Bowie Page 9

  Inspired by his competitive friendship with Bolan, David pursued success with a brand-new sense of ostentation. During the group’s live shows at the Marquee and other Soho blues clubs he would often lapse into lengthy and (to his band) somewhat distressingly campy monologues by way of in troducing the still tough-edged blues numbers that made up their repertoire.

  With Conn’s help, the Manish Boys were soon booked as a support act on a full British tour with the Kinks, who had made it in England and America with a string of hits like “You Really Got Me” and “Tired of Waiting for You.” Even better, the Kinks’ stellar producer Shel Talmy had agreed to produce the Manish Boys. Talmy had also made hits with the Creation and Manfred Mann and the Easybeats (whose “Friday on My Mind” David Bowie would cover on his 1973 covers record Pin Ups). He knew how to harness the power of a touring rock band by compressing the volume and verve into a pent-up sexiness that would appeal to both boys and the girls they lusted after. Even better, for the Yank-workshipping David, he was an American. Talmy was born in Chicago and found early fame as a child actor in Los Angeles. In the early sixties, he settled in London to work for Decca. When he saw David with the Manish Boys, he knew he’d found another great talent.

  According to Talmy, the still-teenage David stood out as the potential star along the lines of the leaders of the Who and the Kinks. “I can’t tell you what it was exactly,” Talmy says. “If I could, I would have bottled it long ago and made billions. I’m not trying to be facetious, but you can’t explain instinct. I instinctively thought David was one of the brightest kids I’d ever met. He was cocky in a nice way and I had no doubt he’d be a star. Unfortunately it didn’t happen on my watch.”

  Talmy chose Bobby Bland’s 1961 R & B smash “I Pity the Fool” for the Manish Boys’ debut single, confident that it fit their sound perfectly. He recorded the band on February 8, 1965, at IBC studios in Portland Place with his usual session musicians helping to achieve the classic Talmy sound. The track is a slow blues song with crunchy horns and a great wiggly solo in the second verse, played by Jimmy Page, who was then a Talmy session man. “Take My Tip,” the B side, is jazzier and more sax driven, with David doing a solid Roger Daltrey homage. There’s a bit of Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames in there as well, a nightclub bounce and some hipster poetry, courtesy of David Jones, the composer: “You’re scared to walk beside her / ’Cause you’re playing with a tiger who possesses the sky.” Sonically speaking, derivative as it was, both sides of the single were worlds away from the King Bees’ “Liza Jane.”

  The Manish Boys promoted the single with a May 8 appearance on a new television program on BBC2 entitled Gadzooks! It’s All Happening, an offshoot of a popular teen show called The Beat Room. When the producers saw the band’s hair, however, they reportedly demanded that the Manish Boys get it trimmed preshow. The band refused and was bumped from the broadcast. What seemed like bad luck turned into a minisensation once Conn and Jones realized that they could exploit the incident. They went to the local papers the Daily Mirror, Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail with the “BBC discriminates against long-haired combo” angle and succeeded in getting both blurbs and photos in each one. For about a half a day, the Manish Boys were big.

  Listening to songs like the Barbarians’ 1965 novelty hit “Are You a Boy or Are You a Girl” (“You’re always wearing skintight pants / And boys wear pants …”) today, you can’t help but giggle. When I think of the sixties, I just assume that everybody let their hair grow. Sideburns got bushier. Flares wider. Skin greasier. I think I got this impression when the shows I grew up watching in reruns after school switched from black and white to lurid, orange-hued color. In doing research on the era, I realized that this was just a show business thing. The people making these programs and the bands taking their cues from the Beatles’ and the Stones’ tonsorial manifest destiny were all entertainers. Even in the mid-sixties, a time associated with lengthening hair, nearly all men of a certain generation still had buzz cuts or even short, oiled and neatly groomed hair. The skinny boys who grew theirs out like a girl remained, in most places, the object of fear and ridicule.

