David Bowie exploded on the scene in 1972 and it caught the world off guard. Although "Hunky Dory" is a very good record it also is dominated by an acoustic sound. It's less straight forward rock than either "Man Who Sold the World" or "Ziggy Stardust."
But from "Hunky Dory" there was the transition in his look as well. The groundbreaking transgender rock musician Jayne County, in her autobiography "Man Enough to be a Woman," accurately describes Bowie at the time of that record as "looking a bit like Lauren Bacall." Ziggy Stardust had yet to be born.
What caused the change? In part it was exposure to Freddi Burretti and the crowd at the Sombrero, the gay bar that he and his wife Angie frequented in Kensington High Street. But it was also due to exposure to County, Tony Zanetta, Leee Black Childers and Cherry Vanilla.
They were all in Andy Warhol's "Pork" which Bowie saw in London in August 1971. "Pork" was full of scatological and sexual content and crossed the line of propriety in about every way you could imagine. Bowie was so impressed with it that he wanted to put it on television. He told William Burroughs in a 1974 co-interview in Rolling Stone that it "could become the next 'I Love Lucy.'"
Bowie was smitten. He signed County to his nascent management company MainMan and hired Zanetta and Childers as president and vice-president of the company and Cherry Vanilla as his publicist. A month after meeting the cast of "Pork," Bowie was in New York to sign a deal with RCA and met both Warhol and Lou Reed.
Four months later, Bowie had transformed himself into Ziggy, with short red hair and looking for all the world like the glam rocker who fell to earth. In an article in "Melody Maker" on January 22, 1972 entitled "Oh You Pretty Thing" he said:
"I'm gay. And always have been, even when I was David Jones."
Gay glam
Bowie was not the first popular musician to comment about his sexuality. Marc Bolan told ZigZag he was bisexual in March 1970. Bowie wasn't even second. Dusty Springfield said she was bisexual in The Evening Standard in September 1970. But what Bowie did had an impact. In "Shock and Awe: Glam Rock and Its Legacy from the Seventies to the Twenty First Century" Simon Reynolds tells us why:
"From the late sixties through the end of 1973, 'Melody Maker' was Britain's leading music magazine. By 1972 it was also the best-selling, having outstripped the pop-oriented 'New Musical Express' and achieving a weekly circulation that hovered just above 200,000."
Bowie put his sexuality front and center for the British rock world in their best-selling magazine in a cover story. It was a brilliant move. His career exploded following the article.
The sexuality had been there for all to see in his lyrics all the way back to "The Man Who Sold the World" in 1970 and through songs like "Queen Bitch" on "Hunky Dory." And interviews and lyrics were not the only way Bowie was playing with notions of sexuality.
In the 2008 online article, "He Swallowed His Pride and Puckered His Lips," journalist Michael Fremer, who was on the Ziggy Stardust tour in America, notes that the record release party for Ziggy Stardust in America was held at The Other Side, a gay bar in Boston.
Gay guides
The Other Side is not the only gay bar which figures in Bowie's American tour history. I had heard of Bowie going to Gagen's in Detroit during the '70s, and it is mentioned in comments on a Detroit Gay History post online.
I put this off as rumor until I read this quote from Leee Black Childers in "David Bowie: A Life" by Dylan Jones. He is talking about the backlash against Bowie on his first tour and how they entertained themselves while on the road:
"I was the road manager for the tour, and when we get to a town that no one had been to before, David would say, 'Well, Leee, get out your guide. Where are we going?' And you would look at the list of gay bars and go to a gay bar, because even though it wasn't necessarily for any gay purpose, a gay bar is just somewhere you can be more comfortable, if you're acting like David did then, as Ziggy Stardust. So that's how we did the whole tour."
Bowie added to the legends of Warhol's world by producing Lou Reed's 1972 album "Transformer." In "Shock and Awe," Reynolds elaborates on the influence of the Ziggy sound on Reed:
"'Transformer' was Lou Reed songs fed through the pristinely produced, semi-orchestrated 'Hunky Dory'/'Ziggy Stardust' sound. That had everything to do with (Mick) Ronson, who was effectively the musical director... Ronson contributed a hefty amount to the arrangements, worked closely with the session musicians, and played gorgeous piano on songs like 'Perfect Day,' as well as contributing guitar and even a spot of recorder-playing elsewhere on the record."
County, Coney, Club 82
"Walk on the Wild Side" from "Transformer" reached number 16 on Billboard's single charts and introduced several Warhol legends to the unaware. It was perhaps the gayest thing on AM radio since the Kinks "Lola."
Bowie and Reed also shared one other aspect of queer life. They both frequented Club 82, a club in New York which featured drag acts and where County, among other rock acts, performed. It was at Club 82 that Reed met his lover Rachel Humphreys, a transgender woman featured on the back cover of Reed's "Sally Can't Dance" album.
Throughout the '70s, Bowie continued to transgress boundaries including the "David Bowie is enough to drive Aladdin Sane" campaign for "Aladdin Sane."
