The Man Who Sold the World (13 page)

In the spring of 1970, as the sessions for
The Man Who Sold the World
began, Terry arrived at the bohemian enclave that was Bowie's portion of Haddon Hall—shared with Angie, his producer Tony Visconti, and assorted musicians, roadies, and associates. It was a volatile environment for rehabilitation, and despite David's attempts to provide his brother with security, Terry soon had to return to Cane Hill.

“Our alienation goes to the roots,” wrote radical psychiatrist R. D. Laing in the late sixties. “We are bemused and crazed creatures, strangers to our true selves, to one another, and to the spiritual and material world—mad, even, from an ideal standpoint we can glimpse but not adopt.” He was describing the world beyond the asylum, where “we who are still half alive” were condemned to “reflect the decay around and within us.” This was the landscape of “All the Madmen,” the song Bowie composed soon after Terry's departure, in which he channeled his brother's alienation from the “real” world in a remarkable display of empathy.

Most commentators have assumed that Bowie was writing from his own perspective, watching his “friends” picked off by madness. He often employed different narrative voices within the same song, but on this occasion his role seemed clear: he had thought himself inside his brother's head, and captured the insecurity of a man who can endure the prison in which he lives but cannot face the “sadmen” of civilization. What was genuinely chilling was the gradual realization that the narrator had the choice of whether or not to pass as “sane” in the eyes of those on the “far side of town.” He presented himself quite deliberately as “mad,” twisting a familiar pop phrase
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to offer behavior that was guaranteed to be considered “insane.” The song ended with a comfortingly meaningless chant, part Dada, part children's rhyme, that became an anthem for those inside the asylum. But the price that he paid for that comfort was, by the standards of those outside, quite terrible: lobotomy, EST, Librium, loss of libido.

The music expressed the value of that bargain. As the chorus proclaimed the narrator's sense of belonging with the insane, it surged into a defiant A major chord, finally escaping the narrow straitjacket (between Dm and G) that had confined the opening verses. The guitar solo maintained that theme of playful liberation, as if announcing a courtly dance. Instead, Bowie employed an unexpected jump cut: a disarming glimpse of madness seen from outside, as four speaking voices competed for attention. Two of them were recognizably Bowie, and unmistakably “simple,” in the parlance of the times, offering eloquent nonsense; a third reinforced them in the stuffy tones of a BBC announcer. The sense of disconnection was profound; only a small child,
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a gentler incarnation of a vari-speed gnome, could relate to this unreality. “He followed me home, Mummy,” the child's voice explained. “Can I keep him?” It was every parent's nightmare, every sane man's stereotype of the threat posed by those who were different from you and me.

The other side of madness was what endured, however, as a Moog synthesizer traced gamboling violin melodies, and the final chorus—a surreal cousin to the coda of “Memory of a Free Festival [9]—revealed its roundelay in B minor.
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It was a stunning conclusion to a masterpiece, all the more impressive for having been constructed around a rhythm track that had impatiently been awaiting its burden for several weeks.

 

[24] SAVIOUR MACHINE

(Bowie)

Recorded April–May 1970;
The Man Who Sold the World
LP

Stripped of its vocal—in the shape, therefore, which it assumed until Visconti chivvied Bowie into composing a song—“Saviour Machine” would have been a highlight of
The Man Who Sold the World
purely as an instrumental. It faded in as if we were eavesdropping on some secret collaboration between Cream and Carlos Santana, matching the British blues band's sturdy dynamics with the Latin-rock guitarist's joyous fluidity, while the spirit of Jimi Hendrix guided Ronson's solo. The album's very own savior machine, a Moog synthesizer, ran lightning-quick string arpeggios that would have boggled Vivaldi's imagination, before reincarnating itself as a trumpet. And then it all faded into the distance: you could imagine that in some other dimension, the band kept playing, for the delight of any planet that strayed momentarily across their path.

It was a testament to Bowie's skill, then, that under duress he was able to concoct a composition that did not betray the intensity of the track. Like the well-intentioned but ultimately destructive Mountain of “Wild-Eyed Boy from Freecloud” [7], the computer created by President Joe (shades of Major Tom) is damned by its own omnipotence. A world without evil and want is too dull for the Saviour Machine, which hates the species that gave it life, and urges them to destroy it before it allows its boredom to wipe them out first. Bowie's vocals reinforced the irony: metallic and machine-like as the human narrator, crooning like a martyr to give the computer voice.

