For his first three years as a superstar, David Bowie found his partner in crime in Mick Ronson.
The guitarist’s expressive playing style never shied away from different sonic territories, lending itself to Bowie’s genre-blending songwriting style on classic early albums including The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972) and Aladdin Sane (1973).
It set the stage for the caliber of six-string talent that accompanied Bowie throughout his career.
Adrian Belew was one such talent. On the recommendation of producer extraordinaire Brian Eno, Belew graduated from the Frank Zappa Band right around the time Bowie was looking for a new guitarist.
“We first met when he appeared at a concert in Berlin, when I was playing with Frank Zappa,” recalls Belew in the new issue of Guitar World.
“Two nights before that, Brian Eno had come to the show in Cologne, and Brian knew David was looking for a fresh guitar player, so he told him, ‘We’ve got to go see this guy that’s with Zappa.’”
And, turns out, Zappa’s onstage theatrics helped Belew land his next gig.
“There was a part of the show where Frank took an extended 10-minute solo, leaving just Terry Bozzio (drummer) and Patrick O’Hearn (bassist) on stage, and the rest of us were supposed to walk off the stage at that point.
“As I was doing that, I looked over at the monitor guy, and there was David Bowie and Iggy Pop standing there.”
Belew wasted no time. “I walked over and shook David’s hand and said, ‘I just want to really thank you for all your music.’ I didn’t even have time to say anything to Iggy before David said, ‘Well, good. How’d you like to be in my band?’”
To this day, it remains a standout moment in Belew’s career and still gives him shivers. “Two weeks later, I was in David’s rehearsal.”
Belew ended up serving as Bowie’s lead guitarist on his Low / Heroes World Tour in 1978 – documented on the live album Stage. On the recording front, he lent his chops to his 13th studio album, Lodger – the final release of his Berlin trilogy.
However, his tenure with Bowie didn’t quite end there. 12 years later, he returned as Bowie's musical director on his mammoth Sound+Vision Tour.
“That was a whole other level; it took me months of preparation,” says Belew.
“One of the main difficulties was that he wanted just a four-piece band, and yet he was doing a retrospective of all his career.” Fortunately, this coincided with the arrival of the first-ever sampler on the market, prototypes of which Roland had sent to Belew, making all the instrumental layers possible.
“Me and my engineer and the keyboard player, Rick Fox, sat for hours and tried to sample all this stuff. We kept buying more samplers, so in the end we had two huge racks of samplers!”
For more from Belew, plus interviews with some of Bowie’s other key guitarists, pick up issue 607 of Guitar World from Magazines Direct.
