The Man Who Sold the World

by Peter Doggett

  And then the dance began again, with Hermione recollected as a touchstone of truth, before the betrayed Thinker was replaced by the voice of the crowd, ungrateful and unworthy, revealing their subterfuge like pantomime villains. Bowie’s language grew even more bombastic, passion replacing poetry, adding up to total condemnation of the values of the counterculture. One by one, the hollow slogans of the failed revolution were tossed aside, Bowie ranting like a robot dictator, the band chaotic in their excitement, an electronically treated harpsichord swaying from side to side across the stereo spectrum.

  Finally, Bowie escaped the tight four-chord restraints of the song with a desperate cry for freedom: “Live!” He had finally shed his illusions: having dominated his songwriting for months, Hermione vanished from his landscape. Even before he had become a star, Bowie had glimpsed the cannibalistic relationship between leader and followers, idol and fans, guru and disciples. Yet he was still drawn toward pursuing fame, influence, the trappings of a god—a tension that would haunt the decade ahead.

  [9] MEMORY OF A FREE FESTIVAL

  (Bowie)

  Recorded September 1969; David Bowie [Space Oddity] LP. Re-recorded March/April 1970; single A/B-sides

  * * *

  Five days after his father’s funeral, when he was “in a completely catatonic state,” Bowie performed at the Growth Summer Festival and Free Concert in Beckenham. It was the epitome of countercultural eclecticism: besides an array of folk and rock musicians, the event offered “a barbecue, exotic tea stall, poster & original artwork stall, Transmutation paper & magazine shop, candy floss, street theatre, puppet theatre, jewellery & ceramics stall, clothes shop, fuzz-nut shy, assault course, Tibetan shop, Culpepper herb and food stall, etc.” The Beckenham Arts Lab collective (alias Growth) had expanded in four months from a sparsely attended folk club in the back room of a pub to a celebration of summer optimism filling a local park.

  Growth organizer Mary Finnigan recalled that Bowie was “vile” that day, castigating his fellow activists as “mercenary pigs” because they had allowed the stalls to raise money for their activities—which was the avowed aim of the festival. “He hated us for it,” she said, “and I hated him.”

  Yet within three weeks Bowie had written and recorded “Memory of a Free Festival,” the anthemic climax to his second album. “We go out on an air of optimism, which I believe in,” he explained. “I wrote this after the Beckenham Festival, when I was very happy.” What he created was a fantasy, a melding of other people’s experiences of Beckenham with news reports of the Woodstock gathering in upstate New York that same weekend, filtered through a science fiction sensibility that passed control of earthly happiness from the hippies to visitors from the stars. It climaxed in a simple chant, inspired by the elongated ending of the Beatles’ “Hey Jude” the previous year, which celebrated the arrival of the Sun Machine, inaugurating a party that would no doubt stretch out into the galaxies.*

  Amid the celebration, however, Bowie acknowledged that this was all fiction—one with which he was prepared to play along, but a simulacrum of reality, nonetheless. Then he immersed himself in the innocence of fantasy, among Venusians, Peter (Pan?), and the rest, with people passing bliss among the crowds, and Bowie himself fixed on the overpowering Buddhist enlightenment of satori. As a growing chorus joined his anthem to the Sun Machine, he let the myth run free, his own memory of a particular free festival fading into the “summer’s end” of 1960s idealism.

  This required a giant leap of faith, so it was apt that the music began with what sounded like an uncertain church organ.* To hint that we were in a dreamworld, the organ (and Bowie’s voice) drifted very slowly back and forth between the stereo speakers. At the height of the fairy tale, with tall Venusians mingling in the crowd, Bowie soared like a choirboy to a top A. Then there was a flurry of sound, an unthreatening counterpart to the anarchic cacophony of the Beatles’ “Revolution 9,” before a fuzz bass stabilized the tempo and Bowie announced the joyous coming of the sun.

  In the mythology of the 1960s, Woodstock was followed by the shambolic Altamont festival in December 1969; the moon landing of July led to the near disaster of Apollo 13 in April 1970; and, after Bowie was pulled onto the pop circuit to promote “Space Oddity,” the Beckenham Arts Lab folded back into a folk club, and then vanished, as did the national movement inspired by Drury Lane. When “The Prettiest Star” [13] failed to extend his career as a pop star, his record company suggested that he should re-record “Free Festival” as a single for the very different summer of 1970.

