Photo credit: Howard Pitkow
Tony Visconti and Woody Woodmansey
One of the most accomplished producers in rock history, Tony Visconti has recorded with dozens of artists, including legends like Paul McCartney and Iggy Pop, but he’ll always be most associated with two: T. Rex, whose studio-slickened glam rock he heavily shaped, and David Bowie. Visconti was there during Bowie’s early years, as the producer for his self-titled 1969 album and his 1970 artistic breakthrough The Man Who Sold The World, and he was there during the final ones, too, producing Bowie’s jazz-inspired swan song Blackstar, released just two days before the singer’s death this January at age 69.
Never much of a road warrior, Visconti is now touring with a David Bowie tribute project called Holy Holy. Founded before Bowie’s death by Bowie’s longtime drummer Woody Woomansey and featuring singer Glenn Gregory and guitarist James Stevenson of The Cult, among others, the group performs The Man Who Sold The World in its entirety, along with other early Bowie songs. Ahead of its performance Tuesday, April 12 at the Milwaukee’s Turner Hall Ballroom, Visconti spoke to the Shepherd Express about the group’s origins, his early encounters with Bowie and the sessions that birthed the singer’s magnificent final album.
Let’s start by talking about the beginnings of Holy Holy. How did the band come about?
I hadn’t spoken to Woody Woodmansey for a long time, but about two years ago I suddenly got an email from him asking me to phone him or have a chat with him about the possibility of playing The Man Who Sold The World live. And I didn’t understand why at first, but when I spoke to him, he explained we had never played the album live. And I realized he was right, we had never played behind the album, which of course explains its miserable sales at the time. But it was in such the distant past that I had forgotten the details. He said I’d have to come to London and asked could I play the original album live? And I thought, “Wow, this would be amazing,” because it was a tough album to play. It’s a very bass oriented album—string oriented and bass oriented, with guitar. So I said yes, but I had to practice three months before I even had a first rehearsal with them to make sure I could even remember those parts, because it’s very complicated.
It had been a long time since you’ve gone on the road with a band, right?
I have never done it. I never go on tour. I play at night clubs all the time, and I do a show in New York show called the TV Show, where I get a few friends on stage, and the premise is we can do any song I produced in the show. But I don’t travel. I don’t get in a van and travel and sleep in a bunk, so this is all brand new to me.
What made you want to start doing that now, at this point in your career?
Well, I felt that I don’t play live enough. I’ve got studio chops. I can pick up my bass any time and play in the studio. And on virtually every album I produce I play bass or guitar or something else. And I thought this would be a real challenge, at my age, to see if I have the stamina and the brain power and all that, so it was a real challenge I set for myself. What I ended up doing is, because I could read and write music, is I transcribed the album, wrote it all out, and then when I played along with the album, the original one—it’s funny, you don’t forget anything. It’s all buried there, and slowly it came back, to the point where after three months I didn’t have to read the music anymore and my hands were strong enough again. In my mind I was back in this album; I was reliving this album. That was two years ago. Since then we must have done about 35 concerts, and now we’re doing 28 more on this leg of the tour, so we’re going to get really good at this soon [laughs].
Why was it you never had those rock-star ambitions to get up on the stage and perform in front of big audiences?
Well, I had them in my early 20s. I got a publishing deal and started writing songs. I was in a folk duo, and I thought, “I’m going to be a big star.” And I did have visions of doing this. Before that I made my living as a working musician. I was in working bands. On some weekends I would get weddings and things like that where I would put on tuxedo and a bowtie and play all the old-fashioned songs and rock songs. I was in demand because I was young and could play all the rock songs, yet I could play all the old songs my parents knew. So I was a working musician, and that was nothing difficult for me to do, playing songs in front of people. But my publisher didn’t like my songs, so he offered me an alternate job as an in-house producer. In one breath I was fired, and in the next I was hired, and that’s how I got this new career.
But through the years I’ve done gigs. I’ve done Carnegie Hall playing bass for David Bowie in the Philip Glass shows, and before we recorded The Man Who Sold The World, we did little tours throughout England. We would all pile into a station wagon and go up north along the famous M1 and play a few gigs. We went as far as Aberdeen and Scotland. But I would say I could count those shows on the fingers of two hands. I did 10 gigs back in those days. Then we were fired after The Man Who Sold World by David’s new manager, and I went on to become a record producer, and I did that from that point onward.
At that point you must have just been happy to have a job in the industry.
Oh, absolutely. I’m a studio rat; I always loved being in the studio. But now after doing this for almost 45 years, being able to change it up and play in front of huge crowds has been a new lease on life. It’s been really different for me.
Did Holy Holy have David’s blessing? Was he supportive of the project?
He was. You know, we did it without him. He didn’t ask us to do it. But I showed him a video of us—there’s one really good video of us that was made two years ago—and he loved it and said, “Boy, if we stayed together we would have been that good.” And I said, “Yeah, you’re right. It’s a shame.” You know, he regrets that we never toured. [Pauses] It’s hard to quote him in the past tense; I’m still dealing with that. But he didn’t officially approve. I said, “Would you say that in print?” And he said, “No.” [Laughs] He wasn’t saying anything in print. It’s not that he held anything against us; he just wasn’t talking in the last few years.
