The Premature Exit
The Premature Exit of the Thin White Duke – Goodbye David Bowie
*Written in Jan 2016 but never published as Karl was ill by then and other priorities overtook us. Of course, the theme of premature exit is even more salient given Karl’s passing.
When news of Bowie’s death came through in January 2016 I was immediately taken back to my teen years, swapping his albums with my best friend Anthony Ackroyd, a Bowie obsessive, in return for my equally precious Beatle albums. Now trying to make sense of why his death saddens me, I realise that part of my childhood died with him. Anthony and I, from working class suburbs of Hobart, Tasmania, had the mad idea we could form a band, and also that we could write our own songs like Bowie and Lennon/McCartney. We embarked on the slow journey of learning to write as we scratched and hacked and learnt the craft of writing songs, and eventually we wrote some good ones and played them live with our band Albatross, but our early repertoire was almost exclusively Bowie and Beatle covers. The incongruous, unintentionally hilarious vision of two 15 year old virginal, spotty Catholic schoolboys singing, “wham bam thank you Ma’am” only now occurs to me. Every Bowie release became a huge event for us, the mystique and oblique Berlin years, the wonderful Lennon collaborations and soul sessions, the mighty Station to Station, and the brilliant and ground-breaking return to pop glory with Ashes to Ashes and the ‘hit’ years with Let’s Dance et al. We moved on, the band broke up, Anthony and I decamped to Sydney and different careers, staying close friends and working together occasionally, and Bowie was always in the background working on something interesting. Now that’s gone.
If the sum quotient of happiness given to others was the measure of a life well lived, then David Bowie hopefully knew of the enormous amount he’d provided, and hopefully he died a good death. How odd to be writing that? He knew it was coming and kept it private, and in a world where every celebrity foible is up for sale, or grist for a very well-worn mill (ex-wife Angie’s tears at the news were exploited on UK Big Brother), how refreshing and classy that Bowie opted for a dignified exit? Should we be surprised? The incredible thing about Bowie was that he was rarely predictable, releasing his last album mere days before his demise, carrying with it as it does poignant, subtle and poetic references to his coming fate. Many words will flow about the significance of the man, his artistry, his penchant for provocation and his yen to take the path less travelled where others opted for more comfort and less risk, but here I’d like to remind readers of his possibly over shadowed ability as a songwriter, albeit a maddeningly mystifying and demanding one for his many devotees.
David Bowie – Songwriter
David Bowie’s influence and legacy is far ranging and comprehensive, but he should be remembered as the pre-eminent solo artist of the 1970’s, a period of time where he provided a stunning body of work, and it’s that part of his songwriting career I’ll focus on here, bounded by Major Tom parts 1 and 2, Space Oddity and Ashes to Ashes. The songs mentioned are essential examples of Bowie’s art, varied and eclectic, and a reminder than in barely more than a decade he carved a repertoire second to none, so rich and innovative that it beggars belief it was achieved while living a life of mostly personal chaos. Or maybe that helped? Artists like Bowie are really explorers out in the wilderness sending back their reports and lessons in the form of songs. It may not be a place that many of us would like to venture to but, for the intrepid few like Bowie, the rewards are significant and eternal. Bob Dylan called himself a “musical expeditioner” (sic) and few others deserve that epithet like Bowie (less sand more glue). Are you sitting comfortably? Let’s begin…
“When I heard Little Richard, I mean, it just set my world on fire. I thought I’d heard God”
~ David Bowie
David Jones started his musical journey in South London as a precocious 9 year old energised by the clarion call of American rock and roll on Armed Forces Radio, which was simultaneously changing the lives of slightly older Brit boys like John Lennon, Mick Jagger and Ray Davies. In a hint towards the contradictions and paradoxes that would mark his career Bowie claimed he was drawn to the outsider status of the music, how revolutionary and threatening it was to the staid, post war status quo, but then quickly determined on a path of writing Broadway and West End musicals. After joining a series of rhythm and blues bands as Davy Jones, he changed his name to avoid confusion with a certain Monkee and embarked on a solo career as David Bowie in 1967.
