The Bowie bio

DAVID BOWIE: LIVING ON THE BRINK, By George Tremlett. Carroll & Graf, 388 pages, $13.95 paperback.

A few details gleaned from George Tremlett's David Bowie: Living on the Brink. Bowie is enormously wealthy, with his estate valued at well above $300 million. He also has an enormous penis (a point made many times in the early chapters). And when it comes to human relations, he used to be a shit. He married his first wife, Angie, for business interests; he dumped various lovers as his whims or ambitions dictated. However, Tremlett also portrays Bowie as a devoted father to his son, Zowie, and a loving husband to his current wife, Iman. And the author gives him his due as the owner of one of popular music's most impressive catalogues.

But this book skims over Bowie's creative process -- how key songs were birthed, how various influences were discovered and assimilated, how any of the important musicians in Bowie's life (save for guitarist Mick Ronson and keyboardist Mike Garson) have affected his work. Occasionally Tremlett discusses how lyrics reflect events in Bowie's personal history, but one would expect a writer who bills himself as England's "first freelance rock journalist" to show a deeper understanding of music than Living on the Brink shares.

Tremlett discovered and repeatedly interviewed Bowie early in his career, before Bowie's former manager Tony Defries decided (correctly) that making Bowie less accessible to the press would enhance his media image. That explains but doesn't excuse the short shrift the book gives the artist's last 15 years of musicmaking and life -- a period in which Bowie's efforts as a visual artist and actor have begun to bear fruit. What's more, Tremlett is not a riveting storyteller, writing stiff, workmanlike prose that tends to repetition.

Living on the Brink speaks best as a cautionary tale of the music business. Tremlett takes pains to make us understand that it was Defries who engineered Bowie's stardom. But Defries also kept the artist under his thumb, broke and bound to him even as Bowie's star ascended to the top of the pop world. Defries's calculated-but-legal plundering of Bowie's considerable income into the early '80s is an enlightening reminder that the music industry is a sandtrap of egos and self-serving ambitions. And artists, unlike the young and now very solvent Bowie, must never be ignorant of how their business is being conducted.

by Ted Drozdowski