  It was a significant moment in Bowie’s career: his first recording session with guitarist Mick Ronson, his creative foil for the next three years. With the song now split across both sides of a single, Ronson dominated the finale, his Eric Clapton–inspired tone subordinating the chorus choir. Earlier, he had taken his turn as each instrument slowly entered the scene, and an instrumental flourish (a signal of allegiance to progressive rock, not pop) marked the end of each verse. But the most significant change came from Bowie himself: the vulnerable idealist of 1969 was now a recognizable prototype for Ziggy Stardust at his most swaggering, drifting into a phrase or two in mock Cockney as a proud badge of identity, rather than a throwback to the music hall as in 1967. Ironically, while the song was now tighter and more focused than before, it appeared at a time when rock festivals were torn between chaos and commercialism, and bliss was no longer being passed among the crowd.

  [10] GOD KNOWS I’M GOOD

  (Bowie)

  Recorded September 1969; David Bowie [Space Oddity] LP

  * * *

  The final two songs recorded for Bowie’s second album offered variants on the African rhythm brought to rock’n’roll by Bo Diddley, and employed most famously on the Rolling Stones’ “Not Fade Away” and George Michael’s “Faith.” Bowie transported it to acoustic twelve-string guitar for this trivial extrapolation of a 1969 tabloid story about a shoplifter. Rhythm aside, his obvious influence was Bob Dylan, Bowie throwing around flamboyant metaphors (the “spitting,” “shrieking” cash machine) and emphasizing apparently random syllables in what he clearly believed to be an imitation of the master. Only in the chorus (echoed for dramatic effect) did he step outside his familiar folk guitar changes in A minor, landing on an E major at the end of each line to accentuate the moral crisis at hand.

  [11] UNWASHED AND SOMEWHAT SLIGHTLY DAZED

  (Bowie) (inc.)

  [11A] DON’T SIT DOWN

  Recorded September 1969; David Bowie [Space Oddity] LP

  * * *

  “Unwashed” was ostensibly the most conventional rock recording on Bowie’s second album, the electric blues workout of its second half almost erasing what had gone before. Within a few days, however, Bowie was capable of revealing two ambiguous “explanations” for the song: that it was “about a boy whose girlfriend thinks he is socially inferior” (a theme that first surfaced on “I’m Not Losing Sleep” [A19] in 1966), and then that it “describes how I felt in the weeks after my father died.” What was most shocking about the song wasn’t the comic-book violence of its imagery—the rotting flesh and rats of a heavy metal nightmare—but the swiftness of the transition from the “pretty girl” who glimpsed Bowie from her window, to the revenge exacted on her accursed father.*

  Like several songs of this period (notably “Cygnet Committee” [8]), “Unwashed” sounded as if it had been assembled piecemeal, wandering through a succession of major chords in a desperate attempt to find a home. It eventually settled on C, and a slowed-down, souped-up reproduction of the Rolling Stones’ “Not Fade Away,” escaping the formula only for two Dylan-inspired* runs from G and then F back to the key chord at the climax of the chorus. After Bowie had exhausted his self-disgust and his social inferiority complex, the band took control, their leader contributing a single scared-sheep bleat in imitation of his friend Marc Bolan, before the brass and Benny Marshall’s blues-wailing harp brought the track home.

  Original pre
ssings of the album, and the most recent CD reissue, separated this track from “Letter to Hermione” [5] with a forty-second audio-verité extract from a jam session around the “Unwashed” chords. Pointless and disruptive, it barely deserved the honor of its own title: “Don’t Sit Down.” The album is stronger without it.

  DAVID BOWIE LP (ALIAS SPACE ODDITY)

  Recorded June–September 1969; released November 1969 (UK), January 1970 (US).

  Like Zager & Evans’s “In the Year 2525,” a transatlantic hit single in late summer 1969, “Space Oddity” [1] was such an obvious novelty for the pop audience—indelibly linked to the Apollo missions—that it sapped rather than reinforced Bowie’s prestige as a performer. Fans at his live performances reacted ecstatically to the song, then ignored everything else he offered them. A similar fate awaited David Bowie, his second album release of that title—replacing the 1967 model with the same lack of regret that Ford might have applied to the launch of a new Escort. Only when it was reissued in 1972, with a Ziggy Stardust–era cover portrait, was the record renamed Space Oddity.

