The Man Who Sold the World (11 page)

 

[10] GOD KNOWS I'M GOOD

(Bowie)

Recorded September 1969;
David Bowie [Space Oddity]
LP

The final two songs recorded for Bowie's second album offered variants on the African rhythm brought to rock'n'roll by Bo Diddley, and employed most famously on the Rolling Stones' “Not Fade Away” and George Michael's “Faith.” Bowie transported it to acoustic twelve-string guitar for this trivial extrapolation of a 1969 tabloid story about a shoplifter. Rhythm aside, his obvious influence was Bob Dylan, Bowie throwing around flamboyant metaphors (the “spitting,” “shrieking” cash machine) and emphasizing apparently random syllables in what he clearly believed to be an imitation of the master. Only in the chorus (echoed for dramatic effect) did he step outside his familiar folk guitar changes in A minor, landing on an E major at the end of each line to accentuate the moral crisis at hand.

 

[11] UNWASHED AND SOMEWHAT SLIGHTLY DAZED

 

(Bowie) (inc.)

 

[11A] DON'T SIT DOWN

Recorded September 1969;
David Bowie [Space Oddity]
LP

“Unwashed” was ostensibly the most conventional rock recording on Bowie's second album, the electric blues workout of its second half almost erasing what had gone before. Within a few days, however, Bowie was capable of revealing two ambiguous “explanations” for the song: that it was “about a boy whose girlfriend thinks he is socially inferior” (a theme that first surfaced on “I'm Not Losing Sleep” [A19] in 1966), and then that it “describes how I felt in the weeks after my father died.” What was most shocking about the song wasn't the comic-book violence of its imagery—the rotting flesh and rats of a heavy metal nightmare—but the swiftness of the transition from the “pretty girl” who glimpsed Bowie from her window, to the revenge exacted on her accursed father.
*

Like several songs of this period (notably “Cygnet Committee” [8]), “Unwashed” sounded as if it had been assembled piecemeal, wandering through a succession of major chords in a desperate attempt to find a home. It eventually settled on C, and a slowed-down, souped-up reproduction of the Rolling Stones' “Not Fade Away,” escaping the formula only for two Dylan-inspired
*
runs from G and then F back to the key chord at the climax of the chorus. After Bowie had exhausted his self-disgust and his social inferiority complex, the band took control, their leader contributing a single scared-sheep bleat in imitation of his friend Marc Bolan, before the brass and Benny Marshall's blues-wailing harp brought the track home.

Original pressings of the album, and the most recent CD reissue, separated this track from “Letter to Hermione” [5] with a forty-second audio-verité extract from a jam session around the “Unwashed” chords. Pointless and disruptive, it barely deserved the honor of its own title: “Don't Sit Down.” The album is stronger without it.

DAVID BOWIE
LP (ALIAS
SPACE ODDITY
)

R
ecorded June–September 1969; released November 1969 (UK), January 1970 (US).

Like Zager & Evans's “In the Year 2525,” a transatlantic hit single in late summer 1969, “Space Oddity” [1] was such an obvious novelty for the pop audience—indelibly linked to the Apollo missions—that it sapped rather than reinforced Bowie's prestige as a performer. Fans at his live performances reacted ecstatically to the song, then ignored everything else he offered them. A similar fate awaited
David Bowie
, his second album release of that title—replacing the 1967 model with the same lack of regret that Ford might have applied to the launch of a new Escort. Only when it was reissued in 1972, with a
Ziggy Stardust
–era cover portrait, was the record renamed
Space Oddity
.

If the original intention was to stress that Bowie could not be defined by one song alone, it was a disaster in marketing terms. Like its Deram predecessor, the 1969
David Bowie
offered no more clue to its contents than a striking color photograph of its creator—his Dylan (circa 1966) perm merging into an Op Art array of blue circles taken from the
Planetary Folklore
portfolio by the Hungarian artist Victor Vasarely. The artist was seeking to create a sense of movement: superimposed with Bowie's staring face, his painting lost its purpose. So did the Beckenham Arts Lab: as Bowie complained in 1971, “We found that the mass percentage of the people that came just came to be entertained. The participation element was gone.” With his idealism punctured, he viewed his success purely in financial terms. “The money I'm making now will make a nice nest egg,” he explained, “and if the bubble bursts, I'll be able to live quite comfortably for a couple of years on the proceeds.” Would success, however short-lived, go to his head? “I can take it all in my stride. I'm not a particularly excitable person.”

Elsewhere, he revealed that “I never plan ahead, and I'm very fickle. I'm always changing my mind about things.” He presented a different persona in every situation: meeting an interviewer whose interests went beyond pop, he would talk knowledgeably about authors such as André Gide, Oscar Wilde, and Dylan Thomas. Confronted by skinheads after a poorly received solo performance, he promised to act as their spokesman in the underground newspaper
International Times
. The paper's in-house “skin” duly announced the launch of a regular column: “He's a good bloke, and on our side, in spite of his long hair, and he should have a lot of interesting things to say.” But none of Bowie's thoughts on the skinhead lifestyle ever appeared in print. Meanwhile, he was toying with the idea of assembling a rock band, having borrowed the services of Junior's Eyes for his late 1969 tour commitments, while at the same time giving serious consideration to starring in a stage adaptation of a novel by Sir Walter Scott at the Harrogate Theatre. This was still the butterfly Bowie of 1967, uncertain how to meet the new decade, and unable to fix on a salable brand that could quell his growing feelings of restlessness and inertia.

