“Everybody that I have spoken to, the first thing that they say is: ‘Is it really 10 years?’”
So says Mike Garson, speaking from his home studio in the San Fernando Valley, where the renowned classical/jazz-trained pianist, who was David Bowie’s longest-serving band member, is preparing for “Bowie’s Piano Man: A Decade in the Stars.”
The three-night residency at Hollywood’s Sun Rose lounge, which will feature special guests like the Smashing Pumpkins’ Billy Corgan and Jimmy Chamberlain, the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Chad Smith, the Struts’ Luke Spiller, Andra Day, Judith Hill, Jake Wesley Rogers, Paul McCartney guitarist Rusty Anderson, and many others, will kick off on Jan. 8, marking what would have been Bowie’s 79th birthday and the 10th anniversary of Bowie’s final landmark album, Blackstar. And it ends Jan. 10 — which is, incredibly, the 10th anniversary of Bowie’s death.
Garson is in an understandably reflective mood, recalling the last time he spoke with the man he fondly describes as his “dream boss,” right before Bowie passed away. “It was only a few weeks before. He reached out to me, talking about continuing the trilogy of the Outside album,” Garson recalls. “He never gave up hope. … He was dying, and yet he was saying, ‘Let’s do this.’ So, of course, I got excited.”
Mike Garson at the Sun Rose (photo courtesy of the P-22 Agency)
Garson’s last communication with Bowie was via email, when, feeling sentimental after relistening to his entire Bowie discography at the urging of his biographer, Clifford Slapper, he “became awestruck and instantly wrote David. And within three seconds, he emailed me back, saying: ‘Mike, we did a great body of work together.’ And I said to my wife, Susan: ‘That’s the last time I’m going to hear from him.’ Because he said it with finality: ‘We did a great body of work together.’ I don’t know if it was just my intuition. I did not know he was dying then, because he kept [his cancer diagnosis] secret from everyone. … But we had a very special connection.”
The final time Garson and Bowie had shared a stage was in November 2006, at Keep a Child Alive benefit at New York City’s Hammerstein Ballroom, two and a half years after the Reality tour was cut short when Bowie suffered a heart attack. But Garson (along with Arcade Fire) had actually joined Bowie for a brief Fashion Rocks set at NYC’s Radio City Music Hall in September 2005, which was, according to Garson, a low-key test run to see if Bowie was up for embarking on another tour. “He said, ‘The reason I’m doing this is to see if my strength is back and I can do it. I could trust you to hold the fort down when you accompany me. It’s no band. It’s just us,’” reveals Garson, who accompanied Bowie that night on a stripped-back version of “Life on Mars?” (This turned out to be Bowie’s final performance of that song.) “And after we did that, he said, ‘OK, I think I can do it.’ I was so excited that this was a possibility.”
Sadly, that never happened. At another point in 2005, when Bowie phoned Garson about maybe touring again, “I should have said, ‘Yeah! Because I want to go out and make a living and I love playing with you!’” Garson chuckles. “But I didn’t go there. You know what I said? I said, ‘Only if you feel it.’ And guess what? He didn’t feel it. It screwed me up financially and just more importantly, out of the joy of being on the road and playing with him. But he was done. He was done touring.”
And so, Garson joined Bowie for one last public performance a year later, at Keep a Child Alive, where they played three songs: “Wild Is the Wind,” “Fantastic Voyage,” and an Alicia Keys duet of “Changes.” Garson claims Bowie wouldn’t let Keys’s crew officially film the performance, “because he was still recuperating from his heart attack and he was a little more overweight and swollen… so he was self-conscious.” But thankfully, footage does exist online of the historic and, for Garson, poignantly full-circle moment. “We did ‘Changes’ — and that was my audition song,” he muses. “So, that’s the bookends.”
Garson confesses that when he auditioned for Bowie in 1972, after being recommend for what was supposed to be an eight-week assignment by avant-garde musician Annette Peacock (who’d actually passed on the job), he had no idea who the glam-rock star even was. But at the time he was struggling, playing $5-a-night shows in Catskills and Brooklyn jazz clubs, so he jumped at the opportunity. “I was giving a piano lesson and my wife was working, and I had a daughter that was 1 years old in a little swing next to the piano,” he remembers of the phone call that “changed the whole trajectory” of his life, requesting that he be at New York’s RCA Studios in 20 minutes. “So, what do I do? I asked the piano student to babysit my daughter! To this day, my wife [gives me a hard time] about that,” he laughs.
It may have seemed like questionable parenting at the time, but the risk paid off. When Garson first walked into RCA Studios that fateful afternoon, he seemed like a mismatch for Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust-era band, the Spiders from Mars. “I’m in jeans, and these guys are all decked out in the middle of the week, decked out in all kinds of wild clothing. And I thought, ‘Where am I?’” But after Garson played just a snippet of “Changes” on demand, Bowie immediately told him, “You got the gig.”
