1971: The Year That Music Changed Everything (2021) s01e03 Episode Script
Changes
I came to London in March of 1970.
There's something about my life about getting to places slightly late.
I went to Apple for some reason or other.
They had already done the concert on the roof.
I missed that.
And the building was kind of hollow and empty.
And then, all of a sudden, it was over.
The small gathering on Savile Row is only the beginning.
The event is so momentous that historians may one day view it as a landmark in the decline of the British Empire.
The Beatles are breaking up.
The Beatles have changed so many lives that the need for them still exists.
The hope that they represent still exists.
And as long as that exists then they have to exist.
We're all in it together.
If the Beatles don't exist, you don't exist.
It was a horrible feeling that it might be all over.
They inspired that whole generation to go and conquer the world.
The whole youth culture could not have happened without them.
What I feared was the establishment was gonna claw back pop music to where it had been pre-Beatles.
Awful, awful light entertainment.
I've been sitting here all day Thinking As we got into 1971, you could see they did not want the counterculture.
They did not want youth movements.
It was them and us.
Now my days are gone Memories linger on Thoughts of when I was boy The dream's over.
- In 1971 - Music said something.
The world was changing.
We were creating the 21st century in 1971.
Myself and, I guess, a certain contingent of musicians at the beginning of the '70s wanted to manufacture a new kind of vocabulary about what rock music was and could become.
The history of rock could be recycled in a different way.
We were fed up with the hippies.
We wanted to go somewhere else.
I was writing for Rolling Stone, and a friend of mine who had become the West Coast publicist for Mercury Records called and asked if I wanted to interview this obscure English artist that they were trying to publicize because he was unknown.
I'd never heard of him.
And he sent me The Man Who Sold The World which I didn't really like very much at all, but I wasn't about to turn down a trip to San Francisco.
So I went.
I remember he emerged from the plane and he was wearing a dress and carrying a purse.
And I felt terribly intimidated.
You know, he was really pretty.
KSTN, KSTN-FM Stockton.
Your official station.
David is with us.
How you doin', David? - Good to see you.
- Thank you very much.
Have you been in this country before? No, it's the first time in the States.
- Wow.
How do you like it so far? - Yeah.
Great.
Incredible.
It says here that you are one of those Englishmen who has happened upon the pop scene and just captured the hearts and minds of minds of nearly all of the audiences that have heard him.
- Isn't that wonderful? - Wow.
Yeah.
- Did you know that? Yeah.
- I'm quite a guy.
I mean, being truthful, his career was not doing well in those days.
He was kind of a cult artist, and his sales weren't that high at all.
After we made The Man Who Sold The World, he went with a manager called Tony Defries.
And Tony Defries didn't like the album.
And he sacked our band.
Even me.
I lost him.
I lost contact with him for at least a year.
The idea was to create a new entity.
We were deconstructing David and reconstructing Bowie.
That was the footing we were on in 1971.
I'm reading this bio here because I just received it here.
And some interesting things about you here.
Did you know this, that your name was David Robert Jones Oh, yeah.
but that Davy Jones of the Monkees claimed the name - Yeah.
- and you became David Bowie.
There was one party in the Hollywood Hills that was intended to introduce him to the LA cognoscenti, but the cognoscenti were greatly outnumbered by these starlet types.
And they didn't know what to make of him.
They were incredulous.
A guy in a dress sitting in the lotus position singing Jacques Brel songs.
I kind of wished that he'd consulted with me, because I I would've said, "No Jacques Brel.
They're not gonna get it.
" And they didn't.
An hour into the party, everyone hearing that an Andy Warhol superstar was having a party up the road, everybody essentially left the Bowie party including Bowie.
I don't know what all that was about.
I landed there, and I found that all I could do was radio shows and the odd private house where I would play for whoever we could get in.
So I can't really give you an honest opinion of what I thought of American audiences because I didn't see any.
The music industry has not been easy on weirdos ever.
And in 1971, he was struggling very much.
Trying to find where he was going, whether he ever would.
He'd been rejected and rejected, he'd made records that hadn't gone anywhere, and then just been ridiculed as a freak in a dress.
Most people would've given up.
By then, everything was so polarized in America.
People had burnt out, and they're cynical and they're angry.
The "peace and flowers" love thing was well over.
Looking back on it now, it's hard to understand how bad it was.
The jury hearing the charges against Charles Manson and three girl members of his so-called "Family" brought in its verdict this afternoon.
All were found guilty of murder in the first degree.
To his family of followers, Manson was a kind of god.
But to the California police, he was something quite different.
A car thief, pimp and Satanist who'd masterminded eight murders, at least.
Members of the so-called "Family" talked to a BBC 24 Hours team soon after Manson had been arrested.
Well, when I first met him, the man talked to me, and he says, "Why don't you come up? And the rules are that, you know, there is no rules.
" This drawing is a drawing of awareness.
And I think that Charles Manson is the most totally aware person alive.
You tried to show Charlie your picture? But sadly enough, you know, like, he's aware of everything that's truly evil as well as everything that's truly good, and I feel that he's a victim.
At that point in time if you had long hair, you were judged immediately.
You were a drug addict.
You were a freak.
You were an enemy of the state.
So parents and children hated each other.
America, there's a phenomenon of parents thinking that that they depict satanic qualities in children.
And really, they don't like their children.
So many parents really hate their children in the United States.
Did you read in the paper the other day about that father in a western state? His son grew long hair, and the father got angry.
The son refused to cut it, and he went into the bedroom and got a shotgun and shot his son dead.
Just over long hair.
We moved to LA when it was all groovy, peace and love, flowers and bubbles, and people thought that we were kind of a joke as we looked so, you know, heavy and sinister and threatening and everything.
And then Charles Manson happened, and the demise of the Beatles happened.
The timing just fell into place for what we were doing.
Right now there's a young man who calls himself Alice Cooper on stage.
The hippie thing, I thought, was extremely phony.
I just thought it got syrupy as hell.
"Everybody love everybody.
" You know, 'cause everybody was on drugs.
Come on.
You know, quit bullshitting.
You know, this thing is really stupid.
We had been concentrating on doing this avant-garde music.
We didn't even try to write hit singles until it became obvious that we weren't gonna be eating unless we did.
You know, Alice has always been very hip to what's happening, and we knew that we wanted to appeal to kids.
And we were thinking, "What is the target audience for record-buying public in America?" And it was 18 years old.
Okay, here on The Barry Richards Thing, we have Alice Cooper with us, and that's the name of the whole group, right? - Yeah.
