...seeing as it's that time of year again, with a glittery sleigh pulled by spiders on the roof, and old Uncle Ziggy sliding down the chimney,,,
Here's the Jazzin' for Blue Jean short from 1984, in two parts. Many years ago, I actually paid to see a terrible breakdance film just to get a look at this. It's not bad, Bowie refreshingly taking the mickey out of himself as both Vic the painter and the decadent rock star Screaming Lord Byron.
Plus of course the inevitable...
21.12.07
Friday On My Mind #5
Song for Bob Dylan - Hunky Dory
It's not hard to see the Dylan influence on early Bowie, especially during the Space Oddity days; at least he comes clean about it in this awkward if sincere tribute. And the extra-musical influences too are easy to spot, especially the way Dylan, very early on, learned how to use the persona of the performing artist, to hide behind it or even use it as a prop. In a sense this song is really about a strange woman who comes around, "from the brow of the Superbrain", no less, and won't leave unless she hears a couple of Dylan albums. O-kay. Musically, it's pretty slight stuff, moving from an acoustic-by-numbers verse into a slightly, er, funkier chorus. Ronson throws in some very nice, melodic guitar licks, and the general atmosphere is pleasant but not particularly rivetting.
Hunky Dory is Bowie's namedropping album, for sure. Sit down sometime and see how many people get namechecked, from Dylan and Warhol to Crowley, Himmler, the Velvets, Churchill, Garbo, even the great Mickey Mouse himself. Only fair that Bobby should get a look in.
Oh and by the way: Todd Haynes has just brought out a brilliant, fascinating, thought-provoking film called I'm Not There. You should go see it. The character of Jude Quinn alone is much more interesting than the lumpy, vaguely approximate (and terribly acted) cypher that was Brian Slade in Velvet Goldmine. And sexier.
The Supermen - Missinglinksoneziggy (bootleg)
As Bowie tells it, he was a Velvet Underground fan from way back. Somehow he'd chanced on a white label of the Velvet Underground and Nico album before it came out and was even covering Waiting For My Man in early bands. The Supermen has always been one of the more perplexing songs in the Bowie canon; you can't help but wonder if all the scattershot images and mythical references add up to profundity or pisstake. In any event, I can't help but think of the Velvets roughing out some new tune in the studio when I hear this early demo version. It's sketchy and tentative but good fun. The tom-tom heavy drums definitely make you think of Maureen Tucker.
I'm not too sure when this was done, but the occasional snazzy guitar fill seems to suggest that Mick Ronson was on board by now, so I'm assuming that this demo is roughly contemporaneous with the album. The album version is a pretty well-wrought piece of rock'n'roll concept-building, with touches of Nietszche, Lovecraft and maybe a bit of Arthur C. Clarke thrown in. The demo is rough-hewn and sketchy but it's kind of fun.
Win - Young Americans
This is one of my favourite Bowie songs and I'm not really sure why. The lyrics are as oblique and vague as anything he's written. The backing is slick and expertly played, but that's the case for thousands of other songs too. It's just that there's real but indefinable emotional impact, and a certain kind of sensual delight, going on here that adds up to more than the sum of its parts.
If it makes you feel good, it must be working I guess. Singer(s) and band strive together to conjure up a certain atmosphere, and you can almost see it in front of you: lush but dangerous, tropical but torrid. A smooth guitar comp underpins the easy, west-coast sounding verse but the chorus kicks things up a notch, built around some very Abbey-Road style guitar arpeggios.
Bowie went out of his way to work with the cream of backup musicians for this album; the whole idea was to cross over to R&B listeners and finally break it big in America. Carlos Alomar (that would be him on the sweet, flanged seductive rhythm guitar then) would end up being a fixture until the mid-80s, and vocal arranger Luther Vandross would go on to bring out, oh, one or two records himself, bless him. The star player on this track, though, is top-class session saxophonist David Sanborn, who sprinkles fairydust all over the tune with a simple, repeated hook played through a pickup and echoplexed from one speaker to the other.
A little touch, but it's one of those little perspective tricks that come at the right time, in the right place. It's pretty. Relax. Put your feet up. Get into the tropical fish. Try not to think about Kenny G...
It's not hard to see the Dylan influence on early Bowie, especially during the Space Oddity days; at least he comes clean about it in this awkward if sincere tribute. And the extra-musical influences too are easy to spot, especially the way Dylan, very early on, learned how to use the persona of the performing artist, to hide behind it or even use it as a prop. In a sense this song is really about a strange woman who comes around, "from the brow of the Superbrain", no less, and won't leave unless she hears a couple of Dylan albums. O-kay. Musically, it's pretty slight stuff, moving from an acoustic-by-numbers verse into a slightly, er, funkier chorus. Ronson throws in some very nice, melodic guitar licks, and the general atmosphere is pleasant but not particularly rivetting.
