February 12, 1976 - David Bowie Rolling Stone Cover & 6 Page Feature

GROUND CONTROL TO DAVY JONES

Despite a new album and tour, David Bowie claims to have rocked his last roll. It's the devil's music, he warns-sterile, fascist, downright dangerous. That's why he's abdicated his glitter throne for more promising careers. Like films. Or world domination.

CORINNE SCHWAB IS PROBABLY THE last holdover from David Bowie's glitter-glam phase—the days of Ziggy Stardust, Moonage Daydream, gaudy costumes, hulking bodyguards, ex-manager Tony De Fries, and the back-room-at-Max's-Kansas-City mystique. In her three years as his secretary, Corinne has watched Bowie shrewdly work up to his most difficult move yet: the switch from cultish deco rocker to a wide-appeal film and recording star/entertainer. "I want to be a Frank Sinatra figure," Bowie declares. "And I will succeed."

Wheeling a cart in a Hollywood supermarket just three blocks from where David is working on his new LP, Station to Station, Corinne says she has no doubts about something so obvious as Bowie's success in achieving his stated goal. The way she sees it, David has only one problem. "I've got to put more weight on that boy," she sighs. And with that, she carefully places eight quarts of extra-rich milk in the basket.

Down the street at Cherokee Studios, David Bowie is just back from three vice-free months in New Mexico where he starred in Nick Roeg's film, The Man Who Fell to Earth. He is still glowing from the experience and, says Corinne, the healthiest he's been in years. He is relaxed and almost humble as he scoots around the studio and directs his musicians (Carlos Alomar and Earl Slick, guitars; George Murray, bass; and Dennis Davis, drums) through the songs. It is a complete evolution from the David Bowie of six months before. But then, of course, anything less than a total personality upheaval would be entirely out of character for him. "I love it," he cracked several months earlier. "I'm really just my own little corporation of characters."

He is actually anything one wants him to be at any given moment—a paranoid hustler, an arrogant opportunist, a versatile actor, a gentleman, maybe even a genius. He had, after all, made a warning up front. "Don't expect to find the real me ... the David Jones [his true name] underneath all this."

May 1975—It's four in the morning, Hollywood time, and David Bowie is twitching with energy. He's fidgeting, jabbing a cigarette in and out of his pursed lips, bouncing lightly on a stool behind the control board in a makeshift demo studio, staring through the glass at Iggy Pop.

Bowie has spent the last nine hours composing, producing, and playing every instrument on the backing track, and it is finally time for Pop to do his bit. After all, this is Iggy's demo.

Bowie touches a button and the room is filled with an ominous, dirgelike instrumental track. The shirtless Iggy listens intently for a moment, then approaches the mic. He has prepared no lyrics, and in the name of improv, he snarls:

You go out at night from your sixty-dollar single down in West Hollywood