 

[25] BLACK COUNTRY ROCK

(Bowie)

Recorded April–May 1970;
The Man Who Sold the World
LP

The creation of this track spotlighted the haphazard nature of Bowie's creativity during these sessions. He arrived at the studio with a fragment of a melody, a repeated phrase that ended with a swift rise and fall. Then he guided Visconti and Ronson as they fleshed out his theme into a song structure. Reckoning that it sounded like the Birmingham band the Move, he spontaneously named the wordless backing track “Black Country Rock” in their honor. Only in the final days of the album sessions did he arrive with a skeletal set of lyrics that—bar another fleeting reference to madness and its unique perspective—were merely functional.

His approach to the vocals epitomized his casual attitude to the song. For the verse, he imitated the way in which Ray Davies satirized the aristocracy on songs such as “Dedicated Follower of Fashion,” before switching his attention to an old friend. “David spontaneously did a [Marc] Bolan vocal impression because he ran out of lyrics,” Tony Visconti recalled. “He did it as a joke, but we all thought it was cool, so it stayed.”

That “tribute” aside, the track was memorable for the musicality that the band introduced, notably the distressingly brief circular guitar lick that acted as a prelude, the expanding density of the central guitar riff (first doubled, then trebled, and finally harmonized as well), and the machine-gun stutter of Woodmansey's drum fills.

 

[26] THE MAN WHO SOLD THE WORLD

(Bowie)

Recorded April–May 1970;
The Man Who Sold the World
LP

There were precursors: a Robert Heinlein science fiction tale from 1949 titled “The Man Who Sold the Moon”; a 1954 DC comic, “The Man Who Sold The Earth”; a 1968 Brazilian political satire that flitted across the arthouse movie circuit,
The Man Who Bought the World
. None of them has an apparent thematic link to one of Bowie's most enigmatic songs, written and vocalized over an existing backing track while the clock counted down for completion of the album to which it lent its name. Its lyrics have proved to be infuriatingly evocative, begging but defying interpretation. Bowie himself has contributed nothing more helpful to our understanding than a teasing suggestion that the song was a sequel to “Space Oddity” [1], an explanation designed to distract rather than enlighten (as the song said, “Who knows? Not me”). Looking back on this period from the vantage point of 1990, however, Bowie reflected that “I felt very ephemeral. I didn't feel substantial. I didn't feel a particular sense of self. It seemed that I had to extract pieces from around me, and put them onto myself to create a person. I was having a real problem. I felt invisible.”

“The Man Who Sold the World” was essentially an unconscious reflection of a piece of self-knowledge that was beyond Bowie's reach in 1970. At the time, there was probably no conscious design in a set of words that suggested more than they defined. Any concrete meaning had to be imposed to the listener's satisfaction. For example: it would be possible to read the song as an acknowledgment of the mysterious connection between David Bowie (who isn't there, because he doesn't actually exist) and David Jones (who does exist, but is effectively dead to the world). Which is the man who sold
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(himself to) the world? Maybe they both are. Or neither of them. Like the question of who killed President Kennedy, or what happened to the crew of the
Mary Celeste
, the mystery is more satisfying than any solution.

But not as satisfying as the track, a compact, elegantly assembled piece that featured none of the metallic theatrics found elsewhere on the album. It was hypnotic from the start, when Ronson's guitar nagged repeatedly at the same riff while Bowie's acoustic shifted ground beneath it. The chord structure was equally treacherous, repeatedly augmenting its key of F with an A major chord borrowed from the relative minor scale of Dm. Every musician played his part: Visconti's bass ran scales under the chorus, and a melody elsewhere; Woodmansey left ecstatic drum rolls deep in the mix, and Latin-flavored percussion trembling on the surface; Ronson conjured a momentary howl of feedback to announce the chorus. But it was the human voice that conveyed the true strangeness of the song, heavily phased during the verse (and briefly doubled, which came as some surprise, as Bowie slyly admitted), compressed (and again double-tracked) for the chorus, and then bursting into a haunting chorale in the final refrains, more rushing to join the crowd with each repetition, filling out the spectrum from bass to alto—facets every one of the single, tangled identity that was the song's enigmatic subject.

