Bowie: A Biography - JFK247

door and talking her into it. Mick wasn’t a devout
Mormon by any means but that’s the way he was
raised.”
His father was also a musician and encouraged
his boy, a shy and unassuming child, to play. “Mick,”
as he was called early on, took to the piano initially,
and there was talk of formal, classical study. He also
expressed interest in string instruments and for a
while studied violin and cello. This forced the quiet
child to toughen up, as it prompted puerile taunts
from some of his classmates. “He used to carry his
violin case around, so [if he was] put in a corner he
could fight,” Suzi says.
As with Bowie, the advent of rock ’n’ roll, however,
dovetailed with Mick Ronson’s adolescence and
soon he was asking his parents for a guitar. His
father purchased an acoustic guitar with trade
stamps, and Mick soon began playing along to
rockabilly and blues on the radio. By his teens
Ronson had grown into a lean, handsome man with
a strong chin, aquiline profile and thick, shoulderlength
hair who played in several local bands, like
the Crestas and the Mariners. By 1965, Ronson was
obsessed with the Yardbirds’ guitarist Jeff Beck and
went down to London himself in an effort to emulate
him. He would hang around local cafés like the
Giaconda and may have very well crossed paths
with Bowie without knowing it. Both men were hungry
and searching at the time.
“I never had any money and I used to sit there with
one cup for five or six hours,” Ronson, who died in