David Bowie: "Pantomime Rock? Lauren Buccal? No, Its David Bowie" Article (1971)

David Bowie’s "Pantomime Rock? Lauren Buccal? No, Its David Bowie", a one-page article in Rolling Stone, April 1, 1971.

Who Refuses To Be Thought Of As Mediocre

LOS ANGELES - In his floral-patterned velvet midi-gown and cosmetically enhanced eyes, in his fine chest-length blonde hair and mod nutty engineer's cap that he bought in the ladies' hat section of the City of Paris department store in San Francisco, he is ravishing, almost disconcertingly reminiscent of Lauren Bacall, although he would prefer to be regarded as the latter-day Garbo.

In the studios of San Francisco's KSAN-FM he assures an incredulous DJ that his last album was, very simply, a collection of reminiscences about his experiences as a shaven-headed transvestite.

In Hollywood, at a party staged in his behalf, he blows the minds of arriving hot-panted honeys with Edy Williams hair, welcoming them lispily in his gorgeous gown before excusing himself so he can watch Ultra Violet give inter-views from a milk bath at a party a few blocks away in her behalf.

Although he is the creator of one of the year's most interesting albums, The Man Who Sold The World, he remains mostly unfamiliar.

But perhaps not for long. The 24-year-old songwriter/singer/theatrician/magnificent outrage from London will under-take his first performing tour of this country (due to visa difficulties he was not allowed to play in public during his February visit) in April.

"I refuse to be thought of as mediocre," Bowie asserts blithely. "If I am mediocre I'll get out of the business. There's enough fog around. That's why the idea of performance-as-spectacle is so important to me."

He plans to appear on stage decked out rather like Cleopatra, in the appro-priate heavy make-up and in costumes that will hopefully recall those designed in the Thirties by Erte.

He says he will also interpret his own works through mime, a form in which he's been involved at several points in his career, most notably when he wrote for, acted in, and produced the Lindsay Demp Mime Company of London: "I'd like to bring mime into a traditional Western sense, to focus the attention of the audience with a very stylized, a very Japanese style of movement."

Bowie assures that he has already put that idea into practice with gratifying results: "About three years ago, at the Festival Hall in London, I did a solo performance of a 20-minute play with song that I wrote called Yet-San and the Eagle, which is about a boy trying to find his way in Tibet, within himself, under the pressures of the Communist Chinese oppression. I might bring it over to some of the bigger places I work in America. It was very successful-every-body seemed to understand and enjoy it."

He is not overly concerned with American audiences' lesser experience with and consequent lesser receptivity to theatrically enhanced musical performances: "Should anyone think that these things are merely distractions or gimmicks intended to obscure the music's shortcomings, he mustn't come to my concerts. He must come on my terms or not at all.

"My performances have got to be theatrical experiences for me as well as for the audience. I don't want to climb out of my fantasies in order to go up on-stage-I want to take them on-stage with me."

Bowie began his career in 1963 as a tenor-saxophonist in a noisy London R&B band. He later formed a semi-pro heavy-blues group called David Jones & the Lower Third. He discarded the sur-name Jones when a Monkee with whom he shared a given name became famous in 1966.

In 1967, tired of both the crushing Yardbirds heaviness that was fashionable in London at the time and his inability to keep up on rhythm guitar with other musicians, he abandoned the Buzz (as the Lower Third had become) and head-ed for the folk club circuit with just an acoustic 12-string.

In 1968 his Love You Till Tuesday and a first album by another young sing-er-songwriter launched the then-new Deram label in Britain. Although Till Tuesday was widely applauded, Cat Stevens' debut outsold it by several thousand, causing Deram to focus its attention on Cat. This situation may be held at least partially responsible for Bowie's then

John Mendelsohn

Lauren Bacall? No, it's David Bowie, who refuses to be thought of as mediocre

quitting professional musical activity entirely for a while in order to devote all of his time to Buddhism, in which he'd been interested and sporadically involved since his middle-teenage years.

Gradually, first through the Demp mime enterprise and later through a mixed-media trio of his own, he became reinvolved with music, the commercial apogee of this renewed interest being a single of his, "Space Oddity," which was a large hit in Britain. Bowie invested a considerable percentage of the money he made from his hit in an experimental community of various sorts of artists that he co-founded, the Arts Laboratory of Beckenham, Kent.

Bowie contends that rock in particular and pop in general should not be taken as seriously as is currently the fashion: "What the music says may be serious, but as a medium it should not be questioned, analyzed, or taken so seriously. I think it should be tarted up, made into a prostitute, a parody of itself. It should be the clown, the Pierrot medium. The music is the mask the message wears-music is the Pierrot and I, the performer, am the message.

"Tell your readers that they can make up their minds about me when I begin getting adverse publicity; when I'm found in bed with Raquel Welch's husband."