The Man Who Sold the World

by Peter Doggett

  This psychological complexity was strangely at odds with the playful exuberance of the music, Bowie and Hutchinson ending the demo with the wordless chorus from the Beatles’ “Hey Jude,”* and Bowie drifting into an impression of Elvis Presley on the record. The latter was wonderfully chaotic, like a herd of buffalo careering through the studio, with Mick Wayne’s electric guitar cutting across the Dylanesque acoustic guitar changes that rooted the song,* while Bowie plucked haphazardly at an African thumb piano. Almost shouting a high harmony behind his chorus vocal, Bowie stretched himself to an A beyond his normal range.

  [3] AN OCCASIONAL DREAM

  (Bowie)

  Demo recorded March 1969; unreleased. Re-recorded July 1969; David Bowie [Space Oddity] LP

  * * *

  Nothing in the “David Bowie + Hutch” repertoire recalled the music of Simon & Garfunkel more than their demo recording of this melancholy reflection on a love affair, which ended with an arpeggio chord that demanded to lead into Simon’s “The Sound of Silence.” Hutchinson’s blueprint was followed exactly in the studio, suggesting that Keith Christmas—a singer-songwriter whom Bowie perhaps envisaged as Hutch’s successor—had listened attentively to the demo. It was a subtle, flowing arrangement, with unexpected shifts of key and mood, and discreet application of woodwinds, but elegantly constructed (in a way that much of Bowie’s earlier material was not) to allow smooth transition between otherwise dissonant elements. Trapped in the circularity of the chorus, the melody soared only when Bowie recalled the fantasy that gave the song its name, and as it escaped its shackles in the final movement, his voice conjured an eerie anticipation of the man who would croon “Wild Is the Wind” [131].

  So personal was the lyrical landscape of the song, with its talk of a “Swedish room,”* that the inspiration can only have been the collapse of Bowie’s relationship with Hermione Farthingale in February 1969, recalled with almost manic obsession. He couldn’t bear to “touch your name,” he insisted, though by the time his album was completed in September he was prepared to use it openly in a song title [5].

  [4] CONVERSATION PIECE

  (Bowie)

  Demo recorded March 1969; unreleased. Re-recorded August/September 1969; single B-side

  * * *

  Intended until late in the day for the 1969 David Bowie album, “Conversation Piece”* might have tilted the record too pointedly toward the melancholy folk rock of his post-Hermione self-pity. It had the tightly restrictive melodic range of a French chanson, a modulation introduced only to shake off the air of gloom, and an ending that neatly embraced both prevailing keys. Oboe added decoration to what would otherwise have been a maudlin tune, and on the single occasion when the instrument ran off its country-tinged rails into an accidental discord (just after Bowie sang “so rudely”), it was masked by the subtle use of strings—a combination that led the ear to believe it was hearing a steel guitar.

  Two years earlier, Bowie had employed his own mask to distance himself from his characters: he was the storyteller, the entertainer, the Actor (as he would bill himself on Hunky Dory). Here, as on “Space Oddity” [1], where Major Tom’s alienation became his own, his characters were infested with his emotions. On his 1967 debut album, “Conversation Piece” might have been called “College Clive”: the heartrending tale, ladies and gentlemen, of a young man who read so many books that he could no longer connect with the real world. The 1969 incarnation of David Bowie wallowed in his narrator’s narcissistic agony and the realization that he could no longer “read” conversation, on the page or in real life. His voice was a warm, husky purr, but the ghost of Hermione lingered over the track like a Gothic mist.

  [5] LETTER TO HERMIONE (AKA I’M NOT QUITE)

  (Bowie)

  Demo recorded March 1969; unreleased. Re-recorded August/September 1969; David Bowie [Space Oddity] LP

  * * *

  The lingering resonance of the twelve-string acoustic guitar encourages experimentation with chord shapes not found in the instruction books. Hanging, open chords that would sound one-dimensional on a six-string instrument suddenly assume three-dimensional form on a twelve-string. Hutchinson and Bowie’s investigations of chord variations lacking a root, by simple tint of lifting a finger from the fretboard, created the lush, appealingly unfulfilled landscape of this study in lost love and emotional transference. The latter turned Bowie’s unashamed acknowledgment of his deepest passion into an admission—possibly unconscious, though painfully obvious in retrospect—that his pain had warped his sense of reality.

