Bowie had already made before several attempts to crack the States,but he was far from being a household name.
Bowie loved the contemporary black music of the day, and was also intrigued by the Latin emanating from the clubs of New York, obviously being tired of the rock scene.
In spring 1974 Bowie met a man who would act as his guide to black music, and would also be his band leader for the next 14 years: Carlos Alomar, a New Yorker of Puerto Rican extraction.
Alomar was good-humoured, calm, jokey and light. He was the bridge between Bowie's pop/rock glam phase and the 'plastic soul' of the mid- 1970s. To Alomar, back in 73-74, Bowie was an alarming creature to behold: " When you see a man so nasty white with red hair, don't you think that's strange? The glam rock that he was known for was a completely different circle than that he was putting himself into. I told him: " What you need to do is to come to my house and my wife can make you some nice chicken and rice and beans and put some meat on those bones! " And surprisingly, he said: " Sure".
Alomar was less than impressed with Tony Defries : " He was extremely intimidating. Defries was not fun. Defries was a guy who would try to pull the wool over your eyes. He was also non-moving. He was not giving in any negotiation. I didn't like Tony Defries at all. "
B. Corinne Schwab
Bowie would also then meet his future personal assistant - Corinne Schwab ( known as Coco) . The two are still together in a professional capacity over 30 years later.
With Angie back in London, enjoying the glitterati of the Chelsea scene with the aid of PMA ( a drug also known as Pamela), Bowie turned to Coco for both friendship and help. At this time, 1974, Bowie's coke addiction was worsening. Bowie's drug use became very excessive very quickly. Drugs were somehow fashionable rather than a real need. Coco was Bowie's nurse, Bowie even dedicated her a song in 1987, Never Let Me Down . She proved an extremely competent charge d'affaires, who did in fact help keep him alive during those days of coke - driven paranoia. Tony Visconti remembers: " Coco has been a very loyal, competent assistant to David. She was well educated and multilingual, and she simply did her job very well. ".
Slowly, but surely Coco began taking on more and more responsibilities. One of David Bowie's insiders put it like this: " Her whole life revolves around David Bowie's affairs and it's a full-time job. She never seems to have anything outside going on much".
C. Making David Bowie a star
Tony Defries was committed to his artist. He was determined to make Bowie a superstar in America, and within 6 months, he had succeeded. The first stage was promoting the Diamond Dogs Tour in the spring of 1974, by TV and radio commercials,Billboards,and so on. The second stage of MainMain's "Operation Bowie" was,of course, the tour itself. The Diamond Dogs tour turned out to be the most theatrical rock tour ever mounted. In fact,in its daring and visual audacity, it has probably never been rivalled since.
This was basically a one-man show ( the main character is Halloween Jack) , with just two dancers, Guy Andrisano and Warren Peace, to provide on-stage action. During the shows the two dancers, who doubled as backing vocals, lassoed Bowie. For Time ,Bowie sang enclosed in a gigantic hand, which opened as the song started. For Sweet Thing he sang atop a bridge , whilst,for Space oddity he seemed to have discovered the gift of flight. Hunger City, a crumbling post-nuclear holocaust city with atomic bomb-blasted skyscrapers of molten steel, would be recreated at huge expense for an astonished public.
Bowie planned a film version of the album, but the plan was never realised. " Diamond Dogs is the last rock'n'roll group " Tony Visconti told Radio 1 in 1976: " In one version of the song, the dogs actually eat people, or they kill people on stage, or they shoot machine guns back into the audience. He has these horrible visions of the apocalypse, the end of civilisation as we know it" .
It was Bowie's most difficult performance to date. The ability to project both a technically proficient and engaging vocal was more important than ever, and around this time Bowie developed a new, richer, full-throated vibrato.
Another change in the band was the replacement of Mick Ronson with Earl Slick. He was brought to Bowie's attention through Michael Kamen, the Bowie's tour musical director, who had worked with Slick previously. Although Slick was delighted with the gig, he was less than delighted with the money offer : "I took the shitty money - $300 a week. The money was disappointing. I was making more money playing bars at the time".
The tour opened on 14 June at the Montreal Forum, Canada. There then followed a gruelling 37 shows in 27 days with one day off and one matinee performance in Toronto. Following a road accident after the gig performance in Atlanta, the tour continued with only half of 'Hunger City' , as the set had been damaged.
He was sued by some members of his band because of the low money they received. Bowie himself was having massive financial problems of his own. He found out in July, much to his utter horror, that he did not,in fact, own half of MainMan, as he had thought all along, and that his stake in the whole Defriesian empire amounted to a pittance . It's important to mention that Bowie was financing the tour out of his own income.
Tony Visconti says: "I don't know how Mainman worked. I wasn't part of it,except that they had more employees than they needed and lots of the running costs were charged to David,not Defries. this is what ended their working relationship. "
