Bowie’s piano man, Mike Garson: ‘My jazz friends excommunicated me for working with David’

In the autumn of 1972, Mike Garson was earning five dollars a night playing piano in a club on 69th Street and Broadway, in Manhattan. Despite being part of a group that featured saxophonist Dave Liebman and bass player Steve Swallow, later to work with Miles Davis and Stan Getz respectively, the musicians’ lengthy sets were usually seen by fewer than 10-people. Schlepping home to his wife and baby daughter in Brooklyn, the 27-year old realised that he needed a new gig.

Luck was waiting in the wings. The following day he received a call from Tony Defries, the manager of David Bowie, inviting him to audition for a berth in the Englishman’s backing band. After playing just four chords for guitarist Mick Ronson, within the hour Garson was offered the job as the newest member of The Spiders From Mars. Despite having never previously heard of Bowie, his wage increased to $2,650 a month. A week later, in Cleveland he stepped into the spotlights of a brand new world.

“Because I was only playing 10-songs out of 22, when I joined the band I would slip out into the audience when the Spiders were doing Hang On To Yourself [from The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars],” Garson tells me. “And I’d be watching David thinking, ‘This guy is the Miles Davis of rock’… I thought, ‘This is not normal. This is what The Beatles were a few years earlier, this is what Dylan was a few years earlier’. And there I am thinking, ‘What is this? Who is this guy?’”

Initially enlisted for an eight week North American tour, Mike Garson’s 1026 concerts as a member of David Bowie’s many bands make him the South Londoner’s longest serving musician. As well as appearing on albums such as Aladdin Sane, Diamond Dogs and Reality, in recent years the 75-year old has brought the revue show, A Bowie Celebration, to theatres in North America and Europe.

To commemorate what would have been the singer’s 74^th birthday, Garson has spent the declining months of 2020 curating an online concert. Airing tonight at 2am, and available to view for a further 24-hours, A Bowie Celebration: Just For One Day features contributions from, among many others, Duran Duran, Peter Frampton, Ian Hunter, Gary Oldman, Gary Barlow, Ricky Gervais, Taylor Momsen, Joe Elliot, Ian Astbury and Lizzy Hale. A percentage of the ticket price will go to the Save The Children Fund.

“This is Live Aid of the virtual world,” he tells me. “I just hope I get it all done. We’ve only got three more days and I’m still mixing things… I think I may have taken on more than I should. I thought it would be a breeze, but it’s actually not. My technical people think I’m nuts. They keep thinking we’re done, but then every day I bring them a new singer.”

At 8 o’ clock in the morning on the West Coast of America, Garson appears on my computer screen seated at an electric piano wearing a leather jacket and mauve-tinted sunglasses the size of welder’s goggles. Bracketed by a bank of keyboards, behind him hang several pictures of David Bowie and a multi-platinum disc for Aladdin Sane. Despite decades in Southern California, the Brooklyn-born musician still speaks like a character from Saturday Night Fever.

In the book Bowie’s Piano Man: The Life Of Mike Garson, by Clifford Slapper, David Bowie describes the classically and jazz trained keyboardist as “exceptional”. As well as this, he adds that “there are very, very few musicians, let alone pianists, who naturally understand the movement and free thinking necessary to hurl themselves into experimental or traditional areas of music… Mike does this with such enthusiasm that it makes my heart glad just to be in the same room with him.”

As if with this in mind, today I’m afforded several glimpses of the range of his talents. At various points in our 45-minute interview, unbidden Mike Garson plays me a burst of George Gershwin’s Summertime, a modal jazz piece in the style of John Coltrane, two markedly different versions of Imagine, and a few bars of Chopin. Not once does he look down at the keys.

“If my wife didn’t tell me about them, I wouldn’t know that there was a Trump or a Covid out there because I’m in [this room] all the time,” he tells me. “I write, I compose, and I practice. That’s how I’ve always been, even at the start. One hundred and sixty thousand hours’ practice, eight hours a day. And then five hours onstage at a jazz club.”

He extemporises a florid beginning to the eternal Life On Mars? that takes me back to one of the most remarkable concerts I’ve ever seen. Standing in the front of rows of the outdoor Jones Beach Theater, on Long Island in 2002, I saw David Bowie and Mike Garson play this very song at the start of a gig that was hurriedly cut short by an Old Testament rainstorm that saw 15,000 people sprinting for shelter. Such was the berserk inclemency of the weather that, over in Manhattan, a young boy was killed by a strike of lightning.

The pianist laughs at the memory. “I’ll never forget it,” he says. “It was kind of a spiritual experience, right? It’s weird because the thousand or so concerts I played with David are really just one big show. But when someone says to me, ‘Do you remember Jones Beach’, or asks if I remember Hammersmith… then it all comes into focus. The memories are on another hard drive that I can sometimes access, and sometimes not.”

“Hammersmith” refers, of course, to the two iconic concerts at which David Bowie retired the character of Ziggy Stardust. After hearing Garson play an unrecognisable version of the namesake track in a West London pub on the afternoon of the first show, on July 2nd 1973 the singer sent Garson out onto the Odeon stage alone to play a four-song warm-up set for an audience that included Mick Jagger, Barbra Streisand, Elliot Gould and Ringo Starr. Placing his fingers on the keys of his Steinway grand, the New Yorker felt like he was “freaking out”.