THE MAN WHO SOLD THE WORLD
LP

Recorded April–May 1970; released January 1971 (US), April 1971 (UK)

D
isconnections provided the shattered backdrop for this record, almost every element of which was fragmented and ambiguous. “It was meant to be our
Sgt. Pepper
,” claimed producer Tony Visconti, who in the same interview noted: “David didn't really care too much about this album.” His verdict was based on the memory of countless recording sessions at which the artist was, at best, a fleeting presence. “David was so frustrating to work with at the time of this album,” Visconti concluded. “I couldn't handle his poor attitude and complete disregard for his music.” Producer and musicians were left to assemble many of the tracks around the hint of a Bowie melody, or a muttered suggestion of a mood. Then, with the studio budget about to run dry, Bowie forced himself to compose the songs that would fill the backing tracks. This modus operandi proved to be unusually effective, and
The Man Who Sold the World
introduced many of the themes and obsessions that would fill his work for the decade ahead: madness, alienation, violence, confusion of identity, power, darkness, sexual possession.

After the rush to complete the record, there was an infuriating delay. “It's been a waste of a year,” Bowie reflected when the album finally appeared in 1971. Business disputes were to blame: his new manager, Tony Defries, was anxious to prove himself as a major force in Bowie's career, and also to test the strength of the deal that his client had signed with Mercury Records. Critical opinion was almost entirely positive: Bowie's longtime supporter, the journalist Penny Valentine, proclaimed, “There can't be another writer/performer around today who is even halfway near doing what Bowie has achieved,” and added that Bowie displayed “all the melodramatic power of Dylan crossed with the Demon King.” “His unhappy relationship with the world is traced to his inability to perceive it sanely,” wrote Bowie's most perceptive American critic, John Mendelsohn, emphasizing that—unconsciously, at least—the singer empathized with the theorists of the radical psychology movement.

In Britain, a record that was filled with propulsive hard rock was issued in a cover that, as Bowie noted slightly tongue-in-cheek later, “was a parody of Gabriel Rossetti. Slightly askew, obviously.” He was clad in “a man's dress” designed by Michael Fish,
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recumbent on a chaise longue like Mrs. William Morris in one of the Pre-Raphaelite artist Rossetti's many sketches of women draped decoratively across furniture (and “slightly askew” because Bowie was, despite his attire, a man). The personality of the record, and that of its cover, were utterly at odds—as were the mock-Rossetti design and the Mike Weller cartoon that filled the US album cover, showing a rifleman in a Stetson (modeled on a photograph of John Wayne) against the backdrop of the asylum in which Bowie's brother Terry was a resident. That picture did at least chime with the prevailing theme of madness: the “man's dress” heralded an entirely different mind-set, anticipating the androgynous look that would soon become one of the decade's prevailing images. For the moment, it simply confused those who might have been attracted by the music.

The Man Who Sold the World
charted only after it was reissued in 1972, in the wake of
Ziggy Stardust
and with a more obvious cover design. Back in 1970, the album's completion marked the end of Bowie's brief liaison with the Hype. Mick Ronson and Woody Woodmansey returned to Hull, and Tony Visconti opted to work with the altogether more active Marc Bolan instead. So it was that between August 1, 1970, and June 20, 1971, David Bowie made no public appearances—his second such “retirement” in just three years. It was an unusual way of pursuing stardom.

 

[27] TIRED OF MY LIFE

(Bowie)

Recorded ca. September 1970; unreleased

Bowie's description of his mental state in 1970 was suggestive of a man battling clinical depression: “I used to have periods, weeks on end, when I just couldn't cope anymore. I'd slump into myself—I felt so depressed, and I really felt so aimless and this torrential feeling of ‘What's it all for, anyway?' ” While there were personal reasons for his despair—the hollowness of fame, the Arts Lab debacle, his brother's illness—Bowie was also mirroring the ennui and disillusionment that were haunting youth culture.

John Lennon reflected at the start of the year that “a lot of people are in what they term as the Post-Drug Depression period, where there's no hope and they're all hooked on various whatevers.” The hard rock music that was becoming the lingua franca of young teenagers—epitomized by Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, Uriah Heep, Deep Purple—was loud, relentless, crushing, and best experienced with a dose of a “downer” like Mandrax. Among those who wanted a more lyrical connection with their music, the two most prominent performers of 1970 were James Taylor, a melancholy folk songwriter with a heroin addiction, and Neil Young, whose lonesome, wasted voice was almost a parody of extreme dejection, masking his wit and poetic insight.

