David Bowie's biggest Philly fan mourns
Patti Brett, 60, owner of Doobies Bar at 22nd and Lombard, estimates that she saw Bowie 150 times since first hearing him in 1972.
Someone knelt down by the side door to Doobie's Bar on Monday afternoon and wrote condolences in pink chalk, a little note for the lady inside whose idol had joined the stardust.
And the stars look very different today.
A little heart was drawn at the end.
When Patti Brett opened the door and stepped outside in her "David Meowie" shirt and saw the lyrics from David Bowie's "Space Oddity" written across her step and the flowers stuffed into a wreath on the door, she held her hand to her mouth and fought back tears.
"Somebody must have just done that," Brett, 60, said outside the bar. "They all know."
Brett, owner of the cozy dive bar at 22d and Lombard Streets, is most likely the biggest Bowie fan in Philadelphia. She met him more times than she can count, and followed him all over the world, catching about 150 shows. She remembers hearing "Space Oddity" and "Changes" in her teens and liking both songs, but it was "Memory of a Free Festival" that hooked her one afternoon in 1972 while driving around Upper Darby in a cavernous Cadillac with a bunch of friends.
"Somebody in the car said, 'Roll up the windows; don't let any of the sound get out,' " she recalled.
Brett, of Germantown, said her jaw dropped at her first Bowie show in December 1972 at the Tower Theater in Upper Darby. For the next four decades, she never let the music escape.
"I don't know what it was exactly. I don't remember listening to anything before that," she said. "Nobody did for me what he did."
Bowie, Brett said, wouldn't have remembered her name, but always recognized her as part of the "Sigma Kids," after she and other hard-core fans crashed and later were invited up to watch and listen as he recorded Young Americans at Sigma Sound Studios near 12th and Race Streets in 1974.
Bowie was nervous about how the album would go over, biting his nails while it played.
"We listened to the recordings and he said, 'This is going to sound new,' and when it was over, one of us screamed, 'Play it again,' and he was like, 'Really?' He was so happy. We danced and partied all night," she said.
Brett said she never considered herself a groupie. They're only out to bed rock stars, she said. Instead, she considered herself a Bowie devotee, a fan above all else. He was always a gentleman, she said, and gave her and her friends more time than she could have imagined. He gave them all a reason to embrace their inner freaks.
Brett holds one memory above the rest.
It was in Montreal, during the Glass Spider Tour in 1987, and she and a friend paid for a guided tour of Olympic Stadium during Bowie's sound check. The plan, she said, was to ditch the stadium tour and get as close to their rock god as possible before getting kicked out.
Brett said her friend had to use the bathroom, so it was basically just her, Bowie, his band, and some roadies, and he sang "Loving the Alien" only to her, it seemed, in that empty stadium.
It was her favorite song, she said.
Then the phone rang at Doobie's, yanking her from that memory.
"Hello, Doobies. I know, I know. Thank you," she said. "It's just heartbreaking."
215-854-5916@JasonNark
