Bowie's Piano Man - The Biography of Mike Garson Page 3
The timing of that call from Defries was felicitous, but it was significant that Garson was receptive to the opportunity when it arose and willing to make the most of it by stepping out of his comfort zone. He says that the best things have happened when he has stepped back, stepped ‘away from himself’, stopped trying to control events, and let things happen. The same laid-back approach which makes the most of good fortune and good timing also carries powerful advantages in almost exactly the same way within the performance of jazz music itself.
At the end of 1974 those two intense years of touring the world and recording with David Bowie would end, for the time being, and he would throw himself back into the jazz scene from which he had come, and which he then realised he had missed in spite of the wild excitement and surreal displacement into which he had been propelled. It may have been a brief interlude, his experience of early 1970s incandescent and fluorescent glam hysteria, with its rock idioms of world touring and intense recording schedules. But he would never again be limited to the avant-garde jazz world from which he had emerged. He had forged a bridge between jazz and rock across which both he and future generations of musicians could more safely amble.
2 - GI Garson
‘Of the whole lot, Mike is the true genius; we are all just toys in his atonal wonderland’4 – Billy Corgan
The preparation which enabled him to sit at that piano in the Hammersmith Odeon in the summer of 1973 and play those solo instrumentals of Bowie songs for the expectant crowd began long before his audition by Bowie and Mick Ronson the previous autumn.
Garson studied music at Brooklyn College, New York, from 1963. In the first year he loved it and was getting straight A’s. In the second and third years his grades dropped below C, and at this point during the Vietnam war any students whose grades fell below C could be drafted into the army. In an effort to rescue the situation, he attended a summer school at Adelphi University on Long Island, where he was awarded three A’s. This might have compensated to lift his main grade to a C and saved him from the draft, but Brooklyn College said that they could only interpret Delphi’s three A’s as a ‘pass’ as it was not up to Brooklyn’s standard as a school. Faced with the risk of being drafted for two years (‘in which you could be sent to Vietnam and get killed’), he took the safer option of volunteering for the army band, which entailed serving for three years rather than two, but made it less likely that he would be sent to war, or so he believed, as he would have volunteer status. As he now says, ‘I’d rather play music than shoot people, and I had no problem with people in Vietnam on either side – it wasn’t my fight, it wasn’t my war. I just don’t come from that viewpoint. I’d rather have an instrument than a gun.’
He auditioned for the army band and got 100 on the test, which was mainly on ear training, identifying notes and tones played to him through some headphones. This led to the bizarre spectacle of this young, Jewish jazzman parading with the military band, ‘walking down Fifth Avenue in Manhattan playing bells wrapped around me, the glockenspiel, oom-pah-pah – inspiring!’ Being in the band excused him from later military exercises but did not excuse him from basic training, so that he had eight weeks of a gruelling regime, with ‘a German sergeant who hated Jews’. They were doing bayonet practice, being encouraged to stab dummies with great violence. This German sergeant saw Garson just touching the dummy very gently with his bayonet, like an artist with a brush, and screamed out to the others, ‘Check this out!’ and then, shockingly, to Garson, ‘If you’re an example of the Jews, it’s no wonder what Hitler did to them!’
The prejudice he suffered as the only Jew in his barracks changed one day when he sat down at a rickety old piano in the canteen and played the blues. Almost overnight he became popular and was looked after by all of the others. Every morning they would have to get up, ‘spit-shine’ their shoes, take out their frozen rifles, run a mile in sub-zero temperatures, and put their guns together. These guns were covered in ice and he was scared his fingers would stick to the frozen surface and get damaged, so the others volunteered to do it for him, once they had been won over by his ability to entertain them musically.
To graduate out of basic training after eight weeks you had to score 300 points across five activities – throwing hand grenades, crawling on your stomach whilst bullets are shooting over your head, running a mile, and so on. He was up to 220 points and everything hung on his running the mile. And yet, perversely, he went off and got a hamburger and French fries before running. He says now: ‘It was like a “fuck you” kind of attitude – it’s like “this is who I am, I’ll figure it out”. I was always a rebel in the kind of funniest, healthiest way.’ What followed is best told in Garson’s own words and broad Brooklyn vernacular:
You had to go around four times – each trip around was about a quarter of a mile. Which meant I had to do this run in about five and a half minutes. I couldn’t even have done it in a car, in that time [laughs]. So, I started running, and get around the first… by the time the second one comes around, the stomach pains are coming from the greasy, cheap hamburger [laughs], French fries and the oil, and I’m cramping. Coming to the third time around, I have about thirty seconds to finish the third, I’d zoom around again – a car could barely do that. You’d have to be going about thirty, forty-five miles an hour, or something, to get around the fourth time, so I figured it’s over – I’m going to have to redo the whole two months’ basic training. There were judges on the side, and you have numbers on your shirt, and I was ‘17’, which was my Dad’s favourite number. I come up and I call out to the judge on the left side: ‘17!’ Now, I’m supposed to go around again, I have twenty seconds to get around – I couldn’t do it if I were the fastest runner in the world, because that’ll mean you’re doing a mile in a minute and twenty seconds! I think the record at that time was Roger Bannister, who was, I think… the four-minute mile. So, I called ‘17!’ out to this guy, and then my eye catches another judge on this side, with a piece of paper, writing down how many times you’ve come around, based on your number. I started running, and I’m running forward – I wish I had a video of this – and I do a little backtracking. Whoooo! Like this! I came around to the right side of the track… I ran backwards. I ran over to the right side, so this judge doesn’t see me – there’s a judge on this side too – I just called out to the guy on the left. I did one of these reverses – like when you see a TV go backwards. I ran backwards about twenty feet, and I came flying forward to the guy on the right, hoping the guy on the left doesn’t nail me. And I screamed ‘17!’… got 300 points! The whole barracks stood up and cheered.
