![Earl Slick: Visiting Other Planets With Davie Bowie]( "Earl Slick: Visiting Other Planets With Davie Bowie")
Earl Slick: Visiting Other Planets With Davie Bowie
Few jobs in rock are more coveted than playing lead guitar for David Bowie. From Mick Ronson through Robert Fripp, Adrian Belew, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Pete Frampton and Reeves Gabrels, the Thin White Duke has always had a guitar hero as his right-hand man. Earl Slick is on his third stint with the Bowie band. In 1974, as a 22-year-old, he stepped in for Spider from Mars Mick Ronson; he then stuck around to record Young Americans and critical fave Station To Station. In '83, he played on the Let's Dance tour, and in 2000, he returned for Heathen; he's been in the fold ever since. Bowie describes his playing as "earthy, timeless and never less than stellar" and Slick has another virtue which must make him indispensable as a sideman: he's circumspect about the stories he tells.
Ask him, for instance, about that notorious year 1976, which Bowie claims not to remember because of his massive drug intake, and Slick laughs.
"I honestly will never elaborate on anything David says in that area, not to put my foot in my mouth. As for me, it was a crazy period. I was out there: having a good time, but on another planet having it. So I have a lot of vagueness over the years too... A lot of good memories, but when it started getting ugly, that was it. Time to rethink things, you know."
Was that why he left the band?
"No, actually, I left the David Bowie band for some other reasons at the time, but it was much later on that I actually got clear in my head the idea that I had to change the way I was living."
Zig Zag, Slick's first solo album since '91, was originally called Thirteen, after the number of years the guitarist had been clean since he recorded it. Slick may have done away with the stereotypically unlucky number in the title, but he closed the album with the track "The Cat," which has an eerie provenance. When recording demos with his keyboard player Jack Schell, "I kept thinking I was seeing this cat, and I knew he didn't have a cat. I kept catching it out of the corner of my eye. I would see movement and it kept looking like this little black cat was walking around behind this big plant. It was fuckin' weird! I spooked [Schell] out. I don't think he slept until a few days after I left — thinking his house was haunted!"
Zig Zag features guest spots from Bowie, Robert Smith and Joe Elliott, among others. Slick gave the singers demos of his backing tracks and encouraged them to come up with words and melodies. The lyrics are rather dark: as Slick puts it, Elliott's are about "a nut, a crazy person" trying to escape from an institution, Bowie's are fractured and "pensive" and Smith's are reliably bleak. "Yeah, you know, Robert does that," Slick deadpans.
The album is produced by fellow Bowie colleague, multi-instrumentalist and programmer Mark Plati; in fact, its hard-hitting but atmospheric template is quite similar to that of Bowie's latest, Reality. Put the albums on back-to-back and you'll think one is a continuation of the other. Zig Zag is hardly the kind of noodle-y shredfest that usually constitutes a rock guitarist's record.
"I tend to think more melodically anyway," says Slick, "but I'd done an instrumental record years back and it was a bit on the noodle-y side, because I kinda thought that was what you were supposed to do. And then I went, 'Why do we have to do that? I'm bored with that.' And as I went along, 'I'll just write what I write and record it.' I've never been that much of a heavy noodler anyway."
At the conclusion of the Bowie tour, Slick plans to take a band of his own on the road to play some of Zig Zag, along with even newer material. The guitarist has been inspired by touring with his seemingly ageless counterpart.
"Back in the '70s or '60s, or even the '80s, if you had been around for a while, even if you were a huge artist, once you passed a certain age, you were considered an 'oldie.' Whereas now, guys like David Bowie can go out there and not be a kid and still be accepted as current. That couldn't have happened 20 years ago. They're letting us actually mature in the business, these days."
While the young artists get dropped if their first singles don't sell?
"That's also nothing that new. Maybe in the old days they did stick with the artists a bit more, and I'm sure some of the labels do, but I think just a lot of it is that musicians and artists inherently like to moan about the state of the business. I've done my fair share. It's what we do."
