The Page Hamilton David Bowie tour of 1999 was, by any measure, a career landmark. For Hamilton, though, it was something far more personal than a high-profile gig: it may well have been a lifeline arriving at the exact moment he needed one.
When Bowie parted company with guitarist Reeves Gabrels in 1999 after 13 years together, he picked up the phone to Hamilton and asked him to join the band for the Hours world tour. What Bowie could not have known was the state Hamilton was in when that call came through.
Page Hamilton David Bowie tour: the call that changed everything
Hamilton described the period in a 2016 interview with Louder. He had just left his wife. He was sleeping on his manager’s couch. The nights were long and directionless. ‘I’d met some chick, been to an after-hours Budweiser pool hall… it was pathetic. I was a pathetic mess,’ he recalled. He and his friend Erik Sanko had been out for, in Sanko’s words, ’38 nights in a row’, and Hamilton’s response was: ‘Alright! Let’s make it 39!’, sessions that ran until after sunrise.
Then the phone rang. ‘He might have saved my life,’ Hamilton said of Bowie. ‘Because I would have continued.’ The fact that he pulled himself together enough to learn 30 songs (among them Cracked Actor, Rebel Rebel and Changes) practising for 16 hours a day, while in that condition, is, in his own words, ‘amazing.’
The two had first crossed paths at a festival in Germany two years before the call, an encounter Hamilton clearly treasured. He tried to get Bowie talking about a Ziggy Stardust-era moment when Bowie apparently jumped off speakers and broke his leg, catching him mid-costume-change in just his underwear. Bowie’s response was gracious and self-deprecating: ‘Oh God… I don’t remember much from back then.’ Hamilton’s verdict on the man himself: ‘Just so nice for a guy that has changed so many people’s lives and influenced so many musicians.’
There was a quiet moment of sobriety advice in there too. Bowie’s associate Coco told Hamilton: ‘You know, David’s been very happy since he’s been sober.’ At the time, Bowie had been sober for 12 years. Hamilton, of Scottish, Irish, Welsh, German and Native American descent, was not quite ready to receive that message. ‘I have all the drinking genes,’ he said. But the tribute he chose to pay Bowie in that same interview was unambiguous: ‘He’s not like you and me.’
Helmet’s hiatus and Hamilton’s wider world
According to Noisecreep, the Bowie tour coincided with Helmet entering a hiatus that lasted from 1999 to 2003, meaning the Page Hamilton David Bowie tour filled the gap left by his own band going dormant at precisely the moment his personal life was falling apart. The timing, in retrospect, looks almost providential.
Hamilton’s range as a guitarist extends well beyond the noise-rock architecture Helmet built their name on. His official site notes that he played on Elliot Goldenthal’s guitar-based score for the film Heat, a credit that places him well outside the alt-rock lane and speaks to the breadth that evidently caught Bowie’s ear in the first place.
For Hamilton, the Hours tour remains the pivot point. A Portland-born guitarist who had ground out a cult following through sheer sonic force suddenly found himself learning the Bowie canon at 16 hours a day, hauling himself out of a couch-surfing spiral, and playing those songs on a world stage. The Page Hamilton David Bowie tour did not just keep him busy. By his own account, it kept him going.
