Kooks, Queen Bitches and Andy Warhol: The Making of David Bowie's Hunky Dory

By Ken Sharp

Over the past five decades, David Bowie's towering musical legacy is rightfully acclaimed as among the most inventive, groundbreaking and compelling in rock history. Bowie's 1971 long player, "Hunky Dory," in particular has garnered lofty praise, voted by "Time" magazine as one of the top 100 albums of all-time.

"Kooks, Queen Bitches and Andy Warhol: The Making of David Bowie's Hunky Dory" chronicles the fascinating back story behind that celebrated album. Written by New York Times Best-selling author Ken Sharp, the 112 page book is constructed as an oral history and culls revelatory interviews with scores of the album's key participants for an all-encompassing look at this seminal release. Among those interviewed include Bowie's band, producer Ken Scott, RCA Records personnel plus countless others along with archival commentary from David Bowie and the late Mick Ronson.

Testimonials:
Hunky Dory is still one of my all time favorite albums - it's my favorite of all the records I did with David Bowie. I have many fond memories of the making of it as this was the first recording I ever played on. Hunky Dory is unique, has wonderful songs of great warmth and feel and is beautifully recorded. Ken has really captured much of this sentiment and detail in his book, which I greatly enjoyed and highly recommend.
—Trevor Bolder, bassist, "Hunky Dory"

I’m impressed with Ken’s approach to this project. It was a nice change to have intelligent questions and to be able to recount the making of this album. It will make a good read for any fan.
—Woody Woodmansey, drummer, "Hunky Dory"

Teeming with a great depth of research and information, this is a genuine and honest appreciation of both the period and subject and fully complements an album that continues to entertain and delight now more than 40 years on from its creation. Carefully reexamining and investigating every aspect of this masterpiece, Ken spoke with all of those directly responsible for its recording and ultimately provided us with a very valuable future reference of a brief but essential area of David Bowie’s incredible artistic output – a rich period from which we can learn so much.
—Kevin Cann, author, David Bowie’s "Any Day Now: The London Years 1947-1974"

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ken Sharp
• Release date: Oct 16, 2020
• ISBN: 9781005944674

Ken Sharp

Ken Sharp is the author of Starting Over: The Making of John Lennon & Yoko Ono's Double Fantasy, Elvis: Vegas '69, KISS: Behind the Mask, and numerous other books. He lives in Los Angeles.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

IT’S MARCH OF 1976... I’m 12-years-old and sitting by myself inside the Philadelphia Spectrum, awaiting the arrival of the Thin White Duke. It’s my first concert and a momentous one—David Bowie’s Station to Station tour has come to town. Cigarette smoke mixed with the sweet smell of pot is thick in the humid air. Freaks of all sizes and shapes, kaleidoscopic visions of androgyny and outrageousness, roam freely throughout the aisles while a few psychos begin heaving baseballs randomly at people in the crowd. Next to me, a sleazy-looking dude with greasy black hair and a thick pornstache is shoveling white powder into his nostrils, letting out a maniacal roar when he’s done. Joining in the revelry, his provocatively-attired girlfriend enthusiastically chugs from a brown paper bag with the words GROG XXX written messily in black magic marker. Looks like I need to strap in, it’s gonna be a bumpy ride.

Soon, the lights go out, a screen descends and projected upon it is a freaky 1929 film by Luis Buñuel and Salvadore Dali called Un Chien Andalou, which is equally disturbing and fascinating, replete with the shocking scene of someone’s eyeball being sliced with a razor. Holy Shit! For an innocent, pimply 12 year-old, this was a long way from Jaws or Escape from Witch Mountain and way cooler than my usual slate of Saturday morning cartoons and reruns of Welcome Back, Kotter. The concert itself was remarkable. The hypnotic buildup of the Station to Station opening riff by Bowie’s backing band seemed to go on forever until finally the man himself emerged, slicked back fire-engine red hair bathed in stark black and white light, crooning the opening couplet, the return of the Thin White Duke throwing darts in lovers’ eyes. Bowie even reached back to perform a few Hunky Dory tracks—Changes, Queen Bitch and Life on Mars."

