The Man Who Sold the World (64 page)

 

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These suggestions depended upon the belief that the “Tree of Life,” and the Kabbalah beyond it, were intrinsically “awful” because of their occult connotations, and moreover that Bowie agreed with this verdict. Case not proven on either count.

 

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Tony Visconti revealed in his autobiography that the track had originally featured several other verses, which were edited out during the mixing process.

 

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The initial syn-drums mirrored those on Kraftwerk's
Radio-Activity
album, paced between the title track and “Geiger Counter.” Ralph Hutter described his band's rhythm as “this metallic, metronomic beat,” adding proudly, “We play automatic music.”

 

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For Robert Fripp's interpretation of the same idea, listen to King Crimson's “Larks Tongues in Aspic (Part 1).”

 

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Many supporters refused to believe that their icons had killed themselves after the Lufthansa hijacking failed to bring about their release, preferring to believe that the RAF leaders must have been murdered by the state.

 

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Bowie teased his audience by printing his near lyrics, thereby inviting interpretation. It is tempting to believe that the “share bride” line was actually a comment on the 1975 marriage between Cher and keyboardist Gregg Allman.

 

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New Age is easy to recognize, virtually impossible to define: it exists on the mellow fringes of jazz, world music, classical music, and ambient dance/trance. Originally linked with “new age” spirituality in the late seventies, and then expanded into a marketing genre by the mid-eighties, it rapidly assumed a pejorative edge, as much for its attendant lifestyle as for its nonconfrontational nature.

 

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Another “Hero” was to be found on an album Bowie had certainly relished,
NEU! '75
. Sonically, however, that track exerted more influence on, arguably, “Beauty and the Beast” [147] and, unmistakably, “Red Sails” [168].

 

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Bowie certainly admired the
John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band
album, calling it “very straight from the shoulder”; he clearly listened to it often in 1976–77.

 

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Angus MacKinnon, in the
New Musical Express
, pronounced this “Bowie's most moving performance in years.”

 

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Few rock stars had dared to express themselves in the visual arts by the mid-seventies, the exceptions including John Lennon, who married a conceptual artist; Joni Mitchell, whose talent as a painter was exhibited on her album covers; and Bob Dylan, whose ability as a painter did not yet merit the description of “talent.”

 

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Length is rarely a good measure of art. One can't help recalling the occasion when Bob Dylan was asked, “What are your songs about?” “Oh, some are about six minutes . . .”

 

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Several critics have assumed a connection between this song and Scott Walker's “Nite Flights,” the title track of a 1978 Walker Brothers album, covered by Bowie on 1993's
Black Tie White Noise
. Bowie and Eno were certainly struck by the album, Bowie later describing it as including “quite the most lovely songs that I'd heard in years.” But there are no musical or lyrical resonances from Walker's song on “African Night Flight.” If anything, Walker's contributions to the
Nite Flights
LP sounded as if they were indebted to Bowie's
“Heroes,”
and in turn inspired several of the performances on
Scary Monsters
.

 

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For any students of British pop history, the narrator's claim that he was not “a moody guy” inevitably brought to mind “I'm a Moody Guy,” the first hit by early sixties pop star Shane Fenton—better known in the seventies as Alvin Stardust.

 

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Bowie promised that his Boys could never be cloned, though by 1979 the Mod revival was doing exactly that to the more individual Modernist tradition of the early sixties. And, talking of cloning, this track began life as a tribute to an old friend, under the working title “Louis Reed.”

 

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The following phrase, “tumbling centre,” was presumably a rendering of W. B. Yeats's often-quoted line “the centre cannot hold.”

 

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As a keen student of the three LPs by the German band NEU!, Bowie would have remembered the second side of
NEU! 2
beginning with the click and hum of a needle landing on a vinyl record.

 

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To be exact: seven bars in 7/8, followed by one bar in 3/8.

 

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Bowie insisted as the album was released that he had seen the phrase “scary monsters and super heroes” on the back of a Kellogg's Corn Flakes packet. His story revived memories of John Lennon basing the Beatles' “Good Morning, Good Morning” on a TV commercial for the same cereal.

 

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One line of “Ashes to Ashes” paraphrased a manifesto from a letter by Franz Kafka: “A book must be an ice-axe to break the frozen seas inside us.” As an autodidact, Bowie found it hard not to show off his learning.

 

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Not at the beginning: the song's original working title was “People Are Turning to Gold,” as if King Midas rather than Major Tom might have been the protagonist.

 

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“The next religion might come from the world of fashion,” opined the novelist J. G. Ballard in 1970. Or indeed from rock'n'roll: the death of Elvis Presley in 1977 provoked a gradual blurring of reality and myth that prompted cultural critics to ponder whether he might ultimately become the subject of religious frenzy. By 1992, the BBC's religious affairs correspondent could write a book,
Elvis People
, with a blurb that claimed: “It poses a serious question: are we witnessing the birth of a new religious movement?” Presleyism may one day have to fight for spiritual space with Jacksonism, Lennonism, and of course Cobainianity.

 

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That phrase had been the title of an Astronettes song seven years earlier [94], while the “beep beep” refrain came from the decade-old “Rupert the Riley” [36], and from the Beatles before that.