- It's also your name.
- Yes, it's my name.
- Are you gonna do "Eighteen?" Yeah, yeah, "Eighteen.
" All right, this is the new 45 from Alice Cooper, "Eighteen.
" We were shocked that it was a hit.
But it was so simple and so "duh" that it worked on the radio.
And the song was giving the 18-year-old guy, at least, a voice.
Lines form on my face and hands Lines form from the ups and downs I'm in the middle without any plans I'm a boy and I'm a man I'm eighteen And I don't know what I want Eighteen I just don't know what I want Eighteen, I gotta get away I've gotta get outta this place I'll go runnin' in outer space Oh yeah For years now, the young have been drifting away to a world of their own, unable or unwilling to accept what the established order has to offer.
They wonder aloud about a system that produces material riches and creates emotional poverty.
A system that leaves many of its young with no sense of self-worth, no sense of importance in the home, no useful role in society.
'Cause I'm eighteen I get confused every day Eighteen I just don't know what to say When you have that hit single it's the Willy Wonka golden key because it means you're generating money.
And so everybody's listening now, and you're not this freak show.
You're suddenly viable.
We represented the great disenfranchised.
It was a new audience.
Britain, so they say, is now rather like the morning after the night before.
The party's well and truly over.
The image or, if you like, myth of the swinging '60s has given way to the sober '70s.
We've grown up a little, all of us.
And there has been a change, and we are a bit freer and all that, but it's the same game.
Nothing's really changed, you know.
People are living in fucking poverty with fucking rats crawling over 'em.
It's the same, only I'm 30 and a lot of people have got long hair, that's all.
Three boys in their early teens, and one aged 11, growing up in the East End of London.
Already these four lives are lives at risk.
Already the future shadows them.
Do you ever think about getting old and everything like that? Think about? I am old.
I already think I'm old, you know.
For the new generation coming in, there was a vacuum.
Bands like the Stones, and the Who, and obviously the Beatles, had led us through the '60s.
But the younger generation were looking to find what they loved.
The younger kids feel really kind of neglected, you know.
They haven't got their own music.
They haven't got their own culture.
They haven't got a say yet in anything.
I remember seeing A Hard Day's Night in Brooklyn, and I saw that London where it was the Beatles going to drinking clubs and gambling clubs and all that.
And I was very disappointed when I arrived to see that the UK was pretty old-fashioned.
It was actually quite a drab place.
It was time to come up with something different, but the Beatles were a hard act to follow.
The thing is, the Beatles weren't just a pop group.
They weren't popular entertainers.
They were artists in the real sense of the word.
So as we got into 1971, if you were a pop group with screaming girls you were not gonna get good reviews in Melody Maker and NME.
The musical snobbery was really growing at that time.
It's much more fulfilling nowadays because the audiences are much more educated.
The people are very aware.
Even some of the chicks are aware of what kind of strings and things are used on certain bass guitars and things like that.
Love comes to you and you follow Bands were taking themselves a bit too seriously.
They were becoming slightly pretentious, overblown.
And it was rather frowned on by some of the more superior rock critics to have hit singles.
Sharp distance When I started on Radio 1, I was given an acetate of a single that I could take onto my first program and play as an exclusive.
And it was "Ride a White Swan.
" He was one of the few people at that moment who was driven to appeal to 13, 14, 15-year-olds.
There was very few people making good singles, I think, you know.
So that's when I figured I ought to make some singles.
'Cause I like singles.
It's, like, a three-minute adrenaline buzz.
Wear a tall hat like a druid In the old days Wear a tall hat and a tattooed gown Ride a white swan Like the people of the Beltane Wear your hair long, babe You can't go wrong Catch a bright star And a-place it on your forehead Say a few spells And baby, there you go Take a black cat And a-sit it on your shoulder And in the morning you'll know All you know, oh After David went with Tony Defries, I just blanked him from my consciousness.
And Marc was the one I went with.
They were friends, not that they were in collusion with each other, but they both started playing at the same time with their image as pop stars.
Marc was a chameleon.
When I first met him, he was a hippie sitting playing an acoustic guitar on a Persian rug, you know.
He had emerged in '65 when he was a mod.
And now Marc was beginning to move across into that blurred line, androgynous look.
A sort of embryonic '70s rock and roll style.
I always remember hearing "Ride a White Swan" on the radio and thinking that he was amazing.
And then seeing him.
And he was the first person to really wear the eye shadow and do the glam thing.
And that's how he walked around.
That was Marc in the street, when he came to dinner.
And everything that Marc did was fun.
It was a time when most of the rock and roll bands were very masculine.
The idea of dressing androgynously was new and refreshing.
But, you know, when it came to music, he had a '50s mind.
He jumped back a generation, playing Chuck Berry guitar.
And he was writing rock and roll songs.
When "White Swan" was a hit, I realized that something was changing.
You know, the kids were getting a bit younger, and they were selling out the concerts.
Which they hadn't done before, to be honest.
And then I put out "Hot Love" and it went straight to number one.
And then all the audiences were were predominantly chicks mostly after my balls.
Which was very cute.
Well, she's my woman of gold And she's not very old, ah ha ha She's my woman of gold And she's not very old, ah ha ha I don't mean to be bold But may I hold your hand? Once Marc got his first hit single the hippie emphasis on spirituality was virtually abandoned.
And he started to be very sexual.
Well, she ain't no witch And I love the way she twitch, ah ha ha I'm her twopenny prince And I give her hot love I talked with some of the fans that came to see the shows.
A lot of 12, 13, 14, 15-year-old girls.
And I asked, "What is it about Marc?" And some of them were crying in their efforts to express their emotion for him.
I've come out of the front door of the Newcastle City Hall to speak with some of the people who saw the concert tonight.
- Did you enjoy it? - He was gentle and pretty What particularly do you like about them? They're just lovely, and gorgeous - Did you enjoy the concert tonight? - And I think he's got beautiful hair.
- You enjoyed it did you? - It was lovely! For the younger girls, you know, the new generation coming in, he was just so exciting because they wanted liberation.
Liberation of expression and liberation of thought.
Yet another row about sex education.
The schoolchildren and their parents, their teachers, are all, today, in the middle of an atmosphere where information about sex has never been freer.
The upheaval that followed the making by Dr.
Martin Cole of the sex education film for adolescents called Growing Up has opened, once again, all the old thorny debates about just how much children want and need to know, ought to be told, by whom and at what age.
Boys and girls often have sexual intercourse long before they are ready to have babies.
