The solid book he wrote can be found today…
We set this contest a few days ago (02.01.2007 NEWS: TONY VISCONTI BOOK CONTEST AND EXCLUSIVE PREVIEW) in which we asked you to identify the ‘Brooklyn Boy’ in the title of Tony Visconti‘s autobiography, above.
Well, it wasn’t Lou Reed, or even Iggy Pop, as some have suggested. It was Tony Visconti himself, as the majority of you correctly stated.
However, there can only be five actual winners out of the heap of correct answers, and The Random Selector has decided they are these lucky BowieNetters…
aladdinkent
nolala
stevedscott
vickstar
voyager
If you folx can get your names and addresses to me, a copy of Bowie, Bolan and the Brooklyn Boy will be winging its way to you pronto. For those of you that won’t be purchasing the book just yet, here’s another excerpt to tide you over…
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An edited excerpt about the making of Low from Tony Visconti, The Autobiography. Part 2 of 2
After two weeks of recording backing tracks and guitar overdubs, the band left and David, Brian and I continued to work on our own. Brian added wonderful sounds to the rock tracks by using his briefcase synth. David had been writing lyrics and started to try them out. Mary [Hopkin] came over to Paris during the vocal period and added her ?Doo-doo-doos? to the intro of ?Sound And Vision?, while Morgan played on the verdant grounds of the château with Zowie Bowie, who is almost a year older.
The ambient B-side of Low was created in the last two weeks in September. Often we would leave Brian alone, ?I?ve bored many an engineer to death laying down one note at a time making ambient music “beds”.? I showed him how to change over the tracks to record on and we just left him to it. The overdubs were a different story, but very creative and highly interesting. We would lay down a click track of, say, forty beats per minute. I would record my voice on a second track counting for five minutes, so every beat had a specific number. Because the music on top was so dreamy, it was often not apparent that there was a pulse under each composition on side two. Not much was planned; the two composers were writing on the spot. In the spirit of Zen Impressionism, Brian overheard my son Morgan repeatedly playing A-B-C on the piano in the studio; Brian gently lifted Morgan down off the piano bench and continued the melody from A-B-C. These notes are the opening notes of ?Warzawa?.
A very welcome resident was Iggy Pop, who hovered in the background for the entire month. He was a very positive influence, feeding the project with creative energy. Iggy was present at most of the sessions and even sings a bit on ?What In The World?. One night David decided to start a spoken word album; David loved Iggy?s stories about his days with The Stooges. For a few nights in a row, David, and I sat in the darkened studio asking Iggy questions with the tape rolling. The stories were both decadent and hilarious. I have never heard these tapes since; they would make perfect Podcasts.
Eventually we had to leave the château, as the equipment was increasingly unreliable. Added to which we were infiltrated by a member of the French music press who posed as some kind of minder; on top of all that the food was getting worse. David, along with Coco and Iggy decided to drive to Berlin. I met them there later and we mixed the album at Hansa studios in Berlin.
The mixing of Low and the mixing of The Idiot are a kind of Berlin blur; I think I mixed Low and was asked to come back in a month to sort out the tracks for Iggy?s album. When I came to mix the tracks I found they were a mess, it was because of a cry for help that I was back in Berlin. There was a sonic struggle, a clash of clean German engineering and British grit. Iggy often started a song singing very quietly and then gradually built up to a scream (as in ?China Girl?), distorting the microphone preamplifier. This was one of those ?happy accidents? again, because the vocal wouldn?t be the same if it were any other way now. Usually there was no take two to correct the over-modulation. I love this album!
When Low came out in January 1977 the critics were dumbfounded. The sound went against everything currently on the market. RCA executives and Tony Defries (who was still entitled to a percentage of future Bowie earnings) tried to prevent the album being released. ?I?ll buy him a house in Philadelphia,? grumbled one RCA exec, expecting Young Americans II. It?s what makes David brilliant ? always expect the unexpected.
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Thanx again, Tony and good luck with the book.
As you all must know by now, Bowie, Bolan and the Brooklyn Boy, is published by HarperCollins Entertainment today.
Tony is doing various things to promote the book, including an interview with Mark Lawson on Radio 4’s Front Row at 19:15 UK time this evening. You can listen online here.
And don’t forget the two London signing sessions on the 7th and the 11th that we’ve mentioned previously. (01.25.2007 NEWS: TV IN THE TIMES TOMORROW…LONDON SIGNING NEXT MONTH & 02.01.2007 NEWS: TONY VISCONTI BOOK CONTEST AND EXCLUSIVE PREVIEW)
