The Man Who Sold the World (24 page)

Bowie chronicler Kevin Cann suggests that an earlier version of this song was recorded during Ziggy Stardust's brief infatuation with covering rock standards in 1972 (see [53]). The Spiders certainly performed the song in concert a full year before the
Pin Ups
sessions.

 

[82] FRIDAY ON MY MIND

(Vanda/Young)

Recorded July 1973;
Pin Ups
LP

As an exhibition of the dynamics of pop music, the Easybeats' 1966 single “Friday on My Mind” was virtually unbeatable. It captured the essence of the divide between the working week and the weekend perfectly, the tight, almost neurotic tension of the verses exploding into the release (and relief) of the chorus. Bowie's reinterpretation completely ignored that dichotomy, acting instead as a demonstration tape of the Many Voices of David Jones—every one of them a pastiche, from Peter Sellers to Elvis Presley. He also introduced a layer of background vocals that robbed the song of its anxiety (and at one point reached an unfeasibly high E, the summit of Bowie's vocal exploits during the seventies).

 

[83] SORROW

(Feldman/Goldstein/Gottehrer)

Recorded July 1973;
Pin Ups
LP

The one performance on
Pin Ups
that suggested a real emotional commitment to the song, rather than distant nostalgia for the memory of a record, was Bowie's revival of “Sorrow”—originally cut by the US garage band the McCoys, smoothed out for British consumption by the Merseys in 1966, and recalled affectionately by George Harrison during the fade-out of the Beatles' “It's All Too Much” the following year. If the cumulative effect of
Pin Ups
was to remind Bowie of the bands he'd wanted to lead in the mid-sixties, “Sorrow” seemed to evoke an entirely different career path, in which he might have abandoned rock entirely to become an elegant interpreter of pop's many facets—a cross between P. J. Proby and Scott Walker, perhaps.

There was a very real sense of melancholy to his vocal, with none of his customary theatricality, yet at the same time an amused playfulness, as if sorrow were all he had long since grown to expect. The arrangement was rich, with tenor sax to the fore, baritone honking underneath, strings that shimmered to eerie effect, an elegiac piano coda, and an entire verse on which Bowie was supported by urgent backing vocals, representing his last vain opportunity to break free.

 

[84] DON'T BRING ME DOWN

(Dee)

Recorded July 1973;
Pin Ups
LP

The successor to “Rosalyn” [131] in the Pretty Things' 1964 release schedule, “Don't Bring Me Down” represented British sixties pop at its most carnal. When Phil May snarled that he had laid the heroine on the ground, any crime seemed possible. Bowie had already discovered he couldn't outgrowl May, so once more he subjected the song to parody, crooning away all the lustful aggression of the original. Mick Ronson's guitar offered some compensation, though any impact of his solo was lost amid the cluttered mix. Even when Bowie tried to sound like a confused adolescent, he emerged gauche, not wired. May had sung with a mixture of anger and amazement; Bowie seemed supremely self-satisfied, ridding this erotic encounter of all its apocalyptic edge.

 

[85] SHAPES OF THINGS

(Samwell-Smith/McCarty/Relf)

Recorded July 1973;
Pin Ups
LP

Mick Ronson had emulated Jeff Beck's vicious, stuttering finale to the Yardbirds' 1966 “freakbeat” single on “John I'm Only Dancing” [63]. Faced with the song itself, he dragged out the repeated growl of guitar to the point of self-parody (and then repeated the trick on “Anyway Anyhow Anywhere” [86]). The Yardbirds' guitarists always stole attention from the band's rather anonymous singer, Keith Relf, but Bowie avoided that fate with a deliberately mannered lead vocal (note the bizarre vowel sounds of “shapes” and “lonely”), heavily phased voices in the chorus, some cacophonous antics from saxophone and bass, and a string section that continually tried to pull the track into a different key. The core of the Yardbirds' record was Beck's solo, played with a violin bow over howls of feedback. Ronson probably realized that he couldn't surpass it, so he settled for a showcase of two harmonized guitar lines, supporting rather than overshadowing Bowie's starring role.

 

[86] ANYWAY ANYHOW ANYWHERE

(Townshend/Daltrey)

Recorded July 1973;
Pin Ups
LP

Nothing on
Pin Ups
came closer to replicating the sound of the original record than Bowie's rendition of the Who's second single from 1965. The blueprint was all about tension and release, with Nicky Hopkins's piano valiantly attempting to stabilize the track while Keith Moon's drums rumbled and Pete Townshend unleashed a masterfully controlled blast of dynamic aggression, shaping his guitar feedback into an expression of teenage frustration.

