The Man Who Sold the World (47 page)

 

[A37] THE LAUGHING GNOME

(Bowie)

Recorded January/February 1967; single A-side

Just as Les Paul deserved the credit for pioneering vari-speed and multitrack recording techniques, American comedian Ross Bagdasarian was the man who discovered the comic potential of speeding up the human voice to sound like a cute animal (or, indeed, a gnome). After premiering this trick on “Witch Doctor” in 1958, he launched a trio of lovable sound effects named the Chipmunks, whose debut single established sales records that would be broken only by the Beatles. Britain had its singing pig puppets, Pinky and Perky, while Lou Monte's “Pepino the Teenage Mouse” established the scenario of a human being annoyed by a high-pitched interloper.

So the invasion of hysterical gnomes—playfully voiced by Bowie and producer Gus Dudgeon—was merely the continuation of a long tradition. The circulation of a rough mix demonstrated that many groan-worthy gags were considered for inclusion and discarded; the completed track included a sly reference to Mick Jagger's time as a student at the London School of Eco-Gnom-Ics, and also referenced another popular variety act of the era, the Singing Postman (whose mysterious catchphrase, in Norfolk dialect, was “Have you got a loight, boy?”).

If Bowie had been auditioning for a career as a children's entertainer, “The Laughing Gnome” ought to have guaranteed him a lifetime's employment; it's easy to imagine his becoming the puppet's sidekick in
The Basil Brush Show
, or joining the cast of BBC-TV's perennial Friday-afternoon romp
Crackerjack
. Strangely, the single didn't catch the attention of the producers of BBC Radio's
Children's Favourites
, thereby robbing us of an alternative future in which Bowie became the British equivalent of Danny Kaye. Only when reissued in 1973 did it achieve the success it deserved, while prompting cynics to question how Bowie could be taken seriously as a rock star with skeletons this bony in his closet. An embarrassment for Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane, however, was merely another feather in the cap for the versatile entertainer of 1967.

Bowie would revive the vari-speed vocal trick, to much eerier effect, on songs such as “After All” [20], “All the Madmen” [23], and “The Bewlay Brothers” [51].

 

[A38] THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO TONY DAY

(Bowie)

Recorded January/February 1967; single B-side

Presumably to avoid typecasting, Bowie ensured that the B-side of “The Laughing Gnome” could never be mistaken for a children's song. “The Gospel According to Tony Day” was lugubrious and cynical, with a melody that barely stretched to five notes, sung low, then an octave higher, and with the minimum of variation. The eight-bar verse, with a two-bar interlude, returned dolefully to the progression at the heart of “Good Morning Girl” [A17]. Behind Bowie, an equally jaded rock rhythm section—reminiscent of Phil Spector's arrangement of “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah” for Bob B. Soxx & the Blue Jeans—supported the surreal inclusion of oboe and bassoon, where a blues guitar might have seemed more obvious. If the much-loved English comedian Tony Hancock had made a rock record at the height of his mid-sixties depression, it might have sounded like this, complete with its sarcastic mockery of the clichés of R&B (“gotta, gotta”) and psychedelia (“your mind, blow it”).

 

[A39] LOVE YOU TILL TUESDAY

(Bowie)

Recorded January 1967; unreleased demo. Recorded February 1967;
David Bowie
LP. Re-recorded June 1967; single A-side. German vocals overdubbed, January 1969; unreleased

For Bowie and Pitt, “Love You Till Tuesday” appears to have been the most important song recorded for Deram. A late addition to the
David Bowie
LP, it was rearranged as a single, and still regarded as his most commercial offering more than eighteen months later, as its prime position in his 1969 television special demonstrated. It certainly bore signs of having been conceived as a stage school audition piece,
*
exhibiting Bowie the comedic song-and-dance man, with a smile on his lips, a tear in his eye, and a nod toward every all-round entertainer from Sammy Davis Jr. to Roy Castle.

Its theatrical bent was obvious: from the coy, self-congratulatory laugh Bowie awarded himself when he rhymed “branch” and “romance,” the almost audible wink that accompanied his Cockney impersonation of the Man in the Moon, the octave leap in each verse, and the jokey aside
*
that ended the song. When Ivor Raymonde's orchestral arrangement for the single added a coda comprising a few bars of the “Hearts and Flowers” melody from Alphons Czibulka's
Wintermärchen
, used in countless films to signify bathos, he was simply adding treacle to a bag of sugar.