Two weeks later, wearing a newly acquired sequined tuxedo to better fit in with his flamboyant bandmates, Garson made his debut with the Spiders from Mars, on the first night of the U.S. Ziggy Stardust tour, in Cleveland. Six days later, the Spiders played a sold-out hometown gig for Garson at New York’s Carnegie Hall. And 10 months later, Garson was onstage with the Spiders at London’s Hammersmith Odeon, in front of 5,000 stunned fans, as Bowie famously killed off the Ziggy character in spectacular fashion. Garson was the only band member who “knew that the guillotine was going come down” (he’d been tipped off by Bowie the day before), and the only band member that Bowie didn’t intend to fire that night, which he says was “painful” and “very uncomfortable” for him. Adding to the stress of the evening was his boss’s last-minute request that he open the Hammersmith show with piano renditions of Ziggy hits.
“Out of nowhere, he said, ‘Play a medley of my songs, your way.’ And meanwhile, Streisand’s in the audience, and Mick Jagger and Paul McCartney and Elliott Gould! The only thing I remember was that he said to me afterwards, ‘I was more nervous for you than for myself!’” Garson recalls. “And that’s the point. That guy had humanity and a lot of love. People don’t know that side of him. He was very warm and very loving, aside from being a genius. He just was one of the good guys.”
Garson partnership with “ultimate casting director” Bowie survived that post-Ziggy transition, despite the two musicians seeming like polar opposites. “We were from different planets, but the same solar system,” Garson explains. “Between 1972 and 1974… you won’t believe this, but he fired five bands except for me!” Garson went on to play at least 400 Bowie concerts and appear on more than 20 albums (including Aladdin Sane, Pin Ups, Diamond Dogs, Young Americans, Black Tie White Noise, Outside, Earthling, and Reality). He credits this in part to his own versatility, as a player who’d studied with Herbie Hancock, cut his teeth in Mel Tormé’s backing band, and would later work with the likes of Nine Inch Nails, St. Vincent, Seal, Duran Duran, No Doubt, and the Pretty Reckless. Unlike many straight-up rock musicians, Garson was able to adapt as Bowie veered from glam to blue-eyed soul to drum & bass and electronica over the ensuing decades.
As for his favorite Bowie collaborations, which may or may not end up his rotating setlists at the Sun Rose, Garson quickly rattles some perennial favorites, like “Time” and “Young Americans,” but also many less obvious picks (“because I played great on them!”), like “Lady Grinning Soul,” “Sweet Thing/Candidate/Sweet Thing,” “Shadow Man,” “Bring Me the Disco King,” “The Loneliest Guy,” “Strangers When We Meet,” “Can You Hear Me?,” and even “The Motel” from what he considers to be Bowie’s most underrated album, 1995’s largely improvised, above-mentioned Outside.
“He said to me a year or two before we made that album, ‘I feel like I sold out in the ’80s.’ That’s what he said to me,” Garson says of the Outside era. “I think he felt, because he’s a very honest guy and had a lot of integrity, that he’d compromised his truth. … So, it was very sincere, that album.”
However, the Garson/Bowie moment that the pianist semi-jokes is “the only one anyone ever calls me about or talks about,” the one that he has received “an email about for the last 30 years,” is 1973’s “Aladdin Sane.” His legendary avant piano solo on that track perhaps best displays the artistic freedom that Bowie granted him.
Recalling the “Aladdin Sane” recording session at London’s Trident Studios, Garson marvels, “I had no idea he wanted something that out-there. I played a blues-type solo, and he said, ‘That’s too commonplace.’ Then I played a Latin solo, and he said, ‘That’s still too norma! Do something way out-there!’ That’s when I took the liberty. And it was one take. … The fact that he gave me permission to do whatever the f*** I wanted and play such a bizarre piano solo that had classical jazz, rock, a million crazy notes, that was never done. If I did that today, it would be still ahead of its time. And this was 53 years ago. It’s probably the most advanced rock solo ever played.”
Looking back on his body of work with Bowie and their final performances and conversations, Garson bittersweetly muses, “It would have been fascinating to see how we continued to evolve.” He also jokes about a long-circulating meme about how the planet fell apart when Bowie left it in 2016, a year of great political unrest that was also marked by the deaths of other music greats like Prince and George Michael. “I think that might be why he left! Like, ‘Buh-bye. This is above my pay grade. I’m outta here!’”
Garson may or may not crack such jokes onstage at the Sun Rose, but the three nights will definitely be full of surprises. (It should be noted that a then-rising pop singer named Chappell Roan joined Garson and Jake Wesley Rogers for a cover of “Heroes” at the club in 2022, so you never know who might turn up.) And he will enjoy performing “A Decade in the Stars” just as much as when he first teamed with Bowie five decades ago.
“Nothing has shifted in terms of my joy for playing the piano — I’m 80 years old, and it feels like the first 79 years was an internship!” declares Garson. And he will always be endlessly appreciative, as a self-described “loose cannon” known for improv and never playing anything live the same way twice, that his dream boss set him on this career path.
“This could almost make me cry,” Garson admits. “Because he gave permission for jazz guys like me to express themselves, and that’s an extraordinary gift. There’s nobody who’s given me the space to be me more than him.”
This interview originally ran on Gold Derby. Watch Mike Garson’s full, delightful conversation in the video at the top of this article.
