Postscript: David Bowie, 1947-2016

David Bowie in 1974.
David Bowie, in 1974.Photograph by Terry O'Neill/Getty

This was not supposed to happen. Ever. Because he had been so many people over the course of his grand and immense career, it was inconceivable that he wouldn’t continue to be many people—a myriad of folks in a beautiful body who would reflect times to come, times none of us could imagine but that he could. He always got to the unknown first.

David Robert Jones was born, in Brixton, to working-class parents, on January 8, 1947, and the Brixton of his day was a changing place—home to members of the “Windrush generation,” West Indians who, like immigrants everywhere, had come to England looking for a better way. And the music those islanders bought to their new island no doubt influenced the artist who always wanted to be an artist; indeed, Bowie’s need to perform—to be recognized as different—made itself known when he was a child. In movement class, he claimed center stage, striking attitudes that his instructors found unusual, original. He was always an original, not least because he defied “Englishness”—not making a fuss, not standing out—by making theatre out of his body and that incredible face.

Everyone knows the story. Jones—who did not shrink from a fight—was arguing with a friend over a girl when his friend punched him in one of his blue eyes; somehow, his fingernail got caught in Bowie’s left eye. The result was a permanently dilated pupil. Just as Marlon Brando broke his nose while horsing around backstage during the Broadway run of “A Streetcar Named Desire” and the accident added to, rather than detracted from, his beauty, Bowie’s infirmity only added to his allure, an “oddity” whose romanticism imagined other places in addition to this world—places he invented and filled with longing.

A natural collaborator, Bowie used his considerable fame to help popularize artists who would have had less of a chance without him. Nothing’s better than watching Bowie play keyboards for Dinah Shore on her TV show in 1977. He was there to support an artist he loved—Iggy Pop, whose seminal, first solo album, “The Idiot,” had come out that year. In an interview on MTV, recorded in 1990, Pop talked about how Bowie had rescued him, basically, from being a street person, and helped him to become an artist. On the Shore show, Pop’s outrageous body gyrates, twists, and turns as he sings “Sister Midnight”; at one point you can hear Bowie laughing at all the antics. Bowie then sits down with Shore, she of genteel nineteen-forties movie musicals, and attempts to explain, with great seriousness and in depth, why Pop was important, and why their collaboration worked.

Rock stars are not generally known for their generosity to other artists; it takes a lot to get up there and be such a huge presence. Early on, Bowie realized he was more himself—had more of himself—when he built bridges between different worlds. I wonder how much of that he owed to what he saw in Brixton. Two years before he worked with Pop, Bowie made his first masterpiece—1975’s “Young Americans.” Bowie called it “plastic soul,” which was an honest thought. Bowie was not a soul man; he was borrowing from soul artists—the guys who made the sound of Philadelphia just that—in order to make his new self, backed by incredible black artists like Ava Cherry and Luther Vandross. Dressed in high-waisted pants and carrying a cane, Bowie’s elegance and showmanship on “The Dick Cavett Show,” in 1974, while he was getting his plastic-soul thing together, didn’t so much diminish the rather square-looking Cavett as inject a powerful social formula: what blackness looked like on a white artist.

Bowie was a miscegenationist at a time when it wasn’t necessarily cool, or tolerated. Bowie was “queer” in that way, and things only got queerer on the Cavett show when Bowie introduced Cherry, his lover at the time, to the audience. There, again, he was framing a performer he liked by conferring some of his star power on her. (Bowie worked on Cherry’s album “People from Bad Homes.” Check it out. Her sound is not as big as Betty Davis’s, but there are loads of wonderful moments on it, including the lead track, written by Bowie.) Halfway through “Foot Stompin’,” on the Cavett show, Bowie points to Cherry, the blond-haired black woman to his left, and says, “Cherry!” She dances a bit, and the moment is gone, but not the memory of Bowie watching his friend perform in the aura of his generosity.

Indeed, Bowie’s rendition of “Foot Stompin’ ” was the artist’s tribute to the Flares, a doo-wop group that recorded in the nineteen-fifties and early sixties. Back then, a young David Robert Jones thrilled to the records his father brought home, including those made by that outrageous, vulnerable showman Little Richard. When he heard “Tutti Frutti,” Bowie said once, he knew he’d heard God. Little Richard’s uncommon look and feeling were part of what he meant to project in this common world. Bowie, too. He was an Englishman who was sometimes afraid of Americans and fame but, on his final record, could sing “Look up here / I’m in heaven” as a way of describing where he wanted to end up, maybe, but definitely where Bowie—that outsider who made different kids feel like dancing in that difference, and who had a genius for friendship, too—had lived since we knew him.

A further thought (January 12, 2016): When I wrote this piece, I did not know about the interview that Bowie gave to MTV in 1983. This was decades before one was supposed to air such observations, let alone politics, in a Big Brother world. (Remember, Bowie’s 1974 album, “Diamond Dogs,” started off as his response to George Orwell’s “1984,” but he was denied the rights by Orwell’s estate.) Additionally, I would like to point out that Bowie gave two more relatively unknown downtown stage artists—the incredible Joey Arias and the late Klaus Nomi—a big break in 1979, when he worked with them on “Saturday Night Live.” I’m sure his interest in collaboration yielded many more grateful participants over the years.