David Bowie’s 'Ziggy Stardust' (Part 2): Everything You Didn't Know

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Speaker 1: Too Much Information is a production of I Heart Radio. Hello everyone, and welcome to Too Much Information, the show that gives you the secret histories and little known fascinating facts behind your favorite music, movies, TV shows and more. My name is Jordan Runt Dog and I'm Alex Hego. Welcome back to the second in our two part installments celebrating David Bowie's breakthrough album, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders from Mars, which turns fifty years old this very week. Now. Bowie broke so many boundaries and defied so many expectations, So in keeping with that same bold spirit of innovation, we're delivering our first two part episode. We hope you enjoyed. How do you think it's going? I think you can map out the progress here with the rise and fall of my serotonin levels. Uh, I think we're killing it. I like to think of each one of us as different glam rock icons from the seventies. Oh who are you? Which glam rock icon are you? I am Iggy Pop during his terrible Berlin phase. Berlin phase, not the couch phase. But who among us has not been Iggy Pop living on his ex manager's couch. If you could be a phase of Bowie, what phase would you be? Oh gosh, um happy Bowie, like happily married to a supermodel and not caring about things, but before he had cancer. Um you mean like peak Bowie. Um. Also David also in Berlin doing a lot of coke. Okay, I've never been to Berlin. Yeah, so I would like to go there and do coke with Iggy pop and right heroes one of the best ever who among us? Yeah? What about you? Oh man? I mean I would probably be Diamond Dogs era. I would probably be taking on a little too much, trying to do something it was a little too crazy, a little too ambitious. That makes sense to nobody but me. So yeah, probably Dinmond Dog's era. If I was honest with myself, that tracks I mean, in case this isn't obvious, And I know I mentioned this in the last episode. Bowie as someone who means a lot to me, if you allow me the shameless plug. I spent a year writing and researching a scripted biographical podcast for the folks that I heard called Off the Record David Bowie, which came out in early to mark the fifth anniversary of David's ascent to a new astral plane. So he's someone that I feel very passionate about, so please forgive me if I start to ramble. No, it's a great podcast. Everyone should go listen to it. Jordan made himself much like Bowie insane on it, uh and much like Bowie's face when he subsisted on Red Pepper's milk and cocaine, Jordan's subsisted on British candy, regional sodas, and Seltzer. So you know, we got the Berlin Trilogy out of it, and you find folks got an incredible podcast, So go listen to it. But we're gonna go deep on the Ziggy era for this one. In our first episode, we just discussed the world that shape Ziggy start us. Now we look at how Ziggy started us shape the world, or at least a generation of artists. Today, we're going to discuss how the Starman took flight, blasting Bowie into the upper echelon of the music world, setting a benchmark for rock and roll theatricality, physicality, and pure imagination, not to mention pure rock and roll excess. Oftentimes, this took the form of glitter and cocaine, but sometimes a dark shadow and cocaine. Will also take a look at Bowie's complex relationship with both his band and the lgbt Q community, meditate on the likelihood that he was a sex addict, explore his vaccination with Japan, and explain why he ultimately killed off his most famous creation at the peak of Ziggy's popularity. So, without further ado, here's everything else you didn't know about David Bowie's the Rise and Fall of Ziggy, Start Us and the Spiders from Mars. So the Zikist artist store officially kicked off four months before the album came out, on February two, at the Toby Jug Pub in London, which is a truly spectacular name for a pub. I have to say it was definitely a humble start, considering the stadiums that were to come. Uh sixty people milled around in front of the two foot high stage. David would later say Ziggy was a case of small beginnings. I remember when we had no more than twenty or thirty fans at most. They'd be down in the front and the rest of the audience was indifferent. And it feels special because you and the audience kid yourselves that you're in on this big secret. You feel kind of cool. It all gets so dissipated when you get bigger. A lot of artists, I feel like when they play the bigger rooms like arenas and stadium start feeling like it. It's harder to make it feel like it's a group of friends or a clubhouse anyway. So the band his Spiders from Mars, which we should say are Mick ronson and guitar at, Trevor Boulder on base and Woody woodman Z on RUMs. The spectacular named Woody woodman Z. The band spent the spring months criss crossing England and cramped cars and vans, playing mostly empty clubs and college venues, and it was really not glamorous. They hold their own gear and they peed in pub kitchen sinks. One time a venue lost power in the middle of a gig, and David was forced to amuse the crowd by giving an imprompt to rundown of his outfit to just kill time while they worked on getting the uh the electricity back. Another time, David tried to crowd surf as he's seen his buddy Iggy Pop do, and there weren't enough people and he fell flat on his face. So remember all this when we were talking about the you know, twenty thousand dollar room service bills at the Beverly Hills Hotel and stuff later on, you know, in the next year or so. This is very humble beginnings. But slowly but surely words started to spread and the audience started to swell. And The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars was released on June six two, and as I said, it was a slow burn, first, selling eight thousand copies in its first week, which was respectable but hardly earth shattering. But then in July seventy two, there was one performance that would change everything. Yes, and this was an appearance on the British television program Top of the Pops. And this show in England was kind of the everest for every music act in the UK. Once you've been on Top of the Pops, you were officially a star. Everyone watched it. It It was like their version of Ed Sullivan. And in a pre digital age, this was one of the few opportunities you had to actually see your favorite artists, you know, when they weren't out on the road on tour. I love this. While Bowie and his band are waiting to go on, the staff of the BBC assumed that they were extras from Doctor Who because of their flamboyant Spiders from Mars outfit um, which is great. But seven thirty pm on the night of July six, some fifteen million people got their first look at Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. You know, Bowie's not one who really trades and cliches, but it really was a star is Born kind of moment, and it's fitting for such a star making performance. He played Starman, his latest single, and life would really never be the same for David again after this Top of the Pops performance. Just two days after the broadcast, the band performed a charity show at London's Royal Festival Hall, where David was introduced as quote the next biggest thing to God the hell of an intro, and within a week of the performance on Top of the Pop Starman, the single entered the top ten. The Ziggy Starts LP started flying off shelves and by the end of the year, practically everything that David had ever done was charting. He'd done a number of albums before this, and