Iggy Pop Page 45

  They discussed David producing an album for Iggy at Musicland . . . in Munich. Iggy mentioned the possibility of recording in Munich to Punk magazine in April 1976. All other details drawn from my 2005 interview with JO.

  For a court appearance with Bowie the previous day. Dates taken from Kevin Cann’s Bowie chronology and newspaper reports collected on the Bowie Golden Years website.

  For the first time in his life, Iggy said no. Jim: ‘And if I’d gotten high with him that week, we wouldn’t be here talking. And that was the first time I was beginning to turn a corner and acquire some powers of resistance. And it was something . . . that lightbulb that went on and off with me for quite a few years after that.’

  [The] mysterious train trip to Moscow. Most books on Bowie place his trip to Moscow as being right at the start of his European trip. It seems more logical to me that this journey took place a few weeks into it, between his shows on 17 and 24 April in Bern and Helsinki respectively. Although stories about Bowie having books confiscated have been repeated often, along with a quote from Bowie that he’d bought the book as reference material for a movie on Goebbels, they seem full of factual inaccuracies, with an impossible date and an inaccurate route. I haven’t found any contemporary reports detailing this affair and my suspicion is that the story has been exaggerated in the retelling. There’s no doubt that David and Jim had some interest in Nazism but - disappointingly for a good yarn, I know - it’s clear, from speaking to third parties, including Jim’s (Jewish) girlfriend Esther Friedmann, that Bowie’s interest in Hitler was mostly confined to an interest in his mythology, his graphic and stage design and generally to wind up his interviewers. Bowie’s most specific statement about Hitler was made to Cameron Crowe, around May 1975, and wasn’t mentioned in Crowe’s February 1976 Rolling Stone story but was included in his longer Playboy profile of September 1976. In it, Bowie says, ‘Hitler was the first rock star,’ a quote I suggest was plagiarised from Ron Asheton.

  The Idiot rhythm tracks. The final version of The Idiot incorporates parts from Davis, Murray, Santageli and Thibault. They can be distinguished, with some difficulty, according to the sound. Dennis Davis’s snare drum was smaller and tuned higher; George Murray uses a bass guitar with a rounder sound than Thibault’s Rickenbacker. Davis and Murray seem audible on ‘Sister Midnight’ and ‘Mass Production’; Santageli and Thibault seem to have made the final mix on, for instance, ‘China Girl’ (with its superb Joy Division-esque bass part) and ‘Baby’, although in every case the effects-laden mix makes it harder to work out who is who - and on several songs you can hear two snare drums at once. ‘Nightclubbing’ features a Roland drum machine and a bass part played on Bowie’s Arp Axe synthesiser.

  As Palmer prepared to overdub guitar. It has been reported that the recorded version of ‘Sister Midnight’ is played by Carlos Alomar, probably from an initial recording made during the Man Who Fell To Earth soundtrack sessions at Cherokee in Los Angeles. Palmer was certain he recognised his own work on the album, while Carlos Alomar regards it as perfectly plausible his own guitar parts were replayed by another musician: ‘[David’s] done this to me a million times. I’ll put down three or four guitars and then he’ll hire another guitar player and then one of those parts that I did he just goes to another guitar player and there’s another little difference in it.’

  Hansa studios on Kurfürstendamm. This is sometimes misidentified as Hansa by the Wall. There were two Hansa studio buildings; that on Kurfürstendamm contained a single studio on the fourth floor and opened in 1971. The Köthenerstrasse studio, in the much grander Meistersaal building, was purchased by the Meisel family in 1973 and overlooked the Berlin Wall. It initially contained two studios; Tonstudios 2 and 3, another was added later.

  Thibault’s original mixes. Laurent believes his original mixes were used on at least two songs. ‘Sister Midnight’ contains a squelch of feedback from the Musicland mixing desk that can be clearly heard [at 1.05] on the album version; while ‘Mass Production’, according to Laurent, uses his tape loop, and sounds like it was mixed using his trademark method, which involved mixing a section at a time, then splicing the final version together with a series of tape edits.

  Musical quote from Gary Glitter. ‘Rock And Roll Part One’ features an identical drum beat and funereal tempo.

