The Man Who Sold the World (29 page)

Bowie could hardly have offered more commitment to the song, vocally or lyrically, if he'd been speaking in tongues: the change of key midway not only refocused the lyrical theme, it also pushed his voice to its limit. Yet for a song of such intensity, the musical framework was refreshingly loose, following a simple I-ii-IV-V chord sequence through the verse and chorus. The band reached out for attention at the start—one of those percussive intros that were ubiquitous in 1974's soul music, followed by a run down the keyboard—and then lay back, with plenty of space in the arrangement, and only David Sanborn's word-in-your-ear saxophone coming close to rivaling Bowie's insistence. As they would throughout the Philadelphia sessions, the backing of Luther Vandross, Ava Cherry, and Robin Clark filled out the vocal spectrum around and against Bowie's lead, never becoming caught up in his hysteria. Musically simple, lyrically fragmented, emotionally inspired, “Young Americans” presented a Bowie who had never been heard on record before, catching almost everyone who had followed him by surprise.

 

[114] AFTER TODAY

(Bowie)

Recorded August 1974;
Sound + Vision
CD

Throughout the sixties, Bowie rarely dared to attempt singing anything above a high G. Yet the chorus of this song barely ventured below that point, provoking one of his most enthusiastic, if erratic, attempts at a falsetto vocal. Like the Bee Gees, whose “Jive Talking” would soon feature even more extreme displays of the art, Bowie was clearly enraptured by the tradition (particularly in Philadelphia) of sweet soul groups with a soaring male lead. While they tended to concentrate on ballads, Bowie let rip on this frenetic disco-funk tune, rather generic in nature, but nonetheless energized for that. Its working lyrics carried a vague message of encouragement to a friend or lover, but would surely have been replaced if “After Today” had become a serious contender for his next album. Throughout, David Sanborn's saxophone mimicked the physical strain of Bowie's voice with playful accuracy.

 

[115] WHO CAN I BE NOW?

(Bowie)

Recorded August and November 1974;
Young Americans
extended CD

It was a title that seemed to summarize Bowie's strange journey. There was a real contempt in his voice as he recalled the drudgery of adopting a new disguise, as if all the allure of “Changes” had been stripped away, to reveal the puppet master going through the motions.

The boundary lines between spiritual desolation and romantic despair were blurred throughout this exercise in gospel-soul, which was naggingly reminiscent of John Lennon's 1973 song “Out of the Blue.” The two compositions shared a circularity of structure, and a familiar melodic descent that was most obvious in the bass line. But where Lennon sought solace in love, Bowie's narrator was concerned with a more profound dilemma about the purpose of existence itself. “Who Can I Be Now?” exhibited many of the trademarks of the Philadelphia sessions: gospel-tinged piano, saxophone as an expression of pain, call-and-response vocal interplay. But despite Bowie's full-blooded performance, it was perhaps a shade too mechanical (note the additional half bar needed to travel from verse to chorus) to stand up to the scrutiny of a place on the
Young Americans
album.

 

[116] IT'S GONNA BE ME

(Bowie)

Recorded August, November, and December 1974;
Young Americans
extended CD

One of the most remarkable performances of Bowie's career, “It's Gonna Be Me” was a consummate display of his vocal artistry, a naked revelation of the man behind the art, and a dexterous piece of character acting—beginning the question of who exactly was holding this thinnest of masks. It staked his claim to be ranked as a soul singer alongside the likes of Aretha Franklin and Dusty Springfield, over a perilously sparse gospel-soul track that apparently left him nowhere to hide. And it raised the tantalizing question of whether he could (or indeed should) have taken a train to Tennessee with this song, “Who Can I Be Now?” [115], and “Can You Hear Me” [108] in his sack, and begged a southern producer like Chips Moman or Dan Penn to help him record a
Bowie in Memphis
album, the way that countless others before him had done (Dusty Springfield, Elvis Presley, Cher, and Lulu among them).