  William Burroughs once described the tape recorder as “an externalized section of the human nervous system,” allowing someone to transfer unpleasant memories from the brain onto an external object, where they could be manipulated into a form that was easier to bear. Bowie later told Burroughs that “I’m not at ease with the word ‘love.’ . . . I gave too much of my time and energy to another person, and they did the same to me, and we started burning out against each other.” He was referring, of course, to Hermione Farthingale, the subject of this song, the loss of whom pervaded so much of Bowie’s work in 1969. More dramatically, and perhaps more truthfully, Bowie once recalled that being in love “was an awful experience. It rotted me, drained me, and it was a disease.” But that was a retrospective judgment: when he wrote the song he initially titled “I’m Not Quite” (itself a telling phrase, in isolation), he was still besotted with her memory. Throughout three beautifully sung verses, he wrapped his feelings around his fantasy of Hermione, in the desperate hope that they might become her own emotional skin. After describing the perfection of her life without him, Bowie wondered if Hermione might, just once, have called out his name, “just by mistake.”

  Yet it would require a hard heart not to be touched by the open naïveté of this performance—a nakedness that Bowie would not repeat until the Low album. His voice grew husky and cracked with tears during the second verse, and unlike his laughter-to-order on “Love You Till Tuesday” [A37], this time it felt unfeigned. Keith Christmas set harmonics ringing on his guitar, sparkling like raindrops on a sunlit lake. And nothing spoke deeper than the scat vocal that began and ended the song, and which—to judge from their acoustic demo—was a Hutchinson innovation, in the style that David Crosby would soon make his own.

  Hermione’s memory was rarely far from Bowie’s mind during the summer of 1969: chronicler Kevin Cann notes that when Bowie attended the Malta Song Festival in July, he wrote new words for a local folk song, which he titled “No-One Someone” and devoted to a girl who “loved to walk by the neon-lit fountains.” Yet by November he had mustered sufficient self-protection to boast, “I’ve never had any traumas with girls.”

  [6] LOVER TO THE DAWN

  (Bowie)

  Demo recorded March 1969; unreleased

  * * *

  This four-minute acoustic demo captured the gestation of one of Bowie’s weightiest compositions, “Cygnet Committee” [8]. It demonstrated the gulf between the melancholy romanticism of his collaborations with John Hutchinson and the harsh eye of his subsequent solo work; it also shed intriguing light on the balance of creative power in the “Bowie + Hutch” partnership.

  As recorded in spring 1969, and presumably intended for their duo album, “Lover to the Dawn” introduced the opening theme of “Cygnet Committee,” but only as an intricate instrumental guitar passage, and included almost all of the second section, with its singing sparrow. Rather than entering the mythical terrain of “Cygnet Committee,” it moved through a series of sequences that were lopped from the later song—including a blatant imitation of the “hey, hey, hey” refrain from Paul Simon’s “Mrs. Robinson.” The object of their lament was, inevitably, a young woman maligned as “bitter” and “crazy” because she no longer wanted to associate with these perfectly nice young men.

  Yet this was far from being a vehicle for Bowie’s sadness, in the vein of “Letter to Hermione” [5]. It was Hutchinson who took center stage here, with Bowie ad
ding a harmony line that pushed his voice to its upper limits. In this form, it was a rather disjointed, derivative, and jaundiced pastoral, taking the Beatles’ “Mother Nature’s Son” and the entire oeuvre of Donovan as its model. Stripped of most of Hutchinson’s decorations, it would soon become something altogether more intimidating.

