In Memoriam David Robert Jones (1947-2016)
William Seward Burroughs (1914-1997)
and Ziggy Stardust (1972-five years to go before the end of the earth)
Burroughs: That's a very good idea,
visual cut-up in a different sequence.
Bowie: I get bored very quickly and that would
give it some new energy. I'm rather kind of old school,
thinking that when an artist does his work it's no longer
his.... I just see what people make of it. That is why the TV
production of Ziggy will have to exceed people's expectations
of what they thought Ziggy was.
Burroughs: Could you explain this Ziggy
Stardust image of yours? From what I can see it has to do with
the world being on the eve of destruction within five years.
Bowie: The time is five years to go before the
end of the earth. It has been announced that the world will end
because of lack of natural resources. Ziggy is in a position
where all the kids have access to things that they thought they
wanted. The older people have lost all touch with reality and the
kids are left on their own to plunder anything. Ziggy was in a
rock-and-roll band and the kids no longer want rock-and-roll.
There's no electricity to play it. Ziggy's adviser tells
him to collect news and sing it, 'cause there is no news. So
Ziggy does this and there is terrible news. 'All the young
dudes' is a song about this news. It is no hymn to the youth
as people thought. It is completely the opposite.
Burroughs: Where did this Ziggy idea come
from, and this five-year idea? Of course, exhaustion of natural
resources will not develop the end of the world. It will result
in the collapse of civilization. And it will cut down the
population by about three-quarters.
Bowie: Exactly. This does not cause the end of
the world for Ziggy. The end comes when the infinites arrive.
They really are a black hole, but I've made them people
because it would be very hard to explain a black hole on
stage.
Burroughs: Yes, a black hole on stage would
be an incredible expense. And it would be a continuing
performance, first eating up Shaftesbury Avenue.
Bowie: Ziggy is advised in a dream by the
infinites to write the coming of a starman, so he writes
'Starman', which is the first news of hope that the
people have heard. So they latch on to it immediately. The
starmen that he is talking about are called the infinites, and
they are black-hole jumpers. Ziggy has been talking about this
amazing spaceman who will be coming down to save the earth. They
arrive somewhere in Greenwich Village. They don't have a care
in the world and are of no possible use to us. They just happened
to stumble into our universe by black-hole jumping. Their whole
life is travelling from universe to universe. In the stage show,
one of them resembles Brando, another one is a Black New Yorker.
I even have one called Queenie the Infinite Fox.
Now Ziggy starts to believe in all this himself
and thinks himself a prophet of the future starman. He takes
himself up to incredible spiritual heights and is kept alive by
his disciples. When the infinites arrive, they take bits of Ziggy
to make themselves real because in their original state they are
anti-matter and cannot exist in our world. And they tear him to
pieces on stage during the song 'Rock 'n' roll
suicide'. As soon as Ziggy dies on stage the infinites take
his elements and make themselves visible. It is a science fiction
fantasy of today and this is what literally blew my head off when
I read Nova Express, which was written in 1961. Maybe we are the
Rodgers and Hammerstein of the seventies, Bill!
Burroughs: Yes, I can believe that. The
parallels are definitely there, and it sounds good.
Bowie: I must have the total image of a stage
show. It has to be total with me. I'm just not content
writing songs, I want to make it three-dimensional. Songwriting
as an art is a bit archaic now. Just writing a song is not good
enough.
Burroughs: It's the whole performance.
It's not like somebody sitting down at the piano and just
playing a piece.
Bowie: A song has to take on character, shape,
body and influence people to an extent that they use it for their
own devices. It must affect them not just as a song, but as a
lifestyle. The rock stars have assimilated all kinds of
philosophies, styles, histories, writings, and they throw out
what they have gleaned from that.
Burroughs: The revolution will come from
ignoring the others out of existence.
Bowie: Really. Now we have people who are
making it happen on a level faster than ever. People who are into
groups like Alice Cooper, The New York Dolls and Iggy Pop, who
are denying totally and irrevocably the existence of people who
are into The Stones and The Beatles. The gap has decreased from
twenty years to ten years.
Burroughs: The escalating rate of change. The
media are really responsible for most of this. Which produces an
incalculable effect.
Bowie: Once upon a time, even when I was 13 or
14, for me it was between 14 and 40 that you were old. Basically.
But now it is 18-year-olds and 26-year-olds - there can be
incredible discrepancies, which is really quite alarming. We are
not trying to bring people together, but to wonder how much
longer we've got. It would be positively boring if minds were
in tune. I'm more interested in whether the planet is going
to survive.