  Favourite [Berlin] hangouts. The information is mainly from JO, Esther Friedmann, Wolfgang Doebeling (who had an office at Hansa and often saw Bowie in the local record shops), Edu Meyer, Klaus Kruger and Tony Visconti. Bowie’s take on the Exil and his later quotes on Berlin come from an interview with Uncut magazine. Thanks also to Ed Ward, who helped me orientate myself in Berlin. The Schlosshotel Gerhus, for prospective sightseers, is now a Karl Lagerfeld boutique hotel named Schlosshotel Vier Jahreszeiten, and has apparently scrubbed up nicely. The Café Exil is now the Horvath bar.

  Later in August 1976. Kevin Cann’s Bowie chronology states that Bowie and crew started work on Low on 1 September; however, according to Edu Meyer’s records from Hansa, the sessions moved to Hansa 2 on 21 August, so my assumption is that they must have started work at the chateau in August, a dating confirmed by Visconti’s memory that all the French chateau staff were on summer holiday, which would have finished by the end of August.

  ‘A joy, ramshackle and comfy’. Bowie in Uncut.

  Hansa seemed to embody Berlin’s ruined grandeur. The Hansa information is from Edu Meyer and from the booklet that celebrated the restoration of studio 2 as a concert hall in 1994. The building is now used mainly as a venue for classical performances, but there remains a later-built Hansa studio on the fourth floor. Thanks to Alex Wende for giving me a tour of the studio and building.

  The Sales brothers had played professionally for mobster-connected Maurice Levy’s Roulette label. Maurice Levy was an intriguing, slightly scary figure, of the type who built the early rock ’n’ roll business. He was Chuck Berry’s publisher, was the inspiration for mobster/music mogul Hesh in The Sopranos, and was also involved in the bizarre saga of John Lennon’s Rock And Roll album, in which Lennon covered several songs by Levy artists to avoid a lawsuit over his ‘borrowing’ a melody and some lyrics from Chuck Berry’s ‘You Can’t Catch Me’ for Abbey Road’s ‘Come Together ’.

  It was [David’s] idea to give the Sales brothers a call. Jim: ‘Hunt and Tony had always been his boys. They got his gig with me because they’d submitted tapes to him.’

  CHAPTER 12: HERE COMES MY CHINESE RUG

  The sources are as for preceding chapter, plus Ricky Gardiner, Marc Zermati, Nick Kent, Kris Needs, David Stopps, Brian James and Glen Matlock (GM).

  ‘Punks cruising for burgers’. This would have been in Lenny Kaye’s review of The Stooges; apart from his obviously crucial roles as guitarist and songwriter in the Patti Smith Group, Lenny was also responsible for the superb Nuggets, a groundbreaking compilation that gathered together many garage classics that had influenced the Stooges, the Ramones and others.

  Both leading music weeklies. The third UK music weekly was Melody Maker, which was owned, like the NME, by IPC. The NME set out to differentiate itself from its sister publication by its focus on punk; their contrasting reactions to the Stooges are exemplified by Nick Kent’s masterfully researched and written May 1975 NME feature ‘The Mighty Pop versus The Hand Of Blight’, and Chris Charlesworth’s 1973 Melody Maker review, in which the outraged writer asks, ‘How low can rock and roll sink?’ ‘I don’t know what the songs were called,’ Charlesworth har rumphed (obviously having done his pre-show research), ‘but they all seemed to contain more than a smattering of strong language intended, it seems, to insult the audience.’ On the same page, the venerable journal saves its praise for Stackridge, and the cutting-edge saxophone skills of Tommy Whittle, Kathy Stobart and Jimmy Skidmore.

  Bowie reckoned, ‘The drug use was unbelievable’. Interview in Q magazine, 1993.

  Jim Osterberg would turn in some fabulous [TV] performances. There’s also a hilarious interv
iew with Peter Gzowski in the Canadian Broadcasting Company archives, http://archives.cbc.ca/IDC-1-68-102-761/arts_entertainment/punk/.