  The demo tapes that “David Bowie + Hutch” recorded in the early weeks of 1969 also included revivals of the blighted “Ching-A-Ling” [A55] and the more passable “When I’m Five” [A53], and two cover versions, Lesley Duncan’s* “Love Song” and “Life Is a Circus,” by the harmony band Djin, both vehicles for duets in the Simon & Garfunkel style.

  Bowie’s partnership with Hutchinson ended for economic, rather than musical, reasons. For several weeks Bowie continued to consider himself a member of a duo, and it was definitely in that guise that he submitted a demo tape to Mercury Records’ London office, staffed by his friend and, apparently, occasional lover, Calvin Mark Lee. Mercury duly offered Bowie a recording contract, by which time he was a solo artist. Lee was also responsible for another, equally momentous liaison: he reintroduced Bowie to nineteen-year-old Angie Barnett, who became his girlfriend. Bowie shamelessly moved her into the house that he was sharing with another sexual partner—with whom he was also engaged in his most committed espousal of the late sixties counterculture.

  [7] WILD-EYED BOY FROM FREECLOUD

  (Bowie)

  Recorded June 1969; single B-side. Re-recorded August 1969; David Bowie [Space Oddity] LP

  * * *

  The first Arts Lab was founded by Jim Haynes in Drury Lane, London. It was, Haynes declared, “an ‘energy centre’ where anything can happen depending upon the needs of the people running each individual Lab and the characteristics of the building. A Lab is a non-Institution . . . a Lab’s boundaries should be limitless.” The venue hosted art exhibitions by Yoko Ono and John Lennon, among many other happenings, and attracted curious visitors from across London. Among them was David Bowie, who by spring 1969 was living with underground journalist Mary Finnigan in Beckenham. As the Arts Lab ethic spread across the country, they launched a local venture at a pub in Beckenham High Street: a Folk Lab, initially, designed as a fund-raising focus for a wider Arts Lab collective. As a demonstration of Bowie’s almost invisible profile as a musician, he and Finnigan listed their home phone number in underground newspaper advertisements for their enterprise.

  “The plan is to turn on the adults by spearheading the project at children,” Finnigan announced. “Initially, we will run Saturday morning poetry, music and mime scenes for children, gradually expanding to include theatre projects for kids.” Bowie, she said, “is enthusiastic about teaching mime, music and drama to kids.” His affinity with children was apparent from songs such as “There Is a Happy Land” [A25] and “When I’m Five” [A53]; his own experience of childhood was more ambiguous. At twenty-two, he admitted that “I feel almost middle-aged physically. I often regret not leading a more normal teenage life.”

  His idealism and regret informed the parable of the “Wild-Eyed Boy from Freecloud”: an innocent boy is threatened with hanging by his fellow citizens and is rescued by the mountain on which he lives, which destroys the village to save his life. “Everything the boy says is taken the wrong way,” Bowie explained, “both by those who fear him and those who love him. I suppose in a way he’s rather a prophet-figure.” The song added another dimension: the boy’s persecution was sparked by a fear that his madness might be contagious. Allowed to speak, though, the boy uttered nothing more insane than a cry of universal humanity: the hippie equivalent of Ziggy Stardust’s “you’re not alone” [61]. Twenty years later, Bowie reflected: “I always felt I was on the edge of events, the fringe of things, and left out. A lot of my characters in those early years seem to revolve around that one feeling.”

  “Wild-Eyed Boy from Freecloud” was a courageous attempt to deal with this isolation on an almost operatic scale. Trapped in his prison, the boy was represented by the endless circularity of a D chord with a descending root, from which there was no escape; even a key shift led inexorably back down the scale to captivity. As the scene cut to the mountain, announced with a strident C major chord, the ground began to slide, and after a series of unexpected key changes, Bowie proclaimed the boy’s apparent freedom with a defiant proclamation of identity. Then the action began to race, with a flurry of abrupt tonic/subdominant and tonic/relative-minor chord changes—before, inexorably, the initial theme returned, to signal that hope had died. The melody kept close to the action, the boy’s plaintive cry reaching to Bowie’s familiar high G, and then being knocked back to earth.

