Burn baby, burn: Did David Bowie REALLY torch his 360-ton ‘Glass Spider’ stage prop in 1987?

09.10.2019
10:29 am
Topics:
Music
Pop Culture
Tags:
David Bowie
1987
Mark Ravitz
Glass Spider Tour

David Bowie performing under one of the massive, glowing arachnids designed by Mark Ravitz for The Glass Spider Tour in 1987.

“I got up on it myself. Anything I design, if I can do it, they can do it. So one day I got up in the head of the spider. Sixty feet in the air. There’s a three-foot square you’re standing on, steel pipe welded to it with weight lifter straps. Foot pedal to make the wings open up. You gotta shit a brick when you’re up there…”

—artist and designer Mark Ravitz on the glass spider he designed from Marc Spitz’s book Bowie: A Biography.

David Bowie’s The Glass Spider Tour in 1987 was his most ambitious outing since the pricey Diamond Dogs Tour. At the cost of one million per week to stage, the set was designed by artist Mark Ravitz, with help from lighting expert Allen Branton and video director Christine Strand. A glowing 64-foot wide spider floated over the stage with its legs (made from vacuum tubes) dangling from its body. Every night, Bowie would descend from the spider and a platform sixty feet in the air (as described by Ravitz above), as long as weather conditions would permit.

Once the 86-date tour hit the U.S. the decision was made to construct two additional identical stages, and a third smaller set for Madison Square Garden (which was too small to accommodate the original stage). This was necessary to avoid any complications that would prevent the set from not being ready at least three times a week. For the first date of the U.S. tour in Philadelphia, it took four days and nearly 300 members of Bowie’s crew to assemble the massive stage in time for the show at Veterans Stadium. The shows were non-stop marathons of entertainment including elaborate, rigorous dance numbers choreographed by Toni Basil. So intense were Basil’s dance numbers, a fan claims to have seen poor David vomit off the side of the stage after a particularly grueling groove session. After playing 44 shows in America, the tour headed to Australia for its last fifteen shows, the final gig set for Auckland, New Zealand on November 28th.

According to those close to Bowie, he was more than ready for the wildly successful, attendance-breaking tour to end and was planning something big to celebrate. His plan? Destroy The Glass Spider set and bury it somewhere in the desert in New Zealand.

Bowie’s story regarding the demise of The Glass Spider set has been documented in a few books including The Complete David Bowie by Nicholas Pegg (2000). The last few shows in Melbourne were plagued by terrible weather—the rain and high winds meant Bowie would not be descending from the spider, and many of the shows dance routines had to be scaled back or eliminated entirely. After the final show in Auckland, Bowie would tell the press what became of his giant spider:

“It was great to burn the spider in New Zealand at the end of the tour. We just put the thing in a field and set light to it. That was such a relief!”

One of the Glass Spider’s used for the Glass Spider Tour in 1987.

Bowie’s ceremonious burning of The Glass Spider set would become the stuff of legend, and on a certain level, it’s incredibly gratifying to think the Thin White Duke was able to exorcise his spidery demons just as you would expect him to. There are other stories associated with The Glass Spider set and its possible whereabouts, such as some of the remains being buried in a hole at the Auckland airport. Bowie bassist Erdal Kizilcay recalls asking Bowie about the set while they were traveling together from Auckland, to which Bowie responded, “They’re burning it.” At the time, Kizilcay found Bowie’s explanation a bit strange. Later, after getting confirmation from others close to the spider set situation, Kizilcay agreed Bowie’s story was probably true. This brings us to New Zealand promoter Peter Grumley—the man who claims to have recovered many parts of the Glass Spider set.

Grumley disputes the story of the set being buried at the airport in Auckland as well as Bowie’s version. In a 2015 interview Grumley asserted he purchased the set from “friends of his” working on the tour, and put it away in one of his warehouses. What he didn’t buy allegedly went to the dump. The only artifacts currently in Grumley’s possession are two staircases used on the set. Chris Davis, a guitar tech for Peter Frampton (who was a part of The Glass Spider Tour) also had some insight into what happened to the pricey stage set and backs up Grumley’s claim. Here’s Davis’ very specific “But wait! There’s more!” moment on this weird tale:

“I don’t know exactly what Peter Grumley managed to stow, but I can tell you this. We arrived early October in Australia with two DC-10 cargo aircraft stuffed to the rafters with gear. The plan was to save some money and return to the USA with only one DC-10 cargo jet; at the time it cost US$50,000 per plane to make the flight. To satisfy customs requirements, any equipment left behind in New Zealand was supposed to have been destroyed while being witnessed by customs agents. I’m glad to hear Peter Grumley has been able to make use of some part of the gear, and can only guess enough of it was sawed up, wrecked or burnt to satisfy New Zealand officials. One thing’s for certain, we didn’t bring 360 tons of equipment, neither did it take 37 trucks to move it.”

Since I’m sure you’re asking “SO WHERE WAS THE SPIDER?” we come back full-circle to Mark Ravitz. In Marc Spitz’s book Bowie: A Biography, Ravitz further illuminates this intriguing chapter of David Bowie mythology by way of a phone call he received from Bowie sometime in the early 2000s inquiring about the Glass Spider prop he had designed. Apparently, Bowie had one in one in his possession, but it was not in good shape. Though Bowie wasn’t really a fan of Ravitz’s spider by the end of the tour, his statement seems to imply that he did, in fact, keep one of the Glass Spiders. And, as it turned out, so did Ravitz:

“I have one of the prototypes of the spider body. Bowie called me up years ago saying that the other was in splinters. Now he wanted to save it for his archives.”

Honestly, this story is not unlike the fictional tale woven for Steven Spielberg’s film Raider of the Lost Ark, as the Rafkin/Bowie Glass Spider (one of the few used on stage) is presumably locked away in Bowie’s personal archives like that pesky Ark of the Covenant. We kind of know where it is, but we can’t see it because maybe we’ll burst into flames.

Below you can check out a vintage black and white news broadcast from 6ABC in Philadelphia on the night of the first U.S. date for the Glass Spider Tour, footage from Bowie’s crew setting up the giant stage in Berlin, and video of Bowie’s dramatic entrance descending 60 feet from the Glass Spider stage shot at Olympic Stadium in Montreal in August of 1987.