Not that Moman or Penn could have improved on this Tony Visconti production,
*
which reinforced the Bible-fearing starkness of piano, bass, and drums and let the human voice carry the emotional burden—either Bowie's alone, racked with guilt and self-doubt, or supported by the tonal richness of the background vocals through the chorus. At its confessional peak, there was just singer and piano, which held back as if to give Bowie room to feel. There was nothing modernist about this arrangement, nothing of the 1970s; this was how the gospel of truth had been presented for decades in the churches of the South, and that tradition lent Bowie's crisis an eerie sense of a soul at stake. He responded with a voice that signified reality, rather than artifice: “pure” soul, not the crooning, whispering persona who inhibited the other ballads from these sessions.

But this was simply a performance. Like “Can You Hear Me,” “It's Gonna Be Me” was ostensibly the confession of a casual seducer, who had suddenly awoken to the audacity of his crimes, glimpsed his own hollowness, and realized that he had let slip the possibility of authentic love. His victim had been robbed of her virginity, her purity, her holiness, qualities that his false display was bound to destroy. He was pleading for a second chance, to be born again in a world of understanding and compassion. He traced out the scenario—he'd run to her door, she'd dissolve tearfully into his arms, and then what? She'd forgive him? He'd apologize? No, he'd be strong, time and again. In the end, it was all about the man, and when the key changed in the final bars of the song, the penitent was once again the smooth seducer, awaiting another victim in another city. Was the penitent Bowie? Only if in the purity of his soul, he talked like Frank Sinatra in a saloon, calling “Hit me, Jack” to the band. But the artifice was full of artistry.

 

[117] JOHN, I'M ONLY DANCING (AGAIN)

(Bowie)

Recorded August and November 1974; single A-side

Critics and fans alike were alarmed by the radical reinvention of several of Bowie's most distinctive songs during his 1974 US tours. These qualms would have multiplied exponentially had he remained faithful to his original decision to include this lengthy mutation of his 1972 hit single [63] on the album he was recording in Philadelphia. Perhaps feeling that he had never quite reached the core
*
of the song—which had, moreover, yet to be released in the United States at this point—he stripped it bare of everything but the essentials of the chorus, and remodeled it as a lengthy genre exercise in disco. If the original arrangement was pure London, the product of nights at the Sombrero Club, then “Again” owed its life to his hedonistic nights in venues like the drag queen capital of the East Village, Club 82 (or the Anvil, or Club 220)—the long, ecstatic play-out matching the stimulant-fueled excesses of the midnight hours. The reference in the revised lyrics to “Charlie” suggested at least one illicit source of inspiration. There was no hint as yet of Bowie's later proclamation that the “endless numb beat” of disco was “really dangerous”; for the moment, he preferred the interpretation that disco broke down social barriers between black and white, male and female, gay and straight. As one historian noted, “It obviously threatened suburban white boys who found it too feminine, too gay, too black,” although “the black musical establishment hated disco just as fervently as the white rock-and-rollers did . . . they dismissed it as bleached and blue-eyed funk.” By the late seventies, when Bowie had lost his enthusiasm for the genre, performers black and white alike were being forced to assimilate disco into their natural style, from the host of soul performers who sacrificed their individuality in favor of generic dance-floor fodder to the cash-in maneuvers of the Beach Boys (“Here Comes the Night”) and Paul McCartney (“Goodnight Tonight”).

Instead of the original two-chord guitar shuffle, the 1974 arrangement began with a defiantly machine-made vamp up and down the scale, vocoder, electronic keyboards, and synthesizers combining to abstract effect. Then humans intervened, with bass and drums thudding eight-to-the-bar to introduce the frantic funk rhythm of the verse, with its parade of seventh chords, chattering guitar motifs, and syncopated breakdown as a finale. Bowie's pleasure at being able to toss off lyrics based on nursery rhymes, innuendo, and improvisation was plain to hear. He reduced the Watergate crisis haunting the American nation to a banal remark, alluded to a line from the standard song “Ain't She Sweet,” and even sneaked in a reference to the Velvet Underground's “White Light/White Heat.” The chorus pitched one of Bowie's more elegant vocal personae against crooning background voices (one of them his own), using more ethereal variations of the original chord phrasings. In its unexpurgated version, however, the song was dwarfed by the dual-phase play-out, the first dominated by almost hysterical interplay between Bowie and his singers, the second devoted to equally madcap instrumental revels. The results still sounded sufficiently strange, and au courant, to produce a hit single five years later.