it all flopped upon its release, but all of a sudden they under the charts too, and fans started camping out outside of his his home. One of these fans was a young boy, George, who would borrow make up quite a bit from David. Um. So Yeah, the Beatles had the Unsullivan Show, Bowie had Top of the Pops. Everything about it was just right. It was the right time, it was the right song, it was the right style. The day after the show aired, classrooms and playgrounds were a buzz with talk of this alien who would hijacked the BBC air waves for three and a half precious minutes. And not only did the show helped launch David's career in the UK, but it also started an untold number of other musical careers. You had, future members of You Two, the Smith's Joy Division, and so many more all watched this show and cited it as a major influence and catalyst for wanting to jump start their own bands. So to say you change lives with that performance isn't an understatement at all. And with Bowie's confident flamboyance, he'd issued a challenge that was important for younger people to see. If you want my talent, accept all of me, makeup and all, and he was good enough that people did. And his triumph was really a triumph for anyone who ever felt like an outcast, and it kind of made him, uh really for the rest of his career the patron saint of the weird. Yeah, and again, we can't underscore enough the fact that homosexuality had been on the books legal for just five years in the k at this point. But you know, it wasn't like a switch had suddenly flipped. Um. There's a book called Glitter Up the Dark by um Sasha Geffen who notes that plenty of gay men were still being arrested for consensual sex acts. They quote an l g B t Q activist named Peter Tatchell who said in seventeen that the partial decriminalization of homosexuality in nineteen six seven was very partial. Indeed, but in July uh that year, two thousand people marched through London in the UK's first ever Pride rally. So progress was incremental. And it's strange to think about now you mentioned how that wasn't like a switch was flicked. The acceptance in the mainstream culture was very gradual. The thing that raised the most eyebrows about David's performance on Top of the Pops. Wasn't his crazy outfit, wasn't his feat makeup. But it was a moment that I when I rewatched this clip doesn't even register with me. It's the moment when the band launches into the Starman chorus. David goes over to guitarist mcronson and casually drapes his arm around him and they pull each other close so they can sing together. And viewers today I really don't think we think twice about seeing such an act. But in the early seventies in England, such a physical contact between men, especially men who were dressed like that, was shocking. I mean, you know, the people wondering could these men and drag adjacent outfits be a couple? Gasp, I say, yeah, I am also struck in that performance by it's such a common, obvious thing that you see people do all the time. But the way that he points right into the camera and says I had to phone someone, so I picked on you. It's such a meaningful thing that kids in the UK would have looked at and been like, oh my god, that moment. They really love it so much. It's so good. But so you know, we do have to talk about David's courting of the queer vote, which is a light way of putting the fact that he treated the public perception of his sexuality charitably as another thing that he could kind of pick up and use. Um. You know. On the cover of Man Who Sold the World, he's lounging on a piece of furniture in the quote man dress from a British designer really Mr Fish, who I believe Big Jagger would also shop from at one point. But the other big bomb he drops around this time is months before the Top of the Pops performance in February of nineteen two. He's giving an interview to Melody Maker, which is one of the biggest British music Is that tabloid? Would you call it a tabloid music publications? I think it's a yeah. That that in the New Musical Express Enemy and kind of the two. Well it hasn't this part hasn't aged well. Uh. Michael Watts described David as rocks swishiest outrage, a gorgeously effeminine boy who's as camp as a row of tents. This is in his article for Melody Maker. Yeah, uh yeah, swish was kind of like a soft slur back then, not a great thing to see in print. But um so, anyway, the quote, the pool quote from the interview is Bowie saying, I'm gay and always have been, even when I was David Jones. And then he shoots down the fact that he may have been doing this to court controversy. He says, I'm not outrageous, I'm David Bowie, and which is a great quote. Greatly he did have a way with a sound bite, um and predictably caused an enormous delusion the press. There were very few, if any, openly gay musicians in England at the time, and coming out in the pages of a print publication, much less one of the publications was really just a move that didn't have any precedent um. And also the fact that David had a wife and kid who is in her own way kind of a celebrity at this point too, and she was like she was a bit of a fashion star, right, um my going at my talent tales out of school there, and you know, I mean she kind of I mean, part of the reason that they ended up breaking up was that she felt like they had kind of a mutual understanding that they would focus on making David a pop star, and then once he was up on that ledge, he would pull her up and she would be an actress, raconteur, cultural provocator kind of type figure. And then he got so caught up in his own world that he sort of didn't really reciprocate. But you know, we mentioned this in the last episode two, when David met all of his artistic friends and confidants, like the the Andy Warhol crowd, they all thought that his wife Angie was like the really interesting, cool, innovative one, and they thought that David was kind of like this mousey meek drip was the word that they used. So, yeah, his relationship with his wife Angie was really very fascinating. They almost seemed like it reminds me of the relationship between Frank Underwood and his wife whose name escapes me on The House of Cards, Like it seemed very much an arranged union of power. Yeah, she does not have good things to say about him, and um, please kill me, which I as for this, Yeah, it's so funny. She basically for all of the and they had a very open marriage for all of the people that either one of them slept with while they were together. The person who sort of broke up their marriage was Iggy Pop because she was just like, I did not like that friendship. Um great music came out of it, though. Anyway, she was caught off guard by this. She said, you could have at least said you were bisexual. But predictably, the story kicked off a widespread debate about the exact nature of David's sexual identity. Was this a proud declaration of sexual independence or was it just an easy way to garner some inches in the columns. As with most things, the truth lies probably somewhere in the middle. David was the son of a pr man. His first straight job, oh god, that bad word play, had been in advertising, and you know, throughout his entire career he's just sort of been mastered, getting the press to kind of dance at his tempo. Um. Well, I think the thing that's important to note is that he'd been trying to break into the music world since thinking sixty four sixty five, so this is like seven years at this point. So he was kind of on the sidelines watching other people do it, watching what worked. So he was not only had you know, seven years of studying how