Ex-Spider From Mars to Invoke Liberace’s...

When it comes to flamboyant musical performance, Mike Garson has touched the Alpha and the Omega.

In the early ‘70s, Garson wore a tuxedo and high platform heels as a member of David Bowie’s backing band, the Spiders From Mars. He toured and recorded for two years with Bowie at a time when the British star was adopting the pose of a strange alien visitor and setting new standards for androgynous outrageousness and theatrical extravagance in rock.

In 1988, Garson slipped into one of Liberace’s sequined jumpsuits, donned one of the pianist’s incredibly expensive jeweled rings and lent a skilled hand by imitating Liberace’s piano style for the filming of an ABC-TV movie about the gaudy showman’s life.

Garson--sans jewels and sequins--will re-create the Liberace piano style once more when he appears Sunday night as guest performer with the Garden Grove Symphony in a New Year’s Eve concert dedicated largely to classical favorites from the Liberace repertoire.

But Garson, 44, also has a musical life of his own as a jazz pianist; the program will include his own “Jazzical Suite,” a composition for orchestra and jazz trio.

“For a month gig, it was a ball,” Garson said by telephone from his home in Woodland Hills, recalling his stint last year as a Liberace imitator for the TV movie. “If I had to do it all my life, I would die.”

Garson got the TV gig when the producers of “Liberace” needed a piano-playing stand-in for leading man Andrew Robinson. “They went to Vegas, but those guys only looked like Liberace, and they couldn’t play well.”

When auditions were held in Los Angeles, Garson got the job, which involved wearing Liberace’s actual wardrobe for shots depicting the star at his piano.

“I got a kick out of it,” Garson said. “I felt like an actor for a day. I had to lose 20 pounds to get into the clothes. I fasted and did it in three weeks.”

Retracing the steps of Liberace’s hands for the camera was a role that Garson, the son of a Brooklyn liquor salesman, had long been primed to play:

“I started playing the piano at 7. When I was 9 or 10, there was a TV show in New York that Liberace did every day. I used to watch that show, so he was my first influence. Later, I wasn’t into his music, but it was ingrained in me.”

By age 12, Garson said, he had showed an uncanny ability to replicate just about any piece or style of piano music that he encountered.

“My parents would play these records,” he said, “and I’d sit down and imitate them, and they would get hysterical.”

By 14, Garson was playing professionally in New York City clubs and working summers as a piano player at resorts in the Catskill Mountains in Upstate New York. As a resort musician during his teens and college years, Garson accompanied a succession of star singers and comics, including Mel Torme, Gloria Loring and Jackie Mason.

For a time, he thought that medicine, not music, might be his calling.

“I had aspirations to be a doctor early on. I was a pre-med student at Brooklyn College. After I dissected my first pig, I knew it was music all the way.”

Besides studying music in college, Garson took lessons from jazz pianist Lennie Tristano. “Lennie taught at his house in Queens,” he said. “I took two trains, then walked a mile every week for three years.”

Garson also had the nerve and the drive to approach such jazz piano masters as Bill Evans and Herbie Hancock at their gigs and ask whether they would give him lessons.

Garson said his single six-hour lesson with Evans “changed my life.”

In 1972, Garson found himself making progress, but not much else, as a piano teacher and struggling musician on the New York jazz scene.

“I was getting fed up with very little money and the routine of teaching. One day I said to one of my students, ‘I’m getting tired of this. I want to get out with a famous rock group.’ ”

It was not long before he had his wish. Actually, Garson said, he got two big breaks on the same day: “I got called to work with Woody Herman the same day I got called up by David Bowie.”

But instead of leaping at the jazz offer, Garson jumped at the chance to audition for Bowie--whose name meant nothing to him the first time he heard it.

“I knew it would be a new experience,” he said. “I wanted to see what it was like playing for 20,000 people.”

Bowie and Mick Ronson, the guitarist and bandleader of the Spiders From Mars, had gotten Garson’s name and number from an engineer at the RCA Records studio who admired Garson’s session work for avant-garde jazz singer and composer Annette Peacock.

“When Bowie called, I had a student in my house,” Garson recalled. “I asked the student to baby-sit my 1-year-old. I went down to the studio at RCA. There was one guy with silver hair (Ronson) and one guy has orange hair (Bowie). They have these wild outfits on, and they’re not even on stage. I thought I was on the moon or something. But I figured, ‘A new experience.’

“I think I played seven seconds, and they said, ‘You’ve got the gig.’ I played the introduction to ‘Changes’ (one of Bowie’s hits). They gave me the chords, I played the first eight bars, and they said, ‘You’ve got the gig.’ ”

With his first U.S. tour about to start, Bowie could not afford to be indecisive about hiring a piano player. Within three days, Garson was in a tux and platform heels, performing as a Spider From Mars.

“I was hired for eight weeks, they kept me two years,” Garson said.

A rock novice, he studied the piano styles of Leon Russell and Dr. John to get himself started.

“Playing with Bowie was a wild trip,” he said. “But I got to play some of my crazy jazz stuff over rock beats, and they loved it.”

Ronson recalled in a recent interview that Garson was not unduly affected by those high-heeled footsteps into the world of glam-rock. “Mike just remained Mike,” the polite British rocker said. “He had his own personality. The guy has a good, open mind and attitude. The way he played and his input, it lent itself very well to what we were doing. It was a good mix. We couldn’t have wanted for a better player. I’d love to work with him again.”

Garson moved to England to continue working with Bowie’s band, then returned to New York when Bowie took a detour into acting with the film, “The Man Who Fell to Earth.”

Garson said he had been out of touch with Bowie until recently. “He called me from Switzerland a few weeks ago to say hello,” he said. “I could see us up the line doing a project together.”

With the rock chapter of his career finished (except for a 1976 album and British tour with other former Bowie sidemen under the name Spiders From Mars), Garson went back to jazz. He moved to California in the late ‘70s and began playing jazz-rock fusion in Stanley Clarke’s band.

Since 1982, Garson has played with Free Flight, a group that combines elements of jazz, classical and pop music. A recent Garson solo album, “Remember Love,” covered a wide span of styles, ranging from slick, sentimental, high-tech jazz-pop ballads to pieces based in rock music and be-bop.

“There was so much music in my head, I had to get it out,” Garson said. “The next album I’ll do straight jazz, then a straight pop album.”

There is a method to this genre-hopping, he said: “As soon as I find myself getting bored, I move to something else. The music won’t be good unless you’re excited by it.”

Mike Garson plays “The Best of Liberace,” including music by Gershwin, Schumann, Strauss and Chopin, and his own “Jazzical Suite” with the Garden Grove Symphony, Sunday at 8 p.m. at the Don Wash Auditorium, Stanford Avenue and Euclid Street in Garden Grove. Tickets: $20. Information: (714) 534-1103.