Also in the crowd was a young Steve Jones. Two years before becoming a founding member of the Sex Pistols, the 16-year old guitarist later re-entered the venue at 2 am and, with a security guard fast asleep in the third row, boosted as much equipment as could be crammed into the back of a waiting Mini Cooper. Decades later, Jones apologised to Garson and to drummer Mick “Woody” Woodmansey, to whom he paid $200 reparation for the theft of part of his kit.

“I nicked a couple of cymbals and I got the bass player’s amp,” Jones later revealed on his Californian radio show, Jonesy’s Jukebox. “But whoever took the brunt of it was the person who recorded it, because I got a load of his Nuemann mics. I knew that place like the back of my hand. I was from Hammersmith and I was like the phantom of the opera of that place… if I nicked some gear from you, it meant that I really liked you.”

“I was on his show and he told the story to me,” Garson tells me. “He still had guilt about it. I went on the show a year later and he told me again… he’s a good guy, but when he told me that story I couldn’t believe it. Of course I didn’t know it was him at the time.”

Prior to an epochal headline appearance at Glastonbury, in 2000, David Bowie once again shoved Mike Garson out onto the stage alone. This time facing an audience numbering as many as a quarter of a million people (this being the last year of widespread literal gatecrashing), the pianist was told to “go out there and warm them up”. This he did by playing a piece of music universally recognised as the perfect fillip with which to get any party jumping - an avant-garde rendition of Greensleeves.

“I grew up listening to Mozart and Bach,” he tells me. “And to Miles Davis and John Coltrane, Beethoven and Stravinsky, Bartok and Benjamin Brittan, and those kind of people. But David was smart enough to take my history of jazz and classical and avant-garde… and to place that on his music. That’s what separates him from a normal rock band. It’s no longer the Rolling Stones anymore, or Bob Dylan, because I’m playing in my style, which you don’t normally hear in rock.”

But if David Bowie gave Mike Garson the opportunity to sprinkle his virtuosic, improvisational magic onto various strains of what might loosely be described as rock’n’roll, the pianist repaid the debt by helping dismantle the rigid and discriminatory boundaries that once separated different styles of music. For this he paid a steep price. “When I went off with David, my jazz friends actually excommunicated me,” he says.

One of such person was Dave Liebman, the saxophonist with whom Garson once played for chump change in the clubs of the Upper West Side. Following a cold shoulder lasting 30-years, in 2002 the pianist received a call from his old collaborator in which he learned that the earth-shaking solo from Aladdin Sane had been brought to his attention by his teenage daughter. “Dad, the stuff you play is good,” she told him, “but this is the real s___.” After listening to the song, Liebman apologised to Garson. Nineteen years later, the two remain close.

Not that Garson himself was always attuned to the sound of breaking ground, mind. “If I have one regret connected with David’s music and [my time] playing with him, it’s that I took it for granted,” he tells me, fingers unfurling a melody in a minor key. Apparently it took him 15-years to listen to his work on Aladdin Sane. Asked by a younger member of Bowie’s band if he’d played on the songs Sweet Thing and Candidate, from Diamond Dogs, he answered, “What are they?”

“I do have to take some responsibility because I was a bit of a jazz snob too,” he says. “I would be playing with David at Wembley, or at Madison Square Garden, but I’d still have that snobby jazz thing where I’d be thinking how I’d love to be playing in a club somewhere. Here I have twenty thousand people in front of me, but still I’m thinking about that. It was like being in an abusive relationship [with the old days]. I wanted those five people again.”

Right at the end, he got the chance to put things straight. Asked by biographer Clifford Slapper to deliver a verdict on each of the songs on which he’d played over the course of nine of David Bowie’s studio albums, in the autumn of 2015 Garson sat back and in a single day listened to a body of work that spans more than half of his adult life. Finally afforded a clear view of a towering oeuvre, with a measure of good-natured sadness he thought to himself, “You know, I should have enjoyed this just a little bit more.”

“I listened deeply and I was overwhelmed,” he tells me. “I wrote David, and within 30 seconds he wrote back and said, ‘Mike, we did an amazing body of work’. Let me tell you, I had chills all over my body. And I said to my wife, Susan, I’m never going to see him again. And I did not know he was sick. It just felt so final. It just felt like that was his way of saying goodbye.”

Once again Mike Garson’s fingers hover above the keys of his electric piano.  With the maestro seemingly close to tears, I wonder what I might be about to hear. A mournful version of Changes, perhaps, or Slip Away; maybe a lonesome rendition of the dependably haunting Ashes To Ashes. But for once the notes go unplayed.

“I miss David terribly,” he says. “Because I think if you were to sum it all up, he gave you permission to be the person you wanted to be. In fact you can boil it down to one sentence. He’s allowed you to be who you are.”

A Bowie Celebration: Just For One Day is available for 24-hours from 2am on Saturday January 9. For tickets go to rollinglivestudios.com/bowie