Not that the finished record—especially the LP version
*
—was without its charm. The melody galloped up and down the scale like an acrobat, a xylophone tinkled a merry theme, followed immediately by an optimistic climb from a string section, and the final progression from a C major chord to C diminished, A
b
, B
b
, and back to C neatly set up and immediately resolved a moment of drama. Like several of its Deram counterparts, however, “Love You Till Tuesday” helped Bowie by not connecting with the public, as its success—as with “Rubber Band” [A20] and “The Laughing Gnome” [A21]—would have eradicated any possibility that he might become a rock star in the subsequent decade. “I would have been doing stage musicals, I could almost guarantee it,” Bowie reflected thirty years later. “I'm sure I would have been a right little trouper on the West End stage. I'd have written ten Laughing Gnomes, not just one!”

 

[A40] WHEN I LIVE MY DREAM

(Bowie)

Recorded February 1967;
David Bowie
LP. Re-recorded June 1967;
Love You Till Tuesday
film. German vocals overdubbed, January 1969; unreleased

Like Anthony Newley's show-stopping ballad, “Once in a Lifetime,” Bowie's “When I Live My Dream” was an emotional tour de force designed to bring a West End audience to its feet. Unfortunately, it lacked a theatrical vehicle for which it could provide a cathartic climax, thereby curtailing another career avenue for its composer. Its lyrics might sometimes have sounded as if they had been translated too hastily from a continental language, but the universal power of its central image, the frustrated man crying out for the chance to fulfill its destiny, could have overcome any flaws.

Had the song become better known, of course, then critics might have pointed out how indebted the middle section was to the corresponding portion of the Righteous Brothers' “You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin,” using the same I-IV-V chord progression. They might also have carped at the almost desperate efforts of the arranger to modulate into a higher key for dramatic effect and then find a coherent way home—a battle that endured into the final bar. By accident or design, Bowie marked the crucial moments of the song by moving the melody away from the root of the chord: it opened at Ba, accentuating the Fsus4 chord, and soared to its height at high G, against an Ea chord. He negotiated the (almost) two-octave range and complex twists and turns of the key changes with ease, however, reinforcing Kenneth Pitt's view that the stage was his most promising prospect.

Two days after the
David Bowie
LP was released, he re-recorded “When I Live My Dream” at a slower tempo, with curt electric guitar chords marking out the third beat of each bar, like many of the “uptown soul” records made in New York around this time. The track was doubtless intended as a single, but instead languished at Decca until Pitt retrieved it for
The David Bowie Show
in 1969—at which time he also persuaded Bowie to tape a German translation of this song and “Love You Till Tuesday” [A39] in the vain hope they might be required by a German TV station.

 

[A41] PUSSY CAT

(unknown)

Recorded March 1967; unreleased

Bowie chronicler Kevin Cann reckons that this song, recorded immediately after the completion of the Deram LP, was a cover of a noncharting 1964 single by the novelty pop crooner Jess Conrad, of “This Pullover” infamy. If it was a nonoriginal, then a more likely source might be a 1966 soul single by Chubby Checker, “Hey You! Little Boo-Ga-Loo,” of which it formed the B-side. Whatever the case, Cann (the only researcher to have heard the track) makes it sound less than appealing, calling it “a true oddity . . . David's vocal deteriorates as he appears to tire of the song.”

 

[A42] LITTLE TOY SOLDIER (AKA SADIE'S SONG)

(Bowie/Reed)

Recorded with the Riot Squad, March/April 1967; unreleased

If, as the novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald contended, “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function,” then Bowie's Janus-headed enthusiasm for the furthest extremes of popular music in spring 1967 suggested the presence of genius. While concocting novelty song-and-dance tunes and romantic ballads, he was also searching for a way to incorporate sonic distortion and sexual experimentation into his repertoire.