The German sergeant, who had been looking forward to picking on Garson for another two months, looked like thunder.
Some of the musicians were duly sent to Vietnam, though at least if they were playing at a parade in Hanoi they might be less likely to be killed than in front-line combat. But Garson got stationed in a fort just over the newly built Verrazano Bridge which connected his hometown of Brooklyn with Staten Island. He was legitimately able to tell people he was ‘stationed overseas’ as it was across the water; and he was able discreetly to return home every night, as long as he was back at the fort by seven in the morning. They also established a jazz big band, and played for the generals and the colonels at parties. There were as many as three other very good pianists in the one fort, and all competed to be the player for this jazz band. Garson got the post, but then made a point of creating a role as arranger for one of the others, Tom Salisbury, who ended up with the Pointer Sisters and went on to be a producer in Europe.
It was at this time that Garson stepped up his approach to practising. Prior to the army he was practising for an hour or two per day at most; now he started a gruelling schedule of working on his playing for eight hours every day, and this has continued consistently (albeit including composing and arranging) through to the present day. This regime of practice was initially prompted by mortal fear, since the army’s musicians were regularl
y tested and any slip in standards, it seemed, might prompt a transfer into ordinary service with the possibility of overseas postings, combat and death. In retrospect he sees that there was not such a safe correlation between musical performance and not being sent into action, but at the time his fear certainly drove him to extraordinary efforts – which persisted long after he left the army and such fears evaporated. His virtuosity is a good example of the adage about genius being ‘one per cent inspiration, ninety-nine per cent perspiration’. At least one study of the phenomenon of musical genius has found that those we regard as possessing it have clocked up thousands of hours of hard work to perfect their art, and that this may well be the most significant factor in getting them to such an enviable position.5
As he continued to try to make his skills as a musician indispensable to the army as an insurance against being sent into active service, a random lottery (the 1969 US Draft Lottery) was held, in which musician friends and colleagues were being despatched globally to Vietnam and other war zones. His friend Danny D’Imperio, a great drummer who ended up playing with Woody Herman and filling in for Buddy Rich after Rich died, was sent to Korea for two years. The musicians in the military continued to be monitored and rigorously graded, allowing Garson to be nominated a ‘specialist’ with similar status to a sergeant.
The pressure to excel musically was also motivated by boredom at the position he had been thrust into. He played for the Officers’ Clubs and would be paid an extra fifty or seventy dollars on the side, which was helping him to finance regular piano lessons from some great musicians too.
He was also keen to come up to the standard of the jazz musicians he found himself with in the army jazz band, and stepped up his game accordingly. Garson had only switched his emphasis from classical towards jazz playing about three years earlier. Some of his fellow musicians there were of a very high standard, having been devoted to jazz since childhood. The bass player was three years older and tended to try to belittle Garson’s abilities and standing. They spoke recently and he was bowled over by Garson’s accomplishments. It was an example of how easily confidence can be damaged by the invalidation resulting from negative criticism. Garson explains:
They say it takes about seventy-five compliments to wash away one of those negative things. And it knocks people out of the arena, every single day, in the arts and the music area, more than anything else, because that’s your whole life, and if somebody puts it down, it just stops you dead in your tracks. As artists, we’re very vulnerable and very sensitive. And there’s always some truth in the criticism, even if it’s one per cent, and we’re stupid enough to buy the one per cent, instead of seeing that this guy’s out to get me, and that it’s sour grapes. So, there’s a whole subject there connected to what happens to musicians – that’s one of the reasons they go to drugs.
When he first arrived for basic training at Fort Dix, New Jersey, his long, thick, black hair was summarily shaved as the first step in depersonalisation and demoralisation: ‘They charge you a buck, and they take this razor: zip, zip, zip!’ Susan came to visit and walked straight past him without recognising this shaven-headed man. He could only be visited every couple of weeks. And he felt this sudden ‘imprisonment’ had come about for him basically because he had allowed his grades at college to fall below that cut-off point for the draft. He had been one of the only students at Brooklyn who was actively working as a gigging musician, and composing, and yet he was not as academically inclined or as able to memorise data parrot-fashion as were many of the other students. Meanwhile his overriding view of the role of music was that it should exist simply to communicate emotion (or, in the words of E. M. Forster, ‘only connect’). In some of his recent jazz concerts for internet broadcast, the response from the public has been expansive and enthusiastic, with some of the strongest responses being emails praising not his dazzling virtuosity but the simple though moving emotional ballads he plays such as his own ‘Lullaby for Our Daughters’, or his cover of Irving Berlin’s ‘Count Your Blessings’.
