The Man Who Sold the World (19 page)

The word
soul
rarely entered Bowie's vocabulary (“Lady Grinning Soul” [74] being another rare exception): his occult studies had taught him that the soul was vulnerable to unwelcome claimants, while he may have mistrusted the facile boast of soulfulness that had become a rock cliché. There was little in “Soul Love” to inspire braggadocio: this was a song of stifled creativity and cynicism. Its brief libretto destroyed all illusions—religion, politics, romance, idealism—while retaining the outer vestiges of a musical form that was usually devoted to the banalities of teenage infatuation, the three-minute pop song.

This appeared a tame example of the genre, its melody rising in wary steps over conventional chord changes. But two minor excursions in the chorus told a darker story. As Bowie subverted the romantic theme in the chorus, he introduced an E major chord (“sweeping”) in place of the expected minor, to strengthen the image of love's carelessness. Then he used a vulnerable Eb to interrupt the G major theme, highlighting the weakness of “all I have” and the hollow nature of fantasy.

Even on this (apparently) slightest of Ziggy songs, the attention to musical detail was stunning. Mick Ronson added sparkles of guitar harmonics to the verse, and Bowie's saxophone kept relaxed company. Meanwhile, the backing voices wailed like harpies, as if fifties doo-wop had become the devil's music. Bowie's lead vocal, defeated at first, bit back with the spirit of Ziggy himself in the chorus, before dropping apparently random cockney vowel sounds in the final verse, to add a cynical veneer to an already enervated vision of humanity and its follies. On this album, it seemed, no love could stand unchallenged.

 

[58] SHADOW MAN

(Bowie)

Recorded November 1971; unreleased

The similarity of “Shadow Man” to the sound of the Rolling Stones in 1971—all elongated southern (US) vowels and swaggering power chords—suggests that, like “Looking for a Friend” [43], the song was intended for a band who would be Bowie-but-not-Bowie: not the Spiders from Mars in this instance, but Arnold Corns. The melody was clearly constructed around the framework of the chords, and the contrivance involved was perhaps too obvious: the song seemed to lead toward a dramatic chorus that wasn't there. Bowie revisited the song early in the twenty-first century as a power ballad, perhaps indulging the entertainer he might have become if his 1968 cabaret act had ever reached the stage.

THE MAKING OF A STAR #2: The Birth of Ziggy Stardust

N
obody believed that Arnold Corns were the new Rolling Stones, or that Rudi Valentino could topple Mick Jagger. (The music wasn't even momentarily convincing.) Bowie realized that sooner than anyone, and began to sketch out a more ambitious vision of stardom, and how it might be manufactured.

That was a pejorative concept in 1971, and for many years afterward; late sixties rock was, by definition, authentic, the anti-pop, anti-hype, anti-commercial refuge for those fans who wanted their music to have a meaning as well as a backbeat. The true badge of authenticity was a connection—real or feigned, it didn't matter—with rock's roots in working-class American styles such as blues, soul, and country. Emotional openness was de rigueur, a link to the soil a distinct advantage, which is why it became a cliché, in the wake of the Band's
Music from Big Pink
album, for British musicians to “get their heads together in the country.” The most authentic performers of all, such as Bob Dylan and the Band, were steeped in American folk traditions, grew ragged beards, abandoned the city, and spoke for a community that believed that it had escaped the vacuity of consumerism—despite the fact that its messages from the country arrived in shrink-wrap with a sales sticker on the front. Only much later would it become apparent to many observers that the most authentic personae of the era were also the most elaborately constructed. As Bowie reflected three decades later, “Realism, honesty and all these things that came out of the late 60s had got really boring to many jaded people going into the early 70s.”

As early as 1971, he was speaking for the jaded minority: “I think [rock] should be tarted up, made into a prostitute, a parody of itself.” Nothing could be more self-parodic than for him to live out John Lennon's sarcastic line from his 1970 single “Instant Karma!,” daring his listeners to imagine themselves as superstars. Lennon wasn't the only person confronting the emptiness of stardom: it was implicit in Delaney Bramlett and Leon Russell's tawdry tale of a “Groupie” (aka “Superstar”; smoothed for commercial acceptance by the Carpenters); in the Kinks' cynical
Lola Versus Powerman and the Moneygoround
, with its tales of music business chicanery and media manipulation; and even in the musical
Jesus Christ Superstar
, which repositioned the Gospel story in the world of first-century AD public relations.

“I really wanted to write musicals more than anything else,” Bowie claimed in 2002. “Some kind of new approach to the rock musical, that was at the back of my mind. The initial framework in '71, when I first starting thinking about Ziggy, was as a musical-theatrical piece. [But] I couldn't afford to sit around for six months and write up a proper stage piece. I was too impatient.”

