How David Bowie Became New York’s Favorite Adopted Son

In his 1997 song “I’m Afraid of Americans,” David Bowie sang, “I’m afraid of Americans…I’m afraid I can’t help it.” These sentiments were at odds with a life that saw him move to Manhattan in the early nineties and live at New York City until he died in January 2016. It was somehow typical of this South Londoner that he should embrace his New York existence far more than any of the other places he had spent time, from Switzerland to Mustique. As he once said in 2003, almost in disbelief, “I realized the other day that I’ve lived in New York longer than I’ve lived anywhere else. It’s amazing: I am a New Yorker. It’s strange; I never thought I would be.”Still, there was a limit to his newly acquired life. He never became an American citizen, and liked to emphasize the difference between his situation and life in the country in general to the media. “I don’t live in America,” he said. “I live in New York.” His apartment of choice was a large condo on Lafayette Street in SoHo, where he lived with his wife Iman, and when she was born in 2000, his daughter Lexi. It was from here that he headed out to soak up New York’s cultural and artistic life, although he intentionally limited his horizons. He said of the city in 2005, the year after his semi-retirement following an on-stage heart attack he suffered while performing: “It’s just a place that I adore. And I love seeing new theatre, I love seeing new bands, art shows, everything. I get everywhere – very quietly and never above 14th Street. I’m very downtown.” It was a measure of this quietness that although Bowie involved himself in the New York arts scene, curating the inaugural High Line festival in 2007 and judging at the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival – the winning film was the vampire picture “Let The Right One In” – he was uncomfortable at the idea of being recognized in public. Famously, his street outfit was a cloth cap, dark glasses and a Greek-language newspaper, on the grounds that any curious fan seeing him and believing that they were in the presence of the former Thin White Duke would see the journal and think that this middle-aged man was instead a blameless Greek tourist.Yet Bowie was not bothered by too many people. He once said of his Manhattan anonymity, “I am not a secretive guy, but I am quite private. I live as a citizen pure and simple. I don’t go for the disguise thing – I’ve never found it necessary, at least not since my real hair color grew in years ago. I suppose wearing jeans is the nearest I get to confounding expectations.”His New York-focused career, before his decade-long departure from the scene, saw him confound expectations in countless ways. Shortly after his arrival in the city – a planned move to Los Angeles was frustrated by the city’s 1992 riots, which put him and Iman off the idea of life there – he was sued by a local record label, Savage. It accused him of defaulting on his responsibilities to them after the disastrous release of his 1993 album “Black Tie White Noise”, which was barely distributed in the States. The case was not settled at the New York State Court of Appeals until 1998. However, there were also more interesting ventures. He dabbled in Wall Street finance with the so-called “Bowie Bonds” scheme in 1997, in which he agreed to forgo all the royalties from all the albums that he had recorded prior to 1990 for a period of ten years. Instead, the royalties would be translated into bonds, which were sold for $1,000 apiece and would attract an interest rate of 7.9 percent for the next decade, before self-liquidating upon expiry. Years before Ponzi schemes, sub-prime mortgages and junk bonds brought about the financial crisis, Bowie managed to be one of the select few who made serious money – as much as $50 million, by some estimates – out of the money markets, transforming him from someone who had worried about cash flow (dodgy managers had plagued him throughout his career) to the plutocracy that an A-List rock star deserved. However, the bustling energy of New York alone did not make Bowie harder nosed. Instead, it was a vital creative hub for him. He recorded most of his albums there from the early Nineties, with his final records “The Next Day” and “Blackstar” cut in secrecy at the Magic Shop Studios in Tribeca. He played with New York artists, including jazz maestro Donny McCaslin and super-producer Tony Visconti, used a Manhattan-based business manager in the formidable form of Bill Zysblat and generally immersed himself in the cultural and creative opportunities that the city offered. It was 9/11 that proved the key turning point. The day after the attack, Bowie, who had been upstate at the time, wrote on his website of his respect for his fellow New Yorkers, calling them “a resilient and fast-thinking people. In this way, they really do resemble my own Londoners. They came together quickly in massive community support and silent determination.” The next month, Bowie performed at the Concert for New York City, covering Simon and Garfunkel’s “America” before performing his own “Heroes.” If there was a moment at which he became a New Yorker, it was this. All the fond tributes left to him outside his apartment after his death were testament to the love his fellow residents bore for the Starman, the city’s favorite adopted son. Alexander Larman’s “Lazarus: The Second Coming of David Bowie” is now available from Pegasus Books.

How David Bowie Became New York’s Favorite Adopted Son

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