  A romantic idyll with Pleasant Gehman. Pleasant had met Iggy back in 1975 when he was a classic fallen rock star, living in a decayed apartment on Flores and asking visitors, ‘You got any drugs?’ the moment they walked through the door. She met him again in 1977, a couple of days after she’d fallen down some steps; she had a cast on her wrist and a bruised, swollen face. Jim recognised her and whisked her away from her friends, and they spent an idyllic couple of weeks in a beachfront house in Malibu. ‘We were smoking pot and drinking red wine and went out onto the jetty. We were talking about everything; about the Romanovs and the Russian Revolution, we were talking about painting and abstract stuff, we were talking about communism, we were talking about life. Then we had sex a lot, more than I’d ever had. He was amazingly considerate. He had a great body and then the next morning he asked if I wanted to move in with him . . . I was treated like royalty.’ Over the same period, Jim also hung out with the Germs and others, and he posed for some excellent photos by Jenny Lens.

  New flat and contract details. These are from paperwork in the possession of Esther Friedmann, which she kindly allowed me to examine to help identify some of the crucial dates.

  The irritation each felt. This is according to Jim’s recollection. It could be that David Bowie felt no irritation whatsoever with Jim; unfortunately, he declined to speak to me to tell me himself.

  By the time the sessions began in June. Edu Meyer’s partial records of the Hansa sessions detail the recording session as being on 8 to 12 and 14 June, with mastering in July. This contrasts with most other chronologies, which date the sessions in late April. Most of the musicians remember the recording sessions as lasting about ten days.

  Ukulele. This story has been told by Jim many times; asked by Uncut if this account was correct, David replied, ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘Kicking and screaming.’ JO: ‘Yes, [“Success” was written] in an ironic manner. And to me, just to have a little Chinese rug. But also the unironic manner . . . this happens to me, sometimes when my back is against the wall I’ll sorta kick the floor a little bit, enter a successful zone or situation and then proceed to bitch! And kinda have to be dragged kicking and screaming to the good outcome. But I kinda just felt, in that particular song . . . we had a good friction in the studio . . . and came up with that slightly demented vocal, which you hear a big difference in the vocals between [The Idiot and Lust For Life], rockism was starting to set in, and I was starting to revert, but there was a nice balance. And he [Bowie] was sick of the whole thing at that point and just wanted to get the damn thing over with. But he did well.’

  Warren Peace. Warren Peace, aka Geoffrey MacCormack, was Bowie’s backing singer and later travelling companion. He was supplanted in the latter role by Iggy. JO: ‘David was looking for a [new] sidekick [in 1976], he likes to do things that way, and Warren Peace had become more Hollywood than was great for their relationship.’

  CHAPTER 13: MISSING IN ACTION

  Main sources: JO, Charles Levison, Julie Hooker, Tarquin Gotch, Tony Sales, Scott Thurston, EF, Robin Eggar, Edu Meyer, Hunt Sales, Gary Rasmussen, SA, BE, Klaus Kruger, JW, GM, Kingsley Ward, Barry Andrews and Ivan Kral (IK).

  Opening based on accounts by Charles Levison, Tarquin Gotch and Julie Hooker, all of Arista Records. Hooker points out that although many staff called Davis ‘the Godfather’, this wasn’t a comment on his business practices, but a reflection of how intimately he oversaw the business.

  Lust For Life disappeared. Robin Eggar, RCA press: ‘The RCA pressing plant was, I think, in Hayes, and they didn’t just turn 90 per cent of their production to Elvis - it was more like 95 per cent, which was incredibly short-sighted.’

  Pissing in the wastebasket. JO: ‘I think I said something terrible up at RCA after [Elvis] died, saying, OK, that’s too bad, I’m the new Elvis, and I think I peed in the wastebasket under the guy’s desk whose office I was using during the interview and it became ta ta . . . it became psst psst pss.’ [i.e. Iggy started getting the reputation of being ‘difficult’.] I contacted some members of RCA’s A&R department in the late 1970s, and they couldn’t remember this incident, although as one of them succinctly puts it, ‘I was so stoned I don’t remember diddly. We were all out of it, all the time, back then.’ Iggy’s cocaine paranoia episode at the Gerhus occurred shortly before, or shortly after, this incident.

  ‘Needy and wanty.’ Scottie Thurston, when asked if Jim was more together in 1977 than in 1973: ‘Well . . . I don’t know. I really don’t know. You see . . . it was the age of cocaine, which is not a very together drug for a singer. He could have done a lot better job. So could have we all. I don’t look back on it as a regretful period, I just think . . . we honestly all could’ve done a lot better.’