Bowie credited Neil Young as an influence on several occasions during this period, and “Tired of My Life”—a gorgeously maudlin acoustic lament, supported by countless vocal harmony parts in the style of Young's musical associates Crosby, Stills & Nash—clearly bore his mark. It combined the melodic flavor of “Don't Let It Bring You Down” with the vocal blend of “Tell Me Why,” both featured on Young's September 1970
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album,
After the Gold Rush
. Had Bowie retained the services of John Hutchinson in 1969, and never met Mick Ronson, this is the music that he might have been selling to the world. Instead he filed this song away, but never forgot it: an entire melodic section, and two full lines of lyrics, were revived for “It's No Game” [180/181] in 1980.

 

[28] HOLY HOLY

(Bowie)

Recorded November 1970; single A-side. Re-recorded November 1971; single B-side

Billed as “the first haunted song” by Mercury's plucky PR team, “Holy Holy” might have been better described as “cursed.” Issued as a single, it was intended to be the focus of a six-week marketing campaign, involving copious press advertisements and themed carrier bags. Instead it limped into the shops quietly in January 1971, and promptly disappeared—forever, as (almost alone in Bowie's catalogue) it has never been reissued.
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It was Bowie's solitary collaboration with the instrumentalists behind the Blue Mink group of session musicians (contemporary hit makers in their own right with “Melting Pot” and “Good Morning Freedom”), but its blatant musical prototype was Marc Bolan's T. Rex. Bowie's single was recorded as Bolan's “Ride a White Swan” climbed the charts, and from the distinctive warble in his voice to the “lie-lie-lie” chorus at the end, “Holy Holy” sounded like a conscious attempt to mimic (or parody) the vehicle for Bolan's success.

It's been claimed that the song reflected Bowie's interest in the occult, but a more convincing explanation is that, like “The Prettiest Star” [13], it was a private message to his wife, signaling devotion within the acceptance of an open marriage. It was more of an exercise in assonance than communication, however, from the first line to the final chorus. It opened with menacing E-F footsteps, which chased the melody through the opening line, and only allowed the song to root itself in the chorus. A repeated flamenco rhythm from Alan Parker's electric guitar introduced a mock-operatic feel, which had also been present in some of the arrangements on
The Man Who Sold the World
. But the overall effect was of a basket of ideas that had been thrown together haphazardly without a clear design.

Bowie returned to the song during the
Ziggy Stardust
sessions a year later, electrifying the clockwork mechanism of the original recording. Under Mick Ronson's guidance, this rendition was faster, punchier, and more powerful, with Bowie's voice threateningly echoed and compressed.

 

[29] HOW LUCKY YOU ARE (AKA MISS PECULIAR)

(Bowie)

Recorded November 1970; unreleased

If “Holy Holy” [28] retained some of the hard rock dynamics of
The Man Who Sold the World
, “How Lucky You Are” represented a clear step into a new—and mightily productive—arena for Bowie. Until now, his songs had been composed on acoustic guitar, or simply as melodies, translated into musical form by his accompanists. Now, for the first time, he was writing on piano, an instrument that would transform his style over the next year. If his playing was still rudimentary—triads in the right hand, a single left-hand finger for the bass note—it allowed him to explore harmonic movements that were less obvious on guitar, experimenting with what happened if he retained the basic shape of a chord but simply moved one finger up or down the keyboard. The piano didn't immediately cure his perennial problem with constructing a song: the middle section of “How Lucky You Are” was as chaotic as anything on his 1965 demo tapes. But the speed at which his confidence at the keyboard progressed was a sign that it enabled him to approach his creativity with a clear mind, unhindered by the risk of tumbling into his own clichés.

That said, “How Lucky You Are” was a strange place to begin, its waltz tempo first resembling a Eurovision Song Contest entry and then a lost song from
The Threepenny Opera
. Like “Holy Holy,” it ended with a wordless vocal chorus, building a bridge between Kurt Weill and Paul Simon's “The Boxer.” Its lyrics were its most puzzling feature, however, their incoherence demonstrating the extent of the erotic fixation and concomitant self-disgust that were apparently their spark. They must have sounded uncommonly strange to the ears of Tom Jones, to whom this song was sent as a possible single by Bowie's publisher.

Besides his demo, Bowie also supervised a second version of “How Lucky You Are,” sung by his friend Micky King (see [36]).