  In its initial reading, the song was played out starkly against acoustic guitar and an almost aggressive, chopping cello played by Paul Buckmaster. When re-recorded for the David Bowie LP, it was left to gasp beneath an epic arrangement (“I heard a Wagnerian orchestra in my head,” admitted producer Tony Visconti), tonally rich and extravagant to the point that it sapped the drama from the story. This time Bowie’s voice cracked emotionally on the final line, but it was a gesture too far, the wave of an actor’s hand.

  The spare original arrangement was issued as the B-side to “Space Oddity” [1] on July 11, 1969. “Never have I been so flipped out about a single,” enthused one of Mercury Records’ US executives. But he warned: “I’ve been quite concerned about the record’s ending. I’ve been worried that some programmers might not play it, what with the space shot and all.” In America, the single’s negative slant on the space mission smothered its commercial prospects; in Britain it took seven weeks to make the Top 50 sales chart. By then, Bowie’s enthusiasm for his success had been jolted by the unexpected death of his father on August 5. “David’s career would have turned out differently had his father lived,” Kenneth Pitt reflected later. “[John Jones] would have [been] the moderating influence David needed.”

  [8] CYGNET COMMITTEE

  (Bowie)

  Recorded August–September 1969; David Bowie [Space Oddity] LP

  * * *

  Written almost simultaneously, “Cygnet Committee” and “Memory of a Free Festival” [9] documented the extremes of Bowie’s reaction to the hippie movement, and his Arts Lab experiment as a microcosm of that ideal. “Here we are in Beckenham,” he said as “Space Oddity” [1] was released, “with a group of people creating their own momentum without the slightest concern for attitudes, tradition or pre-ordained moralities. It’s alive, healthy and new, and it matters to me more than anything else.” In September, as “Space Oddity” finally charted, three months after it was released, he was still suffused with optimism: “I run an Arts Lab which is my chief occupation. I think it’s the best in the country. There isn’t one pseud involved. All the people are real—like labourers or bank clerks.” Yet by the end of the month he had completed this long, near-hysterical account of betrayal, disillusion, greed, and defiant individualism, which completed one side of his album, while his radiant-eyed account of the Arts Lab festival closed the other.

  By November, he was declaring that the hippie movement was dead,* its followers “materialistic and selfish.” “These people,” he said dismissively, “they’re so apathetic, so lethargic. The laziest people I’ve met in my life.” Hippies were no more motivated than anyone else: everyone was “crying out for a leader.” Like Bob Dylan, who was fighting off all attempts to co-opt him as the figurehead of a countercultural revolution, Bowie wanted nothing more than to be allowed to live. That single word, screeched over and over like a victim’s final cry for help, provided the climax to a song that cast off the comfortable slogans of the counterculture, the catchphrases of the Beatles or the MC5 that were bandied around the underground press as gestures of solidarity. A year later, in a song Bowie much admired (“God”), John Lennon compressed the death of idealism into a single phrase: “The dream is over.” Bowie, still grieving for Hermione and his recently deceased father, struggling to adjust to the commercial recognition that h
ad been his sole aim since 1963, needed more than nine minutes to spit out the emotional debris.* In interviews before his father’s death, Bowie talked warmly of what “we” could achieve with the Arts Lab. After his bereavement, Bowie was a defiantly singular “I.”

  His vehicle, ironically, was a remnant of the dream, as—following a brief prelude, which sounded as if the musicians were uncurling themselves after long hibernation—“Cygnet Committee” was constructed around the delicate skeleton of “Lover to the Dawn” [6]. Its first two sections were retained intact, with another paean to Hermione fleshing out the previously instrumental opening. Once more, Bowie was “The Thinker,”* but now he eschewed romance in favor of a bitter excoriation of all those who had drained his energy, sapped his will, even exhausted his money: the price of his fame. From a defiant movement through the key of F, a rhythm guitar stabbing the third beat of every bar, Bowie gave way to self-pity, unloading himself across the familiar I-vi-IV-V chord progression (in C) that underpinned a thousand maudlin fifties teen ballads.