Burroughs: Actually, the contrary is
happening; people are getting further and further apart.
Bowie: The idea of getting minds together
smacks of the flower power period to me. The coming together of
people I find obscene as a principle. It is not human. It is not
a natural thing as some people would have us believe.
Copetas: What about love?
Burroughs: Ugh.
Bowie: I'm not at ease with the word
'love'.
Burroughs: I'm not either.
Bowie: I was told that it was cool to fall in
love, and that period was nothing like that to me. I gave too
much of my time and energy to another person and they did the
same to me and we started burning out against each other. And
that is what is termed love..... that we decide to put all our
values on another person. It's like two pedestals, each
wanting to be the other pedestal.
Burroughs: I don't think that
'love' is a useful word. It is predicated on a separation
of a thing called sex and a thing called love and that they are
separate. Like the primitive expressions in the old South when
the woman is on a pedestal, and the man worshipped his wife and
then went out and fucked a whore. It is primarily a Western
concept and then it extended to the whole flower power thing of
loving everybody. Well, you can't do that because the
interests are not the same.
Bowie: The word is wrong, I'm sure. It is
the way you understand love. The love that you see, among people
who say, ' we're in love', it's nice to look
at.... but wanting not to be alone, wanting to have a person
there that they relate to for a few years is not often the love
that carries on throughout the lives of those people. There is
another word. I'm not sure whether it is a word. Love is
every type of relationship that you think of.... I'm sure it
means relationship, every type of relationship that you can think
of.
Copetas: What of sexuality, where is it
going?
Bowie: Sexuality and where it is going is an
extraordinary question, for I don't see it going anywhere. It
is with me, and that's it. It's not coming out as a new
advertising campaign next year. It's just there. Everything
that you can think about sexuality is just there. Maybe there are
different kinds of sexuality, maybe they'll be brought into
play more. Like one time it was impossible to be homosexual as
far as the public were concerned. Now it is accepted. Sexuality
will never change, for people have been fucking their own
particular ways since time began and will continue to do it. Just
more of those ways will be coming to light. It might even reach a
puritan state.
Burroughs: There are certain indications that
it might be going that way in the future, real backlash.
Bowie: Oh yes, look at the rock business. Poor
old Clive Davis. He was found to be absconding with money and
there were also drug things tied up with it. And that has started
a whole clean-up campaign among record companies; they're
starting to ditch some of their artists.
I'm regarded quite asexually by a lot of
people. And the people that understand me the best are nearer to
what I understand about me. Which is not very much, for I'm
still searching. I don't know, the people who are coming
anywhere close to where I think I'm at regard me more as an
erogenous kind of thing. But the people who don't know so
much about me regard me more sexually.
But there again, maybe it's the disinterest
with sex after a certain age, because the people who do kind of
get nearer to me are generally older. And the ones who regard me
as more of a sexual thing are generally younger. The younger
people get into the lyrics in a different way, there's much
more of a tactile understanding, which is the way I prefer it.
' Cause that's the way I get off on writing, especially
William's. I can't say that I analyse it all and
that's exactly what you're saying, but from a feeling way
I got what you meant. It's there, a whole wonder-house of
strange shapes and colours, tastes, feelings.
I must confess that up until now I haven't
been an avid reader of William's work. I really did not get
past Kerouac to be honest. But when I started looking at your
work I really couldn't believe it. Especially after reading
Nova Express, I really related to that. My ego obviously put me
on the 'Pay colour' chapter, then I started dragging out
lines from the rest of the book.
Burroughs: Your lyrics are quite
perceptive.
Bowie: They're a bit middle-class, but
that's alright, 'cause I'm middle-class.
Burroughs: It is rather surprising that such
complicated lyrics can go down with a mass audience. The content
of most pop lyrics is practically zero, like 'Power to the
people'.
Bowie: I'm quite certain that the audience
that I've got for my stuff listen to the lyrics.
Burroughs: That's what I'm interested
in hearing about.... do they understand them?
Bowie: Well, it comes over more as a media
thing and it's only after they sit down and bother to look.
On the level they are reading them, they do understand them,
because they will send me back their own kind of write-ups of
what I'm talking about, which is great for me because
sometimes I don't know. There have been times when I've
written something and it goes out and it comes back in a letter
from some kid as to what they think about it and I've taken
their analysis to heart so much that I have taken up his thing.
