“The Jean Genie” is a song by English singer-songwriter David Bowie, originally released in November 1972 as the lead single to his 1973 album Aladdin Sane. Mick Rock directed a film clip to promote the song, in October 1972 in San Francisco, mixing concert and studio footage of Bowie performing with the Spiders from Mars, along with location shots of the singer posing at the Mars Hotel with Cyrinda Foxe. Bowie wanted the video to depict “Ziggy as a kind of Hollywood street-rat” with a “consort of the Marilyn brand.” This led to Foxe’s casting, and she flew from New York to San Francisco especially for the shoot.
“It looks sort of Beatle-y now,” said Bowie in 1986. “It was very new in terms of the way it was dressed. We wanted to get a very graphic, white, almost Vogue look – big faces, big bits of faces, eyes against stark white backdrops, and to throw in an environment, so we found a place called the Mars Hotel in California somewhere and we stuck the band in there.”
“Wanting it to locate Ziggy as a kind of Hollywood street-rat, it became important to me that he had a consort of the Marilyn brand. So I telephoned Cyrinda Foxe in New York and asked her if she was into playing the role. She was, quite rightly, as no-one could have done it better, and she flew in immediately.”
Foxe had relationships with David Bowie and James Williamson of The Stooges while working under Tony Defries as a publicist for MainMan, Bowie’s management company. She records in her memoir that Bowie said to her “I want to write you a song. What do you want?,” to which Foxe replied “something like the Yardbirds.” Foxe in later years maintained a fondness for Bowie referring to him as a “great lover” and stating that she “really cherish[ed her] time” with Bowie.
0 comments:
Post a Comment