Bowie was twenty-six, not nineteen, so he had to manufacture the adolescent fury of his voice. Aynsley Dunbar valiantly emulated Moon's chaotic frenzy behind the drum kit, deliberately echoing the percussive crescendos that had powered the Who's 1966 single “Happy Jack,” while his cymbal crashes were carefully phased. Ronson added some flickers and snorts of guitar feedback to the mix, while Bowie topped them both with a final screech of falsetto.

 

[87] WHERE HAVE ALL THE GOOD TIMES GONE

(Davies)

Recorded July 1973;
Pin Ups
LP

Ray Davies of the Kinks was already lamenting the end of an era in 1965, when most of his contemporaries believed that it was only just beginning. Like Davies, Bowie was a defiant nonbeliever in the manifesto of sixties optimism, so the Kinks' ramshackle exercise in disgust and ennui was the perfect choice to bring down the curtain on an album, and an era. Bowie certainly achieved the required degree of disinterest in his vocal, marshaling a more metallic sound (reminiscent of his own 1970 recordings) only in the chorus. Around him, the band tried to imitate the Kinks without capturing their essence, though Mike Garson's vaudeville piano did at least hint at Davies's love of the London music hall.

SIXTIES NOSTALGIA AND MYTH:
Pin Ups
LP

P
in Ups
was an exercise in Pop Art: a reproduction and interpretation of work by other artists, intended for a mass audience. The British pioneer and theorist of Pop Art Richard Hamilton had re-created Marcel Duchamp's
The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even
; Andy Warhol used newspaper photographs and consumer graphics as the canvases for his art. “I don't know whether I want to be a commercial artist again,” Bowie had pondered during the sessions for an album that epitomized the brand.

The singer became a brand himself—a Pop Art pop artist, indeed—with the release of
Pin Ups
: for the next two years he would no longer be “David Bowie” but merely “Bowie,” paving the way, perhaps, for future incarnations as Pedigree Bowie, New Improved Bowie, and of course Original Bowie.

This album of defiantly unoriginal material was also a sure way of not giving any new Bowie songs to his music publishers, both of whom were in dispute (with each other and with MainMan as Bowie's representatives) during the period that the album was recorded. And this may ultimately have been the primary reason for the project—a way of continuing Bowie's career beyond the retirement of Ziggy Stardust, without having to reveal a fresh direction or surrender any valuable copyrights.

Yet the primary impact of
Pin Ups
was as a fashionable utilization of nostalgia, which was already—alongside the craze for androgyny—emerging as one of the dominant themes of the early seventies. (“It sometimes looked as if the originality of 70s designers lay in their flair for deciding what period style to use next,” journalist Norman Shrapnel reflected in 1980.) In pop rather than Pop terms, Bowie's album was a cheeky way of copying and overshadowing
These Foolish Things
, an album of rock and pre-rock standards by Roxy Music singer Bryan Ferry, which had been much longer in the making than
Pin Ups
. The two albums ultimately emerged on the same day, Bowie gaining more sales, Ferry better reviews. Yet while Ferry ranged across the decades in search of suitably arch material, Bowie chose to concentrate on his own past: not his adolescence, as John Lennon was then attempting with Phil Spector on the album belatedly released in 1975 as
Rock & Roll
, but the years in which he had battled in vain to establish himself alongside the likes of the Who and the Kinks. It seemed as if everyone in British pop was remembering the fifties and early sixties, from Elton John's “Crocodile Rock” to 10cc's “Donna” and Wizzard's “Ball Park Incident,” taking a self-conscious look back at an era they had originally experienced without a hint of irony. Bowie, by contrast, was tackling a more immediate version of the past, as if to prove that he could have been a contender after all.

Once he had reimagined the mid-sixties, Bowie's passion for nostalgia knew no bounds. His next target was his own recent past. First he used pop star Lulu to reinvent “The Man Who Sold the World” and “Watch That Man.” “[Bowie's] in show business, and knows where it's at,” declared Lulu, who had bonded with Bowie in a hotel bar over their shared passion for Anthony Newley's show tunes. And then he reincarnated Ziggy Stardust for American eyes only, for a TV project known as
The 1980 Floor Show
. It allowed him to reprise the highlights of
Pin Ups
and two of his earlier hits, preview his scheme for a musical based around a George Orwell novel, and revisit one of the more enduring singles of the sixties, Sonny & Cher's “I Got You Babe,” in the erratic company of one of that decade's most emblematic figures, Marianne Faithfull. One minute Ziggy was a prophet of the new; the next he was selling the past to an audience desperate to believe that it could return again: tomorrow's nostalgia today.