The first flowering of Bowie’s individual vision had more than a whiff of the old music hall and pub sing-a-long culture of working class England, but both the single, The Laughing Gnome, and the self-titled album failed to sell. Bowie next hitched his star to the Kennedy led assault on the moon, and timed the release of his epic composition Space Oddity, with the first moon landing in 1969. The song remains one of his crowning achievements, equal parts haunting and soaring, ethereal and superbly arranged and performed. The supporting album failed to reach the dizzying heights of the single and showcased the writer’s immersion in the hippie/flower child ethos of the time. Even so it had some fine songs in the memorable pop of the mysterious Janine, the fine melodicism of An Occasional Dream and the earthy rocker, God Knows I’m Good. Bowie continued to rock harder with his follow up, The Man Who Sold the World, bringing an Avant-garde flourish to the table and shaking up gender roles by appearing on the cover in a dress. The album again failed to ignite the charts but one of the key collaborators, guitarist/arranger Mick Ronson stayed for another 4 albums, including the next one, Bowie’s first personal masterpiece, Hunky Dory.
Hunky Dory remains a rococo pop masterwork to conjure with, a breath-taking canvas of inventive musicality and literary wit, washed down with a twist of the sardonic and more than a dash of the surreal. The album contains the bouncy personal manifesto Changes, a smart pop song with references to the much loved rock and roll licks of Bowie’s youth, the quirky Oh! You Pretty Things, a coded message to all the geek freaks that were embracing and identifying with Bowie’s outsider persona (incongruously covered by Peter Noone of Herman’s Hermits) and the glorious, unclassifiable Life of Mars? * (see below) Quicksand showed Bowie’s ability to match it with the best art-rock balladeers, Song For Dylan and Andy Warhol both served as witty nods to his influences and Kooks gave full and charming vent to his music hall fetish. Queen Bitch was a wicked rocker with a riff that wouldn’t quit and served as something of a template for Bowie’s next album, the one that would propel him to superstardom, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders from Mars.
The relative failure of Hunky Dory led Bowie to subsume his own personality into a created character, one that he could hide behind in live performance, the bisexual rock star from another planet, Ziggy Stardust. The album is a conceptual piece, a quasi-rock-opera that runs from the bluesy Five Years to the moody Rock and Roll Suicide, and the story of Ziggy’s rise and fall unfolds between those fine bookends. The first single, Starman, saw Bowie cleverly returning to an area that he was still associated with, outer space, with a hook laden and memorable ballad that conjured hope and fear in equal measure. The album is part Glam Rock manifesto and part retro homage, the story based in small part on an old Brit rocker called Vince Taylor, but Ronson’s guitar and Bowie’s lyrics mark it as much a piece of the future as the past. Soul Love and Moonage Daydream continued to show his mastery of medium paced melodic rock and the riff-fest fun of the title track, Suffragette City and Hang On To Yourself sat nicely with the contemporary Led Zepplin/Black Sabbath competition.
Drugs, booze and showbiz pressure started to play havoc with Bowie’s sanity over the next few years, as he swapped Ziggy for Aladdin Sane, another mask for the troubled writer to hide behind, claiming years later “I was never a natural performer.” The album remains strong and worth the price of admission for one of the great singles of the era, The Jean Genie, a Ronson highlight with a weird title that played with the name of famous French playwright Jean Genet (as you do). Also effective were the moody and magnificent Time, the soul stomp of Cracked Actor and the hard edge of Panic in Detroit and Drive-In Saturday. At this point Bowie was one of the most interesting lyricists to work in rock seeming not bound by conventions that had shackled lesser writers, able to incorporate many literary devices into his obliquely poetic attack on the English language.
After a solid side-line album that paid a debt to his cherished rock and roll influences, Pin-Up’s, Bowie made a ‘final’ rock album, albeit without Ronson, with another concept album that came from the ashes of a failed attempt to write a musical from Orwell’s seminal dystopian classic 1984, the sharp and angular Diamond Dogs. Even if the album treads familiar ground it still has the ebullient Rebel Rebel, one of the catchiest guitar riffs of the decade, and a brace of other worthy treats, like 1984 (Disco strings akimbo) and the anthemic Rock and Roll With Me. If the rollicking flair of the title track pointed backwards, the soulful and keening Sweet Thing pointed the way to the next stop on Bowie’s musical journey, Soulsville USA.
1975 was the year that saw Bowie give full range to his fascination with all things American, after touring there a couple of times, producing the startling blue-eyed soul of Young Americans. The brilliant title track is an example of Bowie playing with lyric form, fashioning a story of newlyweds against a backdrop of wider society, the intimate and the vast contrasted and counter-pointed against a melody your mind can’t shake. The effect is almost impressionistic, lulled as much by the sound of the syllables as much as the meaning of the words. Bowie teamed up with John Lennon, another rock and roll fuelled, art rock Brit with a penchant for the Avant-garde, and produced the wonderful number one single Fame.