the game was played. But it was also a lot older than the big sixties stars who broke on through. I mean the Beatles, the Who, the Kinks, and the big bands that you know, we're getting huge. When he first was trying to break into the industry in the mid sixties were in their late teens really, and now Bowie was like twenty five. So he was much more sophisticated in the art of media manipulation and much more savvy. So I think that's an important thing to know that he was half a generation removed from all the big sixties stars, and I think that that half generation, that that five six seven year period made a huge difference. Yeah, and he was always just sort of along with aliens and jazz, the gays or is big another big parlor fascination for him, you know, on the road Aroak the Beats have some queer themes running through the entire genre. Obviously, Alan Ginsburg, it's a huge figure in that. John Rishi's a city of night and as a teen he would make claims to his bandmates that he was bisexual. But a lot of different people have thrown around words like opportunist, narcissist contrived. Watts, who wrote that article said, personally, I think he was lying. I think he said it for effect as much as anything else. He is a master at misleading the press and creating headlines as a result. And then four years later, David talked to him again, which was possibly a mistake, and denied the whole thing bisexual. Oh lord, No, positively not, he said, which sounds like he's like clutching. Actual. He said that that was just a lie. I never adopted that stance. It was given to me. I've never done a bisexual action in my life on stage, on record, or anywhere else. Fantastic, Yeah, I know, yeah, yeah, like camp like he's like winking as he says it um. Later that same year, he told Playboy, It's true I am bisexual, but I can't deny I have used that fact very well. I suppose it's the best thing that ever happened to me. Then in the eighties, he would characterize his homosexual declaration as the biggest mistake I ever made and advised fans not to believe everything that they read. The eighties period really lost him a fair amount of fans because that was sort of the era when he this is the era when he became MTV famous and famous in a way that he had really never been for all of his artistic breakthroughs all throughout the seventies, when he started doing Let's Dance and getting the video of China Girl played on MTV and stuff, that was a whole different level of like mall fame that he'd never really been. And so he I mean again, he looks like the perfect pop star for Reagan's America. And he kind of started to walk back a lot of his um things that would mark him as different from the main stream, and one of that was the set s truel stance. And I have a lot of friends who talked about that period in a really disparaging way because it was just because they thought that he was abandoning them. Yeah, and then like ten years later in the nineties, he's saying, um, I think I was always a closet heterosexual fun fun turn of phrase there. I was physical about it, but frankly, it wasn't enjoyable. It was almost like I was testing myself For me, I was more magnetized by the whole gay scene. It was like another world that I really wanted to buy into. Oh there's the quote. I didn't sell out, I bought in uh. And then, like we said, Angie, a fair amount of score settling acts, grinding and please kill me. She says. When David said in Melody Maker that he was gay, then he changed it and said he was bisexual, which is what he really meant. He never would have had the balls to do that unless he had been hanging around with Iggy Pop and lou Reid, because they represented this place across the ocean where things were changing. So as an American woman, you know, she kind of painted that statement in his whole stance there as sort of a by way of his fascination with American culture, and in particular, you know lou Red and Iggy Moore, who were both kind of dabbling and pushing those boundaries themselves, although in an extremely not famous way. I mean, they were both such fringe figures by at this point. So thanks for changing in the States, but they were changing a lot more slowly in the UK, and a lot of David's friends were really concerned that he ruined his career with this announcement and Melodymaker that he was gay in early nineteen seventy two, and obviously he did meet with some resistance, especially actually ironically later on when he did come to the States, when a lot of Southern program directors refused to play him or allow him on their show for interviews. One station manager even said to him, we don't have perverts on this show. Just yeah, which I mean. It's really funny because Alice Cooper had made the transition from dresses and high heels to embracing the full on gore and horror in his set. So blood and dead babies were fine in America, but not a man in a dress. I think that is America in nineteen seventy two and maybe two. And during these ziggy shows, David incorporated a bit of stage business where he'd throw himself at mc ronson's feet during the Guitar solo and Suffragette City and the photographer Mick Rock, the recently departed brilliant photographer Rock photographer Mick Rock, incredible name, incredible talent Um captured this moment for posterity where Bowie is on his knees at Ronson's feet as he's playing a solo, David's faces notably near Ronson's crotch photos of this right. But there's this one in particular that David loved so much that he ran it as a full page advertisement in the Music Pressed. And it was supposedly a thank you to his fans and staff, it was basically an advertisement for himself a look how outrageous I am picture that he paid to have placed in the Music Press. But the stunt had the unintended consequence of making life difficult for Mick Ronson and his family, who all endured shouts of various homophobic slurs. Paint was thrown on the Ronson's front door and even on the new car that Mike had just bought them. So, I mean, things were a lot slower to change in England than some parts of America, I should say, in the early seventies. And this all kind of gets to a larger question of was Bowie good for the l g B t Q community. Many in the Burgeinn and gay rights community regarded David as a hero, and this always made David really uneasy. And he was very happy to encourage people to be themselves, let their freak flag fly, so to speak. But he saw himself as an artist rather than an activist, and he didn't want to become a lightning rod for socio political causes. For all of the personas that David would inhabit over the years, he never adopted that of a radicalized street fighting man, and this disappointed some people in the LGBTQ world who felt betrayed and in some cases even used by David as he began to walk back his seemingly proud sexual declaration in the eighties. Like I just mentioned, but despite this complicated alliance, it's impossible to downplay the impact that David had in bringing gay culture to the mainstream. And to this point, homosexuals and mass media were basically punchlines and stereotypes. David projected strength, talent, youth, and success, and to quote the designer Jean Paul Gautier, he gave many the courage not to hide, and that went for homosexuals and also really anyone who deviated from the norm. We're going to take a quick break, but we'll be right back with more too much information in just a moment. You know, we had just talked about Angie saying that America was kind of a longstanding promised land for David, and so we come to the First American Tour September nineteen seventy