John lennon had warned David Bowie against his music manager Tony Defries, who eventually disillusioned Bowie at a poignant phase in his life
David Bowie had met John lennon when they were introduced in los Angeles, at a party thrown by Elizabeth Taylor. “We went on to a great relationship over the years,” David said of lennon. “Terrific guy, very, very funny guy.”
Back in Manhattan, John called David and asked if he could bring May Pang, with whom he was then having a romantic interlude, and linda and Paul McCartney over to see David. According to Ava Cherry, who was there, the meeting between David and linda did not go well.
At that point, David made the unwise move of playing tracks from Young Americans (the soul-influenced album that he would ultimately release in 1975) to his guests, not only once, but twice, whereupon Paul McCartney asked for another album to be put on instead. David ignored him but John lennon intervened and gently asked him to play another album. May Pang diplomatically did what John asked, and David left the room.
That same evening, David called John and the two of them talked for quite a while. Afterward, John confided to May that David had been really hurt when he’d asked him to change the album, but that he had managed to mollify him to such an extent that he and David had become friends.
According to Tony Visconti, David’s friendship with John developed to such a degree that the three of them often spent a night on the town together. “We stayed up with John lennon until 10:30 am. We did mountains of cocaine, it looked like the Matterhorn, obscenely big, and four open bottles of cognac,” Tony recalled, adding of David, “During the making of Young Americans, he was taking so much cocaine it would have killed a horse.”
John and David bonded over drugs, music, and a shared quirky British sense of humor. And when David made a speech to the Berklee College of Music’s class of 1999, he told of a time when he and John were in Hong Kong together: “During one of our expeditions, on the back street a kid comes running up to him and said, Are you John lennonIJ’ And he [John] said, ‘No, but I wish I had his money,’” David recalled, before going on, “Which I promptly stole for myself. [Imitating a fan] Are you David BowieIJ’ ‘No, but I wish I had his money.’ It was such a wonderful thing to say. The kid said, ‘Oh, sorry. Of course you aren’t,’ and ran off. I thought, this is the most effective device I’ve heard.
“I was back in New York a couple of months later in SoHo, downtown, and a voice pipes up in my ear, ‘Are you David BowieIJ’ And I said, ‘No, but I wish I had his money.’ ‘You lying bastard. You wish you had my money.’ It was John lennon,” David said.
However, going back to January 1975, when David co-wrote and recorded Fame (which would be added to Young Americans at the eleventh hour) with John, he played the first cut for Maggie Abbott, and she remembered, “The track was really great, John and him singing. When it was released, I noticed that John’s voice was less prominent. I guess David just wanted to downplay John in favour of himself.”
From the time that David first met John, John warned him about Tony Defries.
Years later, looking back, David said, “I always thought there was somebody better at doing this kind of thing [managing me]. It wasn’t until lennon pointed it out to me that I realised maybe the artist is as good at managing somebody as anybody else.
“It was John that sorted me out all the way down the line. He took me to one side, sat me down, and told me what it was all about, and I realised I was very naive. I still thought you had to have somebody who dealt with these things called contracts, but now I have a better understanding of show-business business.”
Ever since he signed his deal with Tony Defries, he had refused to examine his contract closely. “None of us bothered to check our contracts in those days,” Dana Gillespie confirmed, but David, of course, was less likely to do so than any of them. His father had always managed every aspect of his finances, paying his bills, his taxes, his insurance, so that David had been eager to relinquish control of his finances to another father figure, without checking his contract.
Now, though, in the midst of all his cocaine-fueled haze, toward the end of his Diamond Dogs tour David was forced to confront reality. Continually short of money, he was now so broke that he had been forced to cancel the standing order by which the bank paid his mother £50 a month. labeling him “a terrible hypocrite,” Peggy lambasted David for neglecting her and the family. Outraged, David struck back: “He warned her, ‘If you ever speak to the papers again you won’t see me, your grandson, or any of my money ever again’.”
By the time the Diamond Dogs tour hit Manhattan, the fact that David was truly short of money while Tony Defries was living the high life at his expense had hit him hard and he was ready to do battle with Defries. But money wasn’t the sole bugbear between David and Tony Defries. “David felt Defries had abandoned him,” Tony Zanetta said, “David had only been a vehicle for Defries to get where he wanted to go...but David expected him to revolve around him a hundred percent. But now he was no longer the most important client in Tony’s life and we were no longer a family.”
Finally, when dawn broke over Manhattan and David began to think more clearly, he was compelled to confront reality: Tony Defries, the man in whom he had put all his trust, at whose disposal he had put all his talents, had used and abused him. It was too much for David to bear.
Although he’d spend the next few months attempting to extract from Defries’s web, he refused to be diverted from the only things that truly mattered to him: His music, his career, and his future.
Edited excerpt from Wendy leigh’s
Bowie, Simon & Schuster, Rs699