 

[12] LONDON BYE TA-TA

(Bowie) [see also A52 and 14]

Recorded January 1970;
David Bowie [Space Oddity]
(Deluxe Edition) CD

The success of “Space Oddity” [1] demanded a follow-up, and though Bowie had toyed with a ditty titled “Hole in the Ground”
*
before Christmas, that wasn't it. Neither, it transpired, was this remake of an unreleased song from 1968, despite press reports that it had been scheduled as his next single, and several broadcast performances by Bowie. It might have been a more productive choice than “The Prettiest Star” [13], thanks to an arrangement that featured spiky electric guitar, a three-woman vocal chorus in the gospel-flavored style that was fast becoming de rigueur on the London rock scene, and a boogie riff that looked ahead to “Suffragette City” [59] two years hence.

 

[13] THE PRETTIEST STAR

(Bowie) [see also 71]

Recorded January 1970; single A-side

Bowie promised an ecstatic climb to the summit in the final verse of this spring 1970 single, and if—as is commonly supposed—it was inspired by Angie Barnett, the woman who became his wife two weeks after it was released, then it was uncannily prophetic (professionally, if not personally). The song garnered a huge audience when it was revived on
Aladdin Sane
, but this blueprint is rumored to have sold no more than one thousand copies. “I think a lot of people were expecting another ‘Space Oddity,' ” Bowie mused as it became clear the single would not be a hit.

The flaw was not Bowie's delightful melody, tripping around the key of F like a party of revelers from
The Great Gatsby
; or the words, sufficiently romantic to make any recipient swell with pride; or indeed the intimate, breathy vocal, with Bowie purring like Eartha Kitt draping herself across a chaise longue. What damned the single commercially was, in retrospect, its main attraction for collectors of rock trivia: the only memorable musical collaboration between the two sixties Mods who had spent the decade vainly chasing a vision of stardom, Bowie and Marc Bolan. Tony Visconti produced them both, and engineered this uneasy alliance, in which Bolan extemporized a solo around the verse melody. (Typically, Bolan later claimed that he also “wrote the middle bit” of the song.) The problem was not the notes, but the ambience, which left Bolan's guitar as the sonic focus of the track, with an edginess that grated against the voice and rhythm section. The lethargic nature of the latter didn't help, either. Only Bowie's personal stake in the song could have persuaded him that this was his best shot at radio airplay.

Two weeks after the release of “The Prettiest Star,” Bowie and Angie became husband and wife. “She's an American citizen, and if I hadn't married her, she'd have had to leave the country,” Bowie explained a few months later. “But for that, I don't think we'd have got married at all.” The couple embarked on what both agreed should be an “open marriage”—a fashionable concept of the times, and also the title of a bestselling 1972 study of “free love” by the anthropologists Nena and George O'Neill. By 1977, Nena O'Neill had written a retraction, titled
The Marriage Premise
, having discovered that few of her original interview subjects had succeeded in keeping their open marriages intact. Neither would David and Angie Bowie.

In a coincidence that symbolized the directionless nature of his career, “The Prettiest Star” was released on the same day as
The World of David Bowie
, a budget-priced (less than one pound) album of his Deram recordings. Bowie was allowed to select and sequence the tracks, retaining most of his 1967
David Bowie
LP but substituting three songs that the record company had chosen not to release: “Let Me Sleep Beside You” [A47], “Karma Man” [A48], and “In the Heat of the Morning” [A49]. Although the album's appearance did provide a degree of publicity, it also suggested that he was already a man of the past, his “World” circumscribed by music he had recorded several years earlier.

 

[14] THREEPENNY PIERROT

(Bowie)

 

[15] THE MIRROR (AKA HARLEQUIN)

(Bowie)

 

[16] COLUMBINE

(Bowie)

Recorded January–February 1970; Scottish TV

Finding himself in Scotland at the same time as Lindsay Kemp, Bowie agreed to participate in a Scottish TV production of
Pierrot in Turquoise
, which he had last performed in March 1968. Of the three musical pieces fashioned for the show, “Threepenny Pierrot” was a simple keyboard reworking of “London Bye Ta-Ta” [A52 and 12] sung at breakneck speed with lyrics inspired by the commedia dell'arte archetype. “Columbine” (Harlequin's perennial love interest) and “The Mirror” were brief new compositions, adhering to theatrical need and to the folk ambience of his early 1969 songs, though there was a stridency to the delivery of “The Mirror” that betrayed a new self-confidence waiting to be captured on record. Once again, though, this was a gesture to the past rather than the future.