two, complicated slightly by the fact that David refused to fly. If it flies, it's death was his mantra um. Yeah, he refused to stay in hotel rooms higher than the fourth floor because he had a real problem with heights. So he took an ocean Liner QUE two. The ocean liner from England to New York had great expense. We did we talk about DeFries last time? Tell you the phrase, no, we have not. Probably the biggest wheeler dealer manager this side of Elvis's manager, Colonel Tom Parker. He is quite a character and he's still alive, so we should be very careful. So we'll pepper in some of his greatest hits as we go. But um, yeah, he decided to play up this phobia actually because Zeppelin has their famous jet with the logo plastered on it. Elton John had a private jet, but David has an ocean liner. And it's interesting. Uh. I was just reading in the dogget book The Man Who Sold the World about how the twenties and thirties were kind of coming back into vogue at this time, at least for a certain hipster intelligencia in Britain because they were kind of retreating back even further than World War Two to this what they saw is kind of this last era of glamour. So anyway, yeah, Ocean Liner would play into that. Like this was around when did Great Gatsby movie with Redford come out, Like it was seventy seventy four, so yeah, around the same time, right, de free it's de Freeze, right, I think it's the Freeze. Yeah, yeah, he is. Strategy with David could best be described as fake it till you make it. For years, any British act who wanted to break into the United States kind of had to start from scratch. They would slept around these tiny venues, play third on the bill supporting American acts and try and just build buzz by really just hitting the bricks. And de Freeze planned to skip all that, not just cut the line. David Bowie would arrive on American shores as an a lister. He insisted that David would never open for anyone but always headline, which I wasn't Also a thing that Proviso and Hendricks and the Who that was like the big power move at the time, right, I think so yeah, I mean that might have been the power move for them, But I don't think he would write clauses into his performance contract demanding the largest grand piano in any city that he was playing for his gig. They won't even name it. They just like whenever the biggest one is give us that thing. Well, anything less than nine feet would result in the immediate cancelation of his performance. Yeah, just a couple of other choice bits from the Riders. If the venue didn't have a private walk away from the entrance to the dressing room, they would have to build one so that David could remained unseen. And uh, he was expected to live up this image on on his end as well. He was booked into the highest end hotels so that David could get used to the v I P treatment. Oh, it was like training. This was before he was on tour. He would spend weekends extremely high end London hotels to get used to having people weight on him and stuff. Yeah, and they gave him a large yorkshireman named Stewie George who was hired as his personal bodyguard. And um, they would actually rehearse leaving venues in a hurry like the scene from the bodyguard. I don't know if he was actually carried Kevin Costner and Whitney Houston, but yeah, he would spring outside into one of three vans, one real one and two decoys that would be idling outside of the venue and old. It's really insane. He grew up with a hard days night. This is like all the hard Days Night fantasies and yeah, yeah, yeah, George is a wacky guy. He gave an interview to the Sun recently that fed this constant music industry scuttle butt that Bowie and Mick Jagger used to sleep together all the time, adding the fascinating variation on that that ballet dancer Rudolph Nuyev was banned from a very specific threesome that the pair had with an unnamed famous British female singer. I don't know why he was locked out of that, but um, it's not the first time that there's an overlap between Mick Jagger and Neureev. Christopher Anderson's bio of Jagger, called Mick the Wildlife and Mad Genius of Jagger, includes the claim that Nouriev and Jagger playfully trapped Geraldo Rivera in the middle of a sexual sandwich at a party. I don't know what that means. Maybe they just ran up on him and started grinding on him, but Rivera claimed that this was mixed serious attempt to seduce him. So there's your Mick Jagger weird sex stuff corner. Now tell us about Maine Man Jordan's yes to aid. In his American assault, Tony Defrees set up a field office in New York City for his newly formed management company called MainMan One word, well, yeah, one word maine Man, and the expensive offices in Midtown Manhattan were basically a stage set designed to project strength, importance, and above all success. Again, this is a guy with no hit records in the United States. But the rooms, they were all decorated with elegant leather armchairs and framed portraits of David and expensive stationary and everything looked amazing. But the suggestion of immense wealth was purely a facade. DeFreeze was very much of the you need to spend money to make money, and he knew how to spend money. Look a kind of similar approach with his employees, who were hired more or less because they looked cool rather than for any professional skills. The new York main office was staffed with basically a cast of freaks for Castomy warhol Well, yeah, the cast of Pork Andy Warhol's play. When we use that term loosely, Um, they were all Warhols factory freaks, and they were urged to act and look like a million dollars and this involved pretending that they had a million dollars. So they were turned loose with company credit cards and encouraged to pay for lavish meals with huge groups of industry insiders. There were fleets of limousines kept on constant call, and on top of their hundred dollars a week salary, which was decent back then, staffers had their rent paid. And you know who else had the rent paid? A group known as the f O d s or Friends of David, who were people who had no tangible role within the company but they were taking care of anyway. Yeah. At Lee Chowders says in please kill me that de Frieze and Tony Zanetta, Yeah, yeah, took him out to dinner or and made the decision that he would be the VP of the company just based on their dinner conversation, and then he promptly installed Cherry Vanilla, another factory figure as the secretary, which is an incredible time. They had no idea what they were doing and just doing it on our CIA's time. It was amazing, yeah, I mean. And the best part is, in order to add this extra layer of mystique around David, Tony Duffries turned down basically all interviews by this point in late nineteen seventy two, and instead the aforementioned Cherry Vanilla, who was a factory She did have a background in pr but she was mostly a denizen of Warhol's factory, would give interviews, but she would just make outrageous claims about him being like communists and all this other stuff. And during one she claimed that David met a point to sleep with everyone who worked for him. And the following day the main man offices were flooded with job applications, but again the employees were better at looking cool than being productive. And you mentioned de Freeze drafted the indie Warhol acolyte named Tony Zanetta to act as tour manager for this US tour, but the title meant absolutely nothing to Tony Zonetta, who asked, what does the road manager do? And Tony DeFreeze. David's manager just kind of annoyed by the question, just said, just just make sure they find Cleveland, which