Beneath the bebop moon There is nothing wrong with this, and many people believe that sexual experience in adolescents is essential for normal development.
People have been getting along very well since the dawn of time without sex education.
And why, in the last four or five years, has this been thrust upon us? Early in adolescence, a boy will notice that he can become sexually excited.
I was shocked by the sheer clinical joylessness of the film.
Sex should be fun, it should be thrilling, it should be exciting.
And that film, I think, might almost put people off for life.
People want to know the facts.
I like the straightforward approach.
And I think this is what's necessary.
We don't want your morals.
But now you're 15.
What is it you want to know about sex that any teacher can tell you? It's the positions.
Stuff like that.
And the way how it's done.
You want technical instructions? Yeah.
Do you want to know about relationships? Emotion? Love? Well, it would be helpful.
I had come to London about a year before then.
I basically left America because I couldn't stand being there anymore.
But it was also an odd time in London.
The London underground press was still in full ramp and swing.
And Portobello was the scene.
And yet, you know, Britain had a conservative government then.
People were trying to keep the lid on.
OZ magazine, like a number of other underground publications in Britain, symbolized the clash between two conflicting notions of morality.
There can be few people these days who haven't heard the phrase "underground press.
" Frequently they are publications which shock and offend many people.
He's a journalist who started the controversial underground magazine, OZ.
It seems to me there's an attitude towards sex which is different.
It's now become much more libertarian and guiltless.
OZ, for example, is extraordinarily hard to read.
Not merely is it hung up on drugs to an extent which is quite amazing to anyone who's not actually on drugs, but it is physically difficult to read.
OZ was another planet.
Provocative, outrageous, sexual.
It was all consciously over the top.
I never gave it a lot of serious credibility.
But then somebody got his or her nose out of joint that OZ had crossed a line in terms of obscenity.
I have several members of the underground press here in London with me today.
I gather it's becoming a hazardous occupation.
Jim, you want to tell us about the problems OZ has been having? Just before Christmas, we had been busted big time after we'd invited schoolchildren to help edit an issue of OZ.
That issue was intended for - young-ish readerships.
It was - No, it wasn't.
It was intended for the usual OZ readerships.
That's the whole point.
The police are trying to say it was intended to go into the schools specifically and to disrupt schoolchildren.
It was merely produced by schoolchildren.
We just got 'em 48 pages of, you know, color and glossy paper and they could put in what they wanted.
And basically, that's what's got us into all of this trouble.
Well we were quite shocked with one or two things that they wanted to do, but whatever they wanted to do was fine by us.
And they all saw it as a wonderful opportunity.
The judiciary and the government still hadn't caught on that there had been a tectonic shift in the way young people thought and acted.
OZ was doing the unthinkable, actually telling teenage kids, "Don't get nervous about sex.
" At that time, conservatives of one sort or another went completely berserk.
At last, the permissive society is under attack.
This Manchester rally reaffirms the stand which Christians are taking against the rising tide of pornography.
We believe in purity and love in sexual life.
We are especially concerned about pornographic literature on sale in this city.
Welling inside the British people is the desire to rebuild the moral fiber of this country, which has been under attack, There's no doubt about that.
It's been under attack.
People began to talk about this as a turning point in society.
It was a sort of crisis of moral authority.
I was working as a secretary at OZ.
It just did feel that the establishment was out to get them.
Freedom of expression seemed to me a basic human right.
You know, unarguably something we had to defend, even if sometimes it went beyond the bounds of what I liked.
I really did not like the cover of that issue.
I thought, "How could Jim and Felix have chosen that cover?" Look, we didn't think it through, frankly.
We had the idea of using the double spread of the naked blue lesbians.
And when it was suggested, we both began to laugh.
It was sort of erotic, but it was just a fantasy, really.
But we hadn't even looked at it properly.
And then I noticed the blow job.
And we said, "Oh, we'll put one of the pictures of the schoolkids in front of that.
That'll settle that.
" We had already been charged with publishing obscene material, which was just a very minor charge.
But they had decided to up the ante in changing it to a very serious offense of conspiracy to corrupt public morals.
To implant in the minds of children improper and unsavory desires, or something like that.
We think it's disgusting fascism.
And Yoko and I are gonna propose to Richard Neville, so then he can marry us, and then he'd be British and they can't deport him.
So that's solved that one.
It was amazing how much support there was in the youth and artists and musicians.
Bands were part of the counterculture.
They were part of us.
And I think a lot of the music reflected the complex position of our younger generation.
Don't you know you're driving Your mamas and papas insane? Oh, you pretty things Don't you know you're driving Your mamas and papas insane? Let me make it plain Gotta make way for the Homo Superior Look out at your children See their faces in golden rays Don't kid yourself they belong to you They're the start of the coming race The earth is a bitch We've finished our news Homo Sapiens have outgrown their use All the strangers came today And it looks as though They're here to stay I'd just got back from America.
And I'd just moved to Haddon Hall in Beckenham.
And everything seemed all systems go.
"All right, I understand what I've got to do now.
" At the weekends we'd be down at Haddon Hall.
And David was just busy writing his songs, always.
By then, he was already starting work on the new album.
And, you know, David was absorbing.
I mean, he was like a sponge, taking what he needed from other people and making it his own.
For me, it felt like absolutes were breaking down.
As much as I admired artists who perceived music as being all of their life, for me, personally, I wanted to do something more, something broader, which brought in other art forms.
And make rock more representative of what contemporary culture felt like.
The '60s were a coda to the rest of the century.
It was like the questions were raised then, but still, there was an idealism which, in itself, had its own absolutes.
And its own belief that there was an answer to particular things.
And I think the '70s showed conclusively that everything we knew was wrong.
I think it's important to point out the fact that a culture is an experiment.
It may work and it may not.
And we have to start asking that question about our own way of life.
People were born here, lived here, got married from here, brought their own families up again here.
I don't think you'll ever get the community feeling that we had here.
You'll never get it in flats because they're not real.
This is all sort of artificial now.
In 1970, it was stated that there were nearly two million unfit houses.
A state of limbo, when the present is not permanent and the future only an unguaranteed promise.
The children play in dirt and filth, and are happy because they know no better.
Me being a World War II baby, as time went by in my youth, things just got better and better.
So I had no understanding that things might get bad again.
People were trapped.
And that's what the important thing about glam rock is.
They took this on and things changed, things shifted.
Young kids have principles.
They don't like what their parents like, and they don't even like what their older siblings like.
