil became
permanently dilated in a schoolyard fight. Following his graduation at 16, he
worked as a commercial artist while playing saxophone in a number of mod bands,
including the King Bees, the Manish Boys (which also featured Jimmy
Page as a session man), and Davey Jones & the Lower Third. All three of
those bands released singles, which were generally ignored, yet he continued
performing, changing his name to David Bowie in 1966 after the Monkees' Davy
Jones became an international star. Over the course of 1966, he released
three mod singles on Pye Records, which were all ignored. The following year, he
signed with Deram, releasing the music hall, Anthony
Newley-styled David
Bowie that year. Upon completing the record, he spent several weeks in a
Scottish Buddhist monastery. Once he left the monastery, he studied with Lindsay
Kemp's mime troupe, forming his own mime company, the Feathers, in 1969. The
Feathers were short-lived, and he formed the experimental art group Beckenham
Arts Lab in 1969.
Bowie needed to finance the Arts Lab, so he signed with
Mercury Records that year and released Man of Words, Man of Music, a trippy
singer/songwriter album featuring "Space Oddity." The song was
released as a single and became a major hit in the U.K., convincing Bowie to
concentrate on music. Hooking up with his old friend Marc
Bolan, he began miming at some of Bolan's
T. Rex
concerts, eventually touring with Bolan,
bassist/producer Tony
Visconti, guitarist Mick
Ronson, and drummer Cambridge
as Hype. The
band quickly fell apart, yet Bowie and Ronson
remained close, working on the material that formed Bowie's next album, The Man
Who Sold the World, as well as recruiting Michael "Woody" Woodmansey
as their drummer. Produced by Tony
Visconti, who also played bass, The Man Who Sold the World was a heavy
guitar rock
album that failed to gain much attention. Bowie followed the album in late
1971 with the pop/rock Hunky
Dory, an album that featured Ronson
and keyboardist Rick
Wakeman.
Following the release of Hunky
Dory, Bowie began to develop his most famous incarnation, Ziggy Stardust: an
androgynous, bisexual rock star from another planet. Before he unveiled Ziggy,
Bowie claimed in a January 1972 interview with the Melody Maker that he was gay,
helping to stir interest in his forthcoming album. Taking cues from Bolan's
stylish glam rock, Bowie dyed his hair orange and began wearing women's
clothing. He began calling himself Ziggy Stardust, and his backing band -- Ronson,
Woodmansey,
and bassist Trevor
Bolder -- were the Spiders from Mars. The Rise & Fall of Ziggy Stardust
and the Spiders from Mars was released with much fanfare in England in late
1972. The album and its lavish, theatrical concerts became a sensation
throughout England, and it helped him become the only glam rocker to carve out a
niche in America. Ziggy
Stardust became a word-of-mouth hit in the U.S., and the re-released
"Space Oddity" -- which was now also the title of the re-released Man
of Words, Man of Music -- reached the American Top 20. Bowie quickly followed Ziggy
with Aladdin
Sane later in 1973. Not only did he record a new album that year, but he
also produced Lou
Reed's Transformer,
the Stooges' Raw
Power, and Mott the Hoople's comeback All the Young Dudes, for which he also
wrote the title track.
Given the amount of work Bowie packed into 1972 and 1973,
it wasn't surprising that his relentless schedule began to catch up with him.
After recording the all-covers Pin-Ups with the Spiders from Mars, he
unexpectedly announced the band's breakup, as well as his retirement from live
performances, during the group's final show that year. He retreated from the
spotlight to work on a musical adaptation of George
Orwell's -1984, but once he was denied the rights to the novel, he
transformed the work into Diamond
Dogs. The album was released to generally poor reviews in 1974, yet it
generated the hit single "Rebel Rebel," and he supported the album
with an elaborate and expensive American tour. As the tour progressed, Bowie
became fascinated with soul
music, eventually redesigning the entire show to reflect his new
"plastic soul." Hiring guitarist Carlos
Alomar as the band's leader, Bowie refashioned his group into a Philly soul
band and recostumed himself in sophisticated, stylish fashions. The change took
fans by surprise, as did the double-album David
Live, which featured material recorded on the 1974 tour.
Young
Americans, released in 1975, was the culmination of Bowie's soul obsession,
and it became his first major crossover hit, peaking in the American Top Ten and
generating his first U.S. number one hit in "Fame," a song he co-wrote
with John
Lennon and Alomar.
Bowie relocated to Los Angeles, where he earned his first movie role in Nicolas
Roeg's The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976). While in L.A., he recorded Station
to Station, which took the plastic soul of Young
Americans into darker, avant-garde-tinged directions, yet was also a huge
hit, generating the Top Ten single "Golden Years." The album
inaugurated Bowie's persona of the elegant "Thin White Duke," and it
reflected Bowie's growing cocaine-fueled paranoia. Soon, he decided Los Angeles
was too boring and returned to England; shortly after arriving back in London,
he gave the awaiting crowd a Nazi salute, a signal of his growing, drug-addled
detachment from reality. The incident caused enormous controversy, an