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Portrait
of the Artist: David Bowie
SOMA Magazine 1999, Vol. 13.8
Text: Stefan Chirazi
Photography: Frank Ockenfeis 3 |
He makes music. He acts.
He paints. He makes sculptures. David Bowie sits and talks for 'hours...' with
Stefan Chirazi about how it all comes together in one extraordinary life.
David Bowie's loud, rasping laugh echoes around the long, austere conference
room at his record label's offices in New York. "Y'know those guys that get
old frying pans and tinfoil and make these monstrously fantastic statues out
of crap?" He grins, taking a drag of his cigarette, a sip of espresso, and settling
into the story as if an old pair of slippers. "Well, I have great empathy with
them because I know what they're doing."
He quickly jumps out of the chair to further augment the story. "When I first
started sculpting as a kid, I did something just like that without knowing what
I was doing. It was this 15-foot sculpture of a man holding a baby with his
foot through a huge globe" (these details are passionately intoned as he half-crouches,
drama-stepping his foot slowly into a 'thing,' arms cradling the air). "I made
him out of cellophane and polythene, his vertebrae were made from 3-D postcards,
his penis was made out of cotton reels with one of these little 3-D TV pencil
sharpeners at the end, and his hips were made of 45 rpm records. And I had piano
wire from the rafters to him, so he was like this huge puppet."
Bowie pauses for a moment, reflecting on the image. "His whole body was made
of STUFF," he roars with unbridled amusement. "He was transparent so you could
see his inner-self and it was made up of bric-a-brac. If I'd have known about
myself then what I know now, it's exactly the same fucking thing as I do with
music. I naturally 'magpie' things, I see them and I bring them back to myself."
He might well be many things to many people, but the truth is that talking with
David Bowie feels like chin-wagging with an old friend over late-morning coffee.
Technically, of course, we're not even distant acquaintances, but Bowie's not
one to let small details get in the way of a good old natter.
Indeed, like the many other arts Bowie has mastered (music, film, stage, painting,
and sculpting), he has great conversation sewn up. One minute we're laughing
over a picture in the paper with two cows painting in a field ("I'm a collector
of their work y'know!"), the next we're pushing around contemporary concepts
of faith and God whilst there's still time to mention video games and Lara Croft's
'tits.' He even looks like an old pal, shoulder-length unkempt flaxen hair,
slightly rumpled shirt, black spacey boots, and slivery-gray stubble, the only
difference being a sense of natural style that makes it all look like an instant
Fall classic.
Perhaps the greatest touch, however, is the way in which David Bowie controls
his own aura. He has, during an enormously iconoclastic 30-year career which
has seen generations of pop culture following his lead, become acutely aware
of the aura he radiates. Maturity, not to mention a deeper self-confidence,
sees Bowie keeping that aura turned lower these days in the interest of maintaining
comfortable room temperatures.
"Over the years I've become a very buoyant, happy character," he explains. "1989
was the period I really realized for the first time in my life that I was an
exceptionally lucky man. Many things, such as meeting my wife (Bowie has been
happily married to former model Iman for nearly a decade), made me realize that
I should bless every damn moment I am alive because I was having, and have,
an extraordinary life. The last thing I should do, ever, is whine. My problems
pale into nothingness relative to other people's, and the only thing that would
be a significant problem for me and my family, is illness."
It hasn't always been easy for Bowie to view matters with such equilibrium.
Born David Jones on January 8, 1947 in Brixton, South London, the heights of
fame Bowie reached during his '70s Glam Rock phase brought with them the inevitable
warp factor that affects young recipients of megastardom. There was also divorce
(from Angie Bowie), drug and depression problems, as well as an ex-business
partner who left Bowie broke, all experienced by the time 1980 arrived.
"One thing one always has to work at is relationships, and it wasn't until the
late '80s that I started to become more open," he says philosophically of his
current comfort. "Someone told me that you reach a certain age and either completely
diminish as a person or become the person you always should've been. Age brings
one of two things: either a feeling of complete and utter defeat or understanding
that it's about living the moment. If you harness yourself to that energy of
enjoying the day as it comes along and put yourself to bed at night knowing
that you did everything to the best of your abilities, didn't hurt anybody,
and continue to cement relationships between yourself, friends, and family,
then you're all the better for it. And an accumulation of days like that gives
you a real sense of fulfillment."
Given his state of almost continual epiphany throughout the '90s, it would be
easy to assume that hours..., Bowie's twenty-third album which was written and
recorded in Bermuda, is an autobiographical set of musically-interpreted memoirs.
Instead, it is a semi-fictional composite of the thoughts and reflections someone
in their early 50s might have.
"I felt that I needed to develop a real emotional character," he explains. "I
took the idea of me being over 50 now, and said, 'let's talk about my generation.'
So I started writing songs from the viewpoint of a 50, 55 year old who hadn't
fulfilled things in his life, never reached his potential, and had disastrous
relationships.