The "1980 Floor Show" was broadcast by NBC on "The Midnight Special" and included performances by Marianne Faithfull (dressed as a nun) and Bowie in a net outfit with strategically placed mannequin hands (the hand on the crotch was censored by NBC). And on the "Diamond Dogs" tour (the first one I saw) he performed "Cracked Actor" while singing to a skull...which he then French-kissed.
German-ly
By 1976 Bowie was becoming tired of life in the U.S. and was intent on cleaning up his considerable cocaine habit. On February 11, 1976 he was introduced to Christopher Isherwood by David Hockney backstage at the Inglewood Forum.
Bowie quizzed Isherwood about life in Berlin, where he had decided to move. Simon Reynolds writes that Isherwood told Bowie that it was actually "rather boring" and reminded him that he wrote fiction. Nonetheless, Bowie had made his mind up.
The Inglewood Forum concert followed Bowie's performance at the Cow Palace on February 6, 1976. It was the second time Bowie had been in San Francisco. The first had been the low point of the Ziggy tour. Winterland, where he appeared (with Sylvester as an opening band) was noticeably empty of fans.
There is an apocryphal quote from Bowie about San Francisco not needing him as they had Sylvester (I have been unable to find a source for that quote). However, on this tour it was different, as Paul Trynka notes in "David Bowie: Starman":
"When David had played the city back in October of 1972, amid all of MainMan's hype and bluster, the Winterland had been embarrassingly empty. Now, the same city's Cow Palace was filled with fourteen thousand adoring fans."
Glamour archetypes
On April 10, 1976 Bowie was performing at Deutschlandhalle in Berlin. In "David Bowie Rainbowman: 1967 — 1980" Jérôme Soligny writes:
"It was the day he met Romy Haag, who'd come to see him at Deutschlandhalle with a group of drag queens. They hit it off and spent the night at her club. Then he ended up at her place! We all know the story now. The next day David turned up very late to the first of his two shows at the Congress Centrum in Hamburg."
Haag's club Chez Romy Haag was where the drag queens she was attending the concert with performed. Haag herself is not a drag queen, she is a transgender performer. For the first few years when Bowie was living in Berlin, he often spent time at Chez Romy Haag.
Haag influenced the video of "Boys Keep Swinging" from 1979's "Lodger" album, as Reynolds notes:
"Bowie drags up as female glamour archetypes, including Lauren Bacall and Marlene Dietrich. At each transition he wipes the lipstick across his face in a savage smear while ripping off the wig — a gesture nabbed from Romy Haag's cabaret routine."
For the performance of "Boys Keep Swinging" on Saturday Night Live Bowie used Joey Arias and Klaus Nomi as his backup singers, who he met at the Mudd Club in '79. As Arias told the online site Laist:
"We walked over and we bypassed the bodyguards. He tapped David on the shoulder and said, "Mr. Bowie, I want to introduce you to Joey and Nomi," and he turned around and went "Nomi? Oh my god! I just got back from Berlin and I know your friends! Everyone was talking about you; I can't believe I'm meeting you!"
Straight times
It wasn't the last time that Bowie would go to the clubs for visual inspiration. On July 1, 1980 he visited the Blitz Club in London, a club run by Steve Strange and Rusty Egan of Visage and a frequent early haunt of Boy George. Strange and three other regulars at the Blitz Club appear in the video "Ashes to Ashes."
Somewhere between 1980 and 1983 Bowie decided it was time to change his image again. On May 12, 1983 the article "Straight Time" appeared in Rolling Stone in which he said: "The biggest mistake I ever made was telling that Melody Maker writer that I was bisexual. Christ, I was so young then. I was experimenting."
The slight to the gay community did not go unnoticed. An article entitled "Musical Closets" by Michael Messina from the August 15 issue of New York Native responded by saying, "Bowie's reputation and career were to no small degree built on sexually outrageous statements, effeminate fashion, and a startling androgyny. He would never have gotten where he is today without such manipulation of his persona."
Girls or boys?
As a gay fan who had seen Bowie live four times, it was all a little hard to take. It was an era when we were losing heroes at an alarming rate. Klaus Nomi died of AIDS less than three months after "Straight Time" appeared.
It wasn't the last time Bowie changed his mind about addressing sexual fluidity and ambiguity. In 1995 on "Outside" his song "Hallo Spaceboy" (perhaps best known for its Pet Shop Boys remix) has the lyric, "Do you like girls or boys? It's confusing these days."
And eventually he and Tilda Swinton dressed as one another for a photo shoot after doing a video for "The Stars (are out tonight)" from "The Next Day" in 2013.
Perhaps the last word on Bowie's sexuality should come from Tony Zanetta from Trynka's book (and according to Jayne County, he should know):
"Bowie was bisexual, but what he was really was a narcissist — boys or girls, it was all the same. He was attracted to the gay culture because he loved its flamboyance."
(More to read at www.analogplanet.com
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