Hunky Dory is Bowie's namedropping album, for sure. Sit down sometime and see how many people get namechecked, from Dylan and Warhol to Crowley, Himmler, the Velvets, Churchill, Garbo, even the great Mickey Mouse himself. Only fair that Bobby should get a look in.
Oh and by the way: Todd Haynes has just brought out a brilliant, fascinating, thought-provoking film called I'm Not There. You should go see it. The character of Jude Quinn alone is much more interesting than the lumpy, vaguely approximate (and terribly acted) cypher that was Brian Slade in Velvet Goldmine. And sexier.
The Supermen - Missinglinksoneziggy (bootleg)
As Bowie tells it, he was a Velvet Underground fan from way back. Somehow he'd chanced on a white label of the Velvet Underground and Nico album before it came out and was even covering Waiting For My Man in early bands. The Supermen has always been one of the more perplexing songs in the Bowie canon; you can't help but wonder if all the scattershot images and mythical references add up to profundity or pisstake. In any event, I can't help but think of the Velvets roughing out some new tune in the studio when I hear this early demo version. It's sketchy and tentative but good fun. The tom-tom heavy drums definitely make you think of Maureen Tucker.
I'm not too sure when this was done, but the occasional snazzy guitar fill seems to suggest that Mick Ronson was on board by now, so I'm assuming that this demo is roughly contemporaneous with the album. The album version is a pretty well-wrought piece of rock'n'roll concept-building, with touches of Nietszche, Lovecraft and maybe a bit of Arthur C. Clarke thrown in. The demo is rough-hewn and sketchy but it's kind of fun.
Win - Young Americans
This is one of my favourite Bowie songs and I'm not really sure why. The lyrics are as oblique and vague as anything he's written. The backing is slick and expertly played, but that's the case for thousands of other songs too. It's just that there's real but indefinable emotional impact, and a certain kind of sensual delight, going on here that adds up to more than the sum of its parts.
If it makes you feel good, it must be working I guess. Singer(s) and band strive together to conjure up a certain atmosphere, and you can almost see it in front of you: lush but dangerous, tropical but torrid. A smooth guitar comp underpins the easy, west-coast sounding verse but the chorus kicks things up a notch, built around some very Abbey-Road style guitar arpeggios.
Bowie went out of his way to work with the cream of backup musicians for this album; the whole idea was to cross over to R&B listeners and finally break it big in America. Carlos Alomar (that would be him on the sweet, flanged seductive rhythm guitar then) would end up being a fixture until the mid-80s, and vocal arranger Luther Vandross would go on to bring out, oh, one or two records himself, bless him. The star player on this track, though, is top-class session saxophonist David Sanborn, who sprinkles fairydust all over the tune with a simple, repeated hook played through a pickup and echoplexed from one speaker to the other.
A little touch, but it's one of those little perspective tricks that come at the right time, in the right place. It's pretty. Relax. Put your feet up. Get into the tropical fish. Try not to think about Kenny G...
14.12.07
Friday On My Mind #4: From Central Park to Shantytown, changing at Berlin.
It's No Game (part 1) - (Scary Monsters and Super Creeps)
So our man and his band of faithful retainers (Messrs. Visconti, Eno, Fripp, Alomar et al) have just made three odd albums full of weird sounds, throwing pop music convention up in the air, picking it up off the floor and putting it all back together the wrong way around. On the Scary Monsters album, though, Bowie is back in the mainstream, recording in London and New York and leaving Berlin behind (for the moment).
So does that mean he's back to playing nice? Does it fuck. This track is Bowie at his most uncompromising, growling his litany of defiance while Michi Hirota spits out invective in Japanese and Robert Fripp strangles the life out of an electric guitar. "SHUT UP!" bellows our beloved artiste at the end, while machines wheeze and grind and run down around him. Then straight into the elliptical, oblique pop of Up The Hill Backwards and you're not quite sure what you've bought.
Interestingly, some of this tune is a reworking of one of David Bowie's earliest ever compositions: a tune called Tired Of My Life that he wrote when he was 16. The whole "put a bullet in my brain / and it makes all the papers" section is pretty much lifted from there. Tired Of My Life was evidently in the running for the Man Who Sold The World album, because a later demo of it turns up on the Missinglinksoneziggy bootleg. So is Bowie just recycling old teenage angst out of desperation, or is it just that he has a talent for bringing old sketches back to life and giving them meaning in a new context?