"I drew upon things that had happened in my own life obviously, but also, the
bridge between my own young life led to people I knew where things didn't work
out too well. So the conclusions to these stories were often bridges between
my younger, and their present, selves. Because there's nothing worse than hearing
an album from someone saying, 'life is really great!'" he chuckles. "It's like,
'well, fuck you, I'm sooo pleased for you.' I never buy albums like that and
neither, I don't think, does anybody else."
Despite its older perspective, hours...has more than enough tales of lost life
and love for any generation to find empathy with it. "My son [Duncan] said he
liked this one because he felt it reflected a lot of the things he'd been through,"
says Bowie with obvious pride. "At 27! Been through all that?!" So in that sense
it does cut across all age groups and manages to become a representation of
certain states of mind we get ourselves into. For all of us, there's a certain
kind of atmosphere and anguish that we all feel at times in our lives. You can
feel as walked on and fucked over at 21 as you do at 60, it's the general 'me'
feeling. But if you express it at twenty-one it tends to be a bit histrionic
because you feel it's 'never happened to anyone else ever in the history of
the world.'"
Bowie is eager to point out that he won't be upset if people still take hours...
to be all about him. "Not at all, I'm sort of the same," he starts quickly.
"I kind of care what the author, or artist, intended but I'm more interested
in what their work brings up in me and how I can use it. 'How do I use that
painting or how do I use this music, what kind of thing does it put on the table
which makes me think about something I haven't thought about for a long time,
but should've?' I think the audience finishes off the story," he says strongly.
"I'm a major believer in that. I can only put into my work what I know, but
once you put it into a public situation, it's finished by them."
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Over the years, Bowie, the effervescent canvas, has involved himself in a rich
array of unique colors and brushes. Film director Nicholas Roeg, playwright Bertolt
Brecht, guitarists Mick Ronson, Carlos Alomar, and Reeves Gabrels, composer/producer
Brian Eno and Iggy Pop, as well as Martin Scorcese, David Lynch, artist Julian
Schnabel, and John Lennon, underscore the quality behind so many of Bowie's collaborations.
The results (albums such as Heroes and The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and
the Spiders from Mars, films like The Man Who Fell to Earth and The Last Temptatin
of Christ and stage work like The Elephant Man) have helped establish Bowie's
legend and place him as one of the modern era's most important artistic catalysts.
"Now I know what it is I do," he offers. "I didn't know what I was doing as a
kid and I certainly didn't know why I was doing it. I only knew certain things:
that I was uncomfortable as a blues singer, that I was not comfortable as a soul
singer, and that time after time, it struck me that I was uncomfortable being
in any genre. I didn't feel a natural 'anything.' And then, when I suddenly started
taking bits of things and putting them together in a new way, mixing all the colors,
mixing some blues with folk with artistic ideas in books about Japan, I realized
I was a guy who did collages. I was a collagist! I was good at hybridization,
at juxtaposing things that shouldn't, and often didn't, make sense.
"I was always interested in the guys that didn't fit into the mainstream," he
continues excitedly. "Like Harry Parch with experimental music, Jack Kerouac who
was writing from this strange beat place, William Burroughs because it was just
weird the way he'd put sentences together...these became my inspirations. And
because I'm a populist-minded person-I'm not some avant-gardist intellectual that
strives to be high-minded-I found I naturally became a high-art/low-brow bridge
because I had my feet firmly planted in both. So I could bring these eccentric
ideas to the mainstream and people would listen to me. I could take Japanese kabuki
theater and put it on Ziggy Stardust and it made sense. I could take what some
considered really strange ideas and make them accessible to larger amounts of
people. That's what I found I was really good at doing and, most importantly,
what I really enjoyed doing."
Of course, without Bowie's unique ability to express so clearly with music, not
to mention an undeniable gift for harmony and song-arrangement, the influences
wouldn't have meant much. "I have natural talent for melody and I have a natural
talent for putting words together," he says, briskly moving beyond the territory
of self-appreciation. "But I do produce music in a collagist fashion. I have no
musical loyalty, there's not one kind of music that makes my say, for example,
'I'm a rhythm and blues man.' None of that. For me, all music of any nature is
open season," he cackles loudly. "If I hear something that's great, I'll say 'I
want to use that,' but then I'll think it'd be great to put this Indian harmony
over it and use these kinds of words. It's very similar to sculpting something."
Bowie explains that his creativity has been expressed through both music and art
since his early 20s. "I think sometimes they're helping devices for each other,"
he muses. "If one's weighing me down, I'll try a similar approach with the other.
I don't see the arts as being too separate anyway, probably because I was rude
enough to blur the lines a bit when I was younger. But I suppose confidence is
everything in order to achieve that. I think if you get this idea that 'this is
what you are' and 'you shouldn't do anything else,' then you never get the confidence
to move and try other things."
