Free The Man Who Sold the World by Peter Doggett

clothes, he wanted to wear dirty clothes. This glamorous creature that comes on with all this make-up was once totally introvert and colourless.”
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    VIII
    The lure of the swinging sixties—the myths of Carnaby Street and flower power—both enticed and repelled Bowie. He could recognize the thrill of dressing sharp and loud, of flitting from woman to woman (or man) in search of a momentary thrill, of waving his peacock feathers as a sign that he was alive. Yet like George Harrison of the Beatles, who looked at Carnaby Street and saw only spiritual emptiness, Bowie was racked by the conviction that there must be more. “As far as I’m concerned the whole idea of Western life—that’s the life we live now—is wrong,” he declared in 1966. “The majority [of people in London] just don’t know what life is.”
    Before the Beatles inaugurated an era of pop spirituality with their sponsorship of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Bowie was staking his allegiance to the mystic East. He was, he proclaimed, a Buddhist who was fascinated by Tibet. “I’d like to take a holiday and have a look inside the mountains,” the budding cultural tourist said. He also claimed to be fascinated by astrology and reincarnation—anything that would explain and expand his life on the planet. As he admitted, though, “These are hard convictions to put into songs.” At a formative age, he had read Christmas Humphreys’s book Zen Buddhism , * a suitably enigmatic account of the spiritual path that vanishes at the moment you begin to glimpse it. Humphreys declared that Zen was “incommunicable,” and then devoted two hundred pages to proving himself right, although his failure still offered the stuff of temptation: “[Zen] climbs, with empty hands, from the level of ‘usual life’ to the heights of spiritual awareness. The effort is terrific; the results are commensurate.” For a creative person like Bowie, who was conscious of the fleeting moment of creation and the distraction of goals, Humphreys’s conception of Zen must have sounded both familiar and bewitching: “Zen is not a new thing but a new way of looking at things. It is a new vision with the old eyes.”
    The Beatles had the advantage of being able to immerse themselves in the spirit of the East with only self-imposed distractions. Bowie, by contrast, was scratching for a living, searching for acceptance, struggling to remain immune from his past. On February 22, 1967, Bowie accompanied his brother Terry to a concert by the overpoweringly loud rock band Cream. As they walked home afterward, the increasingly disturbed Terry fell to the ground in terror, convinced that the earth was opening up beneath his feet in flames. The chronology is uncertain, but around this time Bowie’s brother had returned to London after several months, expecting to live with his aunt Pat—only to discover that she and her husband had emigrated to Australia without telling him. Scarred by the apparent rejection, Terry is said to have run away to Chislehurst Caves in Kent (where Bowie and the Buzz had performed the previous year), where he was discovered in a state of profound emotional dislocation, and escorted back to the Jones household by the police. Henceforth he would spend his weekends with his mother and stepfather, and then stay in a mental hospital between Monday and Friday.
    It’s clearly not a coincidence that Bowie now began to spend as much time as he could at Kenneth Pitt’s London flat, becoming a full-time resident in June 1967. Terry had once been his family protector and spiritual guide; perhaps it had simply become too uncomfortable for David to witness his brother’s disintegration; perhaps the Jones house in Plaistow Grove, Beckenham, was now too cramped for creative endeavor; perhaps Bowie simply needed to be closer to London’s media and artistic milieu. Whatever the