
Standing face to face with David Bowie, I didn't feel like I was talking to just another rock star.
After all, he always played these larger-than-life characters like Ziggy Stardust or the Thin White Duke onstage. And I didn't know if he'd be in character, so to speak. And, since this was our first personal encounter, I really wanted to see if one of his eyes was indeed blue and the other brown.
The answer is yes.
We were backstage at a stadium in Anaheim, Calif., in 1987. Bowie – who died Sunday of cancer at age 69 -- was taking his Glass Spider Tour on the road. He was easy to talk to. Just like any other big name rock star. He even seemed surprisingly approachable and friendly later that night at the bar in his posh Hollywood hotel where he was hanging out with his bandmates.
At the stadium, I met the bandmates, including guitarist Peter Frampton (Bowie's old school chum) and choreographer Toni Basil. Yes, this was a theatrical tour. It was Bowie, after all.
He explained that he was at the stage of his tour where he was "half-watching the show myself while I'm performing it. It's a very odd feeling."
Basil said Bowie came to her with concepts illustrated in drawings and photos. "If he could clone himself, he wouldn't need us," she said. "He has a huge perspective creatively. And his mind works like a computer."
With an omnipresent cup of coffee and pack of Marlboro cigarettes in front of him, Bowie explained his concept for the multi-media show: "I hoped the eye would travel as fast as the ear does through
music. You would be barraged with visual information, so you would be switching eyes from what's happening on the screen to, `Oh, look what's happening over there,' so it becomes a pastiche of information, which is kind of what I like, that kind of art. I'm drawn toward Dadaism and that particular kind of fragmented form of information."