Only once, during a confusing spell in the mid-'80s, where sales were soaring,
did Bowie ignore the true nature of his work. "When I saw I was packing huge places
full of people at concerts, I felt it was my duty to provide them with what I
thought they wanted," he sighs. "I remember thinking that their record collections
must be different than mine, that I have stuff they probably didn't have, that
they probably had Phil Collins in their collections, and so I found myself writing
to their expectations. It was a colossal failure on my part, a total misunderstanding
of what I did, what I enjoyed, and why I even started doing what I was doing.
"The crazy thing is I could've been Mr. Mainstream for the rest of my life, because
the two albums after Let's Dance are, unfortunately, amongst my best-sellers.
So I did know what people wanted, but I was letting down myself personally, and
also he hardcore people who followed me religiously because they always know I
believed in what I was doing. And once I sorted that out, again at the turn of
the last decade, that's when the balance returned to my life again and I became
happier."
For many reasons, David Bowie is the perfect millennial male, having flirted with
the ideas of "space" and "cyber" throughout his career. In the'70s, he created
the spaceman Ziggy Stardust, and in 1994, he conceived the computer art detective
Nathan Adler on the Outside project, a concept album revolving around a series
of art crimes in the cybernetic world of 1999. A year ago, Bowie went headlong
into cyberspace, founding his own Internet service provider, Bowienet, and providing
a cutting-edge website for his fans.
On Outside, the character of Adler makes a series of grim discoveries about the
state of society on New Year's Eve 1999: in retrospect, Bowie doesn't feel the
coming millennium will be nearly as foreboding.
"Perhaps the one through-line between some of the stuff in Outside and the coming
millennium is this new Pagan worship, this whole search for a new spiritual life
that's going on," he explains. "Because of the way we've demolished the idea of
God with that triumverate at the beginning of the century, Nietzsche, Einstein,
and Freud. They really demolished everything we believed. 'Time bends, God is
dead, the inner-self is made of many personalities'...wow, where the fuck are
we?
"I wonder if we have realized that the only thing we could create as 'God' was
the hydrogen bomb and that the fall-out from the realization that as gods we can
only seem to produce disaster is people trying to find some spiritual bonding
and universality with a real nurtured inner-life. But there is also this positivism
that you find now which really wasn't there at the end of the last century.
"Then, the general catch phrase among the artistic and literary community was
that it was the end of the world," he says gravely. "They really felt that in
1899 there was nothing else, that only complete disaster could follow. It isn't
like that now. We may be a little wary or jittery about what's around the corner,
but there's no feeling of everything's going to end in the year 2000. Instead,
there's almost a celebratory feeling of 'right, at least we can get cracking and
really pull it all together.'"
Given the amount of time he dedicates to keeping his website on the cutting edge
of Internet technology, plus his boyish enthusiasm for both collaborating on,
and playing with, video games ("There's this one game I was asked to write music
for, Nomad's Soul, where it would take you 220 consecutive hours to just go through
the city!"), it is unsurprising that Bowie is such an ardent supporter of the
world wide web.
"There's a breakthrough happening where there's an on-line community," he states
firmly. "Nobody's quite sure what this animal is and what characteristics it's
going to have. It's being born, so there will be as many downsides as upsides,
and the fact that we should be comfortable with this fragmented and chaotic universe
is only just starting to come in. It's only dawned on us in the last 20-30 years
that this universe is not black and white with clear-cut rules, ways of doing
things, and established patterns and traditions. It's an existence we've never
gauged before, and I really feel this creature will be our next quantum leap,
this creature can almost surf through life in a way we didn't know was possible
before."
Acutely aware as he is of the politics behind access to this virtual community
("One of the major problems right now is between the haves and the have-nots,
and ownership of knowledge is always frightening..."), Bowie remains unshakably
loyal to his long-term belief that the web will eventually reach all global corners.
"When the telephone was first invented around the late 1800's, the President said,
"this is an extraordinary invention! I foresee the day when every town will have
one!"
He lets loose another roar of laughter. "They didn't see beyond the point when
every town would have a telephone. The short-sightedness of that comment applies
very much to what's happening right now."
Like it's been in David Bowie's career for 30 years, the prospect of fiddling
with these continual discoveries and developments are the things which have him
so excited about the future of cyberspace (hours... will have been available for
complete download via participating retailers prior to its October store release
date, the first time any major artist has done such a thing). "We really have
absolutely no knowledge of how exponentially things grow," he says indignantly.
"We have no idea what we have started by creating the Internet. We can only take
stupid flying guesses that are pre-conceived by what we already know about it.
We don't even know the beginning, all we have is the tip of the iceberg which
will change our existence. I think it's fantastic, it's revolution. But let me
just say this," he concludes, smiling. "The revolution will be televised!"
As ever, with that timeless combination of skill and enthusiasm, David Bowie is
in the perfect position to lead the charge.