Writing what my audience is telling me to write.
(...)re.
Burroughs: What is your inspiration for
writing, is it literary?
Bowie: I don't think so.
Burroughs: Well, I read this 'Eight line
poem' of yours and it is very reminiscent of T.S.Eliot.
Bowie: Never read him.
Burroughs: (Laughs) It is very reminiscent of
'The Waste Land'. Do you get any of your ideas from
dreams?
Bowie: Frequently.
Burroughs: I get seventy per cent of mine
from dreams.
Bowie: There's a thing that, just as you go
to sleep, if you keep your elbows elevated you will never go
below the dream stage. And I've used that quite a lot and it
keeps me dreaming much longer than if I just relaxed.
Burroughs: I dream a great deal, and then
because I am a light sleeper, I will wake up and jot down just a
few words and they will always bring the whole idea back to
me.
Bowie: I keep a tape recorder by the bed and
then if anything comes I just say it into the tape recorder. As
for my inspiration, I haven't changed my views much since I
was about 12 really, I've just got a 12-year-old mentality.
When I was in school I had a brother who was into Kerouac and he
gave me On The Road to read when I was 12 years old. That's
still a big influence.
Copetas: The images that transpire are very
graphic, almost comic-booky in nature.
Bowie: Well, yes, I find it easier to write in
these little vignettes; if I try to get any more heavy, I find
myself out of my league. I couldn't contain myself in what I
say. Besides, if you are really heavier there isn't much more
time to read that much, or listen to that much. There's not
much point in getting any heavier.... there's too many things
to read and look at. If people read three hours of what
you've done, then they'll analyse it for seven hours and
come out with seven hours of their own thinking.... whereas if
you give them 30 seconds of your own stuff they usually still
come out with seven hours of their own thinking. They take hook
images of what you do. And they pontificate on the hooks. The
sense of the immediacy of the image. Things have to hit for the
moment. That's one of the reasons I'm into video; the
image has to hit immediately. I adore video and the whole cutting
up of it.
What are your projects at the moment?
Burroughs: At the moment I'm trying to
set up an institute of advanced studies somewhere in Scotland.
It's aim will be to extend awareness and alter consciousness
in the direction of greater range, flexibility and effectiveness
at a time when traditional disciplines have failed to come up
with viable solutions. You see, the advent of the space age and
the possibility of exploring galaxies and contacting alien life
forms poses an urgent necessity for radically new solutions. We
will be considering only non-chemical methods, with the emphasis
placed on combination, synthesis, interaction and rotation of
methods now being used in the East and West, together with
methods that are not at present being used to extend awareness or
increase human potentials.
We know exactly what we intend to do and how
to go about doing it. As I said, no drug experiments are planned
and no drugs other than alcohol, tobacco and personal medications
obtained on prescription will be permitted in the centre.
Basically, the experiments we propose are inexpensive and easy to
carry out. Things such as yoga-style meditation and exercises,
communication, sound, light and film experiments, experiments
with sensory deprivation chambers, pyramids, psychotronic
generators and Reich's orgone accumulators, experiments with
infrasound, experiments with dream and sleep.
Bowie: That sounds fascinating. Are you
basically interested in energy forces?
Burroughs: Expansion of awareness, eventually
leading to mutations. Did you read Journey Out of the Body ? Not
the usual book on astral projection. This American businessman
found he was having these experiences of getting out of the body
- never used any hallucinogenic drugs. He's now setting up
this astral air force. This psychic thing is really a rave in the
States now. Did you experience it much when you were there?
Bowie: No, I really hid from it purposely. I
was studying Tibetan Buddhism when I was quite young, again
influenced by Kerouac. The Tibetan Buddhist Institute was
accessible so I trotted down there to have a look. Lo and behold,
there's a guy down in the basement who's the head man in
setting up a place in Scotland for the refugees, and I got
involved purely on a sociological level - because I wanted to get
the refugees out of India, for they were having a really shitty
time of it down there, dropping like flies due to the change of
atmosphere from the Himalayas.
Scotland was a pretty good place to put them,
and then more and more I was drawn to their way of thinking, or
non-thinking, and for a while got quite heavily involved in it. I
got to the point where I wanted to become a novice monk, and
about two weeks before I was actually going to take those steps,
I broke up and went out on the streets and got drunk and never
looked back.
Burroughs: Just like Kerouac.
Bowie: Go to the States much?
Burroughs: Not since ' 71.
Bowie: It has changed, I can tell you, since
then.