  If the original intention was to stress that Bowie could not be defined by one song alone, it was a disaster in marketing terms. Like its Deram predecessor, the 1969 David Bowie offered no more clue to its contents than a striking color photograph of its creator—his Dylan (circa 1966) perm merging into an Op Art array of blue circles taken from the Planetary Folklore portfolio by the Hungarian artist Victor Vasarely. The artist was seeking to create a sense of movement: superimposed with Bowie’s staring face, his painting lost its purpose. So did the Beckenham Arts Lab: as Bowie complained in 1971, “We found that the mass percentage of the people that came just came to be entertained. The participation element was gone.” With his idealism punctured, he viewed his success purely in financial terms. “The money I’m making now will make a nice nest egg,” he explained, “and if the bubble bursts, I’ll be able to live quite comfortably for a couple of years on the proceeds.” Would success, however short-lived, go to his head? “I can take it all in my stride. I’m not a particularly excitable person.”

  Elsewhere, he revealed that “I never plan ahead, and I’m very fickle. I’m always changing my mind about things.” He presented a different persona in every situation: meeting an interviewer whose interests went beyond pop, he would talk knowledgeably about authors such as André Gide, Oscar Wilde, and Dylan Thomas. Confronted by skinheads after a poorly received solo performance, he promised to act as their spokesman in the underground newspaper International Times. The paper’s in-house “skin” duly announced the launch of a regular column: “He’s a good bloke, and on our side, in spite of his long hair, and he should have a lot of interesting things to say.” But none of Bowie’s thoughts on the skinhead lifestyle ever appeared in print. Meanwhile, he was toying with the idea of assembling a rock band, having borrowed the services of Junior’s Eyes for his late 1969 tour commitments, while at the same time giving serious consideration to starring in a stage adaptation of a novel by Sir Walter Scott at the Harrogate Theatre. This was still the butterfly Bowie of 1967, uncertain how to meet the new decade, and unable to fix on a salable brand that could quell his growing feelings of restlessness and inertia.

  [12] LONDON BYE TA-TA

  (Bowie) [see also A52 and 14]

  Recorded January 1970; David Bowie [Space Oddity] (Deluxe Edition) CD

  * * *

  The success of “Space Oddity” [1] demanded a follow-up, and though Bowie had toyed with a ditty titled “Hole in the Ground”* before Christmas, that wasn’t it. Neither, it transpired, was this remake of an unreleased song from 1968, despite press reports that it had been scheduled as his next single, and several broadcast performances by Bowie. It might have been a more productive choice than “The Prettiest Star” [13], thanks to an arrangement that featured spiky electric guitar, a three-woman vocal chorus in the gospel-flavored style that was fast becoming de rigueur on the London rock scene, and a boogie riff that looked ahead to “Suffragette City” [59] two years hence.

  [13] THE PRETTIEST STAR

  (Bowie) [see also 71]

  Recorded January 1970; single A-side

  * * *

  Bowie promised an ecstatic climb to the summit in the final verse of this spring 1970 single, and if—as is commonly supposed—it was inspired by Angie Barnett, the woman who became his wife two weeks after it was released, then it was uncannily prophetic (professionally, if not personally). The song garnered a huge audience when it was revived on Aladdin Sane, but this blueprint is rumored to have sold no more than one thousand copies. “I think a lot of people were expecting another ‘Space Oddity,’ ” Bowie mused as it became clear the single would not be a hit.

  The flaw was not Bowie’s delightful melody, tripping around the key of F like a party of revelers from The Great Gatsby; or the words, sufficiently romantic to make any recipient swell with pride; or indeed the intimate, breathy vocal, with Bowie purring like Eartha Kitt draping herself across a chaise longue. What damned the single commercially was, in retrospect, its main attraction for collectors of rock trivia: the only memorable musical collaboration between the two sixties Mods who had spent the decade vainly chasing a vision of stardom, Bowie and Marc Bolan. Tony Visconti produced them both, and engineered this uneasy alliance, in which Bolan extemporized a solo around the verse melody. (Typically, Bolan later claimed that he also “wrote the middle bit” of the song.) The problem was not the notes, but the ambience, which left Bolan’s guitar as the sonic focus of the track, with an edginess that grated against the voice and rhythm section. The lethargic nature of the latter didn’t help, either. Only Bowie’s personal stake in the song could have persuaded him that this was his best shot at radio airplay.

