The Man Who Sold the World (17 page)

But the record was something else entirely, a masterpiece of production (credit Ken Scott, whose first record in that role this was) from Rick Wakeman's flowing piano to Bowie's beautifully poised alto sax solo over the final descending chords. The saxophones were there at the start, in fact, alto and tenor side by side in the lead-up to the first verse; so too were the strings, the sole accompaniment for the piano during that verse. Bowie's voice was the purest instrument on display, however. It entered warm but hushed, almost impossibly intimate through headphones, then soared as Bowie “turned” (and it was impossible not to see him on a West End stage, throwing his arms wide to the audience). Every syllable was perfectly clear, the hallmark of a trained actor. Then, the chorus: and suddenly a rush of voices from either side, not the accentless English we'd heard so far, but the unmistakable sound of London, as many as five different Bowies combining to give him, and us, the command to face the strange. We know now that the strange was only just beginning.

 

[49] EIGHT LINE POEM

(Bowie)

Recorded June/July 1971;
Hunky Dory
LP

Designed to sound like a continuation of “Oh! You Pretty Things” [30], “Eight Line Poem” was, at least, eight lines long. (The change in piano tone proved that the two were recorded separately.) Was it a poem? Well, there was a metaphor linking the cactus and the prairie; an internal rhyme (“tactful cactus”); and a striking image in the last line. None of it opened
out
, however; it was a lock with only one key.

“Eight Line Poem” was more intriguing as a performance: sparse and sometimes uncertain piano, wobbling across the speakers like a sine wave, country-tinged guitar, and a vocalist who crammed five different personae into those eight lines. Two highlights: the Hank Williams–inspired yodel of the cacti and the way that his “collision” fell almost an octave, echoed as if it were plummeting down a mine shaft. The inspiration? Haiku; the imagist poets; or perhaps Bowie had been playing Neil Young's “Birds” idly to himself, and allowed himself to dream—but not to rethink what he had written.

 

[50] QUICKSAND

(Bowie)

Recorded July 1971; demo and
Hunky Dory
LP

 

THE ONLY THING THAT EMERGES WITH ANY CERTAINTY FROM THE STUDY OF SPIRITUALISM AND OCCULTISM IS THAT OUR NORMAL, SANE, BALANCED STANDPOINT IS BUILT UPON QUICKSAND, SINCE IT IS BASED UPON A COMMONSENSE VIEW OF HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS THAT DOES NOT CORRESPOND TO THE FACTS.

 

—Colin Wilson,
The Occult
, 1971

How could Bowie complain that he had lost his creative power on a song (and an album) that demonstrated precisely the opposite? Because “Quicksand”—like “Sound and Vision” [136] five years later—was written
about
a lack of inspiration, as a means of
accessing
the inspiration that he had been searching for. Like “Oh! You Pretty Things” [30] and “Changes” [48], it chronicled his confused but dogged attempts to explore the limits (if they existed) of human potential. Through the index of possibilities that the song (re)presented, Bowie held fast to one core belief. Conscious, intellectual thought would not allow him to penetrate beyond the realm of everyday existence, into whatever lay beyond: spontaneous creativity, self-awareness, spiritual discovery or transcendence. Thought, as Wilson suggested, was a form of quicksand that allowed consciousness—with all its traps of self-doubt and self-deception—to keep the unconscious beyond reach. So Bowie's “Quicksand” was a song to himself, and his unconscious (what the poets of old would have called his muse): a plea to be shown the way, or ways, of reaching through, or beyond, or above—whatever metaphor worked for Bowie to be able to touch a realm that his conscious mind told him was an illusion. The very existence of this song (and its neighbors on
Hunky Dory
) demonstrated how profoundly his plea was answered.

It was surely not a coincidence that “Quicksand” was written in America, of which Bowie said in 1971 that it had “opened one door,” and a crucial one at that. Like his readings in the occult, which had preoccupied him for the previous year or more, America offered alternate views of his future; took him out of his everyday environment, and the thinking associated with it; and freed him to experience life in a more direct and fulfilling way. Everyone is familiar with the feeling of liberation that can come on vacation, when you decide to quit your job, leave your partner, or simply stop worrying about the mundane pressures of life at home. Except: when you get home, it takes only a few minutes for the old routine to regain control, and all of that transcendence is lost. Bowie's breakthrough—his escape from the quicksand—was that he was able to use his first visits to America as a means of avoiding those traps. Hence “Changes”: Bowie had discovered how to access his unconscious and bring its treasures to the surface.

