David Bowie '04 talks Ziggy Stardust, John Lennon, Aleister Crowley

[highplainsdem]

Don't have an exact date for the 15-minute interview below, but it was done by Australian journalist Kerry O'Brien, so it would have been done while Bowie was in Australia, the second half of February and beginning of March 2004, midway through his Reality tour, which had started in early October 2003.

That was the tour that ended a few days after Bowie suffered a heart attack during the concert in Prague in late June - a heart attack that was at first misdiagnosed as a pinched nerve, so he did another concert, one in Germany, after which, because of continuing symptoms, the problem was finally diagnosed correctly and he had emergency angioplasty for the blocked artery.

He looked very healthy for this interview, as well as happy and relaxed. I've thought Bowie's performances in the early 2000s were his best ever, and he admitted in this interview he was enjoying singing more than ever before.

He talks about his shyness here, and he mentions John Lennon, which reminded me that Tony Visconti, Bowie's longtime producer and friend, had written in his biography that when David first met John Lennon, he (David) was so shy he didn't say anything to him at first. This was when Tony and David were recording Young Americans in NYC the winter of '74/'75, after having done some initial recording in Philly a few months earlier. John and his girlfriend then, May Pang (who was later married to Tony for about 10 years), were going to meet David at his hotel suite, and David was very nervous about meeting John and had asked Tony to be there to "buffer the meeting," as Tony recalled David saying when he invited him. And for a while after Tony got there, David just sat in the living room sketching while Tony, to fill the silence, asked John all kinds of questions about Beatles recordings. Finally John asked David if he had another sketchpad, and they started talking while having a sketching contest, drawing caricatures of each other.

Bowie also mentioned Aleister Crowley here. His interest in the occult was during his cocaine-addict days in the '70s, and as I recall, there was something in Angie Bowie's book about David having been convinced the pool at the home they were renting in LA was possessed, or a demonic portal - something like that - so he exorcised it. Sigh. I think this was about the time David met Jimmy Page and was intimidated by Page, whose interest in Crowley was pretty notorious then, and he ended up asking Page to leave after Page had been staring at him without saying anything. (Paul Rodgers of Bad Company later experienced what he thought was a paranormal incident at a recording studio Page owned.)

Anyway, the stuff about Crowley makes this seem like an appropriate time to post this, with Halloween approaching...amd it's a great interview, one of my favorites of all the Bowie interviews I've seen.

[underpants]

1. 👀

Hopefully watching this later. Bowie fascinates me. So very intelligent and quite a businessman. He and Neil Young took completely drastic turns in their music but were able to do it. I understand that Neil did some of that just to piss off record label execs.

One of the Bowie stories I heard once was about his heroin phase with Iggy Pop. They both realized they needed to do something but NYC and LA weren’t options. They decided on Berlin only to find out it was the heroin capital of Europe. At least that’s how a heard it.

[highplainsdem]

2. Bowie's addiction was to cocaine. He didn't like heroin. But he has been

given credit for helping rescue Iggy Pop from his heroin addiction with that move to Berlin. Though they did plenty of drinking then.

https://www.mtv.com/news/s9zt69/berlin-low-david-bowie

By the time he escaped Los Angeles for Berlin in late 1976, Bowie had pushed himself to the brink of mental collapse. The change of scenery didn’t exactly result in instant stabilization: Upon his arrival, he still stalked around, drunk in clubs, not sleeping. There is a story from his early Berlin days about him driving around his hotel’s parking garage doing 70 miles per hour, with Iggy Pop in the passenger seat, "screaming that he wanted to end it all," until his car ran out of gas.

Another article about those days - one with much more information - here:

https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/why-david-bowie-iggy-pop-went-to-berlin/


Editing to link to more info on Iggy in an interview he did for ZEIT magazine in 2016:

https://www.tagesspiegel.de/kultur/i-came-to-berlin-totally-fit-and-left-it-as-a-wreck-4902913.html

[underpants]

3. I stand corrected

I’d heard it differently. Thanks.

[highplainsdem]

4. You're welcome, and I hope you noticed I corrected myself when I edited to add

that third link, since that interview had Iggy explaining he'd been off heroin and in better shape, thanks to Bowie's help, BEFORE they went to Berlin. So I'd had that part wrong.

[sarcasmo]

8. The Neil Young and Rick James era is wild, they were roommates.

[highplainsdem]

10. Article on that:

https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/neil-young-rick-james-motown-band/

[highplainsdem]

5. Article on Bowie in LA in the mid-1970s:

https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/the-haunting-of-david-bowie/

[highplainsdem]

6. More on Bowie in Berlin and LA in a 12-page article:

https://uncut.co.uk/features/david-bowie-remembers-berlin-cant-express-feeling-freedom-felt-98780/

[sarcasmo]

7. I own a few Crowley books, it's Bowie's fault.

[highplainsdem]

9. Bowie was so messed up then. So was Page.

I read Colin Wilson's book on the occult when it was first published, and what he wrote about Crowley was enough for me to decide to steer clear.

I steered clear of drugs, too, for the most part.

There are better/smarter/cleaner ways to control and expand consciousness than drugs or "magick" rituals. But they might not seem as entertaining and flashy. Or as accessible to people already addicted to drugs, as Bowie and Page were.

And if people are insecure, as Bowie obviously was despite his vast talent, the idea of having secret or arcane knowledge or powers can be so tempting.

I have to wonder, too, if Crowley had a lot of influence on Bowie's comments then about fascism.

From Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleister_Crowley#Beliefs_and_thought

Crowley described democracy as an "imbecile and nauseating cult of weakness",[268] and commented that The Book of the Law proclaimed that "there is the master and there is the slave; the noble and the serf; the 'lone wolf' and the herd".[232] In this attitude, he was influenced by the work of Friedrich Nietzsche and by Social Darwinism.[269]

I'm glad Bowie realized later that both the drug addiction and the interest in the occult had been a waste of time.