Bowie: A Biography - JFK247

transactions were frowned upon but rampant to the
point of being banal. Still, for all of Pitt’s efforts and
even with the power of NASA on his side, he could
not, in the summer of 1969, turn “Space Oddity” into
a real hit. He didn’t lack drive or strategy; it was the
record label staff who had no idea how to create a
hit. The people with all the money and power did not
know how to apply it.
All the while, Bowie was running on a much more
organic energy source; he spent his long, sunny
afternoons hippie-strumming for a few dozen people
atop a simple wooden stool among the block tables
and stored casks in the Three Tuns’ sunny back
room. “I remember him getting ready for the Arts Lab
one Sunday evening, about four of us lying around in
his room. He was playing the Gibson twelve-string, a
total outpouring of spontaneous music. Just came
out of him,” Finnegan says. “It was just absolutely
totally superb. Brilliant off the cuff. Some very
wonderful music happening. After the Arts Lab,
everybody who had performed used to come back to
Foxgrove Road and stay up until two or three in the
morning. Lots of spontaneous jamming.”
As the hit single he’d spent the entire decade
pursuing was about to chart, Bowie had convinced
himself that the pursuit of authenticity was his “chief
occupation” and boasted to a reporter about the
Lab: “There isn’t one pseud involved. All the people
are real—like laborers or bank clerks.” It was easy to
view Kenneth Pitt with a measure of cynicism as the
hippie movement placed his old-fashioned manners