 

[88] GROWIN' UP

(Springsteen)

Recorded July 1973;
Pin Ups
extended CD

The commercial impact of
Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J.
, the debut album by the American singer-songwriter Bruce Springsteen, was minimal in 1973. Its influence on David Bowie was brief, but intense. Springsteen represented a fabulous collage of classic American symbols: Chuck Berry's command of teenage iconography; James Dean's almost delinquent sullenness; Bob Dylan's lyrical extravagance; the ephemeral glory of pop, mixed with the gutsy authenticity of soul. Rock critics initially greeted him as “the new Bob Dylan,” and within a year journalist Jon Landau could proclaim, “I have seen Rock'n'Roll Future, and its name is Bruce Springsteen.” (Landau was rewarded with a multi-decade career as Springsteen's producer-turned-manager, as if to spite every journalist who had ever crafted a cruel review.) Bowie bought into the hype early, but unlike the press he was not impressed by Springsteen's manic live shows, which belonged to a very different theatrical tradition from his own.

In the aftermath of his celebration of British pop on
Pin Ups
, Bowie began to assemble material for an American equivalent, including the Velvet Underground's “White Light/White Heat” (the exhilarating backing track for which was bequeathed to Mick Ronson) and the Beach Boys' “God Only Knows.” Both of those songs were acknowledged as classics; by approaching Springsteen's catalogue, Bowie would be conferring some sort of princely tribute on a performer who was two years younger than himself. On the evidence of his cover of “Growin' Up,” and his subsequent rendition of “It's Hard to Be a Saint in the City” [122], an entire album of
Bowie Sings Springsteen
might have been a worthier project than
Pin Ups
.

Guitarist Ronnie Wood augmented Ronson for this session, treating Springsteen's song with a disregard for the niceties of rhythm that was well suited to his own band, the Faces, but less appropriate here. That problem faded in the heat of Bowie's vocal performance: taking the song in a higher key than Springsteen, he pushed himself to his physical limit, rasping into falsetto and leaving a raw throatiness in his wake. This imperfection was strangely affecting, betraying his absolute engagement with the song. These early forays into the highest reaches of his vocal range proved to be a rehearsal for his later experiments with soul music.

By the end of 1973, Springsteen's launch would appear understated alongside the publicity campaign focused on another new American singer-songwriter: Jobriath. Billed as “the First Gay Rock Star,” he was flamboyantly hyped by his manager, Jerry Brandt, as “a composer, arranger, singer, dancer, painter, mime artist, ballerina, woman, man” who would soon be “the biggest artist in the world.” When Brandt was asked about his client's similarity to Bowie, he dismissed the comparison contemptuously: “David Bowie has taken his best shot. He's tacky and he can't pirouette and he can't move and he's rigid and he's scared to death. . . . It's just like the difference between a Model A Ford and a Lamborghini.”

Billboards on Sunset Strip and promises of a live show that would be extravagant beyond Bowie's imagination failed to translate into a career strategy, especially when Jobriath's concert debut proved to be spectacularly short on pizzazz. By early 1975, Jobriath—like Ziggy Stardust—had announced his retirement, the only difference being that Ziggy had become a star, while Jobriath was a laughingstock. Little attention was paid to the perfectly respectable blend of Bowie, Stones, and cabaret influences that comprised his two albums, and Jobriath died from AIDS in 1983 without any public recognition. The utter failure of Brandt's PR strategy emphasized the skill of Tony Defries's handling of David Bowie, as well as the subtle difference between launching a “Gay Rock Star” and a rock star who said “I'm gay” with a smile on his face and a twinkle in his eye.

 

[89] MUSIC IS LETHAL

(Battisti; trans. Bowie)

Written for Mick Ronson

The end of Ziggy Stardust, and the consequent demise of the Spiders from Mars, need not have signaled the end of Bowie's working relationship with Mick Ronson. That was a matter of choice, from a man who, less than two years later, would tell an interviewer: “I honestly can't remember Mick that well these days. He's just like any other band member that I had.” During the final Ziggy tour, Bowie had already begun to downplay Ronson's contribution, preferring to regard him as someone who could translate Bowie's creative impulses rather than, as most objective observers remember him, an artistic contributor in his own right.