It seemed so rare, that an active artist of his stature could maintain so much privacy.
You know, it’s really easy if you keep the team small. The team was made up of people very close to him. Like, the studio was a little hard because they had a few [outside] people working there, but everybody in the studio had to sign a PDA. And they were just very happy to have David Bowie in their studio. If the secrecy was broken we would have left. They knew that; they understood that. But in the end, making those albums, everyone involved was one big happy family, so it was easy to keep it a secret.
What were those Blackstar sessions like? In some ways it’s a very somber album, obviously, but in other ways it’s a very joyful one, because it sounds so alive.
Well, we knew he was ill, and he told us. He told us that. And we had to get that out of the way. But once he said that on the first day, it was never mentioned again, and his spirit was so high! He was really, really enjoying making this album. For him, he was doing what you’d expect from David Bowie, which was doing something really different from the last album, and he managed to pull that off. Also it was a desire of his over the years to make a more jazz inflected album. And he discovered this quartet that we worked with, and we went to see them live, and that really was the game changer. It’s not to say that he wouldn’t have worked with his old band, it’s just wanted that game-changing style of music, and because it was working out, he was extremely happy about it.
It’s funny; usually when a legacy artist releases a new album, critics look at it through the lens of mortality, and comb it for signs that it’s a final statement. But a lot of the early reviews of it missed that angle. Nobody seemed to consider the possibility this might be his last.
I guess so. Some tracks are very solemn, but some are very lighthearted and actually hilarious and funny … So I don’t know, the critics just accepted it as the latest Bowie album because he had made The Next Day two years earlier. But nobody expected him to pass away, that’s true. Even myself. I thought everything was going smoothly, and he was going to come out of it alive.
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On the day David Bowie died, for as tragic as it was, I couldn’t help but smile a little bit in awe at him, because he’d pulled off this magnificent feat—he went out privately, on his own terms, with this wonderful last record. Very few artists are able to do that. Did you feel the same way at all, and did that give you any comfort?
I thought it was a work of art. Of course, we were all living with the knowledge that it [his death] could happen, but he did tell me a few weeks before he passed away that he had written some new songs and was anxious to get back in the studio. So you know, you reinterpret things based on the circumstances. So after he passed away and this album came out, it looked like a final statement, but it actually wasn’t. But you know, poets, authors—we’re all obsessed with death. It’s a great thing to write about, and it’s a great way to deal with it. So these aren’t the first songs he wrote about mortality.
After David died, there was a huge outpouring of eulogies and remembrances on a scale I don’t think I’ve seen since Michael Jackson’s death. Do you think those eulogies did justice to him?
Well, David’s a special case. In England it was a national day of mourning. They pulled down the flags to half-mast. I was there just last week in London, and some of the people there that I spoke to said it was like the same reaction as when Lady Diana died. It was revered at that level. The outpouring of grief and sorrow was enormous. And to some extent it was here, too. The thing is when someone that iconic dies, everyone has their own personal story. He touched the hearts and lives of so many people; millions and millions of people. People say songs like “Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide” saved their lives, things like that. So everyone has a story, or at least the true fans do. The true fans can always cite an example of feeling alone and being misfits and feeling that David Bowie helped prove that they could be whoever they are. So all the eulogies are correct in a subjective way. I had no problems with them.
Did they capture the man you knew, though?
Well, no. See I have my own memories of him. He’s a dear friend. I knew him almost 50 years. When we started out, he used to come to my apartment when he still lived with his parents. And one Sunday afternoon he brought his parents and his brother to meet me, this new American in town. He was really happy that he actually met an American [laughs]. He was 20 years old when I met him, and he was my good friend. Over the years we both went our own ways; he had a family and I had a family. But we always came back together to make an album or came together just for a chat, even if it was just over the telephone. And in recent years since the Internet came into bloom, we’d send each other funny emails or funny cartoons or interesting forms of music. We kept our friendship up over the Internet. So to me, he’s my old friend who I thought when I met him was a genius. All the signs were there. And I knew if the industry would give him a chance he would do something special, and my hunch was right.
You know, my goal when I left America to go to London—and it’s going to sound very naïve when I tell you this—was to discover the next Beatles, which is so cliché I can’t tell you [laughs]. And I was actually looking for that four piece group. I thought every London street corner had this four piece group with long hair and electric 12-string guitars and all that. And what I found was a land of very individualistic people, especially in the arts. There were no Beatles standing on the street corner. I came to learn immediately that there would only be one Beatles. Then when I met the recording artists who turned out to be iconic, they were really way out to the left, and they were Marc Bolan and David Bowie, who I met within one month of each other. So I did aim high, I wanted to discover the next Beatles but I discovered those two instead, both of whom turned out so big and had such big careers. So I did the right thing ultimately [laughs].
