SATURDAY RUBRICS: 4/20/24
DAVID BOWIE and IMAN - the latter whom I honestly liked a lot although she ended up not liking me (a lot). You can read about that under the STARS IN BLACK TURTLENECKS Rubric.
BEFORE GOOGLE: David Bowie
(Above: David Bowie photographed by Andy Warhol at The Factory where Bowie gave him a copy of his about-to-be-released album Hunky Dory on which there was a song titled “Andy Warhol.” Bowie later said that meeting Warhol was “fascinating because he had nothing to say at all, absolutely nothing.” It has been reported that Andy walked out of the room as the song about him was in the midst of its being played for him. September 1971.)
The only “play” Andy Warhol ever wrote is titled Pork. It was basically just a transcript of Andy talking to Brigid Berlin in which Brigid would play for Andy tapes she had made of her talking to her mother, socialite Honey Berlin. Other Factory characters were renamed and woven into the mix. Andy’s own avatar was named B. Marlowe and portrayed by Tony Zanetta. Pork was produced at La MaMa for a two-week run in May of 1971. The New York Times’s Grace Glueck wrote in her review, “All in all, it's a cozy bunch; take out the fornication, masturbation, defecation and prevarication with which Pork is larded and you might have a certain similarity to the juvenile gang in You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown.”
(Above: Bowie attending a performance of Pork in London at the Roundhouse with Dana Gillespie and his manager Tony Defries. August 1971.)
The play was taken to London for a six week run at the Roundhouse in August of that year and caused a sensation - not always a positive one. David Bowie loved it and saw it several times and befriended Zanetta who was a kind of tour guide for him when Bowie landed in New York City that September for a week to sign with RCA Records. Zanetta - whom Bowie hired to be part of his management team and later assigned him the role of tour manager for both his Ziggy Stardust and Diamond Dogs tours in the early 1970s - took him to The Factory to introduce him to Warhol. “The meeting was kind of tense because Warhol was not a great talker, you had to talk and entertain Andy, and David really wasn’t a great talker either,” Zanetta remembered. “Nobody was really taking this conversation and running with it. So they were circling each other and then David gave him a copy of Hunky Dory on which was his ode to Andy, the song ‘Andy Warhol.’ We played it for him. Warhol didn’t say anything but absolutely hated it. Which didn’t help the meeting. Remember, David Bowie was not a big star. He was just some guy off the street as far as Andy was concerned. They found a common ground in David’s shoes. David was wearing yellow Mary Janes and Andy had been a shoe illustrator, which David knew so they began talking about shoes. Otherwise it was not the greatest meeting.”
(Above: Bowie as Warhol between takes on the set of the 1996 film Basquiat directed by Julian Schnabel.)
[TO READ ABOUT MY COMPLICATED INTERACTIONS WITH IMAN OVER THE YEARS, PLEASE CONSIDER JOINING OUR PAID SUBSCRIBER COMMUNITY. THANKS.]