The Man Who Sold the World (61 page)

“Your Funny Smile” [A35],
430

Yule, Doug, 182

 

Zager & Evans, 80

Zanetta, Tony, 138

Zappa, Frank, 44, 127, 225, 244, 423, 424, 440, 447, 450

“Zen Archer” (Todd Rundgren), 223

Zen Buddhism
(book), 45

“Ziggy Stardust” [35],
121–23
, 124, 130

Ziggy Stardust
(LP), 11, 81, 92, 106, 109, 116, 118, 119, 121, 127, 132, 133, 151–53, 158–62, 167–70,
172–75
, 204, 230, 244, 297, 350, 441, 447

Ziggy Stardust
(proposed musical), 242, 246

Zimmerman, Tucker, 186n

“Zion” [75],
205

“Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah” (Bob B. Soxx & the Blue Jeans), 433

Zoo, 211

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Peter Doggett has been writing about popular music, the entertainment industry, and social and cultural history since 1980. A regular contributor to
Mojo, Q,
and
GQ,
Doggett is the author of many books, including
There's a Riot Going On: Revolutionaries, Rock Stars, and the Rise and Fall of the '60s
; and, most recently,
You Never Give Me Your Money: The Beatles After the Breakup.

 

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ALSO BY PETER DOGGETT

You Never Give Me Your Money: The Beatles After the Breakup

There's a Riot Going On: Revolutionaries, Rock Stars, and the Rise and Fall of the '60s

The Art and Music of John Lennon

Christie's Rock and Pop Memorabilia (co-author)

Are You Ready for the Country: Elvis, Dylan, Parsons and the Roots of Country Rock

Abbey Road/Let It Be: The Beatles (Classic Rock Albums Series)

Lou Reed: Growing Up in Public

CREDITS

Cover photograph © R. BAMBER /Rex Features /Courtesy Everett Collection

Cover design by Archie Ferguson

COPYRIGHT

THE MAN WHO SOLD THE WORLD.
Copyright © 2012 Peter Doggett. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks.

Originally published in different form in Great Britain in 2011 by The Bodley Head, The Random House Group Limited.

FIRST U.S. EDITION

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.

ISBN: 978-0-06-202465-7

Epub Edition © AUGUST 2012 ISBN: 9780062097149

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*
This was exactly the quality that the German rock band Kraftwerk exploited during the seventies, exerting a huge influence over Bowie's work in the second half of the decade.

 

*
The same argument had been propounded by surrealists such as the poet Paul Éluard in the 1920s.

 

*
Though not for long: his company went into voluntary liquidation in July 1964.

 

*
The name was inspired by the legendary Wild West character Jim Bowie, creator of the Bowie knife. David would later claim that he had chosen it for its incisive, knifelike qualities, but this was retrospective exaggeration; the simple fact was that he had enjoyed Richard Widmark's portrayal of Bowie in the 1960 Western epic
The Alamo
. In a bid for individuality, he chose to ignore the US pronunciation of the name [
Boo
-ie]; he rhymed the first syllable of his adopted surname with “mow,” and not “wow.”

 

*
Van Morrison would later acknowledge the same influence, in his song “Cleaning Windows.”

 

*
The British Board of Film Censors effectively sabotaged the project by informing Armstrong that the screenplay's homoerotic ambience made it impossible to film within the existing censorship laws.

 

*
Typically, Bowie was able to create mythology out of this depressing interlude. In 1975, he recalled: “I used to work for two guys [presumably in the copy shop] who put out a UFO magazine in England. And I made sightings six, seven times a night for about a year, when I was in the observatory. We never used to tell anybody.” A few seconds later, he talked about “media control . . . It's just so easy to do.” Indeed, he could have lectured on the subject.

 

*
All Our Yesterdays
was a TV series that ran in the United Kingdom from 1960 to 1973, comprising nostalgic excerpts of twenty-five-year-old newsreel footage.

 

*
The American rock band the Byrds preempted Kubrick by several months with their own “Space Odyssey”; they later recorded a tribute to the Apollo 11 astronauts.

 

*
Compare also the construction of Simon & Garfunkel's “Save the Life of My Child” on the
Bookends
album, which Bowie studied closely in 1968.

 

*
This chord recurred on other songs Bowie wrote during their collaboration, then vanished from his repertoire.

 

*
The C chord that established the key was played higher up the guitar neck than its companions.

 

*
All Bowie biographers agree that this artifact was taped in the Mercury Records office and was aimed at the record company's executives. But internal evidence leads me to believe that it was recorded at Bowie's home, for the ears of Bob Harris, the future BBC disc jockey then working for the London listings magazine
Time Out
. Harris had secured prestigious London gigs for Turquoise the previous year and continued to promote Bowie's cause throughout 1969.

 

*
For example, Bowie used
collocate
instead of
organize
, for no apparent reason except to show off his vocabulary; coincidentally, or not, T. S. Eliot had talked of “collocation” in the notes to
The Waste Land
. Another obscure reference may have been sparked by the death of the Polish “outsider” artist Nikifor in October 1968.

 

*
Bowie briefly intended to re-record “Janine” as a follow-up single to “Space Oddity” [1], incorporating parts of another Beatles song, “Love Me Do”—which he later added to “The Jean Genie” [65] in his 1973 concert repertoire. “Janine” could certainly have been retooled for the Ziggy era with only a modicum of effort.

 

*
The unexpected surge into an E major chord at the start of the verse's second line added a macho defiance to an already abrasive lyric.

 

*
This cannot help but recall the romantic bathos of the Beatles' “Norwegian Wood,” though Bowie was referring to the dream of Scandinavian bourgeois comfort marketed today by the Ikea chain.

 

*
The title told its own story: this was a Conversation Piece, or conceptual artwork, and also nothing more than a “conversation piece,” hardly worth anyone's attention, in the same protest-too-much tradition as “I'm Not Losing Sleep” [A19].

 

*
Rumor has it that Lesley Duncan was Bowie's lover in 1968; “Love Song” was later recorded by another of Duncan's friends, Elton John.

 

*
He wasn't alone in this complaint: Kevin Ayers's “Song for Insane Times” pursued a similar theme.

 

*
Speaking in America more than a year later, Bowie claimed: “I basically wanted [the song] to be a cry of ‘fuck humanity,' ” before adding with more than a degree of creative imagination, “it's a dialogue between a left-wing capitalist and a real revolutionary.”

 

*
And “older”: he held the first syllable, his voice cavernous with echo, with a keening croon that would reappear at the climax of “Wild Is the Wind” [131].

 

*
Compare the “Cygnet Committee” [8] nightmare of a “love machine” on “desolation rows.”

 

*
It was a Rosedale chord organ, played by Bowie; he could press buttons to trigger wheezing chords, though he was restricted to a choice of twelve, the major and minor chords of A, B
b
, C, D, F, and G, which—apart from a solitary Em—determined the structure of the song.

 

*
The music reflected the abrupt transition, veering from the soft, hanging and heavily echoed twelve-string chords of the opening bars, accompanied only by the tap of a cymbal and an electric guitar heavy in reverb, to the rough-edged knife of a rock band.

 

*
The Dylan references didn't end there: the title was only an adverb short of sounding like a refugee from
Blonde on Blonde
, while the track was performed with the same chaotic daring, all missed changes and dropouts, as the most anarchic moments of
Highway 61 Revisited
. Some other moments to treasure: the voice steering left for the first verse, right for the second, and eventually finding the middle of the road; Bowie's American pronunciation of
tomatoes
; and the way he defused the incendiary (for 1969) word
phallus
, by pronouncing it “fey-less.”

 

*
This throwaway song was gifted to Bowie's friend George Underwood but did nothing to revive a recording career that had extended to one 1965 single under the pseudonym “Calvin James.”

 

*
American singer John Denver recorded the song in 1970: he doesn't piss but “spits.”

 

*
Walker claimed that he originally learned the songs from Brel's original recordings, as translated for him by a German girlfriend, a claim that led him into dispute with Shuman.

 

*
This represented a minor variation on the D/D7/G/Gm pattern that opened “Lover to the Dawn” [6], which was itself a transposition of the E/E7/A/Am of the Beatles' “Dear Prudence,” released about a month before Bowie wrote his song.

 

*
The first line of the Beatles' “You've Got to Hide Your Love Away,” in fact.

 

*
The child/madman nexus of innocence was explored further in “After All” [20].

 

*
The chord quartet achieved the illusion of constantly rising, like the Penrose Stairs in Escher's
Ascending and Descending
.

 

*
In the same year, novelist J. G. Ballard noted that “the exterior landscapes of the 70s are almost entirely fictional ones created by advertising. . . . We move through a landscape composed of fictions.” In that context, it would be simple for someone to be there, and not there at all.