Spider from Mars by Woody Woodmansey

Author:Woody Woodmansey [Woodmansey, Woody]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780283072741
Publisher: Pan Macmillan UK

We rocked St Louis on 11 October, even though it was not a ‘Ziggy and Spiders’ city; in fact, only a couple of hundred people showed up to a venue that held over 10,000, but Bowie turned it into a very intimate gig by inviting everyone down to the front. Then it was Kansas City where we did the show in our street clothes after the stage clothes failed to arrive on time. Then things changed again.

We rolled into Los Angeles for two sold-out shows on 20 and 21 October at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium.

Legendary DJ and Anglophile Rodney Bingenheimer had a glam rock club on Sunset Boulevard called Rodney’s English Disco. I first met him when he dropped in during the recording of Hunky Dory in Trident Studios. He was a very friendly guy and a total fan of Bowie and the band. He would continually say, ‘You guys have got to come to the US, you’ll be huge.’ He’d done everything he could to create a buzz for us, so we did have a huge following by the time we got to LA. Without his help we certainly wouldn’t have had the double sell-out shows.

The 20 October concert was broadcast on FM radio, the band’s first live radio show in America. It became a quality bootleg album and, many years later, would eventually be officially released. A good mix of this concert was never done for either the bootleg or the official release but the recording did capture the energy and power of Bowie and the Spiders.

After playing so many shows on the tour we had really found our feet; we were on peak form that night and the feeling was particularly magical. Lucky, really, because we didn’t actually know it was being recorded.

I still remember it clearly: the introduction, the version of Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’ from A Clockwork Orange was played with the house lights down, and it was spine-chilling, helped by the breeze blowing in off the ocean. The venue was a massive aircraft hangar that was jam-packed with people and the atmosphere was electric.

During the show there was some fuck-up with Bowie’s microphone. I seem to remember that it kept slipping down, and wouldn’t stay in place. Then a roadie came on with pliers to try and fix it, but it was taking too long, so Bowie just said, ‘Give them here!’ and the whole audience cheered. He took the pliers, fixed the mic and went into a stream-of-consciousness speech. The audience loved it, because he’d never said anything to them before, and I guess they didn’t know what it was like to be talked to by David Bowie.

After Santa Monica, we had a couple of days off. Bowie went in to Western Sound Studios with Iggy Pop to re-mix The Stooges’ album Raw Power. He managed to finish writing ‘Panic in Detroit’ while in LA, too.

We were staying at one of the world’s most iconic and best-known hotels, the Beverly Hills Hotel on Sunset Boulevard.

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