The Story Chapter Four

The band and the children's choir behind him burst into the intro to "When I Live My Dream." David looks around him and sees Peter Frampton on guitar, Gail on bass, and an enormous Rick Wakeman on keyboards looking much like Walter Mathau in a blond-shag wearing a gold lami muu-muu. David rises to the occaision and proceeds to do a long nostagia-laden medley of tunes from the sixties including portions of "Love You Till Tuesday" "Wild Eyed Boy From Freecloud" "Space Oddity" and finally closing with "Memory of a Free Festival," the children's choir singing "The sun machine is coming down..." and Rick Wakeman sending great heaving tsunami's of moog-wash out into the adoring crowd. They finish the song. Wakeman waddles off and Philip Glass replaces him on keyboards. Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon appear stage left (Kim, stunning holding a ratty looking bass and her in a pink satin floor-length sheath -her hair is 'up.') Glass begins a rather symphonic intro to 'Heroes,' Kim adding sub-sonic texture and Thurston doing his tortured best at the guitar parts. David lets Kim sing the first verse which is drenched with beautiful irony as she sings 'I, I will be king, and you, (looking at David) you will be queen.' A fan at the front has thrown a kitten with a big pink bow (a gift?) onto the stage and as they finish 'Heroes,' stage hands chase the frightened kitty around the stage. Slowly, Bowie look-a-likes from all the stages of his career rush the front of the stage. Wacky fans who have constructed outfits from memory wave and mug for David's attention. As Kim, Thurston, Frampton and Glass leave the stage, Bowie sees in the front rows at least a dozen different Ziggy's, many thin white dukes, and several brave fans who've dared to be seen in public in outfits similar to ones he wore in the 'Day In Day Out' video. Big hair and all. Camille Paglia comes on stage to make a brief announcement, she begins "Welcome effete courtiers and soliciting ephebic sodomites, (a hush falls over the crowd), we're her to pay tribute to our beloved mannequin transvestite Nefrititi, who also had one bad eye...." The crowd have no patience for this and begin throwing half-filled Pepsi's and assorted gifts at her. A giftwrapped glassware set make a direct hit to the forehead and Paglia screams and falls over unconscious. The children's choir has also left the stage at this point because moments ago Jarvis Cocker who was intended to do a duet with Bowie ran onstage, mooned the audience and beat a small girl to the ground. Stagehands wrestled Jarvis to the ground and drag him offstage. Gifts of all sorts litter the stage and stage hands arrive with push-brooms to clear the way for more guest musicians. The rest of Bowie's band arrive onstage, Reeves, Garson and the others, joined by the portly Brian Eno. Paglia remains an inert form at the front of the stage. Fans cover her with gifts and stagehands pile more gifts on her till she's buried beneath a massive pile. A fan at the front tosses a match on the pile and the whole mess goes up in flames as the band launch into a blistering version of Eno's 'Baby's On Fire' and then into 'Cat People.' The flames die down and Paglia's charred corpse is dragged off stage. (Academia heaves a sigh of relief) Presently, Madonna arrives onstage with the Pet Shop Boys. Neil and Chris are handed tiny Casio keyboards and they begin playing a tasty disco medley of 'Space Oddity/Ashes to Ashes/Hallo Spaceboy.' Madonna who feels she's being upstaged runs off and reappears with her newest accessory, the shrieking little Lourdes dressed in beautiful beaded Gaultier nappies. The audience is indifferent to the appearance of the tiny child and Madonna drops her and stagehands chase the frightened baby around the stage. Madonna pulls off her blouse and the audience goes wild. She dances topless about the stage, occasionally trying to pry a microphone out of Bowie's hands but has no luck. She stands at the edge of the stage shouting at stagehands, the audience, pointing fingers at her breasts and screaming at Bowie but 'Hallo Spaceboy' drowns her out. Neil and Chris look disinterested. Finally a giftwrapped set of Lalique bookends make a direct hit to the temple and Madonna collapses. She's dragged offstage by her feet to great applause. A brief intermission follows and the audience rush out to the merchandising stands which are actually complete gift shops stocked with Bowie everything. In the Bowie-Mall there are hundreds of different t-shirts, sweatshirts, dress shirts, A-line suits, embroidered gowns, twin-sets, shoes, hats and jewelry. In the housewares section one can purchase limited edition Bowie/Katherine Hamnet silk bed-sets, impractical Bowie/Vivienne Westwood dish towels and oven mitts, Issey Miyake tablecloths, curtains and tea-cozies. And in the atrium of the gift shop, for a mere $167,000, one can purchase a limited edition BMW which features a customized white-pearl paint job with an Aladin Sane style lightening-bolt across the hood, metallic blue leather upholstery, a cd player containing 12 hours of personally selected Bowie out-takes and one headlight smaller than the other. The lights in the mall flash on and off which signals the beginning of the second half of the show. People grab their shopping bags and head back into the hall. The musicians appear onstage and a spotlight appears on a lovely recently made-over Courtney Love who begins singing 'Teenage Wildlife,' she gets into the song half a verse when Madonna rushes Courtney and tackles her to the floor. The band stops as the two women wrestle, pulling each other's hair. Courtney bites a chunk out of Madonna's arm and spits it into the audience. (A lucky fan picks up the bite-sized piece of meat and places it in her recently purchased Bowie/Prada hammered eel-bladder and rhinocerous tusk handbag) The two women roll offstage into the audience who proceed to crowd-surf them to the back of the hall and finally out the door. Onstage Bowie is joined by the three surviving Beatles who dedicate a sensitively rendered version of 'Real Soul Love' to "Ramona, who couldn't be here tonight.' The three surviving Beatles and Bowie leave and the band starts up a smokin' version of 'Station to Station.' Thurston Moore provides screeching feedback and Bowie appears singing 'The return of the thin white duke....' They finish and are joined by Diamanda Galas who sits at a grand piano and she and Bowie sing 'Sweet Thing/Big Brother.' Yoko Ono and Sean Lennon (Ima) come on and the assembled group do an industrial/grunge/caterwauling-version of 'It's No Game' with Yoko shrieking in Japanese and rolling about the floor. All the musicians leave the stage and Bowie sings 'Wild is the Wind' accompanied only by Garson on piano. Half way through the song Nina Simone comes on to duet with Bowie. The effect is stunning. Many in the audience rush out to the Bowie-Mall to purchase $75 Galliano/Bowie handkerchieves to daub their tears. Bowie announces they'll be leaving soon and what a great birthday it's been... the band play 'Rebel Rebel' and the house rocks. They all leave the stage and the audience chants 'Bowie, Bowie, Bowie' for a full ten minutes. All the musicians come back onstage and they do a final song 'Drive-In Saturday' with Bowie crying and throwing gifts back into the audience....