Scary Monsters is certainly a strong record, precisely because (once again) the singer completely confounds expectations throughout. And It's No Game is a brave introduction to an album that's difficult and problematic, but it also seems to be a favourite with a lot of fans. SM(ASC) has definitely improved over time; but its initial promise was never fulfilled: the 80s were a period of creative inertia for a lot of artists, and it turned out Bowie was no exception. (Though, to be fair, he always seemed to turn out sterling work on outside projects like the Absolute Beginners movie or the Baal TV play; it was just David Bowie the label-bound recording artist who hit a creative lull.)
Don't Look Down - Tonight
So Iggy Pop had just made two albums with Bowie helping out, The Idiot and Lust For Life. Great records both of them, but a long way from The Stooges. His 1979 album, New Values, saw him reunited with James Williamson - not an original Stooge, more a later-stage interloper, but a fine guitarist and co-writer, and a pretty good musical foil - a Ronson to Iggy's Bowie, if you like. After Raw Power, Pop and Williamson had collaborated on the promising but only half-finished Kill City while Iggy was an outpatient. Williamson didn't actually do much guitar playing on the New Values album, but he did co-write this with Iggy and the original is a decent piece of work: poppy and accessible, with some nice grinding guitar, but still full of guts and heart. Listening back to the original, it's the sort of hummable guitar groove that wouldn't have sounded out of place on Big Star's Radio City. Bowie's cover, on the other hand, is insipid and uninspiring.
Maybe it seemed like a good idea (at the time) to take a short, snappy, rocky guitar song and try to do it as a lovers rock tune. Reggae was flavour of the "month" in the mid 80s, which meant that a lot of great music got exposure in the UK pop charts, but it also meant that a lot of third-rate, ersatz imitators jumped on board the bandwagon for a ride. The backing track on Bowie's version is smooth, slickly played and entirely inconsequential and I'm sorry, lover's rock is not meant to sound like that. It's meant to sound pretty but not poncey. Romantic but maybe just a little bit rude.
It's a shame that an ex-mod from South London with a lifelong passion and respect for black music couldn't have done a better job of this, is all. This is one of three Iggy Pop covers on the album, and Bowie also duets with Iggy on a number they co-wrote called Dancing With The Big Boys which is so forgettable I actually had to look up the title. And the moral of the story is: avoid Tonight like the plague, especially if you're a David Bowie fan, because by all appearances he's barely involved in the making of it. You don't believe me? You want me to tell you about the Beach Boys cover? Take my word for it.
(In all fairness, Tonight does contain the single Blue Jean, which was a perfectly agreeable pop song, and a very inventive long-form video you can find easily enough hanging around at YouTube. Not a classic tune by any means, but on this album it stands out like a diamond from dross. Buy it on a compilation instead.)
Subterraneans - Low
The three of us assembled in the music room where Dusty got one together. He'd assembled skins and a bit of a cigarette box for roach, and he was frantically cooking hash and crumbling it onto tobacco on top of the piano keys. The lid poised right over his hand in case a priest stuck his head around the door. Spanky, the California kid who'd been sent over by his family for a year in an Irish boarding school, kept nervous lookout. Owly, a priest with a booming voice and a menacing walk, was "on" tonight, and we only had a twenty-minute window in which we could skin up, have a smoke, and get back inside in time for the second evening study period.
I was the day boy. It was my job to get the cigs and papers. I didn't even bother asking who Dusty had got the hash from, everything was hush-hush and cloak and dagger, don't-ask-don't-tell. In any event, he put the whole thing together adequately, licked the papers shut with a flourish, poked in a rolled-up bit of roach with a matchstick, stuck the thing behind his ear and out we went, unmenaced by Owly, up the hill to the handball alleys at the back of the school.
The moon was fat and creamy, waxing gibbous, and the walls of the alleys made odd, angular shadows. Dusty lit up and passed the first blast around; it was good resiny tasting Afghan Black and he'd put plenty in. "You know," he said, "I'd love to get a tape machine, bring it up here and play something deadly, like Dark Side of the Moon or fuckin' the second side of Low. "For sure," said Spanky in his long California drawl. He very rarely came out with anything other than some mumble of vague assent, like "for sure" or "far out". It went without saying: we were all Bowie fans. Dusty'd been a prog-rock fan before he got into the Ramones; I'd liked prog and some metal before I'd heard The Saints and Television; Spanky loved the Eagles and all that American FM stuff but was pretty much up for anything. We all agreed on Floyd, Dylan and Bowie.
I started half-singing a minor melody from one of the songs of the second side of Low; I forgot which one. Dusty joined in on the wordless syllables: "So-la-mee, ee-lay-ho..." Which one was that again? "Warszawa", he said, trying his best to pronounce it like a Slav with vees instead of doubleyous and a chewy bit in the middle. "My favourite track is Subterraneans, though." "Shelly shelly shelly owm..." He took a deep toke and passed it on to Spanky. "That's what the whole album was about, you know. The Subterraneans." The spliff came around to me. "You listen to that song and you can almost see them," Dusty continued, well into a nice hash reverie. "You can see their eyes. He puts it so well you don't need words that mean anything."
You know, he had a point, and it seemed even more credible standing there in those handball alleys late at night thirty years ago, turning on, with the moon casting crazy shadows and every step or shuffle creating some weird echo somewhere else. The shadows swam with the likenesses of those left behind, forgotten people passing through the basements and the U-bahns of some faraway city, with hollow eyes and whispery voices. Forget those glittery alien rock-star myths, it really did seem right then as though Bowie was giving a voice to those forgotten people. Even today, some thirty years later, I can still almost see those faces when I hear the song, humming along with that slow ascending bassline, wondering if that's the sound of the subterraneans slowly making their way up into the light.
Myself and Dusty both went on to play in bands; we met up by accident at some record business do in Dublin years later. Spanky went back home to the US at the end of the school year and we never heard from him again. Owly became principal of the school a few years later, after we'd gone, and ended up leaving the church and marrying his housekeeper. They had kids and everything. By all accounts he's still a bollocks, though.
So our man and his band of faithful retainers (Messrs. Visconti, Eno, Fripp, Alomar et al) have just made three odd albums full of weird sounds, throwing pop music convention up in the air, picking it up off the floor and putting it all back together the wrong way around. On the Scary Monsters album, though, Bowie is back in the mainstream, recording in London and New York and leaving Berlin behind (for the moment).
So does that mean he's back to playing nice? Does it fuck. This track is Bowie at his most uncompromising, growling his litany of defiance while Michi Hirota spits out invective in Japanese and Robert Fripp strangles the life out of an electric guitar. "SHUT UP!" bellows our beloved artiste at the end, while machines wheeze and grind and run down around him. Then straight into the elliptical, oblique pop of Up The Hill Backwards and you're not quite sure what you've bought.
Interestingly, some of this tune is a reworking of one of David Bowie's earliest ever compositions: a tune called Tired Of My Life that he wrote when he was 16. The whole "put a bullet in my brain / and it makes all the papers" section is pretty much lifted from there. Tired Of My Life was evidently in the running for the Man Who Sold The World album, because a later demo of it turns up on the Missinglinksoneziggy bootleg. So is Bowie just recycling old teenage angst out of desperation, or is it just that he has a talent for bringing old sketches back to life and giving them meaning in a new context?
Scary Monsters is certainly a strong record, precisely because (once again) the singer completely confounds expectations throughout. And It's No Game is a brave introduction to an album that's difficult and problematic, but it also seems to be a favourite with a lot of fans. SM(ASC) has definitely improved over time; but its initial promise was never fulfilled: the 80s were a period of creative inertia for a lot of artists, and it turned out Bowie was no exception. (Though, to be fair, he always seemed to turn out sterling work on outside projects like the Absolute Beginners movie or the Baal TV play; it was just David Bowie the label-bound recording artist who hit a creative lull.)
Don't Look Down - Tonight
So Iggy Pop had just made two albums with Bowie helping out, The Idiot and Lust For Life. Great records both of them, but a long way from The Stooges. His 1979 album, New Values, saw him reunited with James Williamson - not an original Stooge, more a later-stage interloper, but a fine guitarist and co-writer, and a pretty good musical foil - a Ronson to Iggy's Bowie, if you like. After Raw Power, Pop and Williamson had collaborated on the promising but only half-finished Kill City while Iggy was an outpatient. Williamson didn't actually do much guitar playing on the New Values album, but he did co-write this with Iggy and the original is a decent piece of work: poppy and accessible, with some nice grinding guitar, but still full of guts and heart. Listening back to the original, it's the sort of hummable guitar groove that wouldn't have sounded out of place on Big Star's Radio City. Bowie's cover, on the other hand, is insipid and uninspiring.
Maybe it seemed like a good idea (at the time) to take a short, snappy, rocky guitar song and try to do it as a lovers rock tune. Reggae was flavour of the "month" in the mid 80s, which meant that a lot of great music got exposure in the UK pop charts, but it also meant that a lot of third-rate, ersatz imitators jumped on board the bandwagon for a ride. The backing track on Bowie's version is smooth, slickly played and entirely inconsequential and I'm sorry, lover's rock is not meant to sound like that. It's meant to sound pretty but not poncey. Romantic but maybe just a little bit rude.
It's a shame that an ex-mod from South London with a lifelong passion and respect for black music couldn't have done a better job of this, is all. This is one of three Iggy Pop covers on the album, and Bowie also duets with Iggy on a number they co-wrote called Dancing With The Big Boys which is so forgettable I actually had to look up the title. And the moral of the story is: avoid Tonight like the plague, especially if you're a David Bowie fan, because by all appearances he's barely involved in the making of it. You don't believe me? You want me to tell you about the Beach Boys cover? Take my word for it.
(In all fairness, Tonight does contain the single Blue Jean, which was a perfectly agreeable pop song, and a very inventive long-form video you can find easily enough hanging around at YouTube. Not a classic tune by any means, but on this album it stands out like a diamond from dross. Buy it on a compilation instead.)
Subterraneans - Low
The three of us assembled in the music room where Dusty got one together. He'd assembled skins and a bit of a cigarette box for roach, and he was frantically cooking hash and crumbling it onto tobacco on top of the piano keys. The lid poised right over his hand in case a priest stuck his head around the door. Spanky, the California kid who'd been sent over by his family for a year in an Irish boarding school, kept nervous lookout. Owly, a priest with a booming voice and a menacing walk, was "on" tonight, and we only had a twenty-minute window in which we could skin up, have a smoke, and get back inside in time for the second evening study period.
I was the day boy. It was my job to get the cigs and papers. I didn't even bother asking who Dusty had got the hash from, everything was hush-hush and cloak and dagger, don't-ask-don't-tell. In any event, he put the whole thing together adequately, licked the papers shut with a flourish, poked in a rolled-up bit of roach with a matchstick, stuck the thing behind his ear and out we went, unmenaced by Owly, up the hill to the handball alleys at the back of the school.
The moon was fat and creamy, waxing gibbous, and the walls of the alleys made odd, angular shadows. Dusty lit up and passed the first blast around; it was good resiny tasting Afghan Black and he'd put plenty in. "You know," he said, "I'd love to get a tape machine, bring it up here and play something deadly, like Dark Side of the Moon or fuckin' the second side of Low. "For sure," said Spanky in his long California drawl. He very rarely came out with anything other than some mumble of vague assent, like "for sure" or "far out". It went without saying: we were all Bowie fans. Dusty'd been a prog-rock fan before he got into the Ramones; I'd liked prog and some metal before I'd heard The Saints and Television; Spanky loved the Eagles and all that American FM stuff but was pretty much up for anything. We all agreed on Floyd, Dylan and Bowie.
I started half-singing a minor melody from one of the songs of the second side of Low; I forgot which one. Dusty joined in on the wordless syllables: "So-la-mee, ee-lay-ho..." Which one was that again? "Warszawa", he said, trying his best to pronounce it like a Slav with vees instead of doubleyous and a chewy bit in the middle. "My favourite track is Subterraneans, though." "Shelly shelly shelly owm..." He took a deep toke and passed it on to Spanky. "That's what the whole album was about, you know. The Subterraneans." The spliff came around to me. "You listen to that song and you can almost see them," Dusty continued, well into a nice hash reverie. "You can see their eyes. He puts it so well you don't need words that mean anything."
You know, he had a point, and it seemed even more credible standing there in those handball alleys late at night thirty years ago, turning on, with the moon casting crazy shadows and every step or shuffle creating some weird echo somewhere else. The shadows swam with the likenesses of those left behind, forgotten people passing through the basements and the U-bahns of some faraway city, with hollow eyes and whispery voices. Forget those glittery alien rock-star myths, it really did seem right then as though Bowie was giving a voice to those forgotten people. Even today, some thirty years later, I can still almost see those faces when I hear the song, humming along with that slow ascending bassline, wondering if that's the sound of the subterraneans slowly making their way up into the light.
Myself and Dusty both went on to play in bands; we met up by accident at some record business do in Dublin years later. Spanky went back home to the US at the end of the school year and we never heard from him again. Owly became principal of the school a few years later, after we'd gone, and ended up leaving the church and marrying his housekeeper. They had kids and everything. By all accounts he's still a bollocks, though.