is where the tour was due to kick off. He Zenetta claims on the Diamond Dogs tour he was partying in a hotel with a bunch of these A listers and they knocked on the door and they're like, it's the cops, and everyone just drops their drugs on the carpet, and then he got arrested for it because the room is in his name. I just love that, like just a coordinated thing. Everyone just drops a bunch of blow and weed and whatever else on the floor, so they walk in. It's just a bunch of celebrities like standing around, like just studiously ignoring a drug littered shag carpet. That's how I imagined it, anyway. But thankfully Tony Zonetta and the Bowie crew did find Cleveland, where Bowie made his American debut on September two, and this by metis ocation was nearly a total loss after organizers failed to provide a properly huge Baby Grand piano under nine feet. They were not messing around. They were gonna completely scuttle his American debut until they found an appropriately enormous set of keys borrowed from the City Symphony Orchestra. But thankfully, other than that, his American debut went off without a hitch. But something really interesting happened afterward. David met a twenty one year old fan from Akron, Ohio named Chrissy Hind who was the future front woman of the Pretenders, and she and her friends chauffeured David around the rest of the night in her mother's oldsmobile to like a local diner and hung out. I love pre fame rock stars hanging out, and I love that he was so not big that he could just meet up with some fans to go out to a diner in Cleveland. That's I love this so much. So I got some good old fashioned American hospitality. But this hospitality was taken to a a logical conclusion when yeah, they had a lot of fun on this tour in different ways. They would love to just crash these hotel cocktail lounges late at night in their full makeup and costume, just to see the looks of everybody as they kind of strutted in, looking and sounding like aliens. Because if you're in Cleveland, you probably, isn't it. I think it's lou Reid who U Mick Ronson plays on the Transformers the Transformer tour with him, and I think it's in the classic albums for Transformer that He's like, I couldn't understand a single word, he said, Yeah, is that is that? All these like northern English guys come in and it's just like, and you're in Cleveland. You have not heard that accent before? Um? Yeah. And so Zanetta got a call one morning that well, David just had gone missing. All the gears packed the cruise ready to go, David is nowhere to be found, and so thankfully he gets another phone call from David, who also has no idea where he is uh and gives him the wonderful description I'm in a house. There are trees everywhere. I think I'm in the middle of a forest. Stories honestly, kudas to the bell hop at the hotel, who somehow manages to work out where he is based on that. But then they found him happy, so all's well, that ends out well. But you know, the stories of the stuff they got off to on this tour are endless and usually related to sex stuff. Uh, you know. Once at a party, Bowie sets his sight on a woman who is dancing with disgusting garbage person Kim Fowley, one of the worst people in the l A music scene, and David sidles up to him and politely asks are you in love with this woman? Or may I take her into the bathroom? And um, he responded in the in the negative. I'm pretty sure the woman was like overhearing all of this. I think she was like right there listening to they really talked about her as if she wasn't there, uh and receiving no objection, David then turns to her and says, how do you do I'm David Bowie. I'd like to discuss life or the universal whatever, my dear, and takes her by the hand and they go off looking for a restroom. David Bowie bat in a thousand. My favorite seventies rock star pickup line. I think edging that out belongs to Mick Jagger, who used to ask people do you prefer to wake up in the city or the country, and that would decide whether or not they would take him to his London town house and Chelsea or his baronial manner star Groves in the British countryside Jagger. Uh. Many people who knew David during this time have posited that he was possibly suffering, maybe not suffering, per se, from sex addiction. One person who do him would describe him with less than charitable brio, as screwing everything that moved and quite a bit that didn't. Uh. And this got taken to its illogical conclusion one night at his hotel when some creepy wheeler dealer in Hollywood offered to procure a dead body for his pleasure, still warm if he liked, David thankfully was deeply horrified and rejected the indecent overture. I'm gonna guess it was Keim Fowley. I'm just gonna in my mind the imagined certainly all right, getting into weird growth stuff. Let's tread carefully here. Speaking of deeply upsetting moments, we would be remiss not to mention the troubling claim of Laurie Maddox, who was a member of the so called baby groupies I term I don't like. They were a click of teenagers who hung around with visiting musicians who roamed the sunset strip clubs at night, and Maddox is probably most famous for her very tempestuous relationship with led Zeppelins Jimmy Page while she was still a minor. Prior to that, she said that she lost her virginity to Bowie during the Ziggy Stardust tour when she was fifteen years old and David was twenty six. Now, her version of events has varied considerably over the years and occasionally features historical impossibilities, leading some to doubt her story, but she's repeated the general just for decades and tells her tale with utmost fondness. She said, I remember him looking like God. Who wouldn't want to lose their virginity to David Bowie? And to this day, Maddox claims that her experience with Bowie wasn't only consensual, as or her words, but also a cherished memory, which creates a thorny moral quandary for herself and also Bowie's fans. Now, Maddox has always rebuffed those who sought to label her a victim, and while she admits that her perception is shifted following the rise of the Me Too movement, she still denies that she was ever taken advantage of by Bowie, and her quote is, we were friends. It was all pure fun. It was a different time in rock and roll, and in that era, some of the world's most famous rock stars shamelessly engaged in relationships with young girls. Some of these women have no regrets, and others remain scarred by their experience and the time it was just an accepted part of the Hollywood music scene. Um, I guess I'm glad that it's a positive memory for her. See, Hollywood was, as you might expect, the scene of the most extreme accesses on the Z Stardust tour, the Bowie entourage. You stay at the Beverly Hills Hotel cost a hundred thousand dollars, including twenty dollars in room service bills alone. And this is nineteen seventy two. That is that is, it's a lot of money now, but that's serious money. Then. Yeah, Childers basically says admirably, they basically bullied our CIA into doing this. It was easier for a huge company of like our c A to give us whatever we wanted, then to listen to us, he says, and please again him, please kill me. They didn't want us there at all, So I just come in with this blonde hair flying and say I need fourteen tickets to Kansas City and they go, okay, fine, you got them, just go away. It was a totally unheard of tactic, but it worked. We lived the credit. I have no idea how much we went into debt with our CIA, but of course the philosophy was once you went so far into debt, they didn't dare cut you off because then they'd never make