  Kill City [was] released by Bomp. The Kill City album augmented the tracks recorded at Jimmy Webb’s studio with two songs, ‘Lucky Monkey’ and ‘Mastercharge’, recorded on a four-track at Scottie Thurston’s house, during the period when Scottie had found Jim an apartment near him in Venice Beach, probably in the spring of 1974. All the tracks were remixed by James Williamson - according to Ben Edmonds, the original version was much tougher and more like the Stooges.

  The Sonic’s Rendezvous Band issued just one legendary single, ‘City Slang’. This historical oversight was corrected in late 2006 with a lavish box set of SRB material issued by the Easy Action label (www.easyac-tion.co.uk). There is an excellent retrospective of the SRB by Ken Shimamoto at http://www.i94bar.com/ints/srb1.html, with a hilarious story of the time an unruly Scandinavian crowd threw fish at the band. Many Iggy fans cite SRB as one of his best backing bands, but some of their performances and song arrangements must stand as the absolute antithesis of Iggy’s original musical manifesto; their versions of ‘Lust For Life’ and ‘Little Doll’ in particular sound like dreadful Yardbirds ripoffs - this from a man who criticised Bowie for copying the same band.

  Charles Levison, [Arista’s] managing director. Levison was given the job of managing director of Arista Worldwide, overseeing the entire company outside the USA. His main task, along with Edmonds, was to establish the company as a major force in the UK, bringing in new, hipper talent, trying to break artists signed by Arista’s head office in New York - in particular, Barry Manilow - as well as trying to eke out the careers of two artists the UK company had inherited, namely retro-glamsters Showaddywaddy and one-time bopper idols the Bay City Rollers. Levison was a charming, well-loved man; he died on 7 July 2006, of complications following a heart attack.

  ‘Peter was very together in the beginning.’ I have spent many days trying to track down Peter through ex-colleagues at RCA, friends and other acquaintances, to hear his own recollection of events, without success. He was universally respected by those who dealt with him in the early days, but unfortunately, as Barry Andrews and others remember, he was engulfed by the chaos that started to envelop Iggy over this period.

  Bindon was a one-time gangster who’d made his living as an actor. Barry Andrews: ‘Bowie was holding court really and talking about Princess Margaret being shagged by Johnny Bindon, who has the biggest dick in London, and cut a guy’s head off in a bar, and all those Johnny Bindon stories which we now know. And it grew out of the conversation, “What’s the safest thing you can be? A criminal.”’ The account of ‘Play It Safe’ here is based on the recollections of Andrews, who was there throughout the session, seems to have been more sober than most of the other musicians and has no axe to grind. James Williamson, however, while acknowledging that he detested Bowie’s intrusion, remembers the final row being about Iggy’s vocals. From this period, Glen Matlock has also told in print an enthralling story of how Steve New encountered David Bowie talking to his girlfriend, Patti Palladin, and punched Bowie out in the belief he was chatting her up - only to find that Bowie was merely cadging some cigarettes. However, Glen was in London du
ring Bowie’s visit to the studio, and New was reportedly overawed with Bowie, so I have regretfully been forced to omit this story from the main narrative.

  CHAPTER 14: THE LONG, LONG ROAD

  Main interviews: JO, EF, IK, Brian James, GM, Charles Levison, Tarquin Gotch, Mike Page, Rob Duprey, Carlos Alomar, Frank Infante, Dayna Louise, Margaret Moser, Anne Wehrer (interviewed in 1996) and Gary Valentine. Thanks also to Dr Murray Zucker for background information. Tour dates courtesy of Per Nilsen.

  ‘I felt that David wanted to dump Jim on me. It was like, “I’m trying to help him, but he always screws up.”’ Note that this is what Ivan thought Bowie meant, not necessarily what Bowie actually meant. Ivan certainly thought that Iggy didn’t appreciate, or perhaps deserve, Bowie’s help, but this isn’t necessarily David’s perception.

  ‘One For My Baby’. This song had first appeared in the set with SRB, but became a fixture over the New Values tour. It was later recorded, with a rather staid arrangement, during the Party sessions.