7.12.07
Friday On My Mind #3
It being the third Friday of this here Bowie-based feature, it behooves your humble blogger to once again, and for the third time, pick out three of the Bowie songs he's been listening to this past week. Picking out tunes isn't quite as simple as hitting shuffle and then just writing about whatever comes up. (God forbid.) I've made a deliberate point of listening to at least ten, more like fifteen, Bowie songs a week; plus the odd album if I start feeling curious. Then at some stage I actually (gasp) pick up pencil & paper, write out what I've been listening to, take a deep breath and pick three out of that list, more or less at random. Unless of course there's a particular song among them that really sticks in my head and demands to be written about. As for instance:
Drive-in Saturday - Aladdin Sane
A whole lot of very appealing things going on in this dreamy slice of sci-fi 70s pop. A bit nostalgic, with the doo-wop chord changes, greasy saxes, and references to old movies. A bit futuristic too, with all the whooshing synth noises, sci-fi imagery and backing vocals by droids on helium. But the tune, in just a shade over 4 minutes (on the album version) is a great exercise in invention, throwing in all sorts of cultural references and still managing to paint a convincing picture of a future dystopia where all those ordinary things that kids did back in the 20th century (movies, rock'n'roll and what have you) have been turned into a sort of mythology.
For all of his need to look outside the box and experiment, Bowie could never really stay outside of pop music for too long: on the evidence of pieces like this, it's obvious that he delights in pop way too much to alienate himself from it. Drive-in Saturday is like a mini-Thomas Pynchon novel distilled into pop-song format: it flits from character to character, giving us (in a relatively short space of time) a pretty comprehensive picture of what it's like to live in this future world, whether you're some starry-eyed young couple hooked on old "video films", or poor old John The Foreman, who's so starved for companionship he has to turn to some sort of artificial companion called "Sylvian" (Japan fans take note). All is not lost, though: you get the feeling that 20th century pop culture is a sort of touchstone for the people of this weird future world where the seas have all dried up, something that keeps them going.
We Bowie fans spend a lot of time talking about how the man spent a good wedge of his career changing roles and inventing new characters for himself, characters like Ziggy and Aladdin Sane, Halloween Jack and the Thin White Duke; we spend little enough time noticing how great he's been, throughout his career, at making up wholly credible minor characters who sometimes only play walk-on parts, though they're crucial to the stories he tells. But the important thing is, Drive-in Saturday is just a damn good, cleverly written pop song that makes you want to wave your scarf (or indeed, lighter) in the air, and sing along.
The Width of a Circle - Bowie At The Beeb
An ambitious piece, coming as it did halfway between Space Oddity's acoustic-based, very conventional "singer-songwriter" narratives and the more metal-oriented Man Who Sold The World material. The album version of this probably surprised Bowie fans the first time out when they dropped the needle on it, expecting windblown twelve-string balladry like that last album, only to have their poor, sensitive ears pummelled by what can only be described as Heavy fahcking Metal. Written by some bloke in a frock, no less.
Lyrically, this song shows the singer trying to come to terms with his carefully-cultivated androgynous image, by writing about what it's like to actually sleep with someone of the same sex. Highly laudable subject matter for sure, and it's inspired plenty of great works of art over the years. The only problem is, for all its musical and structural merits, Width of a Circle fails to convince you that such an encounter had any real meaning for the person who's singing about it (other than perhaps giving them something to write about). The first half sounds like it could have come off of Space Oddity, with all the hectic acoustic scrubbing and nervous wordplay, and the second half, when the song's narrator and the Other Guy (who could even be God, or the Devil, or something) actually seem to Do The Deed, simply sounds forced and overdone.
There's no doubt that the games that Bowie played with identity and the question of sexuality were highly influential on a lot of people. The ironic thing is that Bowie helped pave the way for a greater acceptance of gay artists and themes by pop & rock fans, and as a result we can now listen to a wide range of songs by people who all write about homosexual love a lot more convincingly than Bowie does here, quite simply because their hearts are actually in it.
Musically, the album track remains notable because, well, it's the former acoustic balladeer dipping his toe into the hard rock waters, a lot more credibly than his attempts to dabble with alternative sexuality. Lyrical weaknesses aside, it sounds great and has a brooding sense of drama. Much of this is down to the new guitarist, a gent from Yorkshire who manages to completely upstage the singer's mannered, affected performance with some grandstanding guitar pyrotechnics.
This early BBC airing of WOAC is an interesting listen, mainly because it shows the song early in its evolution, a lot more acoustic-based and less pompous sounding than the eventual album version, though it kind of falls apart towards the end and the "awkward second half" doesn't sound as though it's been written yet (unless the singer himself was self-censoring for a radio audience.)