 

[118] SOMEBODY UP THERE LIKES ME

(Bowie)

Recorded August and November 1974;
Young Americans
LP

 

REALLY, I'M A ONE-TRACK PERSON. WHAT I'VE SAID FOR YEARS UNDER VARIOUS GUISES IS, “WATCH OUT, THE WEST IS GOING TO HAVE A HITLER!” I'VE SAID IT IN A THOUSAND DIFFERENT WAYS. THAT SONG IS YET ANOTHER WAY.

 

—David Bowie, August 1974

Aldous Huxley was the first commentator to recognize the similarities between the techniques used by the advertising industry and the way in which Adolf Hitler was “sold” to the German public in the thirties. His account of Hitler's emotional manipulation of his audiences read like an account of a performance by a teenage pop idol: “Strong emotion (as every actor and dramatist knows) is in the highest degree contagious. Infected by the malignant frenzy of the orator, the audience would groan and sob and scream in an orgy of uninhibited passion. And these orgies were so enjoyable that most of those who had experienced them eagerly came back for more.” The next step was to “brand” Hitler as an ad agency would brand cigarettes: “Hitler induced the German masses to buy themselves a Fuhrer, an insane philosophy, and the Second World War,” Huxley concluded. The historian of fascist iconography Steven Heller has taken the comparison further: “It could be argued that this self-proclaimed artist [Hitler was an aspiring painter] conceived his horrific plans as a massive socio-political
Gesamtkunstwerk
(total work of art) built on the notions of racial purification, nationalist regeneration, and world domination. These were integrated in an overall graphic scheme . . . [that] ultimately became a textbook example—indeed, a perverse paradigm—of corporate branding.”

Bowie recognized the insidious attraction of the Nazi brand, allowing it to influence his iconography (the “SS” lightning flash across his face on the cover of
Aladdin Sane
) and staging (the stark spotlighting of the stage on his 1976 world tour). He also knew the potency of his own branding as a star: what else was Ziggy Stardust but a demonstration of that effect? “Somebody Up There Likes Me” (its title purloined from a 1956 Paul Newman movie about boxing champ Rocky Graziano) explored his confusing relationships with advertising, stardom, and power. It built upon the melodic framework, though with a revised chord structure, of “I Am Divine” [192]—a song that, like his more recent “Shilling the Rubes” [112], seemed to have a specific predator in mind. Now Bowie was casting his net into an ocean of sharks, himself included.

At times, he sounded like a jaundiced political commentator of the old school, complaining that in the TV age, appearance counted more than substance. The obvious target was “Tricky Dick” Nixon, who had just resigned from the US presidency because of his involvement in the Watergate scandal, and the frequent target of the question “Would you buy a used car from this man?” Yet Bowie's attack on Nixon seemed tame alongside more pointed barbs from singers such as Stevie Wonder (whose attack on the former president, “You Haven't Done Nothin',” charted the week that Bowie's sessions began). What gave Bowie's lyric its bite was his willingness to extend his cynicism beyond the political arena and into his own backyard, where a star such as Valentino—or David Bowie—had the power to sell his audience anything under the innocent guise of his own stardom, and where the star's relationship with his manager might resemble that between Faust and Mephistopheles.

By accident or design, the instrumental accompaniment for this exploration of cunning and deceit was colored by the facsimile of an orchestral string section, as conjured up on a synthesizer. Over this lush background, David Sanborn's defiantly harsh saxophone sounded a wake-up call. Bowie, meanwhile, phrased with the confidence of a born charmer, or a natural salesman, eventually adopting an array of different vocal personae like a one-man Sly & the Family Stone, a different mood for every moment and every pair of ears. Seduction had rarely seemed so attractive, or so menacing.