In November 1966, Kenneth Pitt visited New York in search of new avenues for Bowie to explore. He returned in mid-December with, so Bowie recalled in 2002, “two albums he had been given by someone. . . . Not being his particular cup of tea, he gave them to me to see what I made of them.” One was
Virgin Fugs
by the Fugs, a shambling collective of beat poets and hippies whose anarchic approach to melody, performance, and common decency did not directly influence Bowie's music.
*

The other record, Bowie explained, “a demo with the signature Warhol scrawled on it, was shattering. Everything I both felt and didn't know about rock music was opened up to me on one unreleased disc. It was
The Velvet Underground & Nico
album.” He would claim in the early seventies to have known nothing about Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground until he met Reed in 1971. That was patently untrue, as in the early weeks of 1967 he composed a song incorporating an entire verse written by Reed. Known variously as “Little Toy Soldier” and “Sadie's Song,” it was taped at a rehearsal with the Riot Squad at a North London public house in March, alongside “Silly Boy Blue” [A31], “Silver Tree-Top School for Boys” [A43], and another Reed composition from that Velvet Underground album, “Waiting for the Man” [A44]. Three weeks later, three of those songs were also recorded at Decca, for private rather than commercial consumption.

It is certainly impossible to imagine Decca
*
contemplating the release of “Little Toy Soldier,” a darkly comic and suggestive tale of sadomasochism. The fact that it included a sizable extract from the Velvet Underground's “Venus in Furs,” sung by Bowie in an impression of Reed's Long Island monotone to the accompaniment of whip cracks and cackling laughter, merely added legal problems to the central issue of vulgarity. Subject aside, the track opened like one of John Entwistle's more mischievous excursions into black humor with the Who, and incorporated a Mothers of Invention–inspired “freak-out” featuring bomb blasts, airplane engines, traffic, and a healthy bout of coughing. Even the GPO's Speaking Clock telephone service made a cameo appearance.

Although Bowie's interest in Reed's work was maintained into the seventies, his adventures in experimental music were effectively laid to rest after this session for almost a decade. It is intriguing to wonder what might have happened if he had continued to work with the Riot Squad beyond the release of his debut album. He would, after all, have made a worthy replacement for Syd Barrett when the mercurial singer-songwriter left Pink Floyd in 1968.

 

[A43] SILVER TREE-TOP SCHOOL FOR BOYS

(Bowie)

Recorded with the Riot Squad, March 1967; unreleased demo

Alumni of the independent school Lancing College in Sussex include cabinet ministers, generals, bishops, ambassadors, and the novelist Evelyn Waugh, whose work influenced “Aladdin Sane” [70]. The school governors might be less willing to celebrate another distinction: rumors of a sixties drug bust among pupils that apparently inspired Bowie to write “Silver Tree-Top School for Boys.” The lyrics mixed a satirical response to the incident with imagery reminiscent of more utopian visions of childhood, from William Blake and Lewis Carroll.

Bowie's demo of the song is not in circulation, leaving rival versions by the Beatstalkers (arguably the stronger of the two) and the Slender Plenty as our only evidence of how it might have sounded. The Beatstalkers accentuated its similarity to contemporary material by the Kinks, complete with a descending bass line reminiscent of their hit “Sunny Afternoon,” and an opening riff in the style of another English band who left a mark on Bowie, the Move. The slightly awkward chord sequence in the middle section undermined a melody that might otherwise have fitted onto
Hunky Dory
.

 

[A44] WAITING FOR THE MAN

(Reed)

Recorded with the Riot Squad, March–April 1967; unreleased

Bowie described this song as the “linchpin” of the first Velvet Underground album, lauding its “throbbing, sarcastic bass and guitar.” He incorporated it into his stage repertoire with the Riot Squad (and sporadically since then), later boasting that this was “the first time that a Velvets song had been covered by anyone, anywhere in the world.” His attempt to replicate the Velvets' sonic propulsion in the studio was only marginally successful, however. Both his harmonica and saxophone detracted from the sleazy urban ambience he was essaying, while bassist Brian Prebble veered away too obviously from the relentless key notes of the original recording. Bowie's vocal was a passable re-creation of Lou Reed's sound, though his efforts at transcription weren't: one of Reed's lines emerged as “a good friendly behind” in Bowie's mouth, anticipating his later excursions into sexual adventurism.