The Man Who Sold the World (26 page)

 

[99] (ALTERNATIVE) CANDIDATE

(Bowie)

Recorded January 1974;
Diamond Dogs
extended CD

The deluxe
Diamond Dogs
reissue of 2004 unveiled this “Alternative” version of a song that was subsequently incorporated into a medley with “Sweet Thing” [100]. It was described as “a demo for proposed
1984
musical,” although its thematic link with that project was difficult to determine. Some courageous fans have provided elaborate and highly creative “interpretations” of the lyrics, linking them with the
Nineteen Eighty-Four
narrative.
*
But there was little internal evidence to support such a theory, beyond a mysterious sense of dissatisfaction, as felt by Orwell's Winston Smith (and characters in thousands of other novels). More persuasive was the idea that this was one of Bowie's first experiments with the cut-up technique, to fill out a track for which he had a title but no song. Everything operated just outside the realm of logic, though Bowie's self-description as the “Fuhrerling” not only was alarming and prophetic, but also predated Nick Lowe and Elvis Costello's “little Hitlers” by half a decade. The very title of “Candidate” was emblematic at a time when the Watergate scandal was beginning to bite, however, and Richard Nixon's defiant words (“I am not a crook”) were slowly being stripped of their sincerity.

Only the first two lines of this composition reappeared in the later incarnation of the song, set to a different melody. No musical element of the “(Alternative) Candidate” track survived the transition, in fact: while the released “Candidate” revolved around a single three-chord sequence, the “Alternative” comprised several different sections welded together. But there was musical promise: not in the very lackadaisical melody, but in the syncopation of the drums and piano in the introduction, and the way in which the strings oozed eerily beneath an aggressive wah-wah guitar line. Note also the second use of the “detuned” drum sound first heard on “1984/Dodo” [96].

THE ART OF FRAGMENTATION

T
he primary source for Bowie's lyrics during the
Diamond Dogs
sessions was a collection of notebooks, in which he had written hundreds of phrases and lines. Flashes of inspiration were recorded there, alongside images borrowed from books, TV advertisements, even the labels stuck on the Olympic Studios mixing consoles. Bowie had already discovered the value of introducing chance into his creative process, but on this album, and again in 1977 on much of “
Heroes
,” he elected to rely explicitly upon an accidental collision of images rather than orthodox narrative techniques. He was encouraged in this direction by his November 1973 meeting with the author William S. Burroughs (motto: “mix your own linguistic virus”), an encounter engineered by the editors of
Rolling Stone
magazine. To prepare for the interview, Bowie immersed himself in Burroughs's novel
Nova Express
, the third of his books (after
The Soft Machine
and
The Ticket That Exploded
) to depend on the cut-up technique pioneered by his friend Brion Gysin. He in turn acknowledged the influence of Dada and surrealist writers such as Tristan Tzara, who had assembled poetry by cutting random words out of newspapers. “Cut up everything in sight,” Gysin once wrote. “Make your whole life a poem.”

The “poem” of Burroughs's
Nova Express
was obscure to anyone who wasn't under chemical influence or acutely alert to the sound, rather than the meaning, of words. Bowie qualified on both counts, describing the cut-up technique as “a very western tarot” and using it as a substitute for the random significance of the
I Ching
. “My thought forms are already fragmented, to say the least,” he admitted in 1975. “I've had to do cut-ups on my writing for some time, so that I might be able to put it all back into some coherent form again. My actual writing doesn't make a tremendous amount of sense.” Faced with a society that he imagined was deconstructing itself, and a personality that was in danger of fragmenting, he found a rationale in cut-up that eluded him elsewhere.

He was hardly the first musician to utilize similar techniques: Stravinsky had compressed fragments of folk tunes into
The Rite of Spring
; Pierre Boulez pioneered the operation of chance as a compositional method in the fifties; the Beatles
*
chopped up tapes of fairground organs and threw them to the ground during the recording of
Sgt. Pepper
. Steve Reich's pioneering minimalist piece “It's Gonna Rain” evolved when two recordings of the same speech pattern accidentally ran out of phase with each other. Brian Eno would later incorporate elements of chance into his fundamental theories of composition: hence the working title of the third album he made with Bowie,
Planned Accidents
. Bowie met Brion Gysin in 1976, and for the next decade Gysin pursued the dream of persuading Bowie to star in his screenplay of Burroughs's most famous novel,
Naked Lunch
. Meanwhile, Bowie would return to cut-up—this time facilitated by a computer program—in the mid-nineties, as a way of triggering a creative leap of faith during the assembly of the
1.Outside
project.