 

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Gary Numan is a prime example of how context and time alter the meaning of art. For anyone over the age of fifteen when the preternaturally awkward and robotic singer emerged in 1979, Numan was a joke. He's now acclaimed as a formative influence on industrial metal and a dozen related genres.

 

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One phrase, “midwives of history,” took an elliptical route to Bowie's song. The title of a 1940 poem by the American writer Lionel Abel, it was based on a common misquotation from Karl Marx's
Das Kapital
, to the effect that it is violence that forces the birth of a new society from the belly of the old. The phrase was brought into general political discourse via an essay by Hannah Arendt and is often repeated as “war and violence are the midwives of history,” something that neither Marx nor Arendt wrote.

 

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“There is no such thing as society,” Margaret Thatcher would declare seven years later, as if to explain Bowie's verbal blockage.

 

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Bowie briefly considered tackling Cream's “I Feel Free” on this album, a song that he had performed live with the Spiders in 1972. He abandoned the idea after recording a backing track, perhaps realizing that the song's title contradicted everything else on his record.

 

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His original demo for the song suggested that he didn't entirely believe this verdict: lyrically incomplete, it was titled defiantly “Because I'm Young.”

 

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Ironically, the song may have left an indelible mark on Townshend after all. Bowie invented the word
psychodelicate
; more than a decade later, Townshend issued a concept album titled
Psychoderelict
.

 

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This visual motif harked back to the Dalí/Buñuel film
Un Chien Andalou
and was reproduced by a genuine woman in the clip for Bowie's 1983 single “China Girl.”

 

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Bowie wrote in the sleeve notes: “My personal memory stock for this album was made up from an almighty plethora of influences and reminiscences from the 1970s.” He provided a list, many items on which seemed to date back to his early-sixties exploration of London with his elder brother. He also referenced both T. Rex and Marc Bolan, unfortunately giving his friend's name as “Mark,” which robbed his tribute of some of its poignancy.

 

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The title was probably borrowed from a contemporary single by the Dixie Cups, “Gee the Moon Is Shining Bright,” a theme also included in Bowie's lyric.

 

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Composing on guitar by instinct rather than musical awareness, he incorporated some “borrowed” chords that gave the song a modal and chromatic effect.

 

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The bass offered an ominous A-B-C climb against the less decisive E
b
-D
b
-E of the vocal melody.

 

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The mention of “playgirl” predated the magazine of that name by several years, and was probably inspired by the Marvelettes' 1962 Motown hit, and Mod anthem, “Playboy.” Dana Gillespie, meanwhile, pursued her own recording career, reemerging in Bowie's story in 1971 [47].

 

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The term was coined in the early 1970s to describe an aggressive, R&B-flavored form of urban US rock heavily influenced by the Rolling Stones and the Yardbirds. The “punk” tag was then applied to artists such as the New York Dolls and Patti Smith, before becoming tied to the altogether more restrictive sound of young Britain circa 1976–77.

 

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The success of the vintage clothes store I Was Lord Kitchener's Valet, which opened in London's Portobello Road in 1964 and had extended to five shops by 1966, exemplified this trend. Edwardian jackets became a virtual uniform for the likes of the Jimi Hendrix Experience, the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones in 1966.

 

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The mock-baroque introduction in Gm is interrupted by the insistent root of Am, where the track remains for two verses before a trumpet solo and verse in Bm, a final verse in C#m, and a coda in E
b
m. The rhythm is equally varied, toying with the constraints of the 4/4 rhythm.

 

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One wonders what influence this song might have had on the Beatles, about to begin work on their
Sgt. Pepper
album when “Rubber Band” was released. They reprised the “out-of-tune” theme on “With a Little Help from My Friends,” while both the
Pepper
uniforms and the orchestral coloring of several songs on the LP reflected Bowie's Georgian theme.

 

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Bowie wasn't targeted for special treatment; Pye also succeeded in destroying almost all of the sixties master tapes by the Kinks.

 

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“Big Black Smoke,” issued on the B-side of “Dead End Street” in November 1966, offered an equally jaundiced perspective on a young girl's prospects in Swinging London. There are clear thematic links between the two songs: had Ray Davies perhaps heard Bowie's original recording at Pye, or was the coincidence merely synchronicity?

 

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The writer Kenneth Leach worked in a Soho coffee bar at the time this song was written, and when Bowie was frequenting such clubs: he noted that 1966 was the year when amphetamines were starting to be superseded by LSD and cannabis. His London boys, he wrote, “were either homosexual or experimenting with homosexuality. The average age was about 18–19. There were at this time only a few heterosexual girls, and a large number of ‘chickens,' that is, very young, pretty boys who were acquired and used by the older ones. . . . Use of amphetamines by kids in the club was closely related to the confusion about sexual identity. There was as much boasting about the number of pills consumed as about the number of sexual acts.”

 

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These basically followed—with occasional substitutions—the “circle/cycle of fifths” found everywhere from Bach to the Beatles' “Lovely Rita.”

 

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Bowie had clearly read the book: though he changed the characters' names, he retained the location of their illicit adventures, in the rhubarb fields. Coincidentally, the leading role in the 1961 BBC radio adaptation of this story was played by another David Jones, the future star of the Monkees.