At times it’s easy to forget that David Bowie is not, in fact, a lean, extraterrestrial rock god sent down to bless us mortals with the gift of glam. Not so, one assumes, for Mick Rock, who bore more intimate witness to Bowie the Man than perhaps any other living lensman. From 1972 to 1973, while Bowie was in the throes of the glittering, feline Ziggy Stardust persona, Rock served as his official photographer. That period is now the subject of Taschen’s new epic coffee-table book, Mick Rock: Shooting for Stardust, The Rise of David Bowie & Co., coming out later this month, along with an accompanying show at the publisher’s Los Angeles gallery on September 9.
Rock regularly shot the Holy Trinity (David, Lou, and Iggy), but the book’s most compelling images are of the boy from Brixton off-duty, many of them never before seen—David doing his makeup before a gig, reclining on the tour bus, even sleeping. The vulnerability of the pictures shed a new light on music’s greatest chameleon, a man for whom iconic images are the norm. We recently caught up with the photographer, who got candid about his first encounter with David, life on the road, and Bowie’s vision of “a rock ’n’ roll in flaming Technicolor.”
Can you tell us about the first time you shot David?
I went to university at Cambridge, so I do know how to scribble a bit, and in the early days, to make a bit of extra money, I used to do interviews and photos for a few publications. It was cheaper–to have a guy doing the pictures and the photographs means you could pay less. It was Hunky Dory that turned me on to David. It was not, at the time, a hit. I went up to Birmingham Town Hall to meet David, shoot him, and set up an interview. The very first pictures I have of him I took backstage [there]. That was the beginning. He would invite me to different things. I shot him backstage, in performance. I shot him at his home, some more live pictures. And then I shot him for a men’s magazine called Club International. Those pictures David looked up and told his manager, “Mick sees me the way I see myself.” After that, I was around all the time.
Was he forthcoming with you from that first meeting, or was there ever a sense that he was guarded in his persona?
No, not really. David was very open, very charming, and very friendly. It was never difficult being around David. Being dressed the way he was, he kind of had to embrace it fully, and he did. He got a lot of controversial [press], and that probably was why he got his earliest attention, but of course once people got into the music, they realized that he was a formidable force. In the early days, I was the only photographer around. By that summer, when [The Rise and Fall of] Ziggy Stardust [and the Spiders From Mars] was released, then he started to get a lot more attention. I did the famous guitar fellatio shot of him [with guitarist Mick Ronson]. That’s an interesting picture. As David pointed out to me many years later, he was just trying to bite Mick’s guitar, and it was the way Mick swung his guitar. You can see when you look at the picture, the way [David’s] feet are splayed. Later he would duplicate it, and he was definitely assuming, shall we say, a submissive body attitude. Nowadays, who cares. But back in 1972, it was a big deal.
Much as been said about David as an artist, but perhaps less has been said about him as a career-minded entertainer, in the mold of the character of Ziggy Stardust. Did you sense that ambition in him from your first meeting?
He had a huge ambition. I have it somewhere on tape, where he talks to me about being totally ambitious. This is ’72, which is kind of the tail end of the whole hippie thing. To express your ambition in the way he did to me was very unusual. I think the words he used were, “If you were to come and tell me that my best friend had just died, I would probably go, Oh my god, how sad, and then go right back to the work I was doing.” I’m not sure that you could take that literally, because he was always a compassionate man, but he was trying to illustrate the degree of his ambition and his focus.
You’ve shot Bowie backstage, live, on the road. Do you favor one of those categories? David onstage versus David and Mick on the train?
What I’m shooting, that’s the thing I most enjoy shooting. He did give me this great access to everything. I’ve got an incredible series of probably 70 pictures of him making himself up backstage. To be honest, I enjoyed all of it. Of course, there’s something about the intimacy of the offstage pictures, which I [particularly] enjoyed. We were all very young then. When Lou came, he was a little older, he might have been in his late twenties, but I don’t think anybody [else] was over 25. It was a younger world in that sense; the music business was very young. Then we raised the bar as we got a little bit older, and then it became anybody over 30! [laughing] Now it’s anybody over 80, I suppose. Mick Jagger being out there at 72—what else can you say? And Pete Townshend, “I hope I die before I get old,” and of course the bugger didn’t! He’s still going strong. It was this sort of youthful arrogance in those days. There was no underground. You had a few magazines and that was about it. That was the only forum one had as a photographer.
What was it like for you as a photographer, and also a fan, to see the evolution of Bowie’s personas? Was there ever a feeling of sadness that you had just gotten to know one by the time it was over?
I have a kind of flexible way of thinking. I’ve done a lot of yoga over the years, and the yogis would always say, “Change is inevitable. It’s about you, it’s about your stability.” I’ve always kind of accepted changes from quite a young age, I would say. I think it’s essential. I loved David, and I loved all the changes he went through. For me, that’s being an artist: You don’t keep repeating yourself in the way you approach your creativity, and David, above all, did not. He really set the model exemplar. Back in those days, personas were much more static. Madonna picked up on David’s thing–of course, that’s 30 years ago! She was the next one to really keep working the changes, and it bleeds over into the modern world. [Performers today] change their clothes all the time, and it’s pretty accepted. Beyond that, it’s expected.
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