In 1971, all of a sudden the more you glittered, the bigger your personality.
T.
Rex! T.
Rex! "You've got the teeth of the hydra upon you.
You're dirty, sweet and you're my girl.
" That's nice.
"Wear your unclean new vest and shoes and cuffs full of eagles.
You're dirty, sweet and you're my girl.
" "Get on.
Get it on, get it on, get it on.
" Well, you're dirty and sweet Clad in black, don't look back And I love you You're dirty and sweet, oh yeah Well, you're slim and you're weak You've got the teeth Of the hydra upon you You're dirty, sweet and you're my girl Get it on, bang a gong, get it on Get it on, bang a gong, get it on He asked me to do Top of the Pops and I said, "Absolutely.
" He wrote very simple, classic rock 'n' roll.
But Marc was so outrageously cocky and fabulous.
He would come around and say, "I sold a million records this morning.
" And I went, "Great! How fabulous for you.
" Well, you're built like a car My first experience of seeing girls screaming was at a concert in Croydon.
It suddenly exploded.
I have some footage I took on Super 8 film.
It's backstage, it's in black-and-white, and a girl is biting a piece of Marc's hair.
That was the beginning of the craziness.
Get it on, bang a gong, get it on Marc was like someone who was traveling through.
Get it on, bang a gong, get it on He was just stopping off for a couple of years and then going away.
And of course he went away too soon.
I've been reading recently, Marc, an article which suggests that you are the successor to the Beatles.
Well, you're windy and wild You've got the blues in your shoes And your stockings You're windy and wild, oh yeah Well, you're built like a car You've got a hubcap diamond star halo You're dirty, sweet and you're my girl "Sex is a part of it, but it's sex by courtesy of the magic prince," and I presume that means you.
"Who is going to deflower the young virgin - in an atmosphere of blissful romance.
" - That sounds nice.
I like that.
I am talking to a sick nation! A sick nation! I think the whole of what's called "Western civilization" is totally decadent to the point that I have no expectation whatever that it will recover any moral sanity.
I was wondering which people you thought you appealed to most, or whether it's, you know, really just young girls.
They're not all just young girls here.
I mean, I think They are mostly young girls here, Marc.
Let's not get away from the fact.
I'd say there are 90% young girls.
Yeah, 200 people.
You know.
200 people.
I have nothing against them.
I'm just saying that they are mostly girls.
It's very nice.
Marc was very pop.
And he loved it.
He liked being a star.
But maybe the image tripped him up in a way.
It's very hard to straddle going from a pop sensibility into being taken seriously.
Really difficult.
But Marc Bolan enabled young guys to see that they could express themselves like that.
That guys would now wear makeup.
Which had not been allowed before, absolutely not.
Unforgettable television experience coming your way.
This will either knock you out or offend you, one of the two.
We don't care which as long as you react.
This is where we separate the teenagers from the adults as we present the always outrageous and sometimes offensive Alice Cooper.
Our attitude was you grab 'em by the throat.
You're gonna talk about us tomorrow.
That was really our attitude.
We weren't gonna be subtle, we were gonna be sensational.
It got to the point where if you go to a concert, all you're gonna see is a guitar solo.
A drum solo.
You know, how far can that go? You wanna see something that you're gonna go home and talk about and scare your parents with.
1971, that dark character really started to take hold and become the powerful image of what we were doing.
Body We would do the song "Black Juju" with Alice in the makeup, the spider eyes, and the middle of the song would bring everything down.
Click, click, tick, tick.
And Alice would be swinging a watch, hypnotizing the audience.
Bodies need rest.
We all need our rest.
Sleep an easy sleep.
Rest.
It didn't work every night.
Sometimes you'd hear hecklers, but other nights you could hear a pin drop.
Rest.
Every single person would be staring at Alice.
Rest.
Rest.
Give your evil soul to yourself.
And open your eyes and be rather than seem to be.
But come on back to us.
A form of conditioning or reconditioning or restructuring of a group of young people to believe in crime, and violence and murder.
You have eyes.
Open them.
After the show, people would come back and they would tell us what that all meant.
They had figured it all out.
We wouldn't try to explain it because there wasn't really an explanation other than, you know, it's just a visual theatric, that's all.
But we had tapped into this powerful thing.
Sometime in early '71, the proposition was put to David by the organizers of the Glastonbury Fair that they'd like him to perform.
The train stopped miles from where Glastonbury was.
We had to walk to get to the place.
David's wearing his big floppy hat and his floppy trousers and his long hair.
We walk down the road and eventually we get to a field where the festival is gonna happen.
Which has turned into pretty much unscheduled chaos.
It tends to be a bit muddy.
Have you got any boots with you? You do? Nice.
Very much looking forward to seeing you.
And see you later on tonight.
And it will be beautiful, I promise you.
Girl with a heart That keeps on changing Girl with a mind that's moving on Picking up on things That life's afforded Loosen up on teathers Foreseen she's on You don't know Come on, now, keep on changing Come on, girl, little I want the jive Come on, love 'Cause it ain't gonna bother me David went on early in the morning of the next day.
At dawn.
And he was gonna perform new material.
I think you know how I feel at the moment.
It's fucking cold as hell.
It's gettin' a bit better.
We were there at 5:00 in the morning and the sun was literally just starting to peep up.
And he's up there on the stage.
Most people were still asleep or heading for a place to have a pee or something.
I still don't know What I was waiting for And my time was running wild A million dead-end streets and Every time I thought I'd got it made It seemed the taste was not so sweet Now I placed myself to face me But I've never caught a glimpse Of how the others must see the faker I'm much too fast to take the test Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes Ch-changes Don't have to be a richer man Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes Ch-changes Just gonna be a different man Time may change me But I can't trace time Thank you.
Yeah.
There are many people who remember Glastonbury as being a landmark of Bowie.
It wasn't.
As a songwriter, David was beginning to realize who he was.
But he hadn't discovered that ability to project himself off of the stage.
I was all ready to go down to Glastonbury when Richard said, "Jim, the trial is on Monday.
You can't possibly go to Glastonbury, take acid, and be ready for the trial.
" "Yes, that's okay.
No problem.
I always can wing it.
It's easy.
" So I reluctantly didn't go.
That's how unseriously I took the trial.
I thought it would just be a piece of cake.
How wrong I was.
Certain songs, they stay with you forever.
She was writing from her heart.
We really were holding up a mirror to our society.
The incredible feeling of nothing's impossible.
Bowie came to New York.
I was so single-minded.
It didn't fit into the mainstream society.