Bowie’s next adventure was produced in a fog of cocaine in Los Angeles, and remains one of his finest albums, the ground breaking Station to Station, melding the soul of his previous album with the new electronica of Krautrock. The album was a background for a new Bowie character, the quasi fascist Thin White Duke, a nasty, right wing narcissist. The mystical elements to the lyrics hint at the religious allusions of station to station as being the Stations of the Cross, possibly hinting at the paranoia and martyr complex that had been dogging the troubled, depressive star. Most of the songs are fully fledged masterworks (incredible given the mental state of the writer) with the title song, Golden Years, the gorgeous and affecting Stay and TVC15 standouts. Amazingly Bowie had offered Golden Years to Elvis Presley, who knocked it back, but having barely escaped LA with his life and sanity, he made for Berlin and promptly resurrected himself as an artist and chameleon, where instrumental music became more important to an artist looking to express the inexpressible.
“There, in the chords and melodies, is everything I want to say. The words just jolly it along. It’s always been my way of expressing what for me is inexpressible by any other means”.
~ David Bowie
Station to Station’s production coincided with Bowie’s star turn in Nic Roeg’s sci-fi feature, The Man Who Fell to Earth, and Bowie’s next album contained the remnants of what was supposed to be that film’s soundtrack, released as Low after Roeg rejected it for the film. Bowie fleshed out the soundtrack fragments with superior songs like Speed of Life, Be My Wife and the uber-hummable Sound and Vision. Low saw Visconti return to production duties, and both he and crucial collaborator Brian Eno hung around to lend their talents to Bowie’s next sonic adventure, part 2 in the so called Berlin Trilogy, “Heroes.”
“Heroes” is one of Bowie’s most recognisable and beloved songs, it swings effortlessly and has a mood that is palpable, redolent with Cold War angst and paranoia, but also hope. The song is a simple excursion through a ‘50s rock and roll turnaround that could once have been written by Lieber and Stoller, but it sounds as fresh as tomorrow, fleshed out by Eno’s sweeping keyboards and Robert Fripp’s biting guitar figures. Like Low before it, the album had a brace of interesting instrumentals, but the songs were almost uniformly top shelf, particularly Beauty and The Beast, and Sons of The Silent Age. The Secret Life of Arabia was also a fine collaboration with Carlos Alomar, another example of Bowie constructing the entire backing track before writing lyrics to marry to the progression.
Bowie rounded out the ‘70s with the third instalment of the Berlin Trilogy, Lodger, an underwhelming entry that elicited a couple of fine songs in Look Back in Anger, Boys Keep Swinging and DJ, but not much else to amuse or delight. The situation was superbly recovered with the album that pointed the way to a more commercial future for Bowie, Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) and its mega selling single Ashes to Ashes. The single reintroduced Major Tom, now “strung out on heaven’s high, hitting an all-time low,” and inspired a whole new sound and vision in the pop world, a writer and performer/artist at the peak of his powers.
“The truth is of course is that there is no journey. We are arriving and departing all at the same time.”
~ David Bowie
So goodbye David Bowie, vale homo superior, a songwriter who pushed the envelope, using all kinds of literary devices and oblique strategies to fully examine the possibilities music offered. Bowie rarely stood still, was seldom boring and set the scene for artists who took up the explorer banner, like Kate Bush and Radiohead, and whose pop sensibilities helped inform musical fields ploughed by The Smiths and Nirvana. The above referenced songs are my playlist for anyone looking for the most song-based excursions from an artist who rarely accommodated any compromise of his artistic vision, a reminder for those of us who were there of his ability and a good starting point for the curious who are coming to his work for the first time.
It is the rare artist who produces music that affords a window to the mysterious and mystical, to allow the listener to experience the elusive transcendent and sublime, the area of art that puts humans in contact with a collective ‘soul’. David Bowie was such an artist, not only important as a songwriter, but as a social phenomenon – safe to say we’ll not see his like again. Sail on star sailor.
Musycks
Dedicated to my oldest friends, Anthony and the Poet Priest.
*The below bonus is an excerpt from my e-book – 33 Great Songwriters, 33 Great Songs Vol 2.