After leaving the army in 1969, Garson joined the band Brethren (originally managed by Sid Bernstein, who had brought the Beatles to Shea Stadium for their big American debut). Garson replaced their first piano player, who was none other than Dr. John. Garson can be heard, for example, playing organ with them on the song ‘Everybody in the Congregation’, with elements of gospel, country and blues. He also wrote ‘History Repeats Itself’ for their album Moment of Truth (1971), and the whole band provided backing for 1972’s ground-breaking avant-garde album I’m the One, by Annette Peacock. All this time his piano technique was evolving. There is a fascinating piece of footage of Bowie performing ‘Space Oddity’ as part of his ‘The 1980 Floor Show’ on American television show The Midnight Special in 1973. Garson is barely visible in the darkness to the back and left of the screen, but the introduction is given even greater cosmic effect by his harp-like virtuoso piano flourishes and arpeggios of chords evoking mystery.
When the twenty-seven-year-old Garson joined David Bowie for his tour of the USA in September 1972, he was following an interesting series of short-term pianists who had worked with Bowie prior to that. Hunky Dory, the album released the previous December, featured Rick Wakeman who had also played mellotron on the ‘Space Oddity’ song two years earlier. Additionally, jazz pianist and comedian Dudley Moore was invited to play a guest spot on the album but did not respond. For June 1972’s album, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, Mick Ronson played piano.
On the British tour no fewer than three pianists had been used between April and September 1972. First it had been Nicky Graham, a young British keyboard player who later went on to write and produce for Andy Williams, Bros, Ant & Dec and Shirley Bassey; then Matthew Fisher, who had played the famous Hammond organ part for Procol Harum’s A Whiter Shade of Pale, later the subject of a law suit which went as far as the Law Lords; and, for the final part of the British tour, Robin Lumley, cousin of Joanna Lumley, who went on to produce albums by Rod Argent.
Unlike Rick Wakeman, Garson worked for a few months on the road with Bowie before stepping into the studio with him to work on recording Aladdin Sane, and this may well have helped to build the musical rapport between them which can be heard clearly on albums such as Diamond Dogs (1974) and, later, 1. Outside (1995).
Despite the rigours and indignities of army life, that was a key period in Garson’s evolution as a musician, during which he refined his jazz abilities and started a more serious schedule of long daily practice. In his case, it was mortal fear of front-line combat and death which first initiated the extent of that regime. But however it is motivated, it is that kind of application and effort which converts opportunity and potential into real accomplishment.
3 - Ziggy’s support act
‘I had told Bowie about the avant-garde thing. When I was recording the ‘Aladdin Sane’ track for Bowie, it was just two chords, an A and a G chord, and the band was playing very simple English rock and roll. And Bowie said: “play a solo on this”. I had just met him, so I played a blues solo, but then he said: “No, that’s not what I want.” And then I played a Latin solo. Again, Bowie said: “No, no, that’s not what I want.” He then continued: “You told me you play that avant-garde music. Play that stuff!” And I said: “Are you sure? Because you might not be working any more!”… So I did the solo that everybody knows today, in one take. And to this day, I still receive emails about it. Every day. I always tell people that Bowie is the best producer I ever met, because he lets me do my thing.’ – Mike Garson
GARSON PLAYS ME A RECORDING made by sound engineer, Robin Mayhew, from the sound desk, of his performance at Bowie’s legendary farewell performance as Ziggy Stardust at Hammersmith Odeon on 3 July 1973. This is a recording not of his playing with Bowie in the main part of the concert, but of his almost surreal set that night as a surprise opening act, by personal request of David Bowie himself. This recording would not even have survived
had this not been the very last date of the Ziggy Stardust tour. In those days, each night’s show would be recorded on tape over the previous night’s recording.
A solo pianist regaling thousands of impatient Bowie fans with four piano instrumental versions of the very songs they were waiting to hear. It took a brave soul to rise to this challenge, and Garson acquitted himself admirably. After some initial uncertainty in the crowd, you can hear their approval start to surge through the auditorium – encouraged, no doubt, by the fact that the master of ceremonies, RCA publicist Barry Bethell (sounding uncannily like 1980s British comedian, Ben Elton) emphasised that this was Bowie’s own inspired piece of last-minute scheduling.
Bethell comes on first to advertise merchandise and to announce that on this occasion the number of people who had seen the show had passed the 125,000 mark during its eight weeks across the UK, covering 7,000 miles. A young girl from Hull called Gina Reilly who had been the 100,000th attendee, in Bridlington, was there at Hammersmith too. It was already the biggest British music tour ever by one artist at that time. He then says he has to leave the stage as he gets ‘too nostalgic’ and jokes that ‘I’m a star, anyway’. He steps off the stage stressing that there are ‘just two minutes ’til show time’, at which point we hear the strains of one of the themes from Kubrick’s 1971 film of A Clockwork Orange, an adaptation of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. He reappears some minutes later to introduce Garson: