The Man Who Sold the World (15 page)

 

[32] MOONAGE DAYDREAM

(Bowie)

Demo recorded January 1971; unreleased. Re-recorded February 1971; Arnold Corns single. Re-recorded November 1971;
Ziggy Stardust
LP

Like “Hang Onto Yourself” [31], “Moonage Daydream” would long since have been forgotten had it survived only in the version Bowie recorded in the Radio Luxembourg studio in February 1971. At this point it consisted of a playful science-fiction-inspired chorus, two nondescript verses with a single memorable line, and an arrangement that not only racked his voice like a martyr under the Inquisition, but virtually defined the word
shambolic
. (That it was still released as a single by the pseudonymous Arnold Corns in May says much about the depth of Bowie's commitment to this strange side project, more of which later.)

Chorus and key line—that gloriously emblematic phrase about the holiness of “the church of man-love,” which must have delighted Bowie's mother—were retained for the Spiders from Mars in November. By then, Bowie had wallowed in another bout of self-mythology, declaring himself an alligator (strong and remorseless), a mama/papa (and thereby fashionably gender nonspecific), a space invader (alien and phallic), and even a pink monkey-bird, gay slang for a recipient of anal sex. His carefree imagery heightened the erotic fantasy of the chorus, a wet dream that was “moonage” for the era of the Apollo missions—and also, perhaps, for the tradition of what Robert Graves called “muse poetry,” linked to ancient cults that worshipped the moon, accessing the imagination without involving the intellect. As existentialist turned occult historian Colin Wilson noted in 1971, “The moon goddess was the goddess of magic, of the subconscious, of poetic inspiration.” Hence a “Moonage Daydream” might represent an ecstatic, instinctive path to creativity—or, more banally, nothing more substantial than a homage to Marc Bolan's brand of lyrical imagery. His last single under the name Tyrannosaurus Rex in 1970 had, after all, been called “By the Light of a Magical Moon.”

Learning from the vocal agonies of the initial recording, the Spiders tackled the song three semitones lower than before. After Ronson's declaration of intent with a pile-driver D chord, there was a moment's pause for the shock to resound before Bowie launched into his vocal, his rounded tone far removed from the metallic rasp of his 1970 recordings. The electric thrust of the opening bars was deceptive, as the first voice was powered by Bowie's acoustic, and Ronson reappeared only late in the chorus. Saxophone and pennywhistle
*
danced a prim duet over a sliding major-chord progression for the solo, echoed by electric guitar, before Ronson introduced a lush, hopeful string arrangement for the return of the chorus, climaxing in a steep pizzicato descent. Only in the final moments did Ronson's guitar provide the climactic release that the daydream demanded, continually returning to the same motifs as if in ecstatic spasm.

 

[33] LADY STARDUST

(Bowie)

Demo recorded March 1971; unreleased. Re-recorded November 1971;
Ziggy Stardust
LP

As America had been robbed of the opportunity to gaze upon Bowie in his “man's dress” on the cover of
The Man Who Sold the World
, the singer brought that vision of loveliness to life when he first visited the country. The Bowie whom John Mendelsohn of
Rolling Stone
magazine met in California during January 1971 was “ravishing, almost disconcertingly reminiscent of Lauren Bacall, although he would prefer to be regarded as the latter-day Garbo.” He was wearing “a floral-patterned velvet mini-gown . . . fine chest-length blond hair and mod nutty engineer's cap that he bought in the ladies' hat section of the City of Paris department store in San Francisco.” This exotic creature was both male and female, straight and gay, and even the land that had spawned a male hard rock band called Alice Cooper was taken by surprise.

