Angie Part II: Be My Wife

Time for more 'rediscovered' content. This is part two of the Backstage Passes report. The one I wasn't going to post. Prepare yourself. To immerse yourself in Angie's World, you might want to go back and reread the first post.

So, I don't think I actually have any audience for these posts, which makes it a bit difficult to summarize. What juicy gossip does my audience want? And if I have no audience am I tailoring this entry to myself, someone who already know everything that happens in this book?

I guess I'll stick to the basic narrative.
We've already met Angela, so I guess it's time to meet Bowie. Angie helpfully provides lots of biographical background on her future husband with special emphasis on dysfunctional family. I'll skip over most of this although its really very interesting, and arrive at the time she meets Bowie, a hippie singer in a song, dance, and touch of mime trio. The book is much more detailed on the beginning of their relationship than the end, which is fine by me because I love beginnings. On to the convoluted first meeting with Angie's future husband:
1. First becomes aware of Bowie: A shirtless photo on the wall of Calvin Mark Lee, a guy she is sleeping with. Calvin Mark Lee was a record executive for Mercury. When David would claim he met his wife when they were "laying the same bloke" Calvin is that "bloke".
2. First sees Bowie in person: Okay, so Angie is dating Calvin's boss, right? And Calvin really wants to get David a contract with Mercury. Boss however is skeptical. So, Calvin tells Angie to come with them, see David perform, and tell Boss how great he is. Which she does and actually thinks he is pretty good, but he is performing in a trio with his hippie dancer girlfriend. Clear?
3. The actual meeting: David's girlfriend (improbably named Hermione Farthingale) breaks up with him. Angie and Calvin meet him for dinner. The two hit it off, Calvin seems cool with it. The rest is history, sort of.

Musically, Angie enters just as Bowie is recording his second self-titled album. This is not David Bowie: Freaky Novelty Tunes, but David Bowie: The One With Major Tom. Also, Bowie's manager at this time is Ken Pitt. Here we are introduced to Angie's first great rival, whom she eventually dispatches. Angela can be generous in victory towards a defeated opponent. She does acknowledge Pitt's utter devotion to David and his occasional clever ideas. However, she is also quite cutting, especially in aid of a clever turn of phrase. Pitt's appearance, old-fashioned musical taste, and closeted behavior all come in for criticism. David once told her that Pitt's kink was German military uniforms (he lived with Pitt at one time). So, the poor man is in for endless cracks about Germans, Nazis, precision, discipline, and fashion. Truly endless. Anyway, in Angie's eyes Ken Pitt is a jealous old queen who resents her relationship with Bowie and whose conservative nature hinders David's career. She arranges for his removal in the chapter titled "Rejoice, For the Queen is Dead" (no, really). Yet at the end of this chapter she also comes to a rousing defense of the music business gay mafia: "None of the most significant musicians mentioned above-- the Beatles, the Who, David Bowie, Madonna-- got anywhere worthwhile in the business until the talent and energy of a gay man was added to the act" (103).

Okay, back on track. The book contains lots of stories of the famous, because that sells books, but Angie really has two primary concerns:1. bisexuality/ sexual identity/ sexual freedom 2. her under-appreciated contribution to David Bowie's career.
She's truly interested and invested in these ideas. I'll start backwards of course. What I do appreciate is that Angie doesn't get too caught up in how she contributed to/appreciated the music. Bebe Buell was always pushing how much various artists respected her 'taste' and it honestly made the woman sound pathetic and self-aggrandizing. Angie doesn't necessarily suffer from low-self esteem, but she mostly sticks to what she knows. You can learn how David might procrastinate or where he liked to write, but Angie claims no credit for anything musical. If you want to hear about clothes, though, you are in luck. In the early years Angie's jobs were fashion, running a kind of communal home, and being the 'door-breaker'-- dealing with anyone that David passive aggressively couldn't face
Oh-- another tangent. Remember how I tried to amateur psychoanalyze Bebe? Angie does the work for us with loads of back seat psychology. For example: you can learn how David relates to all of his managers as father-figures. More tenuous is her theory that the first fissures in their marriage had their roots in her behavior after their son's birth. According to Angie's reading, he displaced his resentment of his mother's neglect of half-brother Terry onto his wife. Isn't this fun!
Anyway, back to fashion. You can hear about Angie's shopping trips. How she encourages David to borrow her clothes, and the purchase of the infamous man-dress worn on the cover of The Man Who Sold the World ("It's just amazing what the right dress will do for you.") Also, how she would sew up clothes and costumes until they met Freddi Burretti and he became their personal designer. How Any Warhol complemented Bowie's shoes (but not his music). The drama of getting the Ziggy haircut without offending any of their hairdresser friends, etc. etc.

Now, Angie is always pretty flattering about David's music, and she does recount some crazy cocaine paranoia, but generally you would think that this book isn't so bad as far as ex-wife tell-alls go. However, if I were a famous musician I could shrug of any number of crazy drug stories and even throw in some of the 'poor victim' riffs that Angie mostly avoids. Instead, Angie goes for the jugular with The Embarrassing Sexual Problem. Yes, Angie goes there. That has got to hurt the rock star ego.

The biggest drawback to this book is that it is confusingly organized (not unlike this blog). Unlike this blog Angie has a professional co-writer. Anyway, there are issues of chronology that cause confusion. For example she writes about trying to poach David's dates and lovers, but she also says "..he began breaking our unspoken rules. He began making his conquests and maintaining his mistresses close to home, in my circle, in my face. He started sleeping with a big (two-hundred pound), beautiful black woman who was my friend...". (By the way is 'friend' a euphemism here? I can't really tell.) On the one hand, you could just say that Angie is being contradictory and hypocritical or when she complains that David couldn't handle an open-relationship, that he isn't the only one. However, if you are paying very careful attention to the chronology it is possible that this occurs earlier in the relationship than her own accounts of sexual one-upsmanship. That being said, it definitely is preceded by her holiday with Dana Gillespie, so I can only rationalize so far.
Another problem is that Angie likes to throw out intriguing lines without following up on them. For example:


Ha! It's like a cliff hanger, except that I never finished, so the reader is hanging on the cliff for eternity,