Yet, as the small print of “Quicksand” revealed, this was not a painless or reliable process. “Sometimes I don't feel as if I'm a person at all,” he let slip in a 1972 interview. “I'm just a collection of other people's ideas.” And here they were, a bewildering collection of voices, each threatening to impose thought onto the unconscious. Many of them were tantalizing, because they seemed to be seeking the same thing as Bowie: that explained the appeal of the occult teachings of the Order of the Golden Dawn, or the man who effectively destroyed that organization, Aleister Crowley. No wonder Bowie declared that he was torn between light and dark—white and black magick, trusting in human potential, or seeking the help of Satan. From Nietzsche he had already felt the lure of being human, with potential of becoming a “superman”; he had been raised in a culture soaked in the “bullshit faith” of Christianity. Most of all, he had been attracted for many years by the promise of transcendence offered by Zen Buddhism,
*
the philosophy of which was neatly summarized in the chorus. Now even Buddhism might be suspect in Bowie's search for enlightenment—a quest for the total goal that, as he admitted elsewhere in the song, terrified him at the same time he realized its inevitability.

This was a song that begged for academic annotation, to discuss whether, for example, Churchill's lies were those alleged in a notorious late sixties play about the death of the Polish wartime leader Sikorski, or whether he was considering intimacy with a snake because he had recently attended a late-night screening of the classic film noir
Kiss of the Viper Woman
. But in the context of this song, all that is quicksand: conscious, distracting thought; a neurotic need for explanation and consistency. The music offered another choice: between the tight and tense melodic framework of the verses, almost Dylanesque in their construction, with a questioning rise at the end of several lines; and the choruses, which were all ebb and flow, effortlessly sweeping to a high B
b
with an ease that suggested Bowie had already discovered one way of transcending the everyday.

On his original acoustic demo (included on the extended CD of
Hunky Dory
), Bowie set the song higher than on the finished record, with the result that he sounded like a child bewildered by ideas beyond his grasp. The ragged edge to his voice also conveyed the immediacy of the song's drama: he did not yet know whether he could escape the quicksand. All of that uncertainty had vanished when the song was recorded professionally—the irony being that it was the careful nature of the arrangement, the product of conscious thought rather than unconscious instinct, that conveyed the power of Bowie's message. The opening gambit of acoustic guitar and shimmering vibes gave way to an epic canopy of sound, with massed guitars (and multiple Bowies, in the chorus) decorated by a lavish string score, Rick Wakeman's flamboyant piano, and a succession of urgent drum fills from Woody Woodmansey. Yet the genius of Ken Scott's production was that the overwhelming impression left by “Quicksand” was of a solitary man looking for a solution, the almost decadent arrangement merely reinforcing the existential drama of Bowie's song.

 

[51] THE BEWLAY BROTHERS

(Bowie)

Recorded July 1971;
Hunky Dory
LP

Bowie told producer Ken Scott that the final track on
Hunky Dory
was deliberately meaningless,
*
designed to bamboozle American rock critics with its obscure imagery. The artist was merely covering his tracks. “I like ‘The Bewlay Brothers' so much, only because it's so personal,” Bowie conceded in 1972. “I'm sure it doesn't mean a thing to anybody else, and I'm sorry if I inflicted myself upon people with that track.” He subsequently told his cousin that it was actually a portrait of his relationship with his brother, Terry, and confirmed this interpretation during a 1977 radio interview. Certainly the song retained great significance for him, as he used its name for his music publishing company, founded in 1976. But the title was only obliquely personal: Bewlay's was a chain of London tobacconists (something Bowie signaled at the start of the track by striking a match and lighting up).