  Two weeks after the release of “The Prettiest Star,” Bowie and Angie became husband and wife. “She’s an American citizen, and if I hadn’t married her, she’d have had to leave the country,” Bowie explained a few months later. “But for that, I don’t think we’d have got married at all.” The couple embarked on what both agreed should be an “open marriage”—a fashionable concept of the times, and also the title of a bestselling 1972 study of “free love” by the anthropologists Nena and George O’Neill. By 1977, Nena O’Neill had written a retraction, titled The Marriage Premise, having discovered that few of her original interview subjects had succeeded in keeping their open marriages intact. Neither would David and Angie Bowie.

  In a coincidence that symbolized the directionless nature of his career, “The Prettiest Star” was released on the same day as The World of David Bowie, a budget-priced (less than one pound) album of his Deram recordings. Bowie was allowed to select and sequence the tracks, retaining most of his 1967 David Bowie LP but substituting three songs that the record company had chosen not to release: “Let Me Sleep Beside You” [A47], “Karma Man” [A48], and “In the Heat of the Morning” [A49]. Although the album’s appearance did provide a degree of publicity, it also suggested that he was already a man of the past, his “World” circumscribed by music he had recorded several years earlier.

  [14] THREEPENNY PIERROT

  (Bowie)

  [15] THE MIRROR (AKA HARLEQUIN)

  (Bowie)

  [16] COLUMBINE

  (Bowie)

  Recorded January–February 1970; Scottish TV

  * * *

  Finding himself in Scotland at the same time as Lindsay Kemp, Bowie agreed to participate in a Scottish TV production of Pierrot in Turquoise, which he had last performed in March 1968. Of the three musical pieces fashioned for the show, “Threepenny Pierrot” was a simple keyboard reworking of “London Bye Ta-Ta” [A52 and 12] sung at breakneck speed with lyrics inspired by the commedia dell’arte archetype. “Columbine” (Harlequin’s perennial love interest) and “The Mirror” were brief new compositions, adhering to theatrical need and to the folk ambience of his early 1969 songs, though there was a stridency to the delivery of “The Mirror” that betrayed a new self-confidenc
e waiting to be captured on record. Once again, though, this was a gesture to the past rather than the future.

  [17] AMSTERDAM

  (Brel; trans. Shuman)

  Recorded February 1970; BBC radio. Re-recorded summer 1971; single B-side

  * * *

  In the music of Jacques Brel, which he discovered secondhand, Bowie found the same relish for the sweat, semen, and soul of everyday life, in all its passion and mundanity, that he had admired in the pages of Jean Genet. There was none of Genet’s extravagant campness in Brel; instead, the Belgian master of the declamatory chanson delivered bulletins of blood-soaked humanity straight from an open vein. Despair and mortality were his battlefield, and nowhere was his scalpel wielded with more zeal than with his lurid evocation of the port of Amsterdam.

  Brel’s tumultuous rendition (recorded live in 1964) accentuated his melody’s similarity to the traditional “Greensleeves,” rising to an ecstatic climax that roused his audience to uproar. Tortured pop star Scott Walker felt Brel as a kindred spirit, and he interpreted “Amsterdam” in 1967 in a hushed croon, disguising the potentially offensive word pisses* and avowing that the whores had “promised their love,” not “given their bodies.” The translation* he was bowdlerizing was by lyricist Mort Shuman, who belied his past as a hit songwriter for Elvis Presley with his libretto for the musical Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris. Bowie saw a London performance of the show in July 1968 and almost immediately began to perform “Amsterdam” himself.

  Unable to master the emotional terrain of the song in a February 1970 BBC performance, he was equal to its demands by 1971. Returning to the BBC that year, he phrased every line like an actor utterly confident of his lines, switching his mood stylishly between lines. His studio rendition, not released until 1973, was more strident, a showcase for his vocal range than for his interpretative talents. He continued to tease out the full range of Brel’s implications, on this song and “My Death” [64], until the end of the Ziggy era.