It really felt like the new era.
Christ.
We are the future.
There's something about my life about getting to places slightly late.
I went to Apple for some reason or other.
They had already done the concert on the roof.
I missed that.
And the building was kind of hollow and empty.
And then, all of a sudden, it was over.
The small gathering on Savile Row is only the beginning.
The event is so momentous that historians may one day view it as a landmark in the decline of the British Empire.
The Beatles are breaking up.
The Beatles have changed so many lives that the need for them still exists.
The hope that they represent still exists.
And as long as that exists then they have to exist.
We're all in it together.
If the Beatles don't exist, you don't exist.
It was a horrible feeling that it might be all over.
They inspired that whole generation to go and conquer the world.
The whole youth culture could not have happened without them.
What I feared was the establishment was gonna claw back pop music to where it had been pre-Beatles.
Awful, awful light entertainment.
I've been sitting here all day Thinking As we got into 1971, you could see they did not want the counterculture.
They did not want youth movements.
It was them and us.
Now my days are gone Memories linger on Thoughts of when I was boy The dream's over.
- In 1971 - Music said something.
The world was changing.
We were creating the 21st century in 1971.
Myself and, I guess, a certain contingent of musicians at the beginning of the '70s wanted to manufacture a new kind of vocabulary about what rock music was and could become.
The history of rock could be recycled in a different way.
We were fed up with the hippies.
We wanted to go somewhere else.
I was writing for Rolling Stone, and a friend of mine who had become the West Coast publicist for Mercury Records called and asked if I wanted to interview this obscure English artist that they were trying to publicize because he was unknown.
I'd never heard of him.
And he sent me The Man Who Sold The World which I didn't really like very much at all, but I wasn't about to turn down a trip to San Francisco.
So I went.
I remember he emerged from the plane and he was wearing a dress and carrying a purse.
And I felt terribly intimidated.
You know, he was really pretty.
KSTN, KSTN-FM Stockton.
Your official station.
David is with us.
How you doin', David? - Good to see you.
- Thank you very much.
Have you been in this country before? No, it's the first time in the States.
- Wow.
How do you like it so far? - Yeah.
Great.
Incredible.
It says here that you are one of those Englishmen who has happened upon the pop scene and just captured the hearts and minds of minds of nearly all of the audiences that have heard him.
- Isn't that wonderful? - Wow.
Yeah.
- Did you know that? Yeah.
- I'm quite a guy.
I mean, being truthful, his career was not doing well in those days.
He was kind of a cult artist, and his sales weren't that high at all.
After we made The Man Who Sold The World, he went with a manager called Tony Defries.
And Tony Defries didn't like the album.
And he sacked our band.
Even me.
I lost him.
I lost contact with him for at least a year.
The idea was to create a new entity.
We were deconstructing David and reconstructing Bowie.
That was the footing we were on in 1971.
I'm reading this bio here because I just received it here.
And some interesting things about you here.
Did you know this, that your name was David Robert Jones Oh, yeah.
but that Davy Jones of the Monkees claimed the name - Yeah.
- and you became David Bowie.
There was one party in the Hollywood Hills that was intended to introduce him to the LA cognoscenti, but the cognoscenti were greatly outnumbered by these starlet types.
And they didn't know what to make of him.
They were incredulous.
A guy in a dress sitting in the lotus position singing Jacques Brel songs.
I kind of wished that he'd consulted with me, because I I would've said, "No Jacques Brel.
They're not gonna get it.
" And they didn't.
An hour into the party, everyone hearing that an Andy Warhol superstar was having a party up the road, everybody essentially left the Bowie party including Bowie.
I don't know what all that was about.
I landed there, and I found that all I could do was radio shows and the odd private house where I would play for whoever we could get in.
So I can't really give you an honest opinion of what I thought of American audiences because I didn't see any.
The music industry has not been easy on weirdos ever.
And in 1971, he was struggling very much.
Trying to find where he was going, whether he ever would.
He'd been rejected and rejected, he'd made records that hadn't gone anywhere, and then just been ridiculed as a freak in a dress.
Most people would've given up.
By then, everything was so polarized in America.
People had burnt out, and they're cynical and they're angry.
The "peace and flowers" love thing was well over.
Looking back on it now, it's hard to understand how bad it was.
The jury hearing the charges against Charles Manson and three girl members of his so-called "Family" brought in its verdict this afternoon.
All were found guilty of murder in the first degree.
To his family of followers, Manson was a kind of god.
But to the California police, he was something quite different.
A car thief, pimp and Satanist who'd masterminded eight murders, at least.
Members of the so-called "Family" talked to a BBC 24 Hours team soon after Manson had been arrested.
Well, when I first met him, the man talked to me, and he says, "Why don't you come up? And the rules are that, you know, there is no rules.
" This drawing is a drawing of awareness.
And I think that Charles Manson is the most totally aware person alive.
You tried to show Charlie your picture? But sadly enough, you know, like, he's aware of everything that's truly evil as well as everything that's truly good, and I feel that he's a victim.
At that point in time if you had long hair, you were judged immediately.
You were a drug addict.
You were a freak.
You were an enemy of the state.
So parents and children hated each other.
America, there's a phenomenon of parents thinking that that they depict satanic qualities in children.
And really, they don't like their children.
So many parents really hate their children in the United States.
Did you read in the paper the other day about that father in a western state? His son grew long hair, and the father got angry.
The son refused to cut it, and he went into the bedroom and got a shotgun and shot his son dead.
Just over long hair.
We moved to LA when it was all groovy, peace and love, flowers and bubbles, and people thought that we were kind of a joke as we looked so, you know, heavy and sinister and threatening and everything.
And then Charles Manson happened, and the demise of the Beatles happened.
The timing just fell into place for what we were doing.
Right now there's a young man who calls himself Alice Cooper on stage.
The hippie thing, I thought, was extremely phony.
I just thought it got syrupy as hell.
"Everybody love everybody.
" You know, 'cause everybody was on drugs.
Come on.
You know, quit bullshitting.
You know, this thing is really stupid.
We had been concentrating on doing this avant-garde music.
We didn't even try to write hit singles until it became obvious that we weren't gonna be eating unless we did.
You know, Alice has always been very hip to what's happening, and we knew that we wanted to appeal to kids.
And we were thinking, "What is the target audience for record-buying public in America?" And it was 18 years old.
Okay, here on The Barry Richards Thing, we have Alice Cooper with us, and that's the name of the whole group, right? - Yeah.
- It's also your name.