Not long after this life-altering show, I strapped on an electric guitar for the first time, and I was immediately hooked. Inspired by such Bowie albums as The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, Aladdin Sane and Pin Ups, I began writing songs, most too lame and embarrassing to remember. Lurking amid a sloppy mountain of well-worn vinyl propped against my cheap Radio Shack stereo, there was one particular Bowie album that kept drawing me in like a giant magnet — Hunky Dory. Housed inside a vividly colorized album cover depicting a shaggy, long-haired Bowie striking his best silent movie queen pose, Hunky Dory’s music spoke to me like no other. It didn’t sound like freaky intergalactic anthems from outer space (Ziggy Stardust) or proto-metal (The Man Who Sold the World), nor did it mine the futuristic experimental thread of Bowie’s late-Seventies Berlin trilogy (Low, Heroes, Lodger). It was altogether different — quirky, quaint and instantly accessible.

"I went to the States for three months to promote The Man Who Sold the World and when I returned I had a whole new perception on songwriting," Bowie told Beat Instrumental writer Steve Turner in 1972. My songs began changing immediately. Secondly, by the time I came back I had a new record label, RCA, and also a new band. America was an incredible adrenaline trip. I got very sharp and very quick. Somehow or other I became very prolific. I wanted to write things that were more... immediate.

Over the years, Hunky Dory has been written off as a transitional album that bridged the gap between more important records in the Bowie canon, namely The Man Who Sold the World and The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. It deserves better. In many ways, Hunky Dory might be the closest we’re ever gonna get to the real David Bowie. On this album, he wasn’t hiding behind an alter-ego. Pure, uncomplicated and strikingly direct, the album serves as Bowie’s quintessential showcase as a songwriter.

Turn and face the strange... indeed. Decades after I first heard it, Hunky Dory still manages to rent space in my psyche. So much so that, in 2008, I decided to hunker down and at-tempt to unlock its many secrets by tracking down as many of the album’s participants as humanly possible — Bowie’s band, producer Ken Scott, original manager Ken Pitt, RCA Records personnel and countless others. Truth be told, I put together this oral history as much for me as for you, the reader. If it inspires you to slap on Life on Mars?, Quicksand or any of the record’s other jagged jewels — or even better, revisit the entire album — then I’ve done my job.

(Author’s note: By the time I began working on this project, Mick Ronson, one of the central figures of Hunky Dory, had passed away 15 years earlier, while efforts to reach a semi-retired David Bowie — a few inner circle members like George Underwood championed my cause — elicited no response. In an attempt to provide their side of the story, I’ve drawn from archival material for both.)

ABSOLUTE BEGINNING

During his formative years in the Sixties, David Bowie was clearly an artist in search of an identity, and his schizophrenic musical adventures reflected that ongoing struggle. For a while, he fronted The Lower Third, a Who/Kinks styled mod band, then suddenly changed course and began crooning middle-of-the-road ballads redolent of his idol, Anthony Newley. Manager Ken Pitt first witnessed Bowie performing at London’s Marquee club in April 1966.

Ken Pitt (Bowie manager, 1967-1970): I had worked with many great singing stars — Frank Sinatra, Billy Eckstine, Sarah Vaughan, Frankie Laine, Mel Tormé, Cleo Laine — and they all had a way with words, but with the exception of Tormé the words were not of their own making. Then along came Bob Dylan, the singer-songwriter whose Blowin’ in the Wind was launched by the musical voices of Peter, Paul and Mary, who made it a hit. So appealing was the imagery of the song that even his own version eventually matched theirs in record sales. The success of the song brought Dylan to Britain in 1964 and I cherish the memory of sitting with him in his suite at the Savoy Hotel watching him while he fed a roll of toilet paper into his typewriter and typed on it his very latest lyrical thoughts. So when I went to the Marquee to see and hear David Bowie for the first time I was heavily laden with my long experience of singers and songs, my love for the poems of Ernest Dowson and my early years as a [Aubrey] Beardsley-inspired art student... There, before my eyes and ears was this 19-year-old singing his own songs, perhaps now seen as lightweight in the mid-Sixties pop style, but more exciting than anything I was currently hearing. He even used his physical form to express essential punctuation marks and his innermost feelings.

Bob Grace (general manager, Chrysalis Music, 1969-1972): There was a company (Gem) run by a man named Laurence Myers and working with him was Tony Defries. They were business management for artists. They told me their business premise is to take square pegs out of round holes. I knew Laurence and he told me they were looking for a new home for David because his contract had come up with his publishing company, Essex Music and invariably