it back again. Yes, the tours sole concession to cost cutting was a decree that groupies quote be sent home without breakfast. Lee Childers, who was part of the Warhol crowd that got absorbed into the Bowie MainMan management madness, apparently doesn't know how much they went into debt. I do um In all, the seventy one day tour cost roughly seven thousand dollars a day and lost four hundred and eighty five thousand dollars, which directly resulted in the cancelation of our CIA records annual Christmas bonus to help pay that off. Yeah, so, he says he arrived at the Beverly Hills Hotel three or four days before the entire day of the entourage forty eight people at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Um. The funniest thing quote is that the Roadies would go up to the Sunset Strip and pick up tourists and bring them back to their rooms and order dinner on room service, and then the Rhodes would pay them for the dinner, which sounds like a scam from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. All of our expenses were paid for. So the Roadies would go to the Strip three or four times a day, bring back these tourists, sit them down in their room, and serve them these fabulous lobster dinners with chocolate soufflet's, and then charge the tourists for it. So the tourists were getting, like I guess, essentially at a discount room service at the Beverly Hills Hotel and the road and that was pure profit for the Rohodies. Just an incredible series of events. But at least they got a record out of it, right Jordan's Yes Our Cia got a new album. It was during Bowie's first American tour in late nineteen seventy two that he wrote the bulk of what would become a Latin saying, which Bowie would describe as Ziggy Goes to America Dispatches from his Alien alter ego on the Road. It was basically a sequel album, although musically very different thanks to the addition of pianists Mike Garson, who added these incredible like cracked cabaret piano flourishes. He's an incredible player. And they recorded that album that winter of the winter of seventy three, and it was due for release in the spring of seventy three, around the same time that the Ziggy Startus tour went to Japan. Yes, uh, much like Tom Waits, David Bowie was big in Japan. Yes, yeah, it's really funny. Ziggy Startus have been selling NonStop in Japan, despite almost no promotional effort whatsoever. It remained in the charts over there for two years. And I guess when you think about it, the attraction was kind of understandable. Their culture, the Japanese culture had been a major part of Ziggy Startus DNA. David had been drawn to Japanese styles and colors and textures while designing Ziki's costumes, creating a look that in a quite literal sense, was alien to Western audiences and most notable the outfits that Bowie commissioned from the future fashion icon Kansai Yamamoto, who designed the most famous Ziggy outfits, kimonos and the big kind of bear like outfits and stuff. Yeah, he had his first London show in ninety one and we had talked a little bit about Ziggy's hair last time, and uh, here's what Bowie had to say about Yamamoto's influence on that quote. He had just unleashed all the kabuky and No inspired clothes on London and one of his models had the kabuky lion's mane on her head, this bright red thing. And uh, Yamamoto would say of Bowie in a bit of rye Japanese understatement, he has an unusual face. He's neither man nor woman. I mean, to the Japanese, Bowie was like a rocked up, larger than life reflection of their own cultural heritage. And they illustrated this point quite literally when they welcomed him to Japan with a massive ninety foot poster of his face, which I think was inducted into the Guinness Book World Records as the largest poster in the world ever at the time, was hung from a Tokyo skyscraper. Um. Yeah, so two things, one that no theaters and and o H. And probably one of the visual touch stumps from that that's going to be most familiar to Western audiences is that was the inspiration for David Byrne's Big Suit. Um. They have these very squared off wardrobe. I mean they' kimonos, but they were very squared off looking stylized fashions and their productions, and that is David Byrne had gotten into that on the stop making sense eron his whole big Suit thing was trying to look like a square with a tiny little head. Yeah. Kabuki is really fascinating, uh, and this whole tour allowed David to really delve more into it. Anyone who doesn't know it's a Japanese theastrical style. The word kabuki is a word that means song dance art, which is, you know, kind of the perfect word to describe what David was trying to do with a ziggy Startus project. And it's characterized by elaborate makeup, garish costumes, and physical expressionism, which you know, again, it's easy to see why kabuki would appeal to David and in many ways, it's the Eastern counterparts to the mime work that David had done back in the sixties. He studied with a very famous performer named Lindsay Kemp. And it's also interesting because kabuki performers were exclusively male, so they played both men and women, sometimes in the same scene, rapidly changing costumes to express this change of personality. So for David, a man who swapped personas like clothes as the mood suited him, this was very compelling and his trip to Japan had very marked influence on his performances. Because he assumed that the Japanese audiences didn't understand his lyrics, he delivered these incredibly physical performances, probably the most physically demanding shows of his life up to that point, activating his songs with his hands and his body. And due in part to this physical exertion, he started performing part of the show in what was basically a red sequin jockstrap, and the sight of this whipped the crowd into a frenzy, and at one point he was forced to barricade himself in his dressing room for hours after the show because the audience was more or less stampeding um so so horny hern as you meditate on that. We'll be right back with more too much information after these messages, rolling right along. David Bowie famously retired Ziggy at the height of this insanity, and the reasons for it are legion so first and foremost, he's just physically dog diamond dog tired, uh, year and a half of touring runs you ragged, especially doing this extremely physical mime influenced stuff. His costumes are literally coming apart of the seams. Um. You know, dog It talks a lot about this. I'm sure people in his circle talked a lot about this. But you know, he was skin and bones at that point. He was barely topping a hundred pounds and he was not a short either. So yeah, during the gig at Radio City Music Hall in February, he collapsed, uh, and he just wanted to stay home, but DeFreeze booked him to play sixty concerts in fifty two days across Britain and pitching a third US tour in just under a year, plus shows in China and Russia. And you know, you mentioned a little bit about the he's not quite his drug adult at this point, but dog. It does say each successive week of this period saw him ingesting more cocaine and less food. You understand why when you see sixty concerts and fifty two days, that's insane. Yeah, it's insane. The tour routing from this, it's like so many of these guys, that's why they had vocal court surgery and it's like why you know, he did lose a big chunk of his upper register. Robert Plant. Yeah, if you listen to that Glasgow show, he's not really doing. He can still do like the falsetto stuff, but yeah, it's bad, dude. Alton John had nodes surgery. Robert Plants. Robert Plant's voices was