  Having too-long tresses amounted to an easy way to cast yourself against modern society, and in the spring of ’65 David Jones realized that in the absence of an undeniable single, the kind Ray Davies, Pete Townshend, Jagger and Richards and Lennon and McCartney seemed to whip up between toast and jam breaks, he needed to exploit this outrage while he still could. It would be the first time his self-fabricated sensation got more attention than the actual song it was cooked up to promote, but certainly not the last.

  “It’s really for the protection of pop musicians and those who wear their hair long,” David explained in a talk show appearance designed to promote his pop society, the International League for the Preservation of Animal Filament. “Anyone who has the courage to wear hair down to his shoulders has to go through hell. It’s time we united and stood up for our curls.” The Manish Boys netted a booking on another big package tour opening up for Gerry and the Pacemakers, along with Marianne Faithfull and Gene Pitney. After the tour, and back in London, they quickly realized that without a radio hit, there was no way to ride the publicity wave very far. This is something David Bowie would later realize; the stunts had to be fabulous but the music needed to be equally remarkable.

  The band still had no real money and no luck, and David remained desperate to transcend his suburban smallness and be a star. When he wasn’t home in Bromley, he’d spend his days in Soho, idling in the Café Giaconda on busy Denmark Street, reading the classified section of the weekly Melody Maker music newspaper and wondering what it took to make the cover … or even page two. Even his ex-bandmate and school friend George Underwood had scored a five-year recording contract with the hot producer Mickey Most, the impresario who handled Herman’s Hermits and the Yardbirds. “He was furious,” Underwood says today. “Music was his life now and he thought that because I could paint, that I wasn’t dedicated enough and it all looked too fuckin’ easy! He was working his bollocks off every night with the Manish Boys. I really thought our friendship was at an end.”

  The sixties, the decade during which London seemed to take over the world, were not half-over and he still seemed to be playing catch-up with it, wondering where his piece of the glory might be. Even little Peter Frampton was better connected among the London pop scenemakers, having been taken under the wing of the Stones’ bassist Bill Wyman. He would have three hits with both the Herd and Humble Pie before David would ever have his first. David did not want to go back to Bromley. Surely the hair wasn’t the answer, even though it still got him some attention that carried him through doubtful times.

  “My first memory of him was meeting him in the Marquee Club; I suppose I was about fifteen maybe,” says singer Dana Gillespie, a longtime friend from the sixties through the mid-seventies, when she was an artist with Bowie’s management company MainMan (she would later appear in bed with Art Garfunkel in future Bowie director Nicholas Roeg’s 1980 film Bad Timing). “I had waist-length peroxide-blond hair then, and I was brushing my hair outside the dressing room in the long mirror there and somebody came up and took the brush out of my hand and carried on brushing and said, ‘Can I take you home?’ And that was him. So I smuggled him past my parents’ bedroom into the house where I lived, which was about twenty minutes away from the Marquee Club. And then we spent the night together, but I mean, I was still at school. And I introduced him to my parents the next morning. And they hadn’t realized it was a boy until I said the word ‘David.’ Because nobody had sort of Veronica Lake–style hair. You know, primrose-yellow blond.”

  Unlike most Marquee habitues, Gillespie had an aristocratic background. She was the well-traveled daughter of a wealthy Austrian baron. Still, with all her cosmopolitan polish, she’d never met anyone like David Jones.

  “Even his eye, you know, the eye that’s discolored, he always said he’d got it in a crash while playing American football.
And that was an unusual thing to be interested in. And he always dressed differently. In knee-length suede trousers with fringe boots and then a white Russian-peasant-type shirt, baggy, with a waistcoat, looking like Robin Hood.”

  Gillespie visited the Jones home in Bromley and noted the quaintness of the modest décor, tiny bedrooms and bathroom, and small, neat kitchen. David’s quiet, repressed English parents were like little museum pieces in the wild and wooly mid-sixties.

  “It was the first time I’d been to a working-class household,” she says. “It sounds silly but I didn’t know what a little tiny house in a row of houses was like because my life was completely the opposite end. You know, I came from a very good family. I’d only known what kind of … another sort of luxury style. And that was a bit of a shock. And even then he said, ‘I wanna get out of this. I want to get out of this.’ He didn’t want to be in a tiny little place where you sit uncomfortably. We sat there eating tuna fish sandwiches with the parents, and they had the television on and not much conversation went on.”