The textbook for doomed rock'n'roll romanticism was
I Am Still the Greatest Says Johnny Angelo
, the novel published in 1970
*
by the young journalist and rock historian Nik Cohn. The author based his hero's stage performances on the mid-sixties pop icon P. J. Proby, but in his closeted stardom, Johnny Angelo is also Elvis Presley, the Bob Dylan of 1966, Howard Hughes, and every other idol isolated from reality, and his audience, by fame. Johnny lives by tarot readings and omens, surrounded by a lickspittle entourage, and respects only “violence and glamour and speed, splendour and vulgarity, gesture and combustion.” More pertinently to Ziggy, and Bowie, “he was all things at once, masculine and feminine and neuter, active and passive, animal and vegetable, and he was satanic, messianic, kitsch and camp, and psychotic, and martyred, and just plain dirty.” Eventually he becomes locked into a bored ritual of stardom: “I mean to make an ending, a final explosion and, when it's done, I shall cease.” Johnny stages a confrontation with the law, and his story ends in an orgy of murder and bullets.

Out of Johnny Angelo's staged martyrdom; Marc Bolan's transformation from hippie to teen idol; Erich von Däniken's claim (in his book
Chariots of the Gods
) that the planet had been visited, and civilization set in motion, by extraterrestrials; the deaths of performers such as Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, and Janis Joplin; his own experience of fame with “Space Oddity,” and of hero-worshipping Little Richard and Elvis: out of all these images and more,
*
Bowie began to assemble an imaginary star whom he could impersonate and ride to his own stardom.

Later, he would adopt a fashionable cynicism toward his creation: “Most people still want their idols and gods to be shallow, like cheap toys. Why do you think teenagers are the way they are? They run around like ants, chewing gum and fitting onto a certain style of dressing for a day; that's as deep as they wish to go. It's no surprise that Ziggy was a huge success.” But by early 1972, when he chanced upon the signifiers of Ziggy's identity—the cropped red hair, the jumpsuit, the glitter and panache—he was operating with one eye on his career, the other trained affectionately on Ziggy's disciples, who deserved a star worthy of their devotion.

Ziggy's hair was chopped, colored, and shaped spikily on top of his head in January 1972. For a TV appearance, he donned a codpiece, a bomber jacket, and trousers rolled up to reveal red and black plastic platform boots. At the end of that month, Bowie's manufactured idol—dressed in a jumpsuit made from what he later called “a quite lovely piece of faux-deco material”—made his stage debut on the tiny stage of the Toby Jug public house in Tolworth for an audience who, if they were expecting anyone, might have assumed that they would see the David Bowie of
Hunky Dory
or even “Space Oddity,” not a space oddity of an entirely different complexion. The artiste had no doubt what would happen next: “I'm going to be huge,” he promised a few days earlier, “and it's quite frightening in a way, because I know that when I reach my peak and it's time for me to be brought down, it will be with a bump.”

 

[59] SUFFRAGETTE CITY

(Bowie)

Recorded February 1972;
Ziggy Stardust
LP

The only popular song to incorporate “suffragette” into its title before
Ziggy Stardust
was “Sister Suffragette” from the musical
Mary Poppins
, and that arguably had more to do with women's liberation than Bowie's “Suffragette City,” despite the claims that he subsequently made on the latter's behalf. His offering was nothing more, or less, than a collage of his rock'n'roll influences: a sexually charged catchphrase borrowed from Charles Mingus via the Small Faces,
*
some “White Light/White Heat” vocal interplay and sonic thrust from the Velvet Underground, a little
Clockwork Orange
imagery (“droogies”), a line from John Lennon's “I Found Out,” some Bolan boogie, some Flamin' Groovies speed, some Jerry Lee Lewis swagger, and a dose of hard rock theatrics to wrap it up. Bowie heightened the feeling of playful pastiche by switching vocal personae every few words, sometimes mock threatening, sometimes sarcastic, sometimes merely alive with the joy of fronting an electric band.

Not that the band was that simple: there was an almost inaudible acoustic guitar, as usual, supporting Ronson's hyperpowered electric, while what registered as a saxophone was actually created using an ARP synthesizer. Bowie dreamed up that synth riff, producer Ken Scott found an appropriate sound on the Trident Studios ARP, and Ronson pushed the keys. The backing vocals skipped from left-hand speaker (first verse) to right (second), to add another layer of contrivance. There was even a trick in the (entirely major chord) fabric of the song. While many classic rock songs, such as the Rolling Stones' “Brown Sugar” and the Kinks' “All Day and All of the Night,” were raised on a three-chord structure spaced two and three semitones apart (for example, E-G-A, or A-G-C), Bowie used tighter two-semitone gaps (F-G-A), leaving the ear to expect a softer Am as the root of the song, only for a decisive A major chord to appear in its stead. This simplest of maneuvers, performed quite unconsciously, gave “Suffragette City” its unrelenting power, causing every deviation from the basic riff to sound transitory and quickening the desire for the root chord to return. And it did, over and over, until the band veered out of the chorus into a teasingly held E major chord, begging for a resolution back to A. “Wham bam thank you ma'am,” Bowie cried gleefully after a fake ending, before the band went round again, and this time delivered the relief of a last climax, as Bowie shrieked: “Suffragette!”