Burroughs: When were you last back?
Bowie: About a year ago.
Burroughs: Did you see any of the porn films
in New York?
Bowie: Yes, quite a few.
Burroughs: When I was last back, I saw about
thirty of them. I was going to be a judge at the erotic film
festival.
Bowie: The best ones were the German ones; they
were really incredible.
Burroughs: I thought that the American ones
were still the best. I really like film.... I understand that you
may play Valentine Michael Smith in the film version of Stranger
in a Strange Land.
Bowie: No, I don't like the book much. In
fact, I think it is terrible. It was suggested to me that I make
it into a movie, then I got around to reading it. It seemed a bit
too flower-powery and that made me a bit wary.
Burroughs: I'm not that happy with the
book either. You know, science fiction has not been very
successful. It was supposed to start a whole new trend and
nothing happened. For the special effects in some of the movies,
like 2001, it was great. But it all ended there.
Bowie: I feel the same way. Now I'm doing
Orwell's 1984 on television; that's a political thesis
and an impression of the way in another country. Something of
that nature will have more impact on television. People having to
go out to the cinema is really archaic. I'd much rather sit
at home.
Burroughs: Do you mean the whole concept of
the audience?
Bowie: Yes, it is ancient. No sense of
immediacy.
Burroughs: Exactly, it all relates back to
image and the way in which it is used.
Bowie: Right. I'd like to start a TV
station.
Burroughs: There are hardly any programmes
worth anything anymore. The British TV is a little better than
American. The best thing the British do is natural history. There
was one last week with sea-lions eating penguins, incredible.
There is no reason for dull programmes, people get very bored
with housing projects and coal strikes.
Bowie: They all have an interest level of about
three seconds. Enough time to get into the commentator's next
sentence. And that is the premise it works on. I'm going to
put together all the bands that I think are of great value in the
States and England, then make an hour-long programme about them.
Probably a majority of people have never heard of these bands.
They are doing and saying things in a way other bands aren't.
Things like the Puerto Rican music at the Cheetah Club in New
York. I want people to hear musicians like Joe Cuba. He has done
things to whole masses of Puerto Rican people. The music is
fantastic and important. I also want to start getting Andy Warhol
films on TV.
Burroughs: Have you ever met Warhol?
Bowie: Yes, about two years ago I was invited
up to The Factory. We got in the lift and went up and when it
opened there was a brick wall in front of us. We rapped on the
wall and they didn't believe who we were. So we went back
down and back up again till finally they opened the wall and
everybody was peering around at each other. That was shortly
after the gun incident. I met this man who was the living dead.
Yellow in complexion, a wig on that was the wrong colour, little
glasses. I extended my hand and the guy retired, so I thought,
'The guy doesn't like flesh, obviously he's
reptilian.' He produced a camera and took a picture of me.
And I tried to make small talk with him, and it wasn't
getting anywhere.
But then he saw my shoes. I was wearing a pair
of gold-and-yellow shoes, and he says, 'I adore those shoes,
tell me where you got those shoes.' He then started a whole
rap about shoe design and that broke the ice. My yellow shoes
broke the ice with Andy Warhol.
I adore what he was doing. I think his
importance was very heavy, it's becoming a big thing to like
him now. But Warhol wanted to be clichi, he wanted to be
available in Woolworth's, and be talked about in that glib
type of manner. I hear he wants to make real films now, which is
very sad because the films he was making were the things that
should be happening. I left knowing as little about him as a
person as when I went in.
Burroughs: I don't think that there is
any person there. It's a very alien thing, completely and
totally unemotional. He's really a science fiction character.
He's got a strange green colour.
Bowie: That's what struck me. He's the
wrong colour, this man is the wrong colour to be a human being.
Especially under the stark neon lighting in The Factory.
Apparently it is a real experience to behold him in the
daylight.
Burroughs: I've seen him in all light and
still have no idea as to what is going on, except that it is
something quite purposeful. It's not energetic, but quite
insidious, completely asexual. His films will be the late-night
movies of the future.
Bowie: Exactly. Remember Pork? I want to get
that on to TV. TV has eaten up everything else, and Warhol films
are all that is left, which is fabulous. Pork could become the
next I Love Lucy, the great American domestic comedy. It's
about how people really live, not like Lucy, who never touched
dishwater. It's about people living and hustling to
survive.