Back in 1973–74, however, when Bowie allowed cut-up to shape the “Sweet Thing” medley [100] and the title track of
Diamond Dogs
[107], the technique he'd borrowed from Gysin and Burroughs performed a different set of functions. It allowed him to convey a sense of apocalyptic decay, one of the themes that followed him from
Nineteen Eighty-Four
into
Diamond Dogs
. More pertinent, perhaps, it was a way of distancing himself from his work—or, to be more accurate, shifting the location of his involvement. On the cut-up songs, there was no personal disclosure or commitment in the lyrics, but on “Sweet Thing,” in particular, Bowie invested almost frightening levels of passion in his performance, which spoke more eloquently than his words. Only when he adopted the musical language of American soul later in 1974 did he find a more satisfying way of combining words and music as a means of emotional expression.

 

[100] SWEET THING/CANDIDATE/SWEET THING

(Bowie)

Recorded January/February 1974;
Diamond Dogs
LP

Nothing on
Diamond Dogs
illustrated the album's creative enigma—emotional commitment, lyrical dissociation—as vividly as this extended
*
exercise in romantic image-mongering. All attempts to squeeze this musical extravaganza into a narrative form, whether inspired by
Nineteen Eighty-Four
or
Diamond Dogs
, were doomed to failure: there was no sweet thing, no candidate, no characters at all.

Yet the song contained several of Bowie's most enduring images: photographs (taken with instinctive perception by Robert Doisneau, perhaps) so emblematic that it is difficult to believe one hadn't witnessed them being played out. There was the couple caught in a doorway, or, later, the same pair glimpsed as they threw themselves into a river, hand in hand. There was Bowie himself, crooning in a voice drenched in despair, or conjuring up “papier mache” icons of semimythical figures such as Charles Manson or Muhammad Ali. And finally, one stunning piece of self-revelation (or was it prophecy?), as Bowie asked himself about life in the “snowstorm” of cocaine, at a time when rock'n'roll life was in total, unquestioning thrall to tooting and snorting the septum-rotting, brain-shrinking powder.
*

That ultimate self-condemnation aside, what mattered in this song was sound and the visions it implied, not the literal meaning of the words. Bowie was effectively painting with the colors of music—the tonal scope of his own crooning voice, the comfortable growl of a baritone saxophone, the crisp richness of an acoustic guitar, the gamut of sounds that could be created by his Moog synthesizer, and above all the rococo flourishes of Mike Garson's keyboards. You could replace Bowie's English words with any other language, and lose none of the effect; even the voice was merely a constituent part of the canvas, no more or less important than any other.

The fundamental structure of this epic was simple enough: “Sweet Thing” was based around a conversation between variations of C and D major chords, occasionally rising to E minor at moments of emotional stress. Its chorus introduced the sequence (Dm-Am-G) that also ran throughout “Candidate.” And when “Sweet Thing” returned, so did its familiar chords. Connecting these elements were interludes that explored more foreign territory, switching their key signature at will but inevitably reverting to the original root. In the end, the most jarring of these interruptions veered into quasi-mechanical noise (worth comparing with the conclusion of Eno's “Dead Finks Don't Talk,” taped a few months earlier), with a slippery bass line that prepared the ears for the simple chord change at the heart of the next track, “Rebel Rebel.”

That was merely the landscape for the drama, however, which began with what sounded like an homage to the famous crescendo from the Beatles' “A Day in the Life” (a song that Bowie would later reference in “Young Americans” [113]). Slowly the colors emerged: sustained and phased guitar, synthetic (Mellotron) woodwind, Bowie's almost conversational croon. After the pinched yet desperate vocal harmonies of the chorus, the scene expanded to rival any of Phil Spector's “Wall of Sound” extravaganzas, filling out the sonic and emotional palettes from a Japanese koto to a rainbow of saxophones. And so it continued: a perfectly restrained but emotive guitar solo, the marching drums that introduced the “candidate” motif, a growling fuzz bass guitar, eventually every instrument in the studio hammering the beat as Bowie's multidubbed vocals neared a hysterical climax. And there was still the reprise of “Sweet Thing” ahead, with electronic strings rising tentatively and falling quickly away as Bowie considered the snowstorm, Garson's piano reeling off epic flourishes, and the final climb to a vocal pitch that even Bowie could not have believed that he could reach, a high D that dragged saxophones and keyboards in its wake—until the almost banal rock cacophony of the transition stripped away the humanity and left nothing of the romance but the squeal and grind of machinery.