The two men had very different temperaments: in an otherwise warm tribute after Ronson's death in 1993, Bowie said that his onetime musical collaborator lacked ambition, and would have been content to sound like Jeff Beck or Free's Paul Kossoff. “I just gave up trying to get him to come out and see other bands or listen to interesting musics,” Bowie recalled. “You'd mention anything new, and his pet phrase was, ‘Don't need to.' ” But it's hard not to conclude that ego—Bowie's need to be seen as master of his own destiny—played an equally large part in the severing of their partnership.

As recompense for his loyalty, Bowie and Tony Defries agreed to support Ronson's launch as a solo artist, and the MainMan hype machine was set in motion on the guitarist's behalf. To publicize his first solo album,
Slaughter on Tenth Avenue
(named after a movie theme that Bowie had suggested Ronson should record), the Rainbow Theatre in London was booked for a prestigious debut performance. It proved to be little more than a disaster, not just because Ronson was never a strong vocalist in isolation, but because he presented himself like someone who didn't believe he deserved to be in the spotlight. Bowie went backstage during the intermission to offer encouragement, and briefly considered joining Ronson onstage, before realizing that this would only highlight the gulf in charisma between the two artists. Neither man could have been delighted that the only song in Ronson's repertoire that roused the crowd was Bowie's “Moonage Daydream,” as if fans had half-closed their eyes and imagined that Ziggy himself were there.

Ronson's solo career ran aground after two albums—the second more cohesive than its predecessor, though it lacked the attraction of any material from Bowie (except for the abandoned backing track for “White Light/White Heat” from the
Pin Ups
sessions). Bowie had a hand in three songs on Ronson's debut, however—among them this rather embarrassing adaptation of an intimate ballad by the Italian singer Lucio Battisti. Bowie certainly seemed to have learned little about the art of translation since his ill-fated attempt to secure the English-language rights to Claude François's “Comme d'Habitude” in 1968 [A50]. The song required an intensely personal lyric, open to the dramatic potential of tiny incidents within a relationship; Bowie delivered an almost hysterical parody of Jacques Brel's most lubricious work, cramming in words as if he were being paid by the syllable.

 

[90] HEY MA HEY PA

(Ronson/Bowie)

Written for Mick Ronson

Working around a framework erected by Mick Ronson was hardly a new experience for Bowie: unlike the songs for
The Man Who Sold the World
, this melody was supplied by Ronson, reducing Bowie's role to lyricist. Both men's recent influences were on brazen display. While Ronson's music betrayed his enthusiasm for Todd Rundgren's dazzling exhibition of pop and electronics on
A Wizard a True Star
(“Zen Archer” was the closest equivalent here), Bowie continued to pay homage to the streetwise sensibility of Bruce Springsteen—albeit via parody. His tale of J. J. Dean and Pigsty Paul was a blend of comic-book Western and a schoolboy's version of a James Dean scenario.

 

[91] GROWING UP AND I'M FINE

(Bowie)

Written for Mick Ronson

It was surely no coincidence that having recorded Springsteen's “Growin' Up” [88], Bowie borrowed that title for another gift to Mick Ronson. Stylistically, though, it was a throwback to the days of
Hunky Dory
, diatonic descent in the chorus and all. If that automatically sparked thoughts of the Beatles, that resemblance was reinforced by the melodic similarity between the finale to the chorus and Paul McCartney's “Mother Nature's Son,” while Mike Garson's piano introduction had the same quality of music-in-motion as George Harrison's circular guitar opening to “I Want to Tell You.”

The lyrics might have been written by the narrator of “Can't Help Thinking About Me” [A14] to explain why he was abandoning his teenage friends in favor of a woman. Like the most existential of Mods, he mapped out his previous life in epic terms. Then love intervened, bringing with it a strident middle section that seemed to have stepped from the score of
West Side Story
—itself an influence on Bruce Springsteen, completing this circle of adolescent melodrama.

 

[92] I AM DIVINE

(Bowie)

Recorded by the Astronettes, November 1973

In November 1973, Bowie interrupted the sessions for his next album to pursue a musical fusion that his own previous work had barely dared to touch. He revived the name of the Astronettes—used for his backing vocalists at the Rainbow in 1972, and mentioned as an aside in “Drive-in Saturday”—for a loose vocal group based around his school friend Geoff MacCormack and his newly appointed lover, Ava Cherry. With session singer Jason Guest, they formed a black/white, male/female combination that allowed Bowie to explore what he could achieve with contemporary forms of soul music, without the pressing necessity to be making a conceptual statement at the same time.