- Yes, it's my name.
- Are you gonna do "Eighteen?" Yeah, yeah, "Eighteen.
" All right, this is the new 45 from Alice Cooper, "Eighteen.
" We were shocked that it was a hit.
But it was so simple and so "duh" that it worked on the radio.
And the song was giving the 18-year-old guy, at least, a voice.
Lines form on my face and hands Lines form from the ups and downs I'm in the middle without any plans I'm a boy and I'm a man I'm eighteen And I don't know what I want Eighteen I just don't know what I want Eighteen, I gotta get away I've gotta get outta this place I'll go runnin' in outer space Oh yeah For years now, the young have been drifting away to a world of their own, unable or unwilling to accept what the established order has to offer.
They wonder aloud about a system that produces material riches and creates emotional poverty.
A system that leaves many of its young with no sense of self-worth, no sense of importance in the home, no useful role in society.
'Cause I'm eighteen I get confused every day Eighteen I just don't know what to say When you have that hit single it's the Willy Wonka golden key because it means you're generating money.
And so everybody's listening now, and you're not this freak show.
You're suddenly viable.
We represented the great disenfranchised.
It was a new audience.
Britain, so they say, is now rather like the morning after the night before.
The party's well and truly over.
The image or, if you like, myth of the swinging '60s has given way to the sober '70s.
We've grown up a little, all of us.
And there has been a change, and we are a bit freer and all that, but it's the same game.
Nothing's really changed, you know.
People are living in fucking poverty with fucking rats crawling over 'em.
It's the same, only I'm 30 and a lot of people have got long hair, that's all.
Three boys in their early teens, and one aged 11, growing up in the East End of London.
Already these four lives are lives at risk.
Already the future shadows them.
Do you ever think about getting old and everything like that? Think about? I am old.
I already think I'm old, you know.
For the new generation coming in, there was a vacuum.
Bands like the Stones, and the Who, and obviously the Beatles, had led us through the '60s.
But the younger generation were looking to find what they loved.
The younger kids feel really kind of neglected, you know.
They haven't got their own music.
They haven't got their own culture.
They haven't got a say yet in anything.
I remember seeing A Hard Day's Night in Brooklyn, and I saw that London where it was the Beatles going to drinking clubs and gambling clubs and all that.
And I was very disappointed when I arrived to see that the UK was pretty old-fashioned.
It was actually quite a drab place.
It was time to come up with something different, but the Beatles were a hard act to follow.
The thing is, the Beatles weren't just a pop group.
They weren't popular entertainers.
They were artists in the real sense of the word.
So as we got into 1971, if you were a pop group with screaming girls you were not gonna get good reviews in Melody Maker and NME.
The musical snobbery was really growing at that time.
It's much more fulfilling nowadays because the audiences are much more educated.
The people are very aware.
Even some of the chicks are aware of what kind of strings and things are used on certain bass guitars and things like that.
Love comes to you and you follow Bands were taking themselves a bit too seriously.
They were becoming slightly pretentious, overblown.
And it was rather frowned on by some of the more superior rock critics to have hit singles.
Sharp distance When I started on Radio 1, I was given an acetate of a single that I could take onto my first program and play as an exclusive.
And it was "Ride a White Swan.
" He was one of the few people at that moment who was driven to appeal to 13, 14, 15-year-olds.
There was very few people making good singles, I think, you know.
So that's when I figured I ought to make some singles.
'Cause I like singles.
It's, like, a three-minute adrenaline buzz.
Wear a tall hat like a druid In the old days Wear a tall hat and a tattooed gown Ride a white swan Like the people of the Beltane Wear your hair long, babe You can't go wrong Catch a bright star And a-place it on your forehead Say a few spells And baby, there you go Take a black cat And a-sit it on your shoulder And in the morning you'll know All you know, oh After David went with Tony Defries, I just blanked him from my consciousness.
And Marc was the one I went with.
They were friends, not that they were in collusion with each other, but they both started playing at the same time with their image as pop stars.
Marc was a chameleon.
When I first met him, he was a hippie sitting playing an acoustic guitar on a Persian rug, you know.
He had emerged in '65 when he was a mod.
And now Marc was beginning to move across into that blurred line, androgynous look.
A sort of embryonic '70s rock and roll style.
I always remember hearing "Ride a White Swan" on the radio and thinking that he was amazing.
And then seeing him.
And he was the first person to really wear the eye shadow and do the glam thing.
And that's how he walked around.
That was Marc in the street, when he came to dinner.
And everything that Marc did was fun.
It was a time when most of the rock and roll bands were very masculine.
The idea of dressing androgynously was new and refreshing.
But, you know, when it came to music, he had a '50s mind.
He jumped back a generation, playing Chuck Berry guitar.
And he was writing rock and roll songs.
When "White Swan" was a hit, I realized that something was changing.
You know, the kids were getting a bit younger, and they were selling out the concerts.
Which they hadn't done before, to be honest.
And then I put out "Hot Love" and it went straight to number one.
And then all the audiences were were predominantly chicks mostly after my balls.
Which was very cute.
Well, she's my woman of gold And she's not very old, ah ha ha She's my woman of gold And she's not very old, ah ha ha I don't mean to be bold But may I hold your hand? Once Marc got his first hit single the hippie emphasis on spirituality was virtually abandoned.
And he started to be very sexual.
Well, she ain't no witch And I love the way she twitch, ah ha ha I'm her twopenny prince And I give her hot love I talked with some of the fans that came to see the shows.
A lot of 12, 13, 14, 15-year-old girls.
And I asked, "What is it about Marc?" And some of them were crying in their efforts to express their emotion for him.
I've come out of the front door of the Newcastle City Hall to speak with some of the people who saw the concert tonight.
- Did you enjoy it? - He was gentle and pretty What particularly do you like about them? They're just lovely, and gorgeous - Did you enjoy the concert tonight? - And I think he's got beautiful hair.
- You enjoyed it did you? - It was lovely! For the younger girls, you know, the new generation coming in, he was just so exciting because they wanted liberation.
Liberation of expression and liberation of thought.
Yet another row about sex education.
The schoolchildren and their parents, their teachers, are all, today, in the middle of an atmosphere where information about sex has never been freer.
The upheaval that followed the making by Dr.
Martin Cole of the sex education film for adolescents called Growing Up has opened, once again, all the old thorny debates about just how much children want and need to know, ought to be told, by whom and at what age.
Boys and girls often have sexual intercourse long before they are ready to have babies.