Even though none of his potential audience would have been able to pierce the skin of his secret, Bowie made sure that he kept any identifying details under heavy wraps. Only an occasional reference to madness and mental dislocation suggested the subject of his song. This dense, deliberately obtuse lyric was as much about the play of language and the joy of its sound as it was about two human beings. The first line insisted that this was all mythology—or, like Herman Melville's epic novel, “a whale of a lie.” It would be possible to deconstruct every line in search of meaning: was the reference to a dress harking back to the cover of
The Man Who Sold the World
? Were the Moonboys a teenage gang in Beckenham? But the song didn't respond on those lines.

You could learn more from the cramped melody of the verses, and their suburban claustrophobia, and the way that the chorus burst into open space when “we were gone”—liberated, or unrestrained by the bounds of sanity, perhaps. The initial intimacy of the vocal, matter-of-fact like a well-worn story, gave way to the double- or triple-tracked voice of the chorus, attacked by the sweeping gulls of Mick Ronson's interjections of backward guitar. From the second verse, the singer was accompanied by a spoken voice, as if his personality were shearing apart. A sense of urgency took hold, which grew until the strange relief of the coda. Then a mock-Cockney music hall ditty (compare Cream's “Mother's Lament,” and remember Terry Burns's breakdown after a Cream concert) mutated into a congress of hobgoblins, as the vari-speed voices of 1967 returned with evil intent: the stuff of nightmares, conjuring up the eerie mental landscape of the man who had once shaped Bowie's world.

 

[52] LIFE ON MARS?

(Bowie)

Recorded August 1971;
Hunky Dory
LP

Having lost the race to the moon, the Soviet Union redirected its space scientists into another battle with the United States: the first landing of a probe on Mars. Two Russian craft were launched on May 19 and 28, 1971, with the admirably simple names of Mars 2 and Mars 3; on May 30, America retaliated with Mariner 9, which trumped its rivals by arriving in Martian orbit first. Even though an earlier mission, Mariner 4, had debunked the notion that there were canals on Mars, and therefore some form of recognizable life-form, this flurry of interplanetary activity was enough to spark headlines around the world, asking the age-old question: Is there life on Mars?

David Bowie had already decided to claim Ziggy Stardust's backing band as Martian invaders: the Red Planet had fascinated him since he was a child, when he had heard Holst's
The Planets
suite, and he had later devoured science fiction about Mars, such as Ray Bradbury's
The Martian Chronicles
(published in Britain as
The Silver Locusts
). But “Life on Mars?” had no connection with our planetary neighbor, beyond a title that was simply a reference to a media frenzy, of the same brand that could envelop a film star and a fan in a symbiosis of desire.

Ironically, the song developed out of a side effect of that relationship. Bowie had watched enviously as Frank Sinatra, whose movie persona he admired, had achieved the biggest success of his recording career with “My Way.” Like Bowie's own “Even a Fool Learns to Love” [A50], it was an English adaptation of Claude François's “Comme d'Habitude”—the publisher of which had opted for Paul Anka's interpretation rather than Bowie's own. It was impossible to fault that decision on artistic grounds, but the perceived slight still rankled with Bowie, who determined to exact his revenge by reusing elements of the song to his own purposes. Hence the coy dedication on the back cover of
Hunky Dory
: “Inspired by Frankie.” Carefully avoiding copyright infringement, he borrowed the chord sequence from the opening lines of “My Way” and reproduced it as the opening to “Life on Mars?”—but with a different rhythm and melody line.

Like “Changes” [48], “Life on Mars?” evolved on the piano, with a single-finger bass line descending in the stately fashion that was something of a
Hunky Dory
trademark. Once it was transferred from the fumbling hands of Bowie to the classically trained Rick Wakeman, the accompaniment assumed flamboyant proportions. It was an epic journey from the single piano note that opened the song to the climax of Mick Ronson's gargantuan orchestral arrangement. Besides his own guitar fanfares (and a solo apparently inspired by George Harrison's “Something”; Ken Scott recalled that Ronson nailed it in a single take), Ronson's score featured grim-reaper cellos, echoing the bass in the chorus, and a tumultuous finale involving a full string section making eight descents in just two bars, each beginning a note above where its predecessor had ended, till it gained the force of a river torrent. After the cellos made one last climb up the scale,
2001
-style timpani sounded a funereal farewell. But Wakeman's piano refused to die with the rest, and tinkled on until, deep in the mix, a phone began to ring and a voice could be heard saying, “I think that's the one.”