What's more, the Yorkshireman on guitar I mentioned above has only been in the band for two days, and hasn't had the chance to rehearse much yet. (The singer helpfully explains this afterwards to an unabashed John Peel.) Young Mick Ronson (for it is he) kind of busks along the first half, half-aware of the chord changes, but really comes into his own in the middle bit, wailing away like Jeff Beck's baby brother or something. After which the thing kind of dawdles around, unfinished, and Bowie himself contributes what sounds like a completely improvised acoustic coda. So there you go, the first appearance of the guitarist who ended up being an important part of David Bowie's (and indeed, Lou Reed's) sound for the next few years. He'd just come all the way from Hull, actually.
Here Comes the Night - Pin Ups
The early-mid 70s were the decade of nostalgia, for sure. There were rock'n'roll and doo-wop revival bands like Sha Na Na and (ulp!) Showaddywaddy, movies like American Graffiti and The Last Picture Show, and "cover" albums like this one, the Band's Moondog Matinee and Bryan Ferry's These Foolish Things. Easy to see the appeal of something like this: established singer-songwriters taking a break from the whole spokesman-for-a-generation thing and just playing songs by other people that they liked. Where Ferry went outside rock for his inspiration, Bowie very deliberately chose a narrow field of music to cover, and not the fifties revivalism that was then popular; instead, he picked songs from the era he grew up in, when R&B bands like the Stones, the Kinks, the Who and the Pretty Things filled up tiny clubs all over the Home Counties, and sent a generation of pop kids home sweating.
Their Ulster cousins Them made a bit of a racket on both sides of the pond too, and the original of Here Comes The Night, written for them by US r&b maestro Bert Berns, was and is a British Invasion crossover classic. That big rumbling guitar over a simple chord change, and Van Morrison intoning that irresistable chorus. There's great drama and tension in the original too: the verse sails through on a brisk, skipping, Gene Pitney-type beat, the sort of thing that housewives probably liked dancing to in the early 60s, and then the chorus rips away the workaday veil with some growling, id-drenched R&B.
For this careful re-working, Bowie and the Spiders are careful not to try and improve on perfection, but they're confident enough as a band to give this treatment just the right mix of modernity and reverence. Plus, you know, plenty of those overdubbed greasy saxes that Bowie was putting, kitchen-sink style, into just about everything he recorded between Ziggy and Diamond Dogs. The sax break on this goes on a bit and is kind of silly, but doesn't really spoil a snappy and listenable cover. Extra credit for the swoon of sheer delight that opens this up - Bowie the singer coming all over all Dionysiac on us, as he does sometimes (compare the ecstatic "oh yeah" at the start of Ziggy Stardust, for instance), but also giving the very clear message that he and the Spiders are covering this old material because they love it, plain and simple.
Drive-in Saturday - Aladdin Sane
A whole lot of very appealing things going on in this dreamy slice of sci-fi 70s pop. A bit nostalgic, with the doo-wop chord changes, greasy saxes, and references to old movies. A bit futuristic too, with all the whooshing synth noises, sci-fi imagery and backing vocals by droids on helium. But the tune, in just a shade over 4 minutes (on the album version) is a great exercise in invention, throwing in all sorts of cultural references and still managing to paint a convincing picture of a future dystopia where all those ordinary things that kids did back in the 20th century (movies, rock'n'roll and what have you) have been turned into a sort of mythology.
For all of his need to look outside the box and experiment, Bowie could never really stay outside of pop music for too long: on the evidence of pieces like this, it's obvious that he delights in pop way too much to alienate himself from it. Drive-in Saturday is like a mini-Thomas Pynchon novel distilled into pop-song format: it flits from character to character, giving us (in a relatively short space of time) a pretty comprehensive picture of what it's like to live in this future world, whether you're some starry-eyed young couple hooked on old "video films", or poor old John The Foreman, who's so starved for companionship he has to turn to some sort of artificial companion called "Sylvian" (Japan fans take note). All is not lost, though: you get the feeling that 20th century pop culture is a sort of touchstone for the people of this weird future world where the seas have all dried up, something that keeps them going.
We Bowie fans spend a lot of time talking about how the man spent a good wedge of his career changing roles and inventing new characters for himself, characters like Ziggy and Aladdin Sane, Halloween Jack and the Thin White Duke; we spend little enough time noticing how great he's been, throughout his career, at making up wholly credible minor characters who sometimes only play walk-on parts, though they're crucial to the stories he tells. But the important thing is, Drive-in Saturday is just a damn good, cleverly written pop song that makes you want to wave your scarf (or indeed, lighter) in the air, and sing along.
The Width of a Circle - Bowie At The Beeb
An ambitious piece, coming as it did halfway between Space Oddity's acoustic-based, very conventional "singer-songwriter" narratives and the more metal-oriented Man Who Sold The World material. The album version of this probably surprised Bowie fans the first time out when they dropped the needle on it, expecting windblown twelve-string balladry like that last album, only to have their poor, sensitive ears pummelled by what can only be described as Heavy fahcking Metal. Written by some bloke in a frock, no less.
