Carlos Dengler was a founding member of Interpol, playing in the band until 2010. He is currently pursuing a career as an actor and working on a memoir.
Dengler is also one of many artists whose lives were changed by David Bowie. Following Bowie's death earlier this week, Dengler reflects on the ways in which the Thin White Duke impacted him, from his first encounter with the "Boys Keep Swinging" music video as a young boy up through his decision to leave Interpol and beyond.
When I was a 10-year-old boy, surviving the cultural wilderness of inland Queens in the '80s, I happened to alight on a public access channel one night broadcasting a music video wherein a thin white duke swaggered, hand on hip, facing the camera. Then, through a haughty, haunting series of drag vignettes, he violently removed his wig with one hand as the other smeared his lipstick across one cheek of his gaunt, chiseled, frozen mien. It was the music video for the song "Boys Keep Swinging."
My childhood TV set was my oracle; when I turned its plastic dial between 13 positions I was like an urchin at a nickelodeon playing with the genie, dropping coins, demanding needed answers to puzzling traumas. The dispatches I received—episodes of "Three’s Company," "What’s Happening," "Inspector Gadget," "Star Trek"—were communiques from safer, sunnier worlds than my own and the answers were beautiful. But no world nor alien that Scotty ever beamed into my childhood living room was more strangely, glacially beautiful than the figure on that public access channel that evening smearing his makeup.
This galactic crooner offered me a vision of abject androgyny and robotic distance that resonated with the loneliness of being a gentle misfit in a dangerous neighborhood full of macho Latino gangs whose members donned goose feather puffy jackets and listened to Run-D.M.C. Here was an option the cable-TV-less outpost of Queens in the '80s simply hadn’t gotten around to until that moment, that evening, when I was permitted to gaze into the land of cosmetic freedom, where not only could a man wear lipstick, but he could smudge it, too, seemingly in protest.
Unlike other, more angry heavy-metal examples, this was a vision of masculine glamour with a bizarre fourth dimension, tailored from worlds I would discover later on in undergrad, the worlds of Dadaism, French Symbolism, German Expressionism, et al. The dispatch had hit its mark; a brutally other, intergalactic denizen had written the constitution to my future goth and post-goth experiments.
Some 20 years later in late 2005, after conducting those experiments globally with varying levels of success, the final stage of my post-adolescence arrived.
I was gazing into my reflection in a mirror inside a locked bathroom backstage at the sold-out Hammerstein Ballroom, five minutes before the lights would go out and 3500 rabid Interpol fans would ostensibly lose their shit. Despite the collective opinion of 3500 ticket holders to the contrary, I regarded the drug-addled, snot-nosed visage staring back at me from the mirror with no shortage of contempt. I’d done it again, only this would be the last time: I’d toyed with a fragile nervous system, dousing it with chemicals and warm bodies well past the hour when most mortals had already made it to the office somehow. Now, at the moment of glory, for the grand homecoming of four heroes who’d recently signed their names on some pages of rock’n’roll’s storybook, I wasn’t able to stand without supporting myself on the bathroom sink with my arms, let alone make it up the stairs. I was ruined, and I was going to cancel the show and disappear into a lifeless twilight of shame and anonymity, with a scarlet letter forever reminding me of my failure.
Then I heard voices from outside the bathroom. Bright, jovial cheers and upturned tones, as though a rainbow had pierced through a muddy cloud casting a years-long shadow over a village and the townspeople now rejoiced. Only I was in no mood to rejoice. My emotional suicide was on schedule, and I had no room for anything but a dirge.
Little did I know another dispatch was headed towards me, and this time the messenger came in person. I thrust open the door and there was the thin white duke from the public access channel in Queens who’d now, 20 years later, grown a bushy beard and learned my name and heartily shook my hand. I don’t remember much about the details of our conversation backstage with him, only that at this moment he was no longer my cherished gorgeous alien, but an unannounced gracious pope on a secret mission to visit lonely Jesuit missionaries, in order to bestow a blessing on this little corner of the great New World of alt-rock ambition.