On his return from the States, Bowie began to erase gender distinctions in his songs. “Lady Stardust” moved painlessly back and forth from “he” to “she” like the hero(ine) of Virginia Woolf's novel
Orlando
. “She” has long been identified with the late Marc Bolan, who shortly before his fatal car crash in 1977 claimed that he and Bowie had enjoyed a gay flirtation, though stopping short of penetration. Bowie critic Nicholas Pegg astutely remarked on the similarity between Lord Alfred Douglas's famous admission, “I am the love that does not speak its name,” and Bowie's “love I could not obey.” In his piano demo, Bowie opened another can of allusions, to Peter forsaking Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane, though this had been removed later in the year. (As “sighed” replaced “lied,” Bowie pushed his ever-expanding vocal range to a falsetto C#.)

Whether or not Bolan was the intended subject of the song (and the references to his hair and animal grace certainly fitted), the finished record sounded like a pastiche of a mutual acquaintance, and another pop star who was familiar with sexual confusion: Elton John. Bowie could hardly have concocted a more exact imitation of Elton's mannered tone, the way he held his notes, and the echoed combination of tambourine and snare that were hallmarks of albums such as
Elton John
and
Tumbleweed Connection
. Only the slow descent over major chords in the chorus established Bowie's ownership of the song.

 

[34] RIGHT ON MOTHER

(Bowie)

Demo recorded March 1971; unreleased

“Right on Mother” was presented to Peter Noone at the same time as “Oh! You Pretty Things” [30], and was indeed taped as the singer's next single, though without repeating its predecessor's success. Beneath its kitchen-sink drama scenario of a young man daring to live with his girlfriend before marriage, it had a personal edge for Bowie, suggesting that his mother had suffered some difficulty in accepting his increasingly camp persona of recent months. As he declared proudly “I'm a man,” his voice soared defiantly to a high C, as a demonstration of how he had liberated himself in recent months. His piano accompaniment, similar to that on his earlier gift to Noone, carried this song deep into the territory of Paul McCartney's “Martha My Dear” and “Honey Pie.”

 

[35] ZIGGY STARDUST

(Bowie)

Demo recorded March 1971; unreleased. Re-recorded November 1971;
Ziggy Stardust
LP

Written within days of each other, “Lady Stardust” [33] and “Ziggy Stardust” were always intended as partners. They offered starkly different portraits of the same protagonist: while “Lady Stardust” left the tale unfinished, with no hint at a denouement beyond a vague air of melancholy, “Ziggy Stardust” was a birth-to-death chronology, from his shocking, Hendrix-like arrival to the moment when “the kids” killed “the man.” It was the equivalent of finding a complete gospel among the Dead Sea Scrolls, giving context to everything around it on the
Ziggy
album. If Bowie was, as he later claimed, thinking from the start about fashioning a theatrical rock opera, then this song could have acted as its overture—or, if he preferred to keep the ending a surprise, it could have reappeared throughout the musical as a running commentary on its star.

As early as his spring 1971 demo, Bowie recognized that a song this pivotal required a fanfare: a simple but stunningly effective combination of tonic and dominant chords (the latter with a hammered 4th), followed by the familiar (for guitarists) shifting-bass run from C to Am, and assuredly back to the root. Bowie's acoustic twelve-string survived onto the record, beneath Ronson's electric fuzz guitar and, almost unnoticeable unless you knew it was there, a “jingle-jangle,” Byrds-inspired riff from a second electric. Then Bowie's voice arrived, like a meteor from a distant galaxy, with the phrase that defined his hero: “Ziggy played guitar.” Whether his inspiration was Hendrix or Bolan mattered less than his checklist of rock star characteristics: the drugs, the enormous cock, the too-wasted-to-leave-the-room pallor. The climax was inevitable, as it has been played out countless times before and after Ziggy: ego, alienation (who would want to get close to a leper messiah?), disintegration. Ziggy was, after all, the Nazz, a name that neatly referenced early bands led by contemporary rock stars Todd Rundgren and Alice Cooper (who also fronted his own set of Spiders in 1965), but ultimately led back to the hip raconteur Lord Buckley and his tales of Jesus of “Naz.” That story also resulted in death, followed by a mysterious afterlife, acolytes, skeptics, and all the other paraphernalia associated with the premature demise of modern-day icons, from Monroe and Dean to Hendrix, Presley, Lennon, and Cobain. If the biblical gospels were an attempt to prejudice the verdict of history, then “Ziggy Stardust” had the same clinical effect upon Bowie's creation, who has passed into legend as the ultimate rock superstar.

Even within the song, however, a multiplicity of voices offered their testimony—heavily echoed in the first and last
*
verses, intimate and close in the second, then doubled in the chorus like a zealot shouting in each ear. That chorus was already eerie, creeping down to the oscillation between E and F chords that found a happier home here than on “Holy Holy” [28], and also rekindled memories of the Who's “Boris the Spider” scurrying across the floor. The final masterstroke, the one major addition to the song after Bowie's original demo, was the reprise of the announcement that “Ziggy played guitar.” Bowie held the note defiantly, his voice finally sliding away from the note, and prompting Ronson's guitar to offer the same tribute. Then, after one of the most perfectly judged pauses ever captured on vinyl, there was “Suffragette City” [59]—a last-minute addition to the mythology.

 

[36] RUPERT THE RILEY

(Bowie)

Recorded by Micky King's All Stars, April 1971; unreleased

The mock-Californian vocal harmonies and lovingly recorded car engine on this playful tribute to Bowie's vintage motor suggested that during his first trip to California in January he had bought a recent Beach Boys' single, the B-side of which (“Susie Cincinnati”) was an affectionate celebration of a taxi driver that opened in remarkably similar style.
*
Like all good car songs, it carried some sexual innuendo, but its intention was merely to amuse. Bowie hoped that it might spawn a musical career for his friend Micky “Sparky” King, a rent-boy whom he and his wife had met at the gay mecca of the Sombrero Club in Kensington. (“I would try and get anyone who would open their mouths to do my songs,” Bowie recalled in 1998.) In the event, the track wasn't released, but it lingered in Bowie's memory: its “beep-beep” chorus (borrowed from the Beatles' “Drive My Car”) not only reappeared in “Fashion” [185], but was probably the melodic ancestor of the “transition/transmission” refrain in “TVC15” [129].

 

[37] LIGHTNING FRIGHTENING (AKA THE MAN)

(Bowie)

Demo recorded April 1971;
The Man Who Sold the World
extended CD

Given unwarranted prominence in Bowie's catalogue by its inclusion on the 1990 CD of
The Man Who Sold the World
, this simple three-chord jam session, with minimal lyrics, was notable only for its antecedents: Marc Bolan's equally simplistic compositions for T. Rex (though he rarely committed anything this labored to tape), and, more specifically, “Dirty Dirty” from the debut album by Neil Young's backing band, Crazy Horse. The CD on which this appeared credited it as a collaboration with Tim Renwick, Tony Visconti, and John Cambridge, suggesting a pre-spring 1970 date; Bowie archivist Kevin Cann opts for April 1971, and claims that its actual title is “The Man.” Imported copies of the
Crazy Horse
LP would have reached British stores by that date, supporting Cann's theory.

THE MAKING OF A STAR #1: Arnold Corns

L
ady Stardust,” “Ziggy Stardust,” and soon “Star” [38]: the recurrent symbolism in David Bowie's songwriting during the early months of 1971 was not a coincidence. Since the beginning of his career, he had been putting into practice the rudimentary theories of advertising and marketing that he had learned as a teenager at his Bond Street agency. He knew how to present and sell an image, how to win publicity, how to rebrand his product—himself—if the public didn't like it. He had also experienced, in the wake of “Space Oddity” [1], the discomfort of achieving success on other people's terms.

He was now, effectively, a performer without an audience. He had no regular band, a recording contract with a label that had been unable to sell his two previous albums, and an image that had won him more notoriety than respect. But he had, at last, conceived the ultimate product, a brand that he could sell to the world with utter sincerity and conviction: the perfect rock'n'roll star. He would be male and female, king and queen, alien and human, transcendental and sublime; he would inspire his audience and belong to them, ultimately be them, become the incarnation of their dreams, lusts, and fears.