Lyrically, this song shows the singer trying to come to terms with his carefully-cultivated androgynous image, by writing about what it's like to actually sleep with someone of the same sex. Highly laudable subject matter for sure, and it's inspired plenty of great works of art over the years. The only problem is, for all its musical and structural merits, Width of a Circle fails to convince you that such an encounter had any real meaning for the person who's singing about it (other than perhaps giving them something to write about). The first half sounds like it could have come off of Space Oddity, with all the hectic acoustic scrubbing and nervous wordplay, and the second half, when the song's narrator and the Other Guy (who could even be God, or the Devil, or something) actually seem to Do The Deed, simply sounds forced and overdone.
There's no doubt that the games that Bowie played with identity and the question of sexuality were highly influential on a lot of people. The ironic thing is that Bowie helped pave the way for a greater acceptance of gay artists and themes by pop & rock fans, and as a result we can now listen to a wide range of songs by people who all write about homosexual love a lot more convincingly than Bowie does here, quite simply because their hearts are actually in it.
Musically, the album track remains notable because, well, it's the former acoustic balladeer dipping his toe into the hard rock waters, a lot more credibly than his attempts to dabble with alternative sexuality. Lyrical weaknesses aside, it sounds great and has a brooding sense of drama. Much of this is down to the new guitarist, a gent from Yorkshire who manages to completely upstage the singer's mannered, affected performance with some grandstanding guitar pyrotechnics.
This early BBC airing of WOAC is an interesting listen, mainly because it shows the song early in its evolution, a lot more acoustic-based and less pompous sounding than the eventual album version, though it kind of falls apart towards the end and the "awkward second half" doesn't sound as though it's been written yet (unless the singer himself was self-censoring for a radio audience.)
What's more, the Yorkshireman on guitar I mentioned above has only been in the band for two days, and hasn't had the chance to rehearse much yet. (The singer helpfully explains this afterwards to an unabashed John Peel.) Young Mick Ronson (for it is he) kind of busks along the first half, half-aware of the chord changes, but really comes into his own in the middle bit, wailing away like Jeff Beck's baby brother or something. After which the thing kind of dawdles around, unfinished, and Bowie himself contributes what sounds like a completely improvised acoustic coda. So there you go, the first appearance of the guitarist who ended up being an important part of David Bowie's (and indeed, Lou Reed's) sound for the next few years. He'd just come all the way from Hull, actually.
Here Comes the Night - Pin Ups
The early-mid 70s were the decade of nostalgia, for sure. There were rock'n'roll and doo-wop revival bands like Sha Na Na and (ulp!) Showaddywaddy, movies like American Graffiti and The Last Picture Show, and "cover" albums like this one, the Band's Moondog Matinee and Bryan Ferry's These Foolish Things. Easy to see the appeal of something like this: established singer-songwriters taking a break from the whole spokesman-for-a-generation thing and just playing songs by other people that they liked. Where Ferry went outside rock for his inspiration, Bowie very deliberately chose a narrow field of music to cover, and not the fifties revivalism that was then popular; instead, he picked songs from the era he grew up in, when R&B bands like the Stones, the Kinks, the Who and the Pretty Things filled up tiny clubs all over the Home Counties, and sent a generation of pop kids home sweating.
Their Ulster cousins Them made a bit of a racket on both sides of the pond too, and the original of Here Comes The Night, written for them by US r&b maestro Bert Berns, was and is a British Invasion crossover classic. That big rumbling guitar over a simple chord change, and Van Morrison intoning that irresistable chorus. There's great drama and tension in the original too: the verse sails through on a brisk, skipping, Gene Pitney-type beat, the sort of thing that housewives probably liked dancing to in the early 60s, and then the chorus rips away the workaday veil with some growling, id-drenched R&B.
For this careful re-working, Bowie and the Spiders are careful not to try and improve on perfection, but they're confident enough as a band to give this treatment just the right mix of modernity and reverence. Plus, you know, plenty of those overdubbed greasy saxes that Bowie was putting, kitchen-sink style, into just about everything he recorded between Ziggy and Diamond Dogs. The sax break on this goes on a bit and is kind of silly, but doesn't really spoil a snappy and listenable cover. Extra credit for the swoon of sheer delight that opens this up - Bowie the singer coming all over all Dionysiac on us, as he does sometimes (compare the ecstatic "oh yeah" at the start of Ziggy Stardust, for instance), but also giving the very clear message that he and the Spiders are covering this old material because they love it, plain and simple.
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