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.
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