 

[17] AMSTERDAM

(Brel; trans. Shuman)

Recorded February 1970; BBC radio. Re-recorded summer 1971; single B-side

In the music of Jacques Brel, which he discovered secondhand, Bowie found the same relish for the sweat, semen, and soul of everyday life, in all its passion and mundanity, that he had admired in the pages of Jean Genet. There was none of Genet's extravagant campness in Brel; instead, the Belgian master of the declamatory chanson delivered bulletins of blood-soaked humanity straight from an open vein. Despair and mortality were his battlefield, and nowhere was his scalpel wielded with more zeal than with his lurid evocation of the port of Amsterdam.

Brel's tumultuous rendition (recorded live in 1964) accentuated his melody's similarity to the traditional “Greensleeves,” rising to an ecstatic climax that roused his audience to uproar. Tortured pop star Scott Walker felt Brel as a kindred spirit, and he interpreted “Amsterdam” in 1967 in a hushed croon, disguising the potentially offensive word
pisses
*
and avowing that the whores had “promised their love,” not “given their bodies.” The translation
*
he was bowdlerizing was by lyricist Mort Shuman, who belied his past as a hit songwriter for Elvis Presley with his libretto for the musical
Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris
. Bowie saw a London performance of the show in July 1968 and almost immediately began to perform “Amsterdam” himself.

Unable to master the emotional terrain of the song in a February 1970 BBC performance, he was equal to its demands by 1971. Returning to the BBC that year, he phrased every line like an actor utterly confident of his lines, switching his mood stylishly between lines. His studio rendition, not released until 1973, was more strident, a showcase for his vocal range than for his interpretative talents. He continued to tease out the full range of Brel's implications, on this song and “My Death” [64], until the end of the Ziggy era.

 

[18] THE WIDTH OF A CIRCLE

(Bowie)

Recorded February 1970; BBC radio. Re-recorded April/May 1970;
The Man Who Sold the World
LP

“I don't want to be one of those singers whose career depends on hit singles, and they are virtually dead for six months of the year,” Bowie remarked in November 1969. He had glimpsed the success that had been his goal since he joined the Kon-Rads, and found it deeply troubling. The failure of “The Prettiest Star” [13] demonstrated that, far from establishing him as an artist of integrity, the sales of “Space Oddity” [1] had actually narrowed his commercial brand: in the eyes of the public, he was simply the man who sold the space song. “I throw myself on the mercy of an audience,” he said, “and I really need them to respond to me. If they don't, I'm lost.” In the same interview, he noted wistfully that “it's a bit early in life for all my ideas to have dried up, isn't it?”—an effective admission that he felt creatively bankrupt.

At heart, he still believed that his primary purpose was to please a mass audience: “I'm determined to be an entertainer; clubs, cabaret, concerts, the lot.” He had little sympathy with the rock underground: “It seems to me that they have expanded their own personal little scenes to a certain extent, and then they stop, content to play to the converted. For some reason, even the words ‘entertainer' and ‘cabaret' make them shudder.” In a musical world no longer attempting to span a widening chasm of taste, between pop and rock, commercial and underground, mass and elite, he was aligning himself firmly with the majority.

“What the underground has got to remember is they're still a minority, and they're not representative of the youth,” John Lennon noted at the start of 1970. “And that's what we've got to realise, that we haven't got youth sewn up, by any means. We haven't even converted our own contemporaries, we're not even communicating fully with
them
.” Bowie concurred: “It's not that they
want
to communicate, particularly. A lot of them haven't anything at all
to
communicate. I want my songs to be known, otherwise I wouldn't go on writing, because I don't write for myself.”

“The Prettiest Star” aside, however, Bowie wrote nothing between September 1969 and April 1970 that made the slightest concessions toward an audience. “All my songs are very personal,” he admitted in March, “and I combine this with an exaggeration so the meaning is clearly brought home to the listener.” This exaggeration was certainly evident on the new material he performed for BBC Radio in February and March, but the intended audience appeared to be Bowie himself, seeking to divine his lack of connection with the world.

In an attempt to bridge that gap, Bowie formed a band who were known, variously, as Harry the Butcher, David Bowie's Imagination, and, ultimately, the Hype. Alongside his established friend/bassist/producer Tony Visconti, he recruited two former members of a Hull-based R&B band called the Rats: drummer John Cambridge and guitarist Mick Ronson. In Ronson, Bowie had happened upon someone who was not only a guitar virtuoso, with an utterly distinctive tone, but also a classically trained musician capable of concocting orchestral arrangements. Ronson and Cambridge were invited to join David and Angie at their Gothic Beckenham residence, known as Haddon Hall. They discovered that their hosts were not only keen buyers of art deco and art nouveau—in keeping with the contemporary revival of both styles—but also avid collectors of sexual conquests, often from the gay club on Kensington High Street known as the Sombrero (or “the Chinese takeaway,” to many of its denizens).