When Has Bowie Not Got His Own Way? - TW David Bowie Conversation Piece

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...., Stevie got a phone call from another Montreux acquaintance. It was David Bowie. He was preparing to record another album in New York in January. Would Stevie Ray be interested in playing on it?
"Sure," he replied.
Stevie wasn't exactly a big fan of the Thin White Duke. He'd heard the Ziggy Stardust & the Spiders from Mars album just enough to hate it real bad. "Uncle John Turner used to play it all the time and rave about it," he said. "It didn't just make me not like it, it made me mad. The way it sounded made me mad and when I saw a picture of Bowie on that tour it made me mad."
But Stevie Ray accepted the invitation, which pissed off half the studio guitar pros in Manhattan. Who the hell was this primitive nobody? Bowie actually bragged that his discovery was so retro that he "considers Jimmy Page something of a modernist. The lad seems to have stopped at Albert Collins."
Running through an album's worth of material in three days at Jackson Browne's was one thing. Working with a perfectionist like David Bowie was another. By the time Stevie entered the picture, most of the album's instrumental tracks were complete. Stevie watched carefully from the sidelines as Bowie went into the studio, cut his vocals and polished the song's rough edges for another hour or two. Only then did he bring Stevie into the process, commanding Stevie to "plug that blues guitar in." Stevie obeyed, using Albert King as his guide. He required but a couple of takes to complete each track. Though Nile Rodgers from the dance band Chic was officially the producer, it was Bowie who was calling the shots.
Stevie played on a total of six selections, needing only two-and-a-half hours of studio time over a three-day period. The sessions gave him a chance to measure his worth against the top studio men in the business. On one cut, "Cat People," Stevie later said, "He wanted real slow, Brian Jones kind of parts. I wanted to rip and roar. We tried it and I thought we'd dumped it. The next time I heard the song it was there." For "China Girl" Stevie evoked the steamy sexuality of an exotic lover with his sensual guitar work. On "Let's Dance," the cut that became the first single off the album, Stevie copped Albert King's licks so closely that King later accused him half jokingly of "doin' all my shit on there."
"Bowie liked what I played," Stevie said in an interview in the Dallas Times-Herald. "When I started listening to the cuts, I had no idea at all what to play; even though he'd already shown me on the rehearsal tape what he wanted. So what I did was go in there and get the best tone I could out of the amp without blowing it up, which I did do to the first one, I killed it. But I finally realized just to go in there and play like I play and it would fit. I'd never played on anything like that before but it worked."
Still, the Texas kid wasn't exactly awe-struck. "I wouldn't necessarily go buy it. But I like what I've heard."
The album Let's Dance, Bowie's self-described "commercial debut," was an unprecedented smash, spinning off three hit singles and eventually selling more than 5 million copies, more than three times the number of records of Ziggy Stardust, Bowie's previous best seller. Bowie realized that a key ingredient of his unprecedented success was Stevie Ray Vaughan's guitar. He asked him to join his Serious Moonlight World Tour, which would last a year minimum.
Stevie was flattered by the invitation but torn. He was ferociously loyal to Chris and Tommy; but Bowie's invite held out the promise of propelling him into the rock 'n' roll big time, a world which Stevie claimed he despised while craving it deep in his soul. What would he do: Stick with the blues and work the clubs or tour the world with David Bowie? There was only one choice. When rehearsals for the Bowie tour began on a soundstage at the Los Colinas studios near Dallas in March of 1983, Stevie Ray Vaughanwas there.
While Stevie's naive artistry was a plus in making the album Let's Dance, it turned the rehearsals into a nightmare. Before His Ladyship, as Bowie was referred to behind his back, even arrived, Stevie got crossways with Carlos Alomar, the tour's musical director, Alomar was a lead guitarist, too, and keenly aware that he was going to have to compete with Stevie for playing time during the shows. To add to the tension, Stevie couldn't read music like the other hired hands, making it difficult for him to figure out the parts he was charted to play. Alomar could deal with the musical shortcomings. What he couldn't deal with was Lenny.
Lenny was starstruck She wanted to hang out at the rehearsals. Stevie wanted her with him. He liked her company, the coke she brought with her and the relief of not worrying where she was or who she was with when she wasn't around. When Bowie arrived after 10 days of preliminary rehearsals, Alomar complained about the drugs and the wife. Bowie immediately banished Lenny from the premises, which pissed Stevie off. Amends were made at a birthday party for Bowie, when the star came over to tell Stevie how nice it would be if Double Trouble could open some shows on the tour.
It was the solution to the problem that had been nagging Stevie ever since he agreed to go on tour with Bowie. He wanted to have a taste of the big time, but it bummed him out putting Chris and Tommy on hold, especially when Double Trouble had an album in the can. The possibility of his boys tagging along seemed like the ideal solution.
Chesley Millikin, Stevie's manager, immediately got on the phone to take advantage of Bowie's offer. With Double Trouble out on the road with Bowie, selling the album would be a piece of cake. During two days of downtime for the Bowie tour, he lined up a gig for Double Trouble on "Musicladen," an influential German TV program. When Bowie caught wind of the side action, he hesitated. He couldn't have one of his support musicians advancing his career in the midst of his own tour. Bowie sent word that Millikin would have to relinquish management of Stevie Ray Vaughan for the duration of the tour.
Chesley hit the roof. Stevie quit the tour.
For several weeks, it was the talk of the music business. This unknown guitar player was blowing off David Bowie. Was he crazy?
"I couldn't gear everything on something I didn't really care a whole lot about," Stevie told a reporter from the Dallas Morning News. "It was kind of risky; but I really didn't need all the headaches. We really thought we had something going with our album." Stevie Ray Vaughan, the world would learn, didn't take no shit.
As a businessman, Chesley knew that he had taken a risk by pulling Stevie off the Bowie tour. As a believer in his client, he knew in his guts that what he had done was right.
"Telling Bowie to fuck off was the greatest factor for establishing Stevie Ray Vaughan as the working-class guitar hero," he later said.
Perhaps the single most important factor that gave Stevie the courage to jump off the Bowie dream machine was an elderly gentleman with a flat top haircut and a set of teeth big enough for a horse. John Hammond was a promoter, a writer, a lifelong civil rights advocate who served for many years on the board of the NAACP..........

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