The singer David Bowie considered his best friend: “A great relationship”
There aren’t many artists who could ever have the kind of iconic status that David Bowie has.
Everyone has tried their hand at sounding different every single time they’ve made a record, but the whole point of Bowie’s music was to try and go outside the norm and make the kinds of songs that no one else would have ever imagined back in the day. The whole point was for him to make tunes that challenged everyone’s perception of what a rock star could be, and he wasn’t the only one in town once the glam rock scene started exploding all across England in the early 1970s.
Granted, looking at Bowie solely for the music that he made in the 1970s is a gross oversimplification. Every single one of his records offered new horizons for him, and even if he cut himself off before the 1990s, he had more than a few periods that left Ziggy Stardust somewhere in the rearview, whether that was his pop star period or his time working in Berlin deconstructing music.
He didn’t feel the need to make glam rock for the rest of his life, and if we’re completely honest, he was already starting to spin his wheels by the end of Diamond Dogs. He had a lot more ideas to work with, and he was going to spend the rest of his days trying to do whatever he could to match what he had done a few years prior. But that didn’t mean he left his friends behind, either.
Tony Visconti was still one of the best producers that he could have asked for around this time, and even outside of the traditional rock and roll norms, Bowie felt that he had a kindred spirit in him. Mick Ronson may have fallen by the wayside and moved on to different projects, but whenever Bowie thought back to that time, he would never fail to get wistful when talking about the way that he and Marc Bolan used to work.
Bolan was already every bit the star that he talked himself up to be when he was making T Rex, and while he and Bowie met while painting a house, ‘The Starman’ knew that he was looking at a star. Not everything that he said always made the most sense, but even with his cool gibberish, Bolan could leave Bowie absolutely stunned every single time they went out together in their prime.
And despite Bolan having long since departed this world, Bowie still considered him one of his greatest friends in the business for the rest of his life, saying, “We became firm friends again up until his death. I think Marc was still my best friend at that particular time up until he died. It was a great tragedy what happened to him. But it was a great relationship. He was incredibly arrogant, but most enchantingly arrogant, most acceptable.”
A lot of Bowie’s work was going to go miles above the glam rock scene, but the reason why a song like ‘The Jean Genie’ still works so well is because of the influence from Bolan. That kind of bluesy swagger that he had alongside all of his outfits and glitter was outrageous, and there still aren’t that many people who seem to fit the bill of a rockstar any better than he did when he was working on his classics.
So while Bolan deserves a place in rock and roll heaven already, Bowie saw him as more than just the free-spirited wild man. Bolan was a friend and one of the most pleasant people to hang around with, and when you see how cutthroat the industry can be, you’ll want to hang onto those people with everything you’ve got.
