Bowie Keeps Swinging

Early in the 70s I washed up in Amsterdam, after a couple years of wandering down the Hippie Trail across Asia and back. I didn't have a dime to my name and no reason to go back to America, which was still systematically destroying Vietnam under Richard Nixon. Necessity created an ascetic and I got a job at the Kosmos, Amsterdam's meditation center. I ate brown rice and vegetables for 4 years and lived... modestly. It was also the time I was slowly coming to realize I was gay. I had another set of friends besides the meditation center crowd. They were some American and British ex-pats who lived in a crazy house and had a lifestyle I had never experienced. They were kind of glamorous in a shabby way. One, Michael LeBow, was pretty outrageous and artistically-inclined grandson of a very right-wing Republican congressman from Ohio. His father was a big time VP at GM and the family paid him a nice stipend to stay out of the U.S. That stipend supported the little community I stumbled into. They took me to my first gay bar and introduced me to David Bowie-- literally.

Michael's boyfriend, an English guy named John, was a bit of a hustler and he had a wealthy benefactor is London who he'd visit from time to time, also named John (Big John, for short). Big John owned a string of resorts across the Mediterranean and his own planes. He's let us stay at the resorts during the off-season. And sometimes we'd all visit him in London. I felt like a fish out of water and wasn't attracted to his scene at all but b two up and coming young British musicians were in his circle, Elton John and David Bowie. To this day I find it hard to hear Bowie's music without recalling the bizarre world I had stumbled into in London. It closed me off to his music for years.

The new issue of Out has a dozen-plus page cover feature on Bowie this month. It's shockingly mediocre, mostly a series of short, Über-trite personal essays by people who were influenced by him-- and lots of photos (some excellent ones) and opportunities to sell advertising. A lot of the coverage was slanted towards fashion and one of the only vaguely interesting essays was by Jean Paul Gaultier. This is the best... so you'll have to imagine what the less than best were like:

I was living in Paris when I first experienced Bowie’s music, and the influence was instant and permanent. He was in a dress for the sleeve of The Man Who Sold the World-- there was a sense of ambiguity and originality that was incredible at the time. He was demonstrating that a man could be powerfully feminine; he didn’t have to aspire to be John Wayne. Even the fact that he was married to a woman [Angie Bowie] who was also a lesbian gave all of us permission to love who we wanted to love. I remember going to gay bars in London that Bowie was known to frequent and it gave many of us courage not to hide, to have confidence in ourselves.

I was working for Pierre Cardin in Manila in the Philippines in 1975, and I used “Diamond Dogs” for the opening of my first show. In 1978, I saw him in Paris for the Low/“Heroes” tour, and the set was entirely composed of white neon. It was unique; no one did things like that then. At the beginning of the show, he appeared as a kind of Marlene Dietrich, but with a white captain’s jacket and a cap-- it was obvious that it was not Bowie playing a captain, but Bowie playing Marlene Dietrich playing a man. One thing that was astonishing was his ability to do cinema and music simultaneously, while endlessly reinventing himself. It wasn’t only his androgyny but his creativity-- he was among the first people to discover Kansai Yamamoto, who made incredible clothes for his Ziggy Stardust era. In that way he was always a pioneer. He had a Dadaist approach to his work; he would cut everything up and put things together in new ways that made them fresh and radical. I remember when [French newspaper] Libération dedicated an entire issue, cover to cover, to Bowie. It was unique. They did it later with Michael Jackson. They didn’t do it as completely for Madonna.

One of my favorite featurettes in Out is the Meta-Data page in the front of the book. One of the tidbits in this issue is a photo of oversized, shiny red boots-- "Bargain Boots £8:"

"I wasn't going to spend that! I had these made for £8 instead."- David Bowie, on his Stardust boots (a copy of a £25 pair of designer Kansai Yamamoto originals).

A few pages on-- and not meant to be related to the Bowie coverage in any way-- is a recurring page about fashion choices by dead celebrities. The idea is that you can dress like them and the magazine's advertisers are happy to charge you insane prices for what looks like what the dead star used to wear. This month it was John Lennon. I'm so excited, I found the page. I don't have to transcribe it and describe it:

Can you read the prices? My favorite is the hat. We used to call it a Lenin hat when I was in college and it was the ultimate symbol of the working man. Armani is selling them-- "price available upon request." I'd like to find out the price... you know, just for the heck of it. Do I have to call Neimann Marcus or something like that?