 

[101] REBEL REBEL

(Bowie)

Recorded January 1974; UK single A-side. Overdubbed/remixed April 1974; US single A-side

Within the context of
Diamond Dogs
, “Rebel Rebel” acted as the musical continuation of the “Sweet Thing/Candidate/Sweet Thing” [100] medley: it began with the chord change (D to E) that had been prefigured by the bass guitar slide underpinning the medley's final chaotic moments. In isolation, it was a magnificent pastiche of the Rolling Stones' sound, with the same timeless quality as “The Jean Genie” [65]. But whereas “The Jean Genie” was as tight as an overwound alarm clock, “Rebel Rebel” had a swaggering insouciance, reinforced by the deliberate indifference of Bowie's vocal. Its axis was a simple guitar riff around D, E, and A chords, concocted by Bowie and then augmented by session musician Alan Parker, who added the downward trail at the end of each line. (The melody of the verse followed Bowie's guitar line, not Parker's.)

Bowie had begun to socialize with the Rolling Stones in 1973: Mick Jagger had attended Ziggy's farewell party, like the king acknowledging and recognizing a distant claimant for his crown. The intention behind “Rebel Rebel” was to outdo the tired self-parody of the Stones' most recent album,
Goats Head Soup
, and Bowie duly emerged with a stronger and more enduring
*
single than Jagger's next offering, “It's Only Rock 'n Roll.” Its wordless vocal riff repeated and therefore satirized the hook of the band's recent US single, “Doo Doo Doo Doo (Heartbreaker).” Meanwhile, the key line of the lyric, about the ambiguity of sexual identity, harked back to the insults that the Stones' appearance had provoked back in 1964.
*

The track was certainly worthy of inclusion on any of the recent Rolling Stones albums, its raw-edged guitar being introduced against a click track, and then the visceral punch of bass and drums, while acoustic guitar and piano languished deep in the mix. “Rebel Rebel” was pure attitude from start to finish: the essence of adolescent defiance, guaranteed to bring out the teenager in all who heard it.

Bowie wasn't satisfied with creating a perennial dance-floor anthem. For US consumption, he treated the track to a Latin dub mix, issued as a summer 1974 single, two decades or more ahead of its time. He effectively buried the signature rock riff of the original beneath phasing, sine waves of percussion, acoustic guitar, and an otherworldly bank of backing vocals, each line preceded by a rush of backward echo, as if time were being sucked into a vacuum.

 

[102] WE ARE THE DEAD

(Bowie)

Recorded February 1974;
Diamond Dogs
LP

Winston and Julia embark on their forbidden romance in Orwell's novel in the knowledge that “what was now happening could not last long. There were times when the fact of impending death seemed as palpable as the bed they lay on.” In their final moments before discovery, Winston considers the closed lives of those who exist in the world of Big Brother with the hope of freedom for their distant descendants. “ ‘We are the dead,' he said.” And with that pronouncement, their illusion of freedom is ended.

Like Winston and Julia, Bowie's “We Are the Dead” was constantly at war between two spheres of existence. Its verses fleshed out the stunted humanity of Winston's life, from his first encounter with Julia to his vain hope of marking their union with a child. Its chorus, an amalgam of accident and intention from Bowie's experiments with cut-ups, evoked menace and confusion in equal proportion, while beneath the relentless decline of the chords,
*
a chorus of soulless voices crooned that they were the new boys, the dogs, the dead.

The treatment of Bowie's voice brilliantly reinforced his lyrical intentions. It entered with a slap across the electric piano introduction, and was then heavily echoed throughout the verse, almost half a beat behind, to emphasize Winston's tentative belief in Julia. The chorus, however, was an ocean of emotional commitment, bringing all of Winston's anguish to the surface—and, with the references to bankers and the bankrupt, resonating beyond the Oceania of 1974 into the second decade of the twenty-first century.

 

[103] BIG BROTHER

(Bowie)

Recorded February 1974;
Diamond Dogs
LP

“Big Brother is watching you” was the warning—or perhaps promise—that restrained the characters in Orwell's novel. Big Brother may not have existed; it was enough that his subjects believed that he did. Orwell portrayed his image as a grim bureaucrat, “black-haired, black-moustachio'd, full of power and mysterious calm.” Bowie's narrator—perhaps one of the subjects of Oceania deranged by the enforced hysteria of the “Two Minutes Hate” (see [104])—envisaged him as the Apollo of Greek mythology, the exemplar of beauty and light. Like Orwell's “little sandy-haired woman,” who cries out “My Saviour!” when she sees Big Brother's picture, the chorus echoed a passionate cry for belonging from an artist who was a natural outsider. Only with a reference to chemical excess that sounded like an uncanny prediction of Bowie's immediate future was there any personal resonance. The fact that its unembellished voices and acoustic guitars sounded like an addendum to “The Bewlay Brothers” [51] merely added to the surreal sense that this fragment belonged elsewhere.