His star would be, in the jargon of the advertising industry, a “trade character,” a brand so powerful that it would demolish everything in its path. And it would arrive fully grown, already invested with the glory that lesser mortals—such as David Bowie—could spend precious years trying in vain to achieve. Bowie would be creating not just a star, but a guaranteed route to stardom.

He was not yet ready to assume this role himself, however. His manager, Tony Defries, was telling him to wait for a more lucrative recording contract to be signed. And there was also a hint of reticence, of insecurity, in Bowie's actions: a feeling that, after his hollow success with “Space Oddity,” he lacked the confidence or the will to put himself forward as the focus of all this desire and expectation.

Meanwhile, he was writing and recording demos of songs that his publisher, Bob Grace, rated as a commercial proposition. Grace was eager to reap some financial reward for his investment in Bowie's potential: with Peter Noone's cover of “Oh! You Pretty Things” [30] not yet in the charts, Grace and Bowie decided to lease two of the demos to the small B&C Records label. They could not be issued under Bowie's name, as he was still under contract to Mercury. So necessity and fantasy were combined: Bowie's initial demos of “Moonage Daydream” [32] and “Hang Onto Yourself” [31] would become the vehicle for an entirely imaginary star. He would be able to test out the potency of his dream without risking his own reputation.

His sacrificial lamb was a nineteen-year-old designer called Freddie Burretti, whom Bowie had met at the Sombrero. He was known professionally as Fred of the East End, and once Bowie began to wear his designs, he was able to open a boutique entitled Play It Cool & Play It Loud. That was exactly the spirit Bowie wanted for his imaginary star. There was one problem: Burretti couldn't sing. And one solution: he wouldn't need to. Years before Milli Vanilli scandalized the American rock industry by using two male models to “front” music that they hadn't made, David Bowie was attempting to play exactly the same trick on the pop audience.

First the two men appeared together on the cover of the “sex education” magazine
Curious
, while Freddie also posed with a snake wrapped around his waist. (Bowie was soon claiming that Burretti had come up with the idea before Alice Cooper.) Bowie touted his protégé around the London pop papers, announcing that Freddie was actually Rudi Valentino, the leader of a band called Arnold Corns. “I believe that Rudi will be the first male to appear on the cover of
Vogue
magazine,” he boasted. “I believe that the Rolling Stones are finished, and that Arnold Corns will be the next Stones. . . . [Rudi] will be the next Mick Jagger.” Burretti wasn't quite so confident: “Really I'm just a dress designer,” he said apologetically.

Despite Bowie's assurances that his prototype of “Moonage Daydream” was “unique, there's certainly nothing to compare with it,” the first Arnold Corns single was a flop. The experiment was extended to two further songs [43/44], one of which Burretti was allowed to sing (though his voice was carefully buried in the mix). But B&C didn't release another Arnold Corns single until after Bowie himself had become a star, and because Bowie officially didn't perform on the records, his management was unable to exert any control over the process of marketing and sales. Neither Bowie nor Tony Defries would make that mistake again.

 

[38] STAR

(Bowie)

Demo recorded May 1971; unreleased. Re-recorded November 1971;
Ziggy Stardust
LP

“I believe in fantasy and star images,” Bowie said in 1971. “I am very aware of these kinds of people and feel they are very important figures in our society. People like to focus on somebody who they might consider not quite the same as them. Whether it's true or not is immaterial.” So it's surprising that he made strident attempts to dispose of “Star” to other artists, giving a copy of his May 1971 demo to at least two other bands. Maybe he was wary of capitalizing himself on the rock'n'roll star mythology; maybe he distrusted the song's blatant commerciality. In either case, he heavily rewrote the lyric (as he had “Hang Onto Yourself” [31]) for
Ziggy Stardust
as a young man's fantasy, almost erotic in its narcissism, in which reality (joining the British army in Belfast, trying to change the world) paled alongside the “wild mutation” of rock stardom. The final lines revealed the scenario: the narrator was lulling himself to sleep by dreaming of fame, as the fifteen-year-old Bowie might have done when he first joined the Kon-Rads. “Watch me now,” he muttered, echoing the proud boast from the Contours' early sixties dance-floor anthem “Do You Love Me.”