shot by like, you know, like five years into Zeppelin, Like I mean they were also smoking and doing you know, stepped on cocaine. Uh Facet number two. The Spider Spiders, the spiders. The relationship with the Spiders are breaking down. There are a lot of reasons, but as always, it comes back to filthy lucre and um, you know, David's also distancing himself from this at this point, while also getting closer to mc ronson the pay thing is wacky. Garson is the most recent higher into the band, and he got a much better rate than Boulder and Woodman's because they were kind of grandfathered into a lower pay rate. Um, They're on a plane one day and wood He is paging through a magazine. He sees an ad for Lamborghini and he's like, oh, I wish, I wish, I I love that car, and Carson says, why don't you get it? You can afford it, And this leads into an awkward moment where they compare their pay and uh, Woodman's told the BBC in Garson was getting paid three times what he was and I guess I just found this. He said. The final straw was to freeze, saying to us, I would rather pay the road crew more than you, so that Batt'll do a number on the tight camaraderie of peeing in pub sinks together. I mean, that seems like it's the old manager trick of trying to like split the singer from the band and have the singer go solo so that you know there's less money than it has to be divided up. So, I mean, it almost seems like he's intentionally trying to to be as crass right and so the seasons ascent Yeah and again, man, I just can't be stressed how great those guys truly were, just as such a great meat and potatoes rhythm section that band is. Um Yeah. So things get so bad that woodman Z and Trivor Bowlder the bassist are barely talking to David and they almost they they boycotted shows until mcronson basically begs them to come back. And speaking of filthy Lucra, another problem for the Zig Startust tour is that they stopped selling David. Well, maybe more Tony Defreese than David had violated the first rule of show business, which is always leave them wanting more. Bowie had taken so many trips across England across the United States that he basically eliminated demand to see him, and American seats were going unsold. Promoters were worrying about making a return of their investment. Plus the American tours never made any money anyway. We mentioned that the first American tour was almost half a million dollars in debt, so these tours were basically a pr move. They increased David's fame but decreased his bank account, and this has been to freeze his plan from the start, but the spending was spiraling out of control and tours were on average making back less than a quarter of what they spent, and the plus David stubborn refusal to fly meant that he can only play a limited number of shows anyway, so there was only so much that they could do to recoup their expenses. Our Cia Records refused to underwrite another tour, and main Man Management didn't have the money to mount the tour themselves. They were hemorrhaging money to the tune of a thousand pounds a week. They were losing, and Bowie himself, for all of his growing fame, at this point, he didn't have the money. There were times when they would get back home after a tour and find that the door to their home had been padlock shut by creditors, and they would send their young son to stay with friends just so they could be, you know, ensured that he had regular meals and stuff. So Bowie didn't have any money. And finally, another reason why David needed to kill Ziggy was that, just purely from an artistic standpoint, he felt stifled by Ziggy, and for the first time, I think David had wanted success for the better part of a decade. At this point finally realized the downside to having a hit on this scale, and he was basically a nobody. He could explore creatively to his heart's content. Now with these fans, there was an expectation and expectation as the artist arch enemy. He would later say, I felt for the first time and the only time, that I was working for someone else. And his Ziggy start Us follow up, A Laddin Saying, was basically a sequel, and David hated to repeat himself creatively, and this time he ceded to label pressure in popular demand that he made this album that was very similar to the sound and style of Ziggy Startust. He created an alter ego and it had completely taken over his life. It was like a cancer. It just grew and grew and threatened to kill the host audiences, journalists, label executives, even his own entourage. They all wanted Ziggy, not David Jones. So David just simply played Ziggy at all times, and it really messed with his mental state. He became lost in the fantasy. He was insulated from a normal daily life by his coterie of handlers. The security guards and all the sycophants who to freeze kind of put in place specifically to make him feel like a star. And now he just was treated like this alien who was in constant need of protection. And as a result, David to be blunt lost touch with reality, and he gave a quote in later years, the doppelganger and my self, we're starting to become one and the same person. Then you start on the trail of chaotic psychological destruction. So it was really a case of David phasing out Ziggy before Ziggy phased out him, and so David decided to kill him off or retire him, which was better to keep his options open, And it really seemed like the perfect solution to all of David's personal and professional problems because in the short term it would excuse him from all the upcoming toward dates, which he was too tired to do. Anyway, we're also shaping up to be a financial disaster poorly attended. By canceling these dates for creative reasons and not economic ones, he could save face and not look like a failure, and it actually would do quite the opposite. It would bolster his reputation as an unclassifiable artistic enigma, because who else would abandoned their star making persona. It made him look like a daring and adventurous creator rather than some guy who was just exhausted and overexposed. So the whole retirement idea a stroke of public relations genius because it offered David creative freedom and the well deserved rest. The Beatles had retired from the road in nineteen sixty six at the peak of their career, so why not David. The one person who objected to David retiring ironically was not ironically but just interestingly, was Bob Dylan. Uh. Dylan talked about this on an episode of his Theme Time radio show. In recent years, he said, David told every I can't can you do a Bob Dylan? David told everyone he was gonna retire after the Ziggy Strotist tour. Remember that maybe that I told him not do it. He sounds like the crypt keeper these days, though, because he's such a chain smoker. So I can't imagine Dylan and Ziggy, shall we say, interacting in this stage. But yeah, I guess Dan told him not a motorcycle, So yeah, but I guess for not the last time, but we didn't listen. So arrangements are made aid for the final bow, which would take place on the last day to the tour, which is, you know, one of the better ones, the sold out gig at the Hammersmith Odeon on July three, ninety three. The plan was top secret, kept strictly between David and De Frieze. Not even Angie was told about it, and neither was half the band. Ronson was tipped off, but he has said at one point in the end it was almost the last minute decision, but Woody and Trevor were not UM after nearly three years of just being thickest thieves. Uh. They were summarily dismissed on stage. Nowadays you get called into HR. Back in the day, they would have just done it to you on