Beneath the bebop moon There is nothing wrong with this, and many people believe that sexual experience in adolescents is essential for normal development.
People have been getting along very well since the dawn of time without sex education.
And why, in the last four or five years, has this been thrust upon us? Early in adolescence, a boy will notice that he can become sexually excited.
I was shocked by the sheer clinical joylessness of the film.
Sex should be fun, it should be thrilling, it should be exciting.
And that film, I think, might almost put people off for life.
People want to know the facts.
I like the straightforward approach.
And I think this is what's necessary.
We don't want your morals.
But now you're 15.
What is it you want to know about sex that any teacher can tell you? It's the positions.
Stuff like that.
And the way how it's done.
You want technical instructions? Yeah.
Do you want to know about relationships? Emotion? Love? Well, it would be helpful.
I had come to London about a year before then.
I basically left America because I couldn't stand being there anymore.
But it was also an odd time in London.
The London underground press was still in full ramp and swing.
And Portobello was the scene.
And yet, you know, Britain had a conservative government then.
People were trying to keep the lid on.
OZ magazine, like a number of other underground publications in Britain, symbolized the clash between two conflicting notions of morality.
There can be few people these days who haven't heard the phrase "underground press.
" Frequently they are publications which shock and offend many people.
He's a journalist who started the controversial underground magazine, OZ.
It seems to me there's an attitude towards sex which is different.
It's now become much more libertarian and guiltless.
OZ, for example, is extraordinarily hard to read.
Not merely is it hung up on drugs to an extent which is quite amazing to anyone who's not actually on drugs, but it is physically difficult to read.
OZ was another planet.
Provocative, outrageous, sexual.
It was all consciously over the top.
I never gave it a lot of serious credibility.
But then somebody got his or her nose out of joint that OZ had crossed a line in terms of obscenity.
I have several members of the underground press here in London with me today.
I gather it's becoming a hazardous occupation.
Jim, you want to tell us about the problems OZ has been having? Just before Christmas, we had been busted big time after we'd invited schoolchildren to help edit an issue of OZ.
That issue was intended for - young-ish readerships.
It was - No, it wasn't.
It was intended for the usual OZ readerships.
That's the whole point.
The police are trying to say it was intended to go into the schools specifically and to disrupt schoolchildren.
It was merely produced by schoolchildren.
We just got 'em 48 pages of, you know, color and glossy paper and they could put in what they wanted.
And basically, that's what's got us into all of this trouble.
Well we were quite shocked with one or two things that they wanted to do, but whatever they wanted to do was fine by us.
And they all saw it as a wonderful opportunity.
The judiciary and the government still hadn't caught on that there had been a tectonic shift in the way young people thought and acted.
OZ was doing the unthinkable, actually telling teenage kids, "Don't get nervous about sex.
" At that time, conservatives of one sort or another went completely berserk.
At last, the permissive society is under attack.
This Manchester rally reaffirms the stand which Christians are taking against the rising tide of pornography.
We believe in purity and love in sexual life.
We are especially concerned about pornographic literature on sale in this city.
Welling inside the British people is the desire to rebuild the moral fiber of this country, which has been under attack, There's no doubt about that.
It's been under attack.
People began to talk about this as a turning point in society.
It was a sort of crisis of moral authority.
I was working as a secretary at OZ.
It just did feel that the establishment was out to get them.
Freedom of expression seemed to me a basic human right.
You know, unarguably something we had to defend, even if sometimes it went beyond the bounds of what I liked.
I really did not like the cover of that issue.
I thought, "How could Jim and Felix have chosen that cover?" Look, we didn't think it through, frankly.
We had the idea of using the double spread of the naked blue lesbians.
And when it was suggested, we both began to laugh.
It was sort of erotic, but it was just a fantasy, really.
But we hadn't even looked at it properly.
And then I noticed the blow job.
And we said, "Oh, we'll put one of the pictures of the schoolkids in front of that.
That'll settle that.
" We had already been charged with publishing obscene material, which was just a very minor charge.
But they had decided to up the ante in changing it to a very serious offense of conspiracy to corrupt public morals.
To implant in the minds of children improper and unsavory desires, or something like that.
We think it's disgusting fascism.
And Yoko and I are gonna propose to Richard Neville, so then he can marry us, and then he'd be British and they can't deport him.
So that's solved that one.
It was amazing how much support there was in the youth and artists and musicians.
Bands were part of the counterculture.
They were part of us.
And I think a lot of the music reflected the complex position of our younger generation.
Don't you know you're driving Your mamas and papas insane? Oh, you pretty things Don't you know you're driving Your mamas and papas insane? Let me make it plain Gotta make way for the Homo Superior Look out at your children See their faces in golden rays Don't kid yourself they belong to you They're the start of the coming race The earth is a bitch We've finished our news Homo Sapiens have outgrown their use All the strangers came today And it looks as though They're here to stay I'd just got back from America.
And I'd just moved to Haddon Hall in Beckenham.
And everything seemed all systems go.
"All right, I understand what I've got to do now.
" At the weekends we'd be down at Haddon Hall.
And David was just busy writing his songs, always.
By then, he was already starting work on the new album.
And, you know, David was absorbing.
I mean, he was like a sponge, taking what he needed from other people and making it his own.
For me, it felt like absolutes were breaking down.
As much as I admired artists who perceived music as being all of their life, for me, personally, I wanted to do something more, something broader, which brought in other art forms.
And make rock more representative of what contemporary culture felt like.
The '60s were a coda to the rest of the century.
It was like the questions were raised then, but still, there was an idealism which, in itself, had its own absolutes.
And its own belief that there was an answer to particular things.
And I think the '70s showed conclusively that everything we knew was wrong.
I think it's important to point out the fact that a culture is an experiment.
It may work and it may not.
And we have to start asking that question about our own way of life.
People were born here, lived here, got married from here, brought their own families up again here.
I don't think you'll ever get the community feeling that we had here.
You'll never get it in flats because they're not real.
This is all sort of artificial now.
In 1970, it was stated that there were nearly two million unfit houses.
A state of limbo, when the present is not permanent and the future only an unguaranteed promise.
The children play in dirt and filth, and are happy because they know no better.
Me being a World War II baby, as time went by in my youth, things just got better and better.
So I had no understanding that things might get bad again.
People were trapped.
And that's what the important thing about glam rock is.
They took this on and things changed, things shifted.
Young kids have principles.
They don't like what their parents like, and they don't even like what their older siblings like.
In 1971, all of a sudden the more you glittered, the bigger your personality.
T.