  David’s parents didn’t really know what to make of his career or the people he was occasionally bringing home to meet them. Between concern over Terry’s frequently erratic behavior and their natural tendencies toward insularity, the house on Plaistow Grove was not necessarily inviting. The couple harbored doubts about the direction David was taking professionally as well. As much as they loved him and wished happiness for him, there didn’t seem to be any money coming in. One vinyl 45 record, like the one the King Bees made, was something to thrill over, but a collection of financially unsuccessful singles was something troubling. Certainly touring was hard work and a source of income, but David would often return from a road trip even more desperate and with less money than he’d left with. The pop stars that John and Peggy Jones saw on television all had broad smiles and seemed healthy, wealthy and well provided for. The day-to-day life of their impatient and wildly ambitious son seemed something altogether different.

  Even within this private culture of hope and disappointment, David did not give up. As I said, he could reliably be seen during this period in the Giaconda café, poring over the music weeklies, the New Musical Express and Melody Maker, and also catching the sets of more successful bands in the nearby clubs. He’d watch each lead singer and take mental notes, studying what worked and why.

  “When [lead singer] Phil May and I started the Pretty Things, he came to the gigs quite a lot and that was it really,” says Dick Taylor of the Pretty Things. “By the time we got to the point where we were well known, he’d latched on a bit. He’d follow us around. You’d look up at the gigs and he’d be there. He liked the rebellious image. We were fellow art students who were doing it.” Although he was not yet twenty, some front men, like Steve Winwood, then of the Spencer Davis Group, were only fifteen and enjoying a career in rapid ascent.

  The Lower Third, David’s next step on the path to becoming “somebody,” was, like the Manish Boys, another marriage of convenience formed in the hungry environment of Soho. “We were going to have a new singer and hold auditions,” the Lower Third’s Denis Taylor told Capital Radio. Among those who showed up to join were David Jones and future Small Faces front man Steve Marriott, who at the time, with his long, blond hair and thin, pale frame, could have been David’s doppelgänger. David was nervous. He showed up to the café with a copy of his Manish Boys single as if to remind the band that he was already in the game. He didn’t need to, as he impressed all involved with his voice and surpassed even Marriott (who would become one of his musical heroes and later perform with Peter Frampton in the supergroup Humble Pie).

  “David was terrific and we all made our decision in the Giaconda,” Taylor said, “and that’s how it all really started. We liked the stuff he was doing and he really started to develop an image for us as well.”

  “We like each other’s ideas,” David stated in the band’s press release, with little effusion. “We have the same policies and fit rather well together. All of us like to keep to ourselves and we like things rather than people.” The band, guitarist Denis Taylor, bassist Graham Rivens and drummer Phil Lancaster, hailed from the seaside town Margate, where they’d been playing as Oliver Twist and the Lower Third. They’d been in London for several months, soaking up the scene around the Marquee and looking for a way in. Sadly, they were even less original than the previous two bands that David had been in. At least they reflected his catholic taste in everything from West Coast jazz to Detroit soul and Delta blues. The Lower Third focused their emulation on one act and were such Who emulators that even Pete Townshend was taken aback by it. David’s time with the Lower Third also marked the beginning of the end for David Jones and Les Conn. Conn explained, “My biggest problem was that I hadn’t the resources to back my judgment. David was too ambitious to hold under the existing conditions. And to my regret, I let him go. There was absolutely no animosity on either side. The way things were, I would have only held him back and harmed his career, and that was the very last thing I wanted to happen. So we shook hands and parted.”

  After Les Conn’s departure, the Lower Third was managed by a tightly wound, round-faced man in his mid-twenties named Ralph Horton. Horton had been a road manager for the Moody Blues, who had a huge hit with “Go Now.” His partner Spike Palmer did time as a roadie with the Rolling Stones. The band auditioned for Horton and Palmer, who quickly got them some gigs and a small publishing contract with the firm Sparta Music, providing everyone with some much needed cash.