A stagehand releases a small flock of freshly shorn, latex skullcap-wearing sheep onto the stage. They gently surround David, who smiles at them beatifically, his palms downturned to meet their innocent, affectionate nuzzling.

As he casts his gaze once more upon the crowd, David's face seems literally to beam with a soft golden radiance. A strange hush falls upon the crowd as waves of unspeakable peace sweep out from the stage over everyone present. All is still, except for a white dove which flutters down from the scaffolding to rest upon David's left shoulder.

"It's TRUE," a young female voice from the crowd breaks the silence. It is BowieManiac. "Dave IS God!" she cries in a frenzy of prepubescent ecstasy.

Instantly, Bowie's good eye glows red (his bad eye orange) as his mouth wrenches violently open in a hideous gape. The stench of sulphur spills from his mouth and flows over the edge of the stage, choking the mosh pit. The dove falls, stricken, from his shoulder. David reaches inside his jacket and pulls out a semi-automatic. Fixing his gaze upon one unlucky gasping Teenage Wildlife T-shirt-wearing mosh pitter, he growls in an unnatural bass:

"Don't... Call... Me... DAVE."

Slowly, he levels the gun barrel at his hapless fan, who offers, in futile desperation, one last winning smile of cheery condescension. A sheep baahhs. The tension is palpable...

...Unbeknownst to the audience, shortly before the grinding feedback intro to Station to Station, the doors to Madison Square Gardens were tightly sealed. The noisy intro to Station to Station was used to cover the noise of the booster rockets that slowly lifted the building and it's 'passengers' into the sky. Thirty minutes later, when the concert had ended the ship was well past our moon and on it's way to a destination known only by Bowie. Naturally some fans were upset. Some were thrilled. David announced from the stage that everyone should calm down, all would be fine and that he would provide further entertainment during the trip. What he failed to tell the audience was - that where ever they were going, it would take them three weeks to get there. For the next few hours David played acoustic versions of many of his songs from the eighties while the co-pilot, Nile Rogers, navigated the lumbering craft towards 'destination unknown'. The next morning the 17,000 passengers began to become restless when it became apparent that the ship was stocked with only enough nachos, hot-dogs and Pepsi's to last a three hour show. Riots broke out. David tried to calm the crowd by regailing them with stories of depravity with Iggy in Berlin. The crowd were having none of it. They wanted real food and groovy metallic space suit type outfits! More rioting broke out and there were many casualties. By the fourth day some groups of fans were resorting to cannibalism. Human flesh and pickle relish. For some reason there was an abundance of pickle relish available at the food stands. By the sixth day the pickle relish and Pepsi had run out, Bowie had performed everysong he'd ever performed as well as every cover he knew and the bathrooms had ceased to function. On the seventh day......

... he remembers he's forgotten to off that innocent mosh pitter. He roams through the rioting crowd until he finds her, puts a bullet in her brain, cleans out his ear holes with the aerial on his mobile phone, takes a deep cleansing breath, surveys the chaos around him, and quietly opens the door to the escape pod. He steps inside (picture cover of Station to Station), and moves to close the door behind him. He gazes sorrowfully across the shattered MSG one last time, thinking of his equally shattered utopian dream, his heart heavy. Aahh - What could have been! Just David and his 17,000 minions. Realising his gross error, he shrugs his shoulders, and turns his back on his fans. "I'll just have to go it alone." Thinks Dave. "Australia, here I come!" And with that, he closes the pod door, and abandons ship...

Free-fall.......silence........bliss. Bowie reflects, and reflects, and reflects, and in between reflecting (hey, i think this thing knows which way to go!) he composes 28 new tunes to regale his adoring- whoops! I got rid of my adoring fans!- his adoring alter-egos with. At first he just uses the well known ones to keep him company. Ziggy appears and slumps boneless against the pod wall. The Thin White Duke is pretty groggy also after such a long nap and curls up serpentine-like in a corner - silent and gaunt. Well they'll have to do Bowie thinks, and begins to sing. The alter egos begin to look up, gaining a strange strength from the music. Soon they are mumbling, then talking brokenly. While Bowie sings blissfully on, mostly bellowing with his eyes closed (man this is great! he thinks, I'm getting IN to this!) His alter egos begin to multiply, feeding off the energy he unknowingly directs toward them. All kinds of beings are born, all of them brain children of the man merrily singing opposite the space. Ziggy grasps what is happening (the decline in personal space available being part of that) and cautiously approaches his creator.