I am nervous and jumpy. Palms sweaty. Heart pounding. Throat dry. An unsettled lightness in my stomach, a dizziness that has been with me since my editor told me that I would be here, sitting in a studio in Soho three feet away from David Bowie.
It’s like floating.
There is a beam of light washing over his face from the high windows of the studio. It engulfs him, like stage lighting in a high school play set in heaven. He is wearing blue jeans and a woven blue-and-white cardigan, his long blond bangs falling into his eyes as he raises an oracular hand over his head and proclaims, “There is no God and man is a fool and that has always been the creed I stand by.”
We’ve been talking about Andy Warhol and Nietzsche and he just blurted it out. I smile uncomfortably, surprised by how quickly he got to the point. We are a long way from the higher power at an AA campout.
I know my job is to play the role of journalist, to fire off questions about the guitar on song three and the “process in the studio.” But nobody really cares about these things. They can make up their own minds. All people want to know is, What is he like? Like, is he cool or a bit of a dick? And if so, is he cool about being a dick? Do you think he would like me?
And all I want to know is the Secret. I know it’s not that simple, but there is a sense I carry that he guards it like a treasure, that he knows something magical and I have this one heartbreakingly brief moment to ask him. So I immediately decide to ignore my proper role as journalist, my fear that he might be offended if I do, and just ask him about that Secret, how he writes songs.
I blurt out a short speech about 2:00 A.M. songwriting sessions and my now abandoned book and my deepest wish, which is to sing for an audience, and just ask him how he turns words into music, how he distinguishes between songwriting and prose.
He nods, a wry, flat smile forming on his British mouth as he stands in that perfect light (How did he know where to stand? Is there a mark on the floor or something?), as if he’s heard this speech before.
“I think a prose writer can articulate ideas in a more straightforward way,” he says. “But with a musician, the words are like a plaster that I lay on this armature of music. I don’t see the words as carrying thoughts particularly. It’s more like an array of feathers which produce a pattern. And the totality of that pattern set against this armature of music is enough to express what I’m feeling.”
It sounds so simple when he says it. The music is a framework, the words are a pattern, together their purpose is to express the precise thing the songwriter feels.
“Do you ever feel alone in the world?” I ask him, because I feel like I can since we are floating through space together somewhere near Mars in this studio in New York City.
He cocks his head sideways and gives me a look. Or at least that’s how I imagine it, that I am speaking to the Wind and the Wind is telling me its secrets, or isn’t, or might.
“I think now we don’t have a God. We are completely and totally at sea. So I think we feel a lot more content to accept that life is chaos. There is no structure to it. There is no plan.”
I write that down: Chaos is good. Structure is bad. “My generation doesn’t even see that. The absence of a plan. Because it’s all we’ve ever known. This absence. This chaos.” I try not to stare at him.
“I don’t know what that must be like.”
“It’s like dancing at ground zero.”
He stands up to pace in front of me, turning quietly in my direction. I sense this oddly paternal feeling from him as he looks at me bent over my notebook.
“I remember when I was sixteen years old,” he says. “I was such an idealist about what could happen in the future. I can’t read whether you younger people can feel the idealism we felt back in the ’60s.”
I think of Chuck, the Old Man, the Imperial Marines with their guns, the School, the violence, the shame we carry from living without parents, the broken marriages and broken families and broken hearts, the failed attempts at changing the world, all the ways that dizzy optimism turned to dread, to disappointment, the feeling we had like we were growing up in the bombed-out craters of the 1960s.
He says, “So I wonder if it is harder for you to feel that there definitely are things we should all abide by.”
“I think I did when I was sixteen. But I spent the last few years feeling pretty fucked-up. So many things I thought were good, including parts of myself, turned out to be more complicated, more broken. And I can barely remember having a thought where love is just love, where there is peace and I feel like I deserve it, before all this contradiction in me came about.”
“Yeah, that contradiction really fucks you all up, doesn’t it?” He stares at me, his fingers clasped in front of his mouth.
“Yes.”
The beam of light from the window has completely surrounded his face so that I’m seeing double, the polite Englishman in front of me and the oracle who answers the riddle, the sky man fallen to earth. He looks at me very seriously.
“Well, write about the contradiction then.”
He goes to the wall-to-wall glass that separates the control room from a microphone in a sound booth and the conversation falls back into the familiar territory of record making, processes, influences. Soon a publicist leans in and points at her watch, which is my cue to leave. We shake hands and he pats me on the back kindly. He tells me it was lovely meeting me. He wishes me luck. If there was a ring, I would kiss it. An altar, and I would kneel.
I walk out to the elevator, down to the street in a daze. It’s dusk. The taxicabs are turning on their headlights, the fluorescent twinkling of a thousand skyscraper windows illuminating the sky above me. A wind blows through my thrift-store scarf and moppish hair as I turn down Canal Street thinking about the moment alone with him. Write about the contradiction.
There was nothing about bridges, pre-choruses, hooks, or repetition, nothing about vocal range or guitar effects, all the mundane things I usually think about. The basic insight was to just ignore those things and write a song that expresses exactly how I feel, no matter how contradictory. It was both simpler and infinitely harder than what I imagined he would say.
* * *
SIX MONTHS OF writing and rewriting, scribbling, and struggling later, I am sitting in a tiny hotel room across from Central Park having a drunken conversation with a polite, middle-aged man in eyeliner and smeared lipstick named Robert Smith.
He still has the look, the one from my Cure posters. That’s the first thing I thought when he walked into the room at a quarter to midnight. The stubble and makeup, the rat nest of hair, like a butterfly drunk on absinthe.
There is a bucket of beer cooling in the corner and after introductions and small talk, after the perfunctory discussion of who played what and where on the new record, after three or four beers from that cooler, after a publicist walked in and he waved her away saying, “We’re extending, we’re extending,” after we are pacing the room like two insomniacs—he letting me smoke, me pretending not to notice his constant rambling, stream-of-consciousness sentences, the endless questions he utters aloud, asking himself about the nature of his career, his life, the private moments I know so well (or imagine to) that brought me here—he stops squarely in the middle of the room, looks over at the tape recorder I’ve placed on the counter and says, “You people always wonder what I think about. But I think it’s dead obvious. So I always think, Well, how far can I go?”