10.Andy Warhol and America

   With hindsigh,1971 was the year in which Bowie became something of a pop-art agent provocateur.What really fired him was the desire to be different,radically different,to challenge and overturn both  dominant musical conventions and the moral and sexual codes of his day.
    Bowie did indeed tart up his art in a radical and shocking manner.Linsday Kemp and his 1960s absurdist mime-and-dance troupe was an influence,and Bowie took a special interest in the Warhol scene too.For a promotional visit to the States in January 1971,Bowie took to wearing a man's dress,as designed by London's Mr Fish,and was threatened by a gun-toting redneck less than chuffed with the cut of Bowie's jib.
     During August,Bowie went to see Andy Warhol's Pork  at the Roundhouse,and befriended the cast of starlets,inlcuding several people who sould become apparatchick in MainMan,Tony Defries' management company: Tony Zanetta ( who would become Bowie's personal assistant),Wayne County ,Cherry Vanilla ( Bowie's future press agent),Leee Black Childers (his tour photographer),and the future president of MainMan Jaime Andrews.
    Bowie initially disappointed the The Pork crowd.Jayne County said of seeing Bowie on his club tour in early 1971: " We'd heard that David Bowie was supposed to be androgynous and everything,but then he came out with long hair,folky clothes,and sat on a stool and played folk songs.We were so disappointed with him.We looked over to him and said: " Just look a that folky old hippy!".
     "David was disappointing",said Leee Childers,"but we loved his wife,Angela Bowie.Angie was loud,she was pregnant,she was crazy,she was grabbing our crotches laughing it up,and having a good time."
    However,back in the UK,Bowie's stage performances were certainly causing more of a stir.As 1971 progressed,Bowie's sound became harder and harder.Anyway,everybody recalls that in the late 60s and earlt 1970s,Bowie was thought of primarily as a sonwwriter,eather than a performer. "Although very talented,he ended up making a career of being unsuccessful",remembers David Stopps (manager of the Friars Aylesbury venue).Stopps was also incredibly impressed with Bowie : " Bowie was fantastic".
    Rock acts like Bowie were as interested in breaking into the American market as they were in the UK.Bowie however,was naturally drawn to the fringes of American cultures and the likes of Iggy Pop,Lou Reed and Andy Warhol.
   In the autumn of 1971,he made a trip to the Factorz in New York.Bowie remembers Warhol as possessing a rather unearthly hue,his skin a preternatural waxy.On a personal level,the meeting itself was far from a howling success.Warhol apparently hated Bowie's tribute to him on the Hunky Dory  album,presented to him in the form of an acetate during the meet-and-greet,and was more interested in Bowie's shoes.

     In the Factory,Warhol constructed fame and made 'talentless' people into movie stars.Anyone could be a star (in only for fifteen minutes).

     In fact,Warhol and Bowie may be said to have shared many psychological states.Both had a morbid fear of premature death.With Bowie this manifested itself in a fear of being shot on stage,and the final Ziggy Stardust shows were redolent with references to his own mortality ( Time,My Death,Rock And Roll Suicide).Warhol only narrowly escaped with his life after being shot by Valerie Solanas,a radical feminist,in 1968.Both had an abiding fear of flying.Both had a consuming passion for notoriety and fame.Even their careers followed certain similiarities in trajectory.

     Warhol also 'reinvented himself',donning a wig to cover his baldness,changing the manner in which he spoke,the way he carried himself and his art and type.Perhaps most importantly,both Warhol and Bowie were unshamedly ' commercial ' in their art.Despite both men's link with the avant-garde,they flaunted the consumerism of popular art and eventually became businessmen themselves.Another major influence on Bowie and Warhol at the time came from the camp aesthetic,and its playfulness.

    This sense of playfulness,married with a Warholian sense of pop art,was relatively new stance in the earlt 70s,and the antithesis of commanding rock ideology at the time.So singers and performers,sometimes unwittingly,followed standards of excellence and decorum which,until Bowie,had never been fundamentally challenged before.For some writers in the 1970s,who totally missed the point,Bowie was all glitz and show,with no substance.