Watch David Bowie discuss his craft with The Turtles
In 1978, David Bowie sat down with two of the music industry’s most renowned oddballs, Mark Volman and Howard Kaylan of The Turtles, who, ten years earlier, had bagged themselves a hit with an infectious slice of pop called ‘Happy Together’. The conversation was broadcast live for the Canadian TV program 90 Minutes Live and saw Bowie, Flo & Eddie discuss the star’s creative process and work outside music.
By 1978, Bowie had left the world of glam rock behind and ventured into a new artistic era inspired by the stark minimalism of krautrock bands like Kraftwerk and Neu. Keen to expand into new fields amid his performance in Nicolas Roeg’s 1976 sci-fi movie The Man Who Fell To Earth, Bowie began searching for possible collaborators for a film script he was working on.
The film was to be a comedy, so Bowie tracked down Volman and Kaylan, who had developed a reputation for bizzare antics and quick-wittedness under pressure during their time with The Turtles. In the final days of March 1976, Bowie flew the pair to New York for a meeting to discuss his script, which was already over 700 pages long by that point. “It was a first-class journey that wound up at his Madison Square Garden concert, backstage,” Kaylan wrote in Shell Shocked. “Then we went to the Village for more of the same. Limos took us everywhere, although we got to see David for all of about ten minutes. Still, I don’t think there were any complaints about the trip. Whatever Bowie wanted.”
During their stay, Flo & Eddie recieved invitations to a screening of The Man Who Fell To Earth alongside two enormous scripts for a film called The Traveler. “The film was to deal with the very real alter ego that Bowie had created for himself, that of the Thin White Duke,” Kaylan recalled. “Eschewing air travel, David would only travel to and from America via ocean liner where, once aboard, he would assume a disposable two-week identity where his lines between fact and fiction blurred and he regaled the other passengers with amazing tales of his conquests and heroics.”
Kaylan and Volman were excited by this near-800-page “outline”, especially given that there seemed to be a lot of room for trippiness and wordplay. Sadly, the whole thing came to nothing. Well, not nothing. A year and a half after their first trip, the duo returned to New York to discuss the film in more detail. They met Bowie in the Mayfair hotel and spent the next two days discussing pretty much anything but the script. One of their conversations was captured for 90 Minutes Live, after which Flo & Eddie left New York and Bowie abandoned The Traveler for good.