That's what Pork is all about. A smashing
of the spectacle. Although I'd like to do my own version of
Sinbad The Sailor. I think that is an all-time classic. But it
would have to be done on an extraordinary level. It would be
incredibly indulgent and expensive. It would have to utilize
lasers and all the things that are going to happen in a true
fantasy.
Even the use of holograms. Holograms are
important. Videotape is next, then it will be holograms.
Holograms will come into use in about seven years. Libraries of
video cassettes should be developed to their fullest during the
interim. You can't video enough good material from your own
TV. I want to have my own choice of programmes. There has to be
the necessary software available.
Burroughs: I audio-record everything I
can.
Bowie: The media is either our salvation or our
death. I'd like to think it's our salvation. My
particular thing is discovering what can be done with media and
how it can be used. You can't draw people together like one
big huge family, people don't want that. They want isolation
or a tribal thing. A group of 18 kids would much rather stick
together and hate the next 18 kids down the block. You are not
going to get two or three blocks joining up and loving each
other. There are just too many people.
Burroughs: Too many people. We're in an
over-populated situation, but even with fewer people that would
not make them any less heterogeneous. They are just not the same.
All this talk about a world family is a lot of bunk. It worked
with the Chinese because they are very similar.
Bowie: And now one man in four in China has a
bicycle, and that is pretty heavy considering what they
didn't have before. And that's the miracle as far as
they're concerned. It's like all of us having a jet plane
over here.
Burroughs: It's because they are the
personification of one character that they can live together
without any friction. We quite evidently are not.
Bowie: It is why they don't need
rock-and-roll. British rock-and-roll stars played in China,
played a dirty great field, and they were treated like a
sideshow. Old women, young children, some teenagers, you name it,
everybody came along, walked past them and looked at them on the
stand. It didn't mean a thing. Certain countries don't
need rock-and-roll because they were so drawn together as a
family unit. China has its mother-father figure - I've never
made my mind up which - it fluctuates between the two. For the
West, Jagger is most certainly a mother figure and he's a
mother hen to the whole thing. He's not a cockadoodledoo;
he's much more like a brothel-keeper or a madame.
Burroughs: Oh, very much so.
Bowie: He's incredibly sexy and very
virile. I also find him incredibly motherly and maternal clutched
into his bosom of ethnic blues. He's a White boy from
Dagenham trying his damnedest to be ethnic. You see, trying to
tart the rock business up a bit is getting nearer to what the
kids themselves are like, because what I find, if you want to
talk in the terms of rock, a lot depends on sensationalism and
the kids are a lot more sensational than the stars themselves.
The rock business is a pale shadow of what the kids' lives
are usually like. The admiration comes from the other side.
It's all a reversal, especially in recent years. Walk down
Christopher Street and then you wonder exactly what went wrong.
People are not like James Taylor; they may be moulded on the
outside, but inside their heads is something completely
different.
Burroughs: Politics of sound.
Bowie: Yes. We have kind of got that now. It
has very loosely shaped itself into the politics of sound. The
fact that you can now subdivide rock into different categories
was something that you couldn't do ten years ago. But now I
can reel off at least ten sounds that represent a kind of person
rather than a type of music. The critics like being critics, and
most of them wish they were rock-and-roll stars. But when they
classify they are talking about people not music. It's a
whole political thing.
Burroughs: Like infrasound, the sound below
the level of hearing. Below 16 MHz. Turned up full blast it can
knock down walls for 30 miles. You can walk into the French
patent office and buy the patent for 40p. The machine itself can
be made very cheaply from things you could find in a junk
yard.
Bowie: Like black noise. I wonder if there is a
sound that can put things back together? There was a band
experimenting with stuff like that; they reckon they could make a
whole audience shake.
Burroughs: They have riot-control noise based
on these soundwaves now. But you could have music with
infrasound, you wouldn't necessarily have to kill the
audience.
Bowie: Just maim them.
Burroughs: The weapon of the Wild Boys is a
Bowie knife, an 18-inch bowie knife, did you know that?
Bowie: An 18-inch bowie knife.... you don't
do things by halves, do you? No, I didn't know that was their
weapon. The name Bowie just appealed to me when I was younger. I
was into a kind of heavy philosophy thing when I was 16 years
old, and I wanted a truism about cutting through the lies and all
that.
Burroughs: Well, it cuts both ways, you know,
double-edged on the end.
Bowie: I didn't see it cutting both ways
till now.
Craig Copetas, "Beat Godfather Meets Glitter Mainman"
Rolling StoneFebruary 28, 1974
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