Rex! T.
Rex! "You've got the teeth of the hydra upon you.
You're dirty, sweet and you're my girl.
" That's nice.
"Wear your unclean new vest and shoes and cuffs full of eagles.
You're dirty, sweet and you're my girl.
" "Get on.
Get it on, get it on, get it on.
" Well, you're dirty and sweet Clad in black, don't look back And I love you You're dirty and sweet, oh yeah Well, you're slim and you're weak You've got the teeth Of the hydra upon you You're dirty, sweet and you're my girl Get it on, bang a gong, get it on Get it on, bang a gong, get it on He asked me to do Top of the Pops and I said, "Absolutely.
" He wrote very simple, classic rock 'n' roll.
But Marc was so outrageously cocky and fabulous.
He would come around and say, "I sold a million records this morning.
" And I went, "Great! How fabulous for you.
" Well, you're built like a car My first experience of seeing girls screaming was at a concert in Croydon.
It suddenly exploded.
I have some footage I took on Super 8 film.
It's backstage, it's in black-and-white, and a girl is biting a piece of Marc's hair.
That was the beginning of the craziness.
Get it on, bang a gong, get it on Marc was like someone who was traveling through.
Get it on, bang a gong, get it on He was just stopping off for a couple of years and then going away.
And of course he went away too soon.
I've been reading recently, Marc, an article which suggests that you are the successor to the Beatles.
Well, you're windy and wild You've got the blues in your shoes And your stockings You're windy and wild, oh yeah Well, you're built like a car You've got a hubcap diamond star halo You're dirty, sweet and you're my girl "Sex is a part of it, but it's sex by courtesy of the magic prince," and I presume that means you.
"Who is going to deflower the young virgin - in an atmosphere of blissful romance.
" - That sounds nice.
I like that.
I am talking to a sick nation! A sick nation! I think the whole of what's called "Western civilization" is totally decadent to the point that I have no expectation whatever that it will recover any moral sanity.
I was wondering which people you thought you appealed to most, or whether it's, you know, really just young girls.
They're not all just young girls here.
I mean, I think They are mostly young girls here, Marc.
Let's not get away from the fact.
I'd say there are 90% young girls.
Yeah, 200 people.
You know.
200 people.
I have nothing against them.
I'm just saying that they are mostly girls.
It's very nice.
Marc was very pop.
And he loved it.
He liked being a star.
But maybe the image tripped him up in a way.
It's very hard to straddle going from a pop sensibility into being taken seriously.
Really difficult.
But Marc Bolan enabled young guys to see that they could express themselves like that.
That guys would now wear makeup.
Which had not been allowed before, absolutely not.
Unforgettable television experience coming your way.
This will either knock you out or offend you, one of the two.
We don't care which as long as you react.
This is where we separate the teenagers from the adults as we present the always outrageous and sometimes offensive Alice Cooper.
Our attitude was you grab 'em by the throat.
You're gonna talk about us tomorrow.
That was really our attitude.
We weren't gonna be subtle, we were gonna be sensational.
It got to the point where if you go to a concert, all you're gonna see is a guitar solo.
A drum solo.
You know, how far can that go? You wanna see something that you're gonna go home and talk about and scare your parents with.
1971, that dark character really started to take hold and become the powerful image of what we were doing.
Body We would do the song "Black Juju" with Alice in the makeup, the spider eyes, and the middle of the song would bring everything down.
Click, click, tick, tick.
And Alice would be swinging a watch, hypnotizing the audience.
Bodies need rest.
We all need our rest.
Sleep an easy sleep.
Rest.
It didn't work every night.
Sometimes you'd hear hecklers, but other nights you could hear a pin drop.
Rest.
Every single person would be staring at Alice.
Rest.
Rest.
Give your evil soul to yourself.
And open your eyes and be rather than seem to be.
But come on back to us.
A form of conditioning or reconditioning or restructuring of a group of young people to believe in crime, and violence and murder.
You have eyes.
Open them.
After the show, people would come back and they would tell us what that all meant.
They had figured it all out.
We wouldn't try to explain it because there wasn't really an explanation other than, you know, it's just a visual theatric, that's all.
But we had tapped into this powerful thing.
Sometime in early '71, the proposition was put to David by the organizers of the Glastonbury Fair that they'd like him to perform.
The train stopped miles from where Glastonbury was.
We had to walk to get to the place.
David's wearing his big floppy hat and his floppy trousers and his long hair.
We walk down the road and eventually we get to a field where the festival is gonna happen.
Which has turned into pretty much unscheduled chaos.
It tends to be a bit muddy.
Have you got any boots with you? You do? Nice.
Very much looking forward to seeing you.
And see you later on tonight.
And it will be beautiful, I promise you.
Girl with a heart That keeps on changing Girl with a mind that's moving on Picking up on things That life's afforded Loosen up on teathers Foreseen she's on You don't know Come on, now, keep on changing Come on, girl, little I want the jive Come on, love 'Cause it ain't gonna bother me David went on early in the morning of the next day.
At dawn.
And he was gonna perform new material.
I think you know how I feel at the moment.
It's fucking cold as hell.
It's gettin' a bit better.
We were there at 5:00 in the morning and the sun was literally just starting to peep up.
And he's up there on the stage.
Most people were still asleep or heading for a place to have a pee or something.
I still don't know What I was waiting for And my time was running wild A million dead-end streets and Every time I thought I'd got it made It seemed the taste was not so sweet Now I placed myself to face me But I've never caught a glimpse Of how the others must see the faker I'm much too fast to take the test Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes Ch-changes Don't have to be a richer man Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes Ch-changes Just gonna be a different man Time may change me But I can't trace time Thank you.
Yeah.
There are many people who remember Glastonbury as being a landmark of Bowie.
It wasn't.
As a songwriter, David was beginning to realize who he was.
But he hadn't discovered that ability to project himself off of the stage.
I was all ready to go down to Glastonbury when Richard said, "Jim, the trial is on Monday.
You can't possibly go to Glastonbury, take acid, and be ready for the trial.
" "Yes, that's okay.
No problem.
I always can wing it.
It's easy.
" So I reluctantly didn't go.
That's how unseriously I took the trial.
I thought it would just be a piece of cake.
How wrong I was.
Certain songs, they stay with you forever.
She was writing from her heart.
We really were holding up a mirror to our society.
The incredible feeling of nothing's impossible.
Bowie came to New York.
I was so single-minded.
It didn't fit into the mainstream society.
It really felt like the new era.
Christ.
We are the future.