There were other ghosts afoot during the recording, with the exaggerated backing vocals mimicking a dozen Beatles songs, from “Baby It's You” via “Girl” to “Sexy Sadie” and “Happiness Is a Warm Gun”—Bowie claimed it was “Lovely Rita,” though that's less easy to hear. Like John Lennon, Bowie must have relished the affectionate doo-wop throwback of Frank Zappa's album
Cruising with Ruben & the Jets
. There was also a hint of the Who's “Pinball Wizard” (another sales pitch for a superstar) in the triple contact of Mick Ronson's plectrum as he hit the power chords beneath the frantic, stumbling
*
introduction. The song was elegantly constructed, too, with verse and chorus nearly replicating each other (separated by a three-beat pause when four was what the ear expected), a guitar interruption offering a series of abrupt tonic-dominant shifts, and a coda that took an unexpectedly flattened route home from C to the key chord of G as if to signal the transition from daydream to the oblivion of sleep.

 

[39] KOOKS

(Bowie)

Recorded June 1971; BBC radio. Re-recorded July 1971;
Hunky Dory
LP

As Bowie was launching his initial experiment in creating a rock star, he decided that he was ready to resume his own career as a public figure. He had been using a shifting group of session musicians and acquaintances (some of whom were ostensibly members of Arnold Corns) for his recording work this year, but now he was keen to recruit a full-time band. His initial impulse was to re-form the Hype, but since he was estranged from his previous bassist, Tony Visconti (who was still masterminding Marc Bolan's star-making machinery), he required a replacement. Mick Ronson and Woody Woodmansey returned to Haddon Hall from Hull with the perfect candidate: another local musician, Trevor Bolder. And so, though he didn't yet realize it, Ziggy Stardust had acquired his Spiders from Mars. The ensemble debuted at a haphazard but joyful performance for BBC Radio, at which Bowie allowed several of his friends—George Underwood and Geoff MacCormack from Bromley, Dana Gillespie from his Marquee days, and Mark Carr-Pritchard from the Arnold Corns sessions—to share his spotlight.

Their performances included covers of Chuck Berry's “Almost Grown” and Ron Davies's “It Ain't Easy” [41], while George Underwood sang Bowie's “Song for Bob Dylan” [40] and Dana Gillespie made his “Andy Warhol” [47] her own. But Bowie also introduced some more personal material of his own.

“Kooks,” an unfinished song about an unconventional family Bowie had met in Chiswick, swam into sharp focus once his son Zowie was born in May 1971. Four days later, he performed the song—musically inspired by Neil Young's fragmentary “Till the Morning Comes”—on BBC Radio, and its inclusion on
Hunky Dory
ensured its enduring appeal among those who were less entranced by his explorations of politics, psychology, and occult elsewhere on the album. The instrumental hook was that guitarist's favorite, the movement between D major and D sustained 4th, with a subtle switch to D7 for the second line. The rest appeared seamless, with the C-Am drift of the chorus giving way to a more definite set of major chords for the verse. Some flamboyant, rollicking piano heightened the vaudeville
*
feel of the latter portion of the song, while bassist Trevor Bolder contributed a simple reprise of the melody on trumpet.

Any minor complication was reserved for the lyrics, with their repeated question—“
will
you stay”—allowing the subject an element of free will that the more obvious alternative (“
won't
you stay . . .”) would have denied. The “story” also suggested an element of fantasy that didn't, perhaps, bode well for the child's welfare. Bowie's bohemian rhapsody included another disavowal of his school days, in the vein of “Can't Help Thinking About Me” [A14].