stage. Uh D. A Penna Baker second deal in connection did don't look back UM was hired to document the proceedings. At one point they sent the famous Rolling Stones mobile recording studio and I this must have been insane. Penna Baker apparently had signs posted around the Hammersmith Odeon that told the crowd to bring flash cameras and take as many photos as they possibly could good lord, can you imagine being in a sold out Hammersmith odeon with many, many, many many people in the crowd having flash and cameras. Yeah, imagtion being on stage with that and high on cocaine and wearing a jockstrap. Talk about a stressful show, I mean, sold out hometown gig, recording a live album, incredibly famous documentary in filming you. David was understandably very stressed out before the show. And there's this really interesting story from a woman named Julie, and she confirmed it to me when I was doing this Bowie podcast. She had tickets to what would become known forever more as the Ziki Starts Farewell concert when she was just thirteen, and before the show, in amongst all the teenage Bowie clones outside, she spotted the real thing pacing outside the venue. I totally alone. No one spotted him because I guess everyone's dressed like David Bowie. It's almost like awere's waldo thing. It's like, oh wait a minute, that's the real one. So she approached him and was really just gonna go say, you know, high and offer words of praise and thanks. But according to her, he started to break down, and he'd fled his dressing room a few moments before just to get some peace outside, and he just started unloading on this young girl, saying that he was worried that he was going crazy, he didn't know who he was anymore, his marriage was going wrong, his finances were a mess. It was such a funny little private moment between Bowie at this critical juncture in his career and this teenage fan. And then he spots some roadies looking for him and he bounds off inside, which must that must been terrifying. He won a moment of peace and you see these presumably huge road manager people off stalking out looking for you. So he runs back inside and watches his fans enter the theater from the balcony like some fascist dictator. But yeah, as you mentioned the rhythm section, Woody Woodman's and Trevor Boulder found out on stage that they were fired. It was just before the trade show closer Rock and Roll Suicide, and David gave a little moment on stage where he thanked the road crew in the band, and you can see him in the footage almost imperceptibly paused before plunging the knife into his most successful creation and into the backs of some of his closest associates. He said, of all the shows in this tour, this particular show remained with us longest because not only is it the last show of the tour, but it's the last show we'll ever do. Thank you. And the spiders are all looking at each other as they're starting the song, like wait, what what did he just say? And it's worth thought rock and roll suicide long song, and they're all kind of looking at each other, mouthing at each other like what wait, we do we just get sacked? And what women's He later said that he considered storming off in the middle of the song, but managed to keep his composure to play through. But after taking their final balance, they looked in vain for David to get some kind of an explanation, and according to them, he was nowhere to be found. I can't he could be brutal when he was done with people. He was done. I know. We talked in the prior episode about what an incredible music fan he was and if he liked your music, he remained a fan for life, as as sweet as he could be to the artist that he loved and admired. When he was done, it was like flicking a switch. He was done. Yeah, I have no segue for that. But Jeff Beck was there? Oh yeah, can have Jeff Beck played guitar on on two of these songs. Uh. Yeah. The movie didn't get released until eighty three, and he, I guess Beck that'st not to be in it because he felt out of place, which is kind of funny. Uh. Other notes, Marlena Dietrich and Ringo Starr we're both in the audience. I think Lulu too. Yeah. I hope they were all there together. It's a fun little trip down. The press reaction to David's news was monumental, and I had heard, actually that the Frieze and David had actually tipped off a few key journalists to prep stories so that they would go Actually, I heard that the story was actually going to press before the concert was even over. Uh so yeah, there's all sorts of stories about how far in advance this was prepped. But the news when it was over and done was huge, especially because of a press release that David's management company put out that dramatically said that David was leaving the concert stage forever and it would take weeks before it kind of became clear that they weren't talking about David himself, but Ziggy Ziggy was the one that wasn't going to perform again, And he said he was making this pivot to movies. He was going to adapt Robert Hinman's Stranger in a Strange Land. Three years later he starts in The Man Who Fell to Earth. It really does seem like they were positioning him for a pivot to film, you know. Even even the one press release made Man said that David Bowie will be writing the script for his own future. But as sad as it was for his band mates and for all the legion of fans who love Ziggy Stardust, Bowie was free all his obligations performance wise. We're all up in smoke. A year almost to the day after his star making appearance on Top of the Pops, David had carried out the self immolation foretold and the Ziggy Stardust narrative. It was a real life rock and roll suicide. Through the act of killing Ziggy, David put the master stroke on his most enduring work of art. And I just find this really funny. For years, Bowie apparently wouldn't look at tapes of himself performing as Ziggy Stardust, but when he finally did, he thought they were hilarious. And I love that, And I just think that's a perfect spot to end, because people forget how damn funny he was. And you know, I mentioned this in the first episode. It's funny. David was not one of my go to people growing up, but he always cropped up in my life in very strange ways. The first article I was ever asked to write for Rolling Stones about Bowie and my heart asked me to do this Bowie biography podcast, And there's some strange force that keeps bringing him to me, and that seems to be the case when I spoke to numerous Bowie super fans for the show I was working on. There's something almost supernatural there. So it felt right to honor the fiftieth anniversary of his breakthrough with all we got this two part episode. Plus, like I said also in the last episode, Bowie people were the best. The Bowie fans were the most kind, supportive people, and I wanted to do right by them, so I salute them and I salute the Starman two. With this episode, I had a lot of fun. Well, we had a lot of fun because it's not only the last show of this Bowie episode, it's the last show will ever do. Just this ain't a podcast, This is suicide. Thanks for listening, folks. I'm Alex Hegel and I'm Jordan run Talk. We'll catch you next time. Too Much Information was a production of I Heart Radio. The show's executive producers are Noel Brown and Jordan Runt Talk. The supervising producer is Mike Johns. The show was researched, written and hosted by Jordan run and Alex Heigel, with original music by Seth Applebaum and the Ghost Funk Orchestra. If you like what you heard, please subscribe and leave us a review. For more podcasts and I heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.