The devil in an LA swimming pool: When David Bowie hired a witch
In the 1970s, David Bowie was shovelling so much Bolivian marching powder into his available orifices that sobriety threatened the economic stability of the global market.
Even when he eventually got clean, the lingering remnants of a narcotic onslaught, hitherto unknown in human history, rendered it impossible for him to wander past a sniffer dog without being accosted. His dark Thin White Duke era saw him subsumed by the decadent excesses of Hollywood, a place which he loathed, and his mind was bent to the point that it became as abstract as the concept of love.
Behind an artistic purple patch was a cocaine addiction measurable by the tonne, a bizarre diet of bell-peppers and milk befitting of a cable TV documentary, and an unwavering obsession with the Third Reich. On top of this caustic confluence of cocaine side-effects, was what Bowie believed to be a harrowing attack by demonic hell beasts, most notably in the form of his friend, musical collaborator, and apparent phantasm, Deep Purple’s Glenn Hughes.
The faux glamour and abundant nose-powder of Los Angeles was intoxicating. 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 […] 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.”
Three years later his thoughts had hardly mellowed. This time ‘The Starman’ opined: “The fucking place should be wiped off the face of the earth. 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.” Bear in mind, Bowie was living in this apparent hell.
He felt trapped there for some reason. As he further explained, “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.” In short, Bowie hated Hollywood, and this meant his time there was a curious carnival of chaos and decline.
One of the most peculiar chapters in his absurd West Coast story came when he had his swimming pool exorcised by a witch after he witnessed the devil doing breaststroke. Glenn Hughes is a bassist and singer known most notably for his work in Deep Purple and the funk-punk band Trapeze.
Speaking to Dylan Jones for his novel David Bowie: A Life, he documented his experiences with the rocker in ’74: “He was self-righteous, and he was driven at the time by an obsession with the Third Reich, and he was viewing that shit at my house.”
He goes on to explain, “He was so into the narcissism of Hitler. He didn’t want to be him, but he was fascinated by the Nazi movement.” These drug-fuelled demagogue binge-watching sessions spawned Bowie’s fascination with fascism, prompting him to infamously declare that “Adolf Hitler was one of the first rock stars,” in a 1976 interview with Playboy magazine. It was basic provocateur behavior from a psyche on the wane.
Away from the inciting remarks was an undeniably wacky symptom of substance abuse that requires a far less judicious approach of analysis. “He felt the pool in his LA home was haunted. He felt the devil was in the pool,” Hughes explains.
Oddly, though, the Deep Purple singer did seem to ratify that there were grounds for Bowie’s bizarre suspicion. He recalled one incident when “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.”
Confusingly, Hughes continues, “You might think, oh my god, these two fucking nincompoops. But on coke, you could talk yourself into seeing anything. Do yourself a favour, stay up for 72 hours, and you will see shit move.” Quite how that is ‘doing yourself a favour’ is debatable, but the pool bubbling incident certainly had an indelible impact on Bowie as the songsmith later had the watery home of the devil exorcised by a mystic New York witch named Walli Elmlark.
In a bid to seek the aptly named Walli’s services, Bowie contacted Cherry Vanilla at his management. He explained that the demonic beleaguering of his LA home had gotten too much and it threatened to derail his work. Ms Vanilla had to step in quickly. “He asked me to get him a white witch to take this curse off of him,” she recalled.
“He was serious, you know. And I actually knew somebody in New York who claimed she was a white witch. She was the only white witch I ever met,” Vanilla adds, far from alone in this regard. “So I put him in touch with her. I don’t know what ever happened to her. And I don’t know if she removed the curse. I guess she did.”
In a roundabout way, Vanilla’s assumption is correct. Soon after Walli visited the Starman’s pool, Bowie was ready to leave LA and turn over a new leaf. He absconded to Berlin – the heroin capital of Europe – with Iggy Pop, and slowly but surely they pieced their lives together, and the cocaine pile diminished.
As guitarist Carlos Alomar states, “David went to Berlin with Iggy for isolation. It was to humanise his condition, to say, ‘I’d like to forget my world, go to a café, have a coffee and read the newspaper.’ They couldn’t do that in America. Sometimes you just need to be by yourself with your problems. Sometimes you just wanna shut up.” And sometimes, you’ve just got to get the devil out of your swimming pool, so to speak.