 

[40] SONG FOR BOB DYLAN

(Bowie)

Recorded June–August 1971;
Hunky Dory
LP

“Dylan belongs in a very personal way to everyone who digs his music,” a British underground newspaper declared in 1970. “He existed in our heads, we absorbed him and his music wholesale.” So deep was this identification that those who aligned themselves with the counterculture needed to believe that Bob Dylan shared their values and ideals. When the singer-songwriter refused to lead protests against the Vietnam War, or comment on the repression in Nixon's America, there was a very real sense of outrage among his peers and fans. Dylan preferred to tease his followers with his indifference to their cause: “How do you know I'm not, as you say,
for
the war?” he said in a 1968 interview. Country Joe & the Fish issued a song in 1970 titled “Hey Bobby,” complaining, “Where you been? We missed you out on the streets.” By the end of the year, self-styled “Dylanologist” A. J. Weberman had founded the Dylan Liberation Front in New York, whose manifesto was simple: “Free Bob Dylan from Himself.” John Lennon was among those who proudly wore the Liberation Front badge.

Bowie's decision to add his name to those placing responsibility for social change on Dylan's shoulders was intriguing, to say the least, especially given that he was also beginning to explore the demands of stardom in his songs. One wonders whether he connected the fate of “Ziggy Stardust” [35], killed by his fans, with the pressure that was being exerted upon Dylan.
*
His excuse was that the song was written to reflect the views of his friend George Underwood, who duly performed it during Bowie's June 1971 BBC concert in an attractively Dylanesque voice. By 1976, however, Bowie had concocted a faintly ridiculous rationale: “It laid out what I wanted to do in rock. It was at that period that I said, ‘OK, if you don't want to do it, I will.' I saw the leadership void.” However much sense this made to him retrospectively, there was nothing in the song to support this explanation.

Not that the song was fully coherent, in any case. The simple finger-pointing of the verses (constructed around chord changes familiar from Dylan's work) and the final lines of the chorus were separated by a shift of perspective that gave the song its working title (“Here She Comes”), and muddied its narrative. Who, for example, was the person masquerading as a friend who could tear everything to pieces with his cat claws? This was purely personal iconography, which read like a lost fragment from “Queen Bitch” [45], especially as its original title recalled a song by Lou Reed, the ostensible inspiration for the latter composition.

More intriguing was Bowie's decision to address Dylan by his real name of Robert Zimmerman, just as John Lennon had done on “God” a few months earlier. By distinguishing “artifice” from “reality,” he was begging a comparison with his own multiple identities of David Jones, David Bowie, and, very soon, Ziggy Stardust.

 

[41] IT AIN'T EASY

(Davies)

Recorded July 1971;
Hunky Dory
LP

American singer-songwriter Ron Davies introduced this song on his eponymous 1970 album as a slice of Louisiana folk blues. The US band Three Dog Night, who had a penchant for translating rock iconography into Top 40 pop, softened the song's rural edges. But it took David Bowie's band of old school friends and new collaborators, at his June 3, 1971, BBC concert, to bring out the gospel-soul potential of the chorus, with Dana Gillespie's powerful voice evoking comparisons to Bonnie Bramlett's adventures with the Delaney & Bonnie big band. This was mainstream early seventies Americana, a sound that was re-created on British records by Joe Cocker, Eric Clapton, and Elton John, making it all the more strange that Bowie chose to revisit the song in the studio—considering it first for
Hunky Dory
, and then imposing it on
Ziggy Stardust
, when it had no sonic or thematic links with either. Though Gillespie's wailing voice ensured that the chorus, at least, was respectable, Bowie doomed his performance by assuming a strangulated vocal tone that was, presumably, meant to sound both southern and intense, without achieving either aim. As this performance proved, he was never less convincing than when trying to be the kind of transatlantic rock star that he was usually content to parody.