How did Russell Crowe’s best friend become David Bowie’s drug dealer?
As one of music’s greatest chameleons, David Bowie was known for slipping into different characters and personas with the greatest of ease. While the likes of Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane were iconic for having positively shaped the singer’s public image, there was one alias that Bowie perhaps threw himself a little too far into, and that became notorious for how it dramatically altered him from being a whimsical glam spaceman into a drug-fuelled monochrome menace.
While he arguably made one of his most sonically daring albums in Station to Station while under the guise of his Thin White Duke persona, it also saw his cocaine addiction spiral out of control, and his behaviour became increasingly erratic during this period in the mid-1970s. The Thin White Duke had gotten too far into Bowie’s head, and the thin white lines were seemingly getting thicker and thicker as they became more detrimental to his well-being.
Drug use, especially cocaine, was rife in the music industry during this time, and in order to deal with the gruelling and hectic lifestyle of touring and recording on a near-constant basis, many musicians got sucked into the dark and depraved world that comes with excessive substance abuse. It was a choice that many artists lived by, and while the short-term effects might have offered an unbeatable pick-me-up, the long-term effects were far more devastating.
Bowie often acknowledged in his later years that he took an ungodly amount of fine powders during this period of his career and was often very candid about how it negatively impacted him. Given his excessive consumption of the drug, the cocaine had to have been coming from somewhere, and he’d have needed a regular supply to keep himself going. While Bowie’s post-cocaine years saw him continue to have a fruitful career, it would appear that his dealer also went on to clean up and find a path in life far from the drugs and depravity.
Switching to providing for the film industry, Mickey Castellano became an on-set costume fitter for the stars of Hollywood in his years after dishing out drugs to Bowie and appeared on the Australian chat show The Truth About Us alongside actor pal Russell Crowe in 2014, where he revealed this information about his sordid past.
The A Beautiful Mind and Gladiator actor said that Castellano had once told him that he “did two albums with Bowie and two albums with [Deep] Purple” during the 1970s, which Crowe initially believed to mean that he was a session musician at the time. When Castellano admitted that he had been their coke dealer, Crowe found himself dumbfounded by the claims and initially sceptical about their validity.
On one occasion when Crowe decided to ask Castellano along to a David Bowie concert, however, he recalled that while they were backstage, he spoke to Bowie and asked him if he could introduce him to his friend who apparently knew him “quite a long time ago”. According to Crowe’s account of the meeting, he recalled that “Bowie’s face went white. Like white as a sheet, like a ghost. He’s just standing there, and he goes, ‘Michael!’ And it’s like, holy shit, what am I witnessing here?”
The instant recognition between the two parties had stunned Crowe, but their reunion provided an amusing moment rather than an awkward one. Crowe continued: “Bowie is shaking, he’s like, ‘Michael, I don’t do drugs any more!’ and Michael’s like, ‘David, David, neither do I! You know, I’m 15 years clean!'”
While most people would say that having worked for the stars of Hollywood is quite the claim to fame to share with future generations, having regularly sold drugs to David Bowie is perhaps a step beyond the sort of story you’d sit the grandchildren on your lap for, even if it is pretty impressive.