 

[60] STARMAN

(Bowie)

Recorded February 1972;
Ziggy Stardust
LP

If Bowie was indeed “the actor,” as he claimed on
Hunky Dory
, then this was his finest performance. It was also a triumph of the techniques he had learned in advertising, from its marketing on the BBC's
Top of the Pops
, to his assumption of superstar status on the back on what was, after all, only a No. 10 success in Britain (and a No. 65 damp squib in America, where it was killed by Elton John's “Rocket Man,” itself little more than an imitation of “Space Oddity” [1]). Even before
Ziggy Stardust
was released, “Starman”
*
was a blatant exploitation of an album, and an image, to which it was largely peripheral. Ultimately, it was simply—like “Space Oddity” before it—a space-age novelty hit, and the fact that Bowie dropped it from his live set as early as he could hinted that it was too calculated a move even for this evangelist of self-re-creation.

But “Starman” was something else: a superbly constructed pop song. Bowie made no attempt to hide the fact that the octave jump in the chorus (“Star-
man
”) mirrored the rise in Judy Garland's “Over the Rainbow” (“some-
where
”); he even combined the two melodies in a showcase London performance. But whereas the Garland song used its cathartic rise to introduce a refrain that was emotionally, and melodically, expansive, the leap in Bowie's song was followed by a more uncertain melody, reflecting his character's innate lack of confidence. All around the starman, however, his presence evoked anticipation (the link between the verse and the chorus was the guitar figure from the Supremes' “You Keep Me Hanging On”) and then joyous relief, when he commanded the children to boogie, and Mick Ronson's guitar led the Spiders through a relaxed swagger through territory that Marc Bolan (the prince of “cosmic jive”) would have recognized as his home turf. Which begs the question: was “Starman,” like “Lady Stardust” [33], another song written with Bolan in mind? If so, it was a tribute that worked as a palace coup. The wordless chorus that brought “Starman” to its fade was interpreted by Bolan as a steal from his 1971 hit “Hot Love.”

The tentative opening chords—the subdominant chord followed by the major 7th of the root—were played out on a twelve-string acoustic that was echoed across the stereo channels, and answered by the occasional strum of a six-string, until the starman and the verse arrived, and the guitar was crammed back into a single speaker. Ronson only introduced his electric guitar for the heavily phased “radio signal” from space, and to prove that we really hadn't strayed very far from Kansas after all, a warmly romantic string arrangement carried us through the chorus. Only when the band obeyed the instruction to boogie, perfectly mimicking the T. Rex style, did a rock sensibility briefly assume the spotlight. If the Starman was going to blow our minds, it would be as a pop idol, not a rock'n'roller.

 

[61] ROCK 'N' ROLL SUICIDE

(Bowie)

Recorded February 1972;
Ziggy Stardust
LP

Like “Starman,” which was designed as a hit single, “Rock 'n' Roll Suicide” was meticulously designed
*
to perform a specific role in Bowie's career. Placed at the end of
Ziggy Stardust
(and at the end of Ziggy's final performance in 1973), it appeared to let the curtain fall on a theatrical narrative. The equation was implicit: Ziggy had allowed himself to be killed by his fans, so he was a suicide
*
in all but deed. But Bowie was cleverer than that. Whoever was performing this song, whether it was the creation of David Jones or David Bowie, was addressing his audience—and every alienated individual in that audience—rather than himself. They were the victims; he reassured them “you're not alone,” begged them to stretch out their hands, let them just touch the end of his fingertips, and then abandoned them in a state of hysteria.

That proclamation of union between artist and audience was never enacted with such passion as in the life of Judy Garland. Diagnosed as bipolar, she played out an incurably dramatic ritual of courtship with her fans. Her moment of “suicide” came with her final season at the London Palladium, in January 1969, where she tested the patience of her admirers beyond sufferance by arriving onstage (if at all) hours late, to the point that they pelted her with breadsticks. She died in June 1969 of barbiturate poisoning, having virtually ceased to eat several months earlier. Elton John connected the dots from Garland to Bowie: “I'll always remember going out for dinner with him and Angie when he was Ziggy Stardust. It was a fabulous dinner, and over dinner he admitted to me that he always wanted to be Judy Garland, and that's the God's honest truth.”

Garland's torturous example aside, the cry of “you're not alone” in “Rock 'n' Roll Suicide” was borrowed from Mort Shuman's translation of the Jacques Brel song “Jef.” Brel's solace for loneliness was sex; Bowie's was a show of awareness that his fans were suffering all the anguish of adolescence. Instead of sending them each a copy of “Can't Help Thinking About Me” [A14], to show that he'd been there, too, he acted the kindly uncle, or big brother perhaps, who understood their agonizing lack of self-confidence.