Meeting David Bowie

On grace, and being a hero just for one day, but also every day

When I think about the term, “Hero” it often is soundtracked by David Bowie. He is one of my top five favorite artists and “Heroes” is one of my top three favorite Bowie songs. DJ John Richards has been known to play 30-minute sets with different versions and covers.

Bowie was so creative, so inventive, so always willing to change course and yet his career also followed a discernible path.

Nothing was random, it was a constant evolution.

When my kids were young, they seemed to think that every song was written by David Bowie. Which is my fault. I played a lot of his songs for them as part of my ongoing efforts to teach them the ins and outs of rocknroll.

David Bowie was both the broccoli and the desert in their music education. I can’t say how proud I was when nearly five-year-old Jane demanded his just-released, “Black Star,” for her shower accompaniment. “It’s my new favorite,” she said.

David Bowie through the years. Photos: Matt Carmichael/rocknroll.net

I was lucky to see Bowie in big rooms: Sound and Vision tour at the Palace of Auburn Hills; Area One at Tweeter Center; with Nine Inch Nails at Tweeter. I also was treated to shows at much smaller: The Vic; Detroit’s State Theater (solo and with Tin Machine); The Aragon; The Rosemont Theater; and even at the Borgata casino for what would turn out to be one of his final U.S. shows. The Polyphonic Spree opened.

In ’97 Bowie was playing the Aragon in Chicago. It’s a terrible place to see/shoot a show so I decided to go home to Detroit and cover his show at the State Theater instead. I brought my sister, so that was fun, and made a new friend in photographer Jennifer Jeffrey.

However the night before the Detroit show Bowie was the mystery performer at a Miller-sponsored show called a “Blind Date.” Blind Dates were a series of shows where folks would win tickets to see a band, but they wouldn’t know who the band was until they showed up.

I was already scheduled to cover that, which turned out to be an amazing show (of course) with the Chemical Brothers opening. (The following year I would see Garbage and the Red Hot Chili Peppers on the Blind Date bill.)

Now I wound up covering two shows early in the tour. Bowie liked the pieces I wrote (!) so I was invited to meet him at the Aragon show which I then attended after all. I don’t normally get all fan-boy-geeked out, but I was anxious to meet him. The PR person was introducing the other people at the meet and greet and they were all radio station head honchos and label muckety-mucks. Bowie was polite. The PR person got to me and had no idea who I was. “I’m sorry, who are you?”

I introduced myself.

Bowie actually perked up and said “oh, you’re Matt Carmichael, it’s great to finally meet you” and told me how he’d really liked the stories etc. I was thinking, “You’ve got this backwards, I’m a 23-year-old schmo and you’re Ziggy Stardust,” but it was totally disarming and we had a nice chat about Chicago jazz, how the Aragon was reportedly where Glenn Miller debuted “In the Mood," and Bowie reminisced about his early tours in the U.S.

I had him sign two of the pics from earlier in the tour. I gave one to my sister as a thanks for going new wave in the ‘80s instead of hair metal and introducing me to so much good music. The other photo hangs by my desk. I guess he thought was somewhat Inferno-esque. He inscribed it, “Another bad day for Dante.”

Bowie could have been a lot of things: He could have had a massive ego, he could have been a jerk. He could have signed some things and wandered off. But he wasn’t. And there’s the lesson. If you know that everyone who meets you is likely to be intimidated (because they’re fans and you’ve probably changed their lives somehow) or bored (because they work for a label and meet everyone) the best way to deal with that is figure out who is who, be polite to the bored ones, but disarm the intimidated ones with charm, grace and humility.

It turned a fun story into a completely unforgettable experience for a guy who was a hero year-round, but an extra special hero on that one day.

Here’s what I wrote for Addicted to Noise about the Detroit show:

DETROIT -- Paint flaked off the ceiling like a heavy Detroit snowfall. Or so it seemed.

Then again as David Bowie has proven time and again, things are not always what they seem. The man never ceases to amaze. He is the total chameleon of rock. Changing costumes, images and musical styles like most rockers change hair styles.

Whatever he is at a given moment, it's always near the edge of a trend.

And while recently he's been accused more of hopping on trends than being too far ahead of them, there's no arguing one would have to sift back through his catalog some 20 years to find music that's just starting to become relevant today.

The shows on his most recent tour have found him digging out some of his classics such as "Scary Monsters," as well as dusty rockers such as "Stay" from his Station to Station album. Thanks to Reeves Gabrels, who lit up the guitar for this number during Sunday night's show at State Theater, doing his nonchalant act while blasting out chord after chord, Bowie proved once more his old songs remain as relevant as ever.

But who's heard that song before? And how does it fit right in, sandwiched between some of the heavier "jungle" tracks from his most recent discs such as "Little Wonder," the lead track from Earthling, and "Hallo Spaceboy" from Outside? Two decades of music -- but judging from their sound, they could have easily been written sequentially for the same disc.

A more intimate Bowie was playing to a packed house for the first of two sold-out shows in the 3,200-person venue. His menu on this tour of smaller-than-stadium venues has been fairly stylized, musically, flowing through a string of beat-laden songs from a good selection of his albums.

Leading off the show with "Quicksand," Bowie soloed on the first few verses accompanying himself on acoustic guitar. As the song took off, midway through, however, his band lifted the sound to another level, then ducked under a cover of the Velvet Underground's "Waiting for the Man" and a bluesy "The Jean Genie." The Thin White Duke launched into songs from Earthling building up to his commercial hit "Under Pressure" which was, oddly, the one that finally pushed the audience over the top as if sending them into a new musical orbit.

Gail Ann Dorsey, who's been playing bass and backing Bowie's vocals for the last couple of tours took a stab at Freddie Mercury's vocal parts for this number, and demonstrated she can hold her own.

Bowie has said he's doing these smaller shows because he wants to. And although cynics point to the lack of sales of his more recent efforts as the real reason, Bowie does seem to be really enjoying the intimacy that these shows afford him. He presses the flesh, jokes with the crowd, points and calls out to people.

He also spends a lot more time bantering between songs, sometimes making rather odd comments. There are three things to look for in good rock 'n' roll, he told the audience. Fulfilling melodies, spiritual enlightenment and the perfect pair of breasts. He then broke into "Fashion" and paraded around the stage a bit doing runway poses. It was classic Bowie: the actor, the innovator, the enigma.

With a potent backup band, Bowie's almost un-paralleled charisma and never-ending catalog, all set against a constant swirl of visual stimuli, it was hard to find fault with this show, except maybe for the paint flaking off the ceiling.