Boy, did I kiss that papal ring.
Later he would watch our set, sitting in the balcony, no doubt flanked on either side by bodyguards. The pope would never know that his blessing had inadvertently reversed the course of an emotional suicide and given a self-hating bass player spiritual CPR. Call it adrenaline if you like, I call it divine intervention, or, in this case, benevolent alien intervention. It would be one of the best shows I ever played with the band.
I’d be looking in the mirror again, four years later in late 2009, without the drugs and sex, but with the same contempt and fear. I’d be looking at a terrified post-adolescent trapped inside a Darth Vader suit that was called Carlos D. Each year he'd ossify more and more behind his constrictive Carlos armor, and now he was suffocating inside. He was panicking and he wanted out of the suit.
It didn’t help that differences had ensued. The decadence of the '00s was at an end. It was a time of conservation, of the profit principle, of high anxiety, of major label betrayals, of group therapy and raised voices, of cold, stony pursed lips on poker faces disguising a contagious terror that trickled down from managers and executives quivering in their boots. Free downloads threatened to take away yachts. The end of art was nigh, I could feel it.
I looked again in the mirror, looking straight at Darth Vader. I waited for jovial voices outside. Nothing: this time there wouldn’t be a papal reprieve. I was on my own.
I thought of that thin white duke, of the beautiful rooster from Mars who was once a lonely astronaut and who at age 30, at the height of his beauty and vitality, became a man who fell to Earth, specifically to Berlin, to collaborate with audio sculptors, and later on to collaborate with an eminent minimalist composer.
I thought of the gracious host who’d invited us backstage at his concert at Madison Square Garden during his final tour; Paul Banks and I shook his hand as we left. We were too awestruck to decipher his plummy, rushed English undertones in real time, instead gazing straight at him in an awkward silence. Losing not a beat with this lapse in our social graces, with his own utmost grace, he said "Goodnight, gentlemen" and turned right around to continue holding court backstage. Here was not the man who fell to Earth, but the man who’d conquered fame.
And of course I thought of the bearded pope who’d rescued the spirit of a confused 31-year-old teenager before an important concert.
I thought of how lovely was the sight of a man who fell to Earth freed from the acrid stench of his own recycled air inside his constrictive astronaut suit, an alien who became human enough to save my ass one lonely, cold evening without even knowing he was doing it.
Staring down a future floating in a fear-driven galaxy of legacy act business models based on ads, metrics, and Facebook likes, and locked in a life-support suit that was my own walking, talking prison, I knew there was no way out for me except by hitting the eject button on my space pod and venturing out into deep space alone with nothing but a dream and some hope. I took a page out of the the duke’s book of reinvention and fell down to Earth my own way.
I would never be able to transmute the DNA of persona the way the duke could. The way he seemingly effortlessly glided from galaxy to galaxy was forever beyond me and my little space pod. God had given him warp drive and a state-of-the-art navigation console to send him along from star system to star system. But I’m not doing so bad. I’ve gotten an MFA in Acting from NYU, a three-year actor’s boot camp not for the faint of heart. I’m finally pursuing my dream to be a decent stage actor. And I’m writing a memoir. Thankfully the Darth Vader suit I created to stay alive in the music industry, Carlos D’s suite of clothes and effects, is hanging in the closet, my private museum of my past in music, as I’m sure the duke had, and those of many like others he inspired.
Today my space pod lands on a new planet with a new tribe. I can see from my windshield the shape of a thin white duke on the ground. He’s giving me the thumbs up for landing. He’s saying "Good on ya mate! Follow your dreams. Just make sure you’re doing what you love and you’ll be all right. Be it all. Don’t dream it, be it. Be an alien, be an astronaut, be a gracious host, be a bearded pope, be a thin white duke. Be a writer, be an actor, or just be a conservatory student. You don’t have to be successful, but you should die trying to be all you can be. Nothing’s impossible. Be free, mate. Travel."
And in remembrance of how we met, he’s smearing his lipstick.
Rest in peace, and thank you, beautiful, ever inspiring, David Bowie.