“The most vile piss-pot”: The American city David Bowie wanted to wipe “off the face of the earth”
They call Los Angeles the City of Angels, David Bowie didn’t find it to be that exactly, quite the opposite, in fact.
Strange things happened for ‘The Starman’ in Los Angeles, but then again, it is full of strange folks – not my words but Joni Mitchell’s. The folk star claims that it contains the kookiest crackpots in the whole entire world. Clearly, she’d never been to Sunderland.
Mitchell once claimed to have read the following passage in a dog-eared book: “Ask anyone in America where the craziest people live, and they’ll tell you California. Ask anyone in California where the craziest people live, and they’ll say, Los Angeles. Ask anyone in Los Angeles where the craziest people live and they’ll tell you Hollywood. Ask anyone in Hollywood where the craziest people live, and they’ll say Laurel Canyon. And ask anyone in Laurel Canyon where the craziest people live, and they’ll say Lookout Mountain. So I bought a house on Lookout Mountain.”
While Bowie might have been a self-professed crazy person himself in the early 1970s, even he couldn’t fit in. Instead, he found himself just getting stranger. Hunter S Thompson might have written, “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro,” but what happens when the weird are already pro, Hunter? What the hell happens then?
Well, as Bowie found out to his own cost in the insidious cesspit of fame’s fairground (again not my words, I’m paraphrasing Bowie), you don’t turn into an even bigger pro… you end up hiring a witch to exorcise your possessed swimming pool while shovelling enough marching powder up your schnoz to supply the House of Commons for at least a month.
He found the sweltering Californian spot to be in keeping with the views of one of his first heroes, Jack Kerouac. As the On The Road novelist drove around the United States on his seven-year amble searching to “find IT”, whatever ‘it’ was, he would stop in sticky Los Angeles on many occasions.
On one trip, as the golden era of Hollywood cinema was slowly handing over the cultural crown of America to the boom of rock ‘n’ roll, Kerouac found himself in some lowly motel and mused: “I could hear everything, together with the hum of my hotel neon. I never felt sadder in my life. LA is the loneliest and most brutal of American cities; New York gets godawful cold in the winter. But there’s a feeling of wacky comradeship somewhere in the streets. LA is a jungle.”
Bowie was lost in this wilderness. He simultaneously fell into the clutches of gaudy LA’s debauched side and despaired, but he also revelled in the way that icons could be crafted in an instant in the city. He would relish the notion of, “I’m an instant star, just add water,” and the sense of the American pop culture dream while also seeing through the whole thing as a plastic facsimile, devoid of any real artistry.
This odd mix proved maddening to Bowie in both senses. Aside from the provocative remarks he was constantly making in the press at the time, there was another undeniably wacky symptom of his substance abuse unfurling at hiome. Feeling creatively displaced, he lost sight of reality. “He felt the pool in his LA home was haunted. He felt the devil was in the pool,” his former friend Glenn Hughes explains.
“The wind was howling, [and the pool started to] bubble like a Jacuzzi […] I swear to you I have a pool, and I have never seen it bubble before. That pool was fucking bubbling,” Hughes continued, evidently intoxicated rather frequently at the time, too.
The effects of the drugs Bowie was ransacking, the occult literature he was voraciously reading, and the malignant miasma that embalmed his LA neighbourhood, stemming from the horrific scene of the Charles Manson Family murders only a few doors down, all combined and whipped Bowie into a world plagued by malevolent spectres from both the sphere of hell and the greedy music industry.
As Bowie said himself of this tricky LA period of his life, “My other fascination was with the Nazis and their search for the Holy Grail. […] I paid with the worst manic depression of my life. […] My psyche went through the roof,” he said. “It just fractured into pieces. I was hallucinating twenty-four hours a day.”
That sound harrowing enough – so harrowing, in fact, that it’s a miracle he made it through – but he even goes on to say, “I felt like I’d fallen into the bowels of the earth.” Needless to say, Bowie did not take well to Los Angeles. As David Buckley writes, Bowie had shunned the plastic world around him and regressed into a state of paranoia, “living a cocooned existence, disconnected from the real world.”
But what is the real world in LA? By rights, there shouldn’t even be a city there at all. It was built on the elusive lustre of unsustainable Gold and that fleeting dream seems to have forever persisted in various malignant forms. This was a notion that proved frankly dangerous as far as Bowie was concerned. In 1977, he railed, “It’s the most vile piss-pot in the world.”
Not content with that butting criticism, he continued, “It’s a movie that is so corrupt with a script that is so devious and insidious. It’s the scariest movie ever written. You feel a total victim there, and you know someone’s got the strings on you.” But at least it’s got good weather. Some of us don’t even have a pool to be possessed, David.
But the sunshine was far outstripped for the Starman and he LA always remained within swiping distance for the singer. Three years on from calling it a “vile piss-pot” his thoughts had hardly mellowed. This time ‘The Starman’ opined: “The fucking place should be wiped off the face of the earth.”
Nothing riled him more, and in brutal fashion, he continued, “To be anything to do with rock and roll and to go and live in Los Angeles is I think just heading for disaster. It really is. Even Brian Eno, who’s so adaptable and quite as versatile as I am now living in strange and foreign environments, he couldn’t last there more than six weeks. He had to get out. But he was very clever. He got out much earlier than I did.”
Maybe Bowie simply shunned the draw of the sun, didn’t take to the delicious taste of In ‘n’ Out Burger at a time when his diet was solely bell peppers and milk, and wasn’t one for the beach, because there are plenty of good folks who would disagree with him on this one. But unlike the Dude, he simply could not abide by LA. He was the wrong man in the wrong place for its undeniably crooked drawbacks.
