Bowie: A Biography - JFK247

lifestyle,” former Defries partner Laurence Myers
says today. “This happened very often with artists.
They loved driving around in the limos, then they get
the bill because their contract says they pay for those
things. Then they say, ‘Well, I haven’t got any money.’
Well, you chose to drive around in limos. You’re also
often surrounded by a hundred different people every
day wanting to party. These people, they either want
to become your new manager themselves or they
just want to be your friend, so what they do is they
say to you, ‘You’re wonderful, you’re marvelous, you
are brilliant and you are a genius and you are not
being served. Why haven’t you got this? Why haven’t
you got that?’ Sometimes they’re right. Sometimes
they’re wrong. And then, from the artist’s point of
view, it’s ‘Jagger’s got a bigger house than I do,’ or
‘I’m fed up with my old guy telling me what to do and
running my life.’ It’s like a marriage. And David was
doing loads and loads and loads and loads of
cocaine. None of which helps.”
Back in New York, work continued on Young
Americans through January of 1975 at the Power
Plant in midtown Manhattan, with Tony Visconti
producing. Bowie had already palled around with
Lennon in L.A. Given his near constant coke
paranoid state, it’s amazing that Bowie pursued
Lennon so doggedly. The prospect of becoming
matey with an actual Beatle clearly outweighed the
risk of drawing FBI attention to himself—as it was
suspected and is now well known that the agency
had been monitoring Lennon closely for most of the