  The group toured England in a modified diesel-powered ambulance, a gift from Rivens’s father. The windows were blacked out, and the vehicle still had a working blue gumball siren atop the white plastic roof. It was big enough to stow their gear, even to sleep in, and could easily cut through a metropolitan traffic jam. The band rode in the back, while David was given the privilege of riding in the passenger seat with Horton, whose affection for his new artist was something that he reportedly could not hide.

  “He took a liking to David definitely and from that point it was no longer a singer and a group, it had become a singer with a group, which is a different thing altogether,” Denis Taylor said. While the band shivered in the ambulance, David would often sleep in Horton’s flat in relative warmth and comfort. “David used to travel in a Jag to any gigs,” Taylor recalled. “He never put gear away when we’d done our work. It became obvious that Ralph was looking after him.”

  “Ralph Horton was uptight and tense,” says John Hutchinson today. Hutchinson would play with David in the Horton-managed post–Lower Third band the Buzz. “He was probably in love with David. He fancied David. I guess he believed in him too. Nothing against him personally but he was a bit uptight, and he got more uptight as things got tougher, I suppose.” His doting on the lead singer drew rancor from the other members of the band, but it was a lack of funding that ensured that the Lower Third would be yet another short-lived entity. The band managed to tour beyond England, playing a short residency in Paris during the Christmas and New Year’s holiday of 1965 and ’66.

  With an inability to gain any real traction, soon the band went the way of the King Bees and the Manish Boys. Horton stuck with David but it was clear that he was in over his head. He did not have the vision to sell his star and began looking for other successful managers to help with the task.

  “Ralph called me out of the blue one day and introduced himself,” recalls Simon Napier-Bell, then manager of Marc Bolan’s pre–Tyrannosaurus Rex act John’s Children. “He asked if I would come to see him and have a chat about a project. His flat was a basement in Pimlico and the project was sitting in the corner—David Jones. Ralph asked if I would be prepared to help with David’s management and as an introductory offer suggested I might like to have sex with him. Although the boy in the corner seemed acquiescent, the overall sleaziness of the idea rather put me off, so I turned it down. Consequently I neither slept with him nor managed him. In retrospect I admit both things might have been wo
rth doing.” Such events were not unheard of at the time. The London-based pop business was full of gay men, and a pretty lead singer knew that even flirting with an insider with the right connections could lead to career advancement.

  “Gay was illegal,” says Napier-Bell. As early as 1966, one could technically be thrown in prison Oscar Wilde–style for committing “sodomy.” “Gay people who didn’t want to live in the closet had to find something to do with their lives … Sexual self-interest was the main force behind casting in Hollywood since the twenties. It didn’t grind to a halt. If you’re gay and you fancy a boy, you’re likely to be making a better choice of artist for teenage girls to fall in love with than a straight man would make. So trusting your instincts worked well. Getting yourself a bit of sex on the way was just natural.”

  David’s fifth band in less than five years was called the Buzz, which was ironic, as they too had none. “He was not even a big fish in that little pond,” says Hutchinson, who auditioned for and joined the Buzz after wandering into the Marquee. “He was just another singer that hadn’t done very much. The musicians knew him but the general public hadn’t seen much of David in those days. He was quite a small fish really. But I had enough respect for him. I’d seen his advert in the back of the New Musical Express. He used to have a weekly advert. ‘We’re looking for gigs.’ With a little photo of him. I realized that somebody who could organize something like rehearsals at the Marquee Club was fairly organized.” Hutchinson had a wife and child and was wary about joining a pop group but was persuaded by David’s professionalism and talent.

  By the spring of 1966, the Buzz had a residency at the Marquee and Ralph Horton had secured a backing deal of 1,500 pounds against 10 percent of their royalties from a private investor named Raymond Cook. Things looked like they were about to finally come together. Hutchinson brought in a keyboard player named Derek Boyes who added a thrumming Hammond organ to the band’s sound for some of David’s new compositions.