David Bowie Rockets Onward

A mercurial superstar tours in triumph

  • Share
  • Read Later

(9 of 9)

Bowie—who has undertaken boxing and martial arts instruction to let off steam and claims to sooth nerves and ears listening to Polish and "Chinese Communist music"—is still bedeviled by those old interviews in which he rushed giddily out of the closet. He speaks of them now as the major miscalculation of his career, claiming he was never gay, bisexual, a transvestite or any selection of the above. Says he: "I was so young then. I was experimenting." He may be more at peace now, but no one is suggesting that complete equanimity comes from perfect equilibrium. Thoroughly tanked one night in Berlin last year, Bowie extinguished a lit cigarette in a fan's ear and woke up the next afternoon in a hippie crash pad.

"There is no definitive David Bowie," he once remarked. Ziggy and the Duke have been slithered out of, like shucked snakeskins, but their creator remains a well-nurtured enigma. Perhaps by design: in concert or in conversation, he always seems like a scrupulous creation. The body, even relaxed, seems conscious of pose. The face—Leslie Howard sketched by George Grosz—can be nearly beautiful, but the mouth splits its sculpted lines when it turns up into a toothy, gratified grin, like Chaplin's as he watched a fat man fall. Bowie's eyes, always appraising, seem to look straight down to his center. Each is different, the right blue, the left gray, and only one pupil works. Hit hard during a teen-age fight, the gray pupil is permanently dilated, fixed forever, like a frozen camera shutter, for permanent depth of field.

No wonder that the camera is so kind. The eyes have always had it, and Bowie has always been as successful with a lens as a microphone. His appearance in The Man Who Fell to Earth was both a dissection of the Bowie mythology to that point and a portent of the bleak direction it was about to take. Oshima's Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, to be released in America in the fall, casts Bowie for the first time in a heroic mold, as a neurotic but noble British P.O.W. in Java during World War II. Bowie is graceful and compelling in the part, with enough residual mystique to transform what is basically a supporting role into a star turn.

The rise of rock video and MTV plays perfectly into Bowie's plans, as well as his mystique. Eno's new ways of listening to music in 1976 are by 1983 new ways of watching it. No one looks better on rock video, or makes better tapes. Like some stalwart stepchild of Roeg and Oshima, Bowie works hard on his video outings. He sketches out each shot, consults with the director on everything before stepping in front of the camera. The results, startling and often funny, are more than musical presentations. They are essential refractions of the songs. Concert personas are thus definitely superfluous. Bowie can become a new character, fixed with the permanence of tape and film, with each new song.

It seems finally to be what he always wanted. The form remains flexible, a regulated extravaganza of mixed media, but the music, mutable in its style, comes always from the same fixed source. From deep beneath a troubled heart, and from right between the eyes.

—By Jay Cocks. Reported by Gary Lee/Gothenburg

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
  10. Next Page