David Bowie Rockets Onward

A mercurial superstar tours in triumph

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He looked like some horrifying Polaroid, a rock-'n'-roll Dorian Gray, "positively skeletal," as he remembers, "and mentally about the same." He took a small apartment in the Kreuzberg section, a neighborhood that was "nice, tough and working class," and set about the serious business of cleaning up, recovering a certain kind of anonymity ("Berlin's absolutely the opposite of Los Angeles—star status doesn't mean anything") and starting over. Music was his only continuity. It was a lifeline. "Brian Eno came to my rescue in a way," he says now. "He came along and said, 'Hey, I have a whole new way of listening to music.' Everything about him was brand new." Bowie says the three albums they made together (Low, "Heroes," Lodger) "hurt. Those songs came from a very aching source. My whole cleaning-up period came through that trilogy. And I think I was successful at dropping my personas completely." Perhaps; or, anyway, dropping them as much as a showman-savant like Bowie ever can. Some lines from Ashes to Ashes come to mind: "I've never done good things/ I've never done bad things/ I've never done anything out of the blue."

During this period, he also reunited with Zowie, now answering to Joey—David and Angie divorced in 1980—who lived with him and went to school in Berlin. "Joey definitely influences the work I do," Bowie says. "Just knowing he's there has left an impact on my music, and he's more influential than anything else in making me try to cut a path through the crap."

Joey, now 12, has been with his father on several legs of the European tour, and will join him in America. They live, with decided privacy and some semblance of serenity, in a house overlooking Lake Geneva in Switzerland. There are certainly rock stars who are richer, but no tears of sympathy should be shed over the Bowie savings account. His new record company, EMI America, paid him between $10 million and $17 million to sign on for five albums. Exact figures are hard to come by—no record company wants its other clients to renegotiate for what the star attraction is getting—but it is a rich deal at either end of the spectrum. Bowie's impact and influence have always charted higher than his actual record sales. In a decade on RCA in the U.S., his 19 albums sold a combined 10 million copies, while sales of singles added up to 3 million. Until the Let's Dance smash, this would have meant that EMI was making a heavy investment in prestige. Now it looks as if they may have lucked out.

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