Life on Mars?
Written by – David Bowie
Published by – Tintoretto Music
Copyright – 1971
David Bowie enjoyed a burst of creativity after finally having commercial success with Space Oddity in 1969. He made up for lost time in making the albums The Man Who Sold The World and Hunky Dory in quick succession. The growth between the two was startling, as Hunky Dory had several magnificent, melodic and pseudo baroque concoctions and none better than Life on Mars. The first single off Hunky Dory was Changes, a fine pop song that failed to crack the Top 40 and Bowie was left with an unrecognised masterwork and an unhappy record company. Bowie, always changing, moved on to his more commercial and rocking Ziggy Stardust album and after that became a huge hit the record company re-released Hunky Dory, this time with Life on Mars as the single. Even though it was a year and a half after the album’s initial release it made it to number 3 on the UK charts.
The song was Bowie’s response to the success of Frank Sinatra’s My Way. Bowie had worked on his own English lyric to Comme d’habitude a 1968 song by a pair ofFrench composer’s. Bowie’s song was called Even a Fool Learns to Love, but his work was overwhelmed by Paul Anka, who wrote English lyrics as well and gave the tune to Sinatra for what became My Way, a late career signature song. Bowie wanted to carve something grandly melodic and epic in scope, which he achieved musically, but his warped lyrical sensibilities took it places Paul Anka could not have dreamt of, except possibly in nightmares.
The song is a litany of the surreal and the mundane, a strange counterpoint as Bowie opens with ‘kitchen sink’ imagery more in keeping with the docu-realist movement of Ken Loach and Mike Leigh in British film. “It’s a god awful small affair, to the girl with the mousey hair”, as the protagonist goes to the cinema, “but the film is a saddening bore, cause she’s lived it ten times or more”, in her contempt she’s forced to focus on the images presented of brawling sailors and “cavemen”. The second verse takes a trip to the weird, contrasting the banality of the first, “Mickey Mouse has grown up a cow… see the mice in their millions horde, from Ibiza to the Norfolk Broads, Rule Britannia is out of bounds, to my mother, my dog and clowns”. It’s an impressionistic take on imagery and a long way from The Laughing Gnome period of half a dozen years earlier.
Keyboard wiz Rick Wakeman took Bowie’s finely constructed piano sequence and embellished it superbly, enlivening it with a formal elegance and grandeur and creating a high water mark in session work of the era, the equal of Larry Knetchel’s work on Bridge Over Troubled Water at least. Bowie moves around the key of F, falling by semitones to D, which points the way to Gm and a descending run to C and back again. This is all very pretty and innocuous but Bowie shakes everyone from their torpor with a stunning move to Ab, a bridging key change that makes use of rising bass semitones (Ab/Eb, Ab+/E, Fm, Ab7/Gb) and then moves through the same relationship on the 4 chord (Db) which points to the chorus. The baroque chorus is a glorious release after the tension of the build, but also keeps the unsettling tones by shifting key again to Bb, and employing an odd Ebm after a minor 2 (Cm). The cherry on the top of an ambitious and breathtaking arrangement is guitarist Mick Ronson’s ferocious orchestral score which swoops and soars and adds a grandeur and gravitas to Bowie’s offbeat masterpiece.
Bowie also played word games, adding an element of humour to the surreal imagery, “Now the workers have struck for fame, ‘cause Lennon’s on sale again”. This is a quirky allusion to the worker’s struggles in Europe during the late ‘60s and early ‘70’s which saw tremendous turmoil in France and Greece et al. and a conflation of Beatle John and revolutionary Vladimir Ilych Lenin. In 1973 John had gone through his most intensive political activist period, mostly aligning himself with leftist and radical organisations to argue for social and political change. It also alludes to the 4th Beatles album, the one where Lennon had bridled against the commoditisation of the band and gave it the ironic title Beatles For Sale.
Bowie rejoiced in the “musical chameleon” moniker but in truth he was a child of the sixties where melodic pop, folk, scrappy rock, rhythmic soul and moody minimalism could sit happily side by side. Bowie could incorporate his influences (The Beatles, Bob Dylan, The Stooges, Otis Redding, The Velvet Underground) and apply them to his own idiosyncratic musical vision. In doing so he carved a singular niche for himself and a legacy that will astound and engage us for many years yet.
Definitive version – David Bowie
Album – Hunky Dory
