The weekend after David Bowie’s death, the Starman’s spirit descended on Iowa City, sprinkling magical fairy dust during The Mill’s David Bowie Karaoke Party and Glam Costume Contest. A benefit for a local homeless shelter that raised $1,700, this lively event embodied what made Bowie such an enduring artist: spectacle.
It’s no secret that David Bowie had theatrical roots, trying to break into traditional showbiz as a young Davy Jones before opting for a hipper approach. He first exploded into public consciousness in 1969 with his hit single “Space Oddity,” though Bowie still wasn’t fully formed as an artist. But the creative gears began turning faster after a close encounter with a troupe of underground theater freaks who entered his orbit in 1971.
New York’s Off-Off-Broadway world was overflowing with musical talent at the time. In 1969, Patti Smith and gender-bending glam-punk pioneer Wayne County (who transitioned from Wayne to Jayne in the late 1970s) appeared in a show titled Femme Fatale, and this dynamic duo returned together in 1971’s Island. These shows were staged by director Tony Ingrassia, a colorful character who also directed Andy Warhol’s Pork—which Bowie attended during the show’s run at London’s Roundhouse theater in August of 1971.
The play featured envelope-pushing sexual content that was more absurd than titillating, but Pork nonetheless caused an uproar in England. “In London, the Tony Ingrassia tribe was really loud and vulgar,” says actor Tony Zanetta, who played the Warhol character in the show. “The first press conference we did was for News of the World, which we didn’t know anything about. So we were very outrageous, and we said things we should never have said to anybody from the press. So we got this reputation.”
After meeting Pork’s crazy cast, Bowie became friendly with many of them. “I had read about him because there was a little article in Rolling Stone a couple of months before,” Zanetta recalls, “when he had done a promotional tour of the United States. So I was intrigued by him because he was this guy in a dress. He looked like Lauren Bacall or Veronica Lake in the [Man Who Sold the World] album cover photograph.”
“But in real life, he just looked kind of hippy-ish when he came to see Pork. He had long, stringy hair. He was actually kind of, not dowdy-looking, but he wasn’t particularly great to look at.” That changed when Bowie debuted his Ziggy Stardust character—shock-red pixie mullet and all. By this time, Zanetta and other Pork cast and crew members had been hired to run the New York headquarters of MainMan, the singer’s management firm that plotted his ascension in America.
Bowie had previously been managed by Kenneth Pitt, who was pushing him to become a gay idol a la Judy Garland, something the singer thought was old fashioned. “When we came along,” Zanetta says, “I don’t think it escaped his attention that there was something very modern and very sexy about this exhibitionistic quality that we had.” These self-proclaimed freaks broke down the barriers between performer and audience, exuding a pansexual energy that was the trademark of downtown New York’s Theatre of the Ridiculous movement.
“We met in London doing Pork, and then we became friends and I went on tour with David,” says Zanetta, who remembers how everybody was raving about how “theatrical” Bowie was during his first two tours in America. “I didn’t really get it because compared to the Ridiculous people, he was pretty tame,” he says. “I mean, he was good. I’m not putting him down. He did change his clothes a lot, but otherwise it was a rock and roll band, but he was very, very good at using the stage.”
Compared to someone like Pork’s County, however, Bowie was as transgressive as Liberace. Yes, Ziggy was freaky, but County was completely out there. In the 1974 musical Wayne County at the Trucks, County wore sculpted cock-and-balls platform shoes while singing songs like “Man Enough To Be a Woman” and “If You Don’t Wanna Fuck Me, Fuck Off.” The backing band was the Backstreet Boys (no, not those Backstreet Boys), who played behind curtains from the side of the stage.
“Wayne County at the Trucks was a little bit of a rehearsal for Bowie’s Diamond Dogs tour,” Zanetta says, “because we wanted to do this theatrical tour but we didn’t really know what that meant yet.” Blondie guitarist Chris Stein says, “It was one of the first times that a rock show was done with a band behind a screen and the singer was the only one seen. Many people think that was a big influence on the Diamond Dogs tour, where Bowie was onstage with a band behind a screen.”
Of course, it’s not as if Bowie ripped off ideas from the downtown scene wholesale. He was clearly a genius who brought a lot to the table. But still, this creative sponge must have been taking notes. “There was an outrageousness about us as a group, and us individually,” Zanetta recalls. “Most of us were pretty much sexually out there, promiscuous, very open about our sexuality. I’m talking men, women—and I don’t necessarily mean gay, straight. I mean everything. I like to think of it like we were sexual outlaws.”
Five months after crossing paths with the people of Pork, Bowie famously told the British music paper Melody Maker, “I’m gay, and always have been, even when I was David Jones.” It was one of the first and most significant steps towards the gradual acceptance of gay and transgender life, even if it was just a publicity stunt.
“So I think if he picked up on anything from us, it was that,” Zanetta says. “He already had the Ziggy Stardust alien idea he was working with before he met us, but perhaps he did get the idea of being this outlaw.”
Kembrew McLeod is the fifth horseman of the apocalypse. This article was originally published in Little Village issue 193.
