The Man Who Sold the World

by Peter Doggett

  [18] THE WIDTH OF A CIRCLE

  (Bowie)

  Recorded February 1970; BBC radio. Re-recorded April/May 1970; The Man Who Sold the World LP

  * * *

  “I don’t want to be one of those singers whose career depends on hit singles, and they are virtually dead for six months of the year,” Bowie remarked in November 1969. He had glimpsed the success that had been his goal since he joined the Kon-Rads, and found it deeply troubling. The failure of “The Prettiest Star” [13] demonstrated that, far from establishing him as an artist of integrity, the sales of “Space Oddity” [1] had actually narrowed his commercial brand: in the eyes of the public, he was simply the man who sold the space song. “I throw myself on the mercy of an audience,” he said, “and I really need them to respond to me. If they don’t, I’m lost.” In the same interview, he noted wistfully that “it’s a bit early in life for all my ideas to have dried up, isn’t it?”—an effective admission that he felt creatively bankrupt.

  At heart, he still believed that his primary purpose was to please a mass audience: “I’m determined to be an entertainer; clubs, cabaret, concerts, the lot.” He had little sympathy with the rock underground: “It seems to me that they have expanded their own personal little scenes to a certain extent, and then they stop, content to play to the converted. For some reason, even the words ‘entertainer’ and ‘cabaret’ make them shudder.” In a musical world no longer attempting to span a widening chasm of taste, between pop and rock, commercial and underground, mass and elite, he was aligning himself firmly with the majority.

  “What the underground has got to remember is they’re still a minority, and they’re not representative of the youth,” John Lennon noted at the start of 1970. “And that’s what we’ve got to realise, that we haven’t got youth sewn up, by any means. We haven’t even converted our own contemporaries, we’re not even communicating fully with them.” Bowie concurred: “It’s not that they want to communicate, particularly. A lot of them haven’t anything at all to communicate. I want my songs to be known, otherwise I wouldn’t go on writing, because I don’t write for myself.”

  “The Prettiest Star” aside, however, Bowie wrote nothing between September 1969 and April 1970 that made the slightest concessions toward an audience. “All my songs are very personal,” he admitted in March, “and I combine this with an exaggeration so the meaning is clearly brought home to the listener.” This exaggeration was certainly evident on the new material he performed for BBC Radio in February and March, but the intended audience appeared to be Bowie himself, seeking to divine his lack of connection with the world.

  In an attempt to bridge that gap, Bowie formed a band who were known, variously, as Harry the Butcher, David Bowie’s Imagination, and, ultimately, the Hype. Alongside his established friend/bassist/producer Tony Visconti, he recruited two former members of a Hull-based R&B band called the Rats: drummer John Cambridge and guitarist Mick Ronson. In Ronson, Bowie had happened upon someone who was not only a guitar virtuoso, with an utterly distinctive tone, but also a classically trained musician capable of concocting orchestral arrangements. Ronson and Cambridge were invited to join David and Angie at their Gothic Beckenham residence, known as Haddon Hall. They discovered that their hosts were not only keen buyers of art deco and art nouveau—in keeping with the contemporary revival of both styles—but also avid collectors of sexual conquests, often from the gay club on Kensington High Street known as the Sombrero (or “the Chinese takeaway,” to many of its denizens).

  Within a fortnight, Bowie and the Hype were appearing at the Roundhouse, a counterculture bastion in North London, dressed as cartoon superheroes. “I was in silver lame and blue silver cloak and silvered hair and blue hair and the whole thing, glitter everywhere,” Bowie recalled sheepishly. “We died a death. [But] I knew what it was I wanted to do, and I knew it was what people would want eventually.” It was, in hindsight, a nativity scene for glam rock—designed not by Bowie, but by his wife and Tony Visconti’s girlfriend Liz. He had yet to fashion appropriate music for this exaggerated image, however. His Roundhouse set included not only “The Width of a Circle” and “The Prettiest Star” but also a cover version of Van Morrison’s “Cyprus Avenue” from the Astral Weeks album—unlikely fare for a glam-rock pioneer.

  The same confusion clouded Bowie’s future plans. He originally intended his next album to be half acoustic, half electric, and “The Width of a Circle” was one of only three songs he presented at the sessions for The Man Who Sold the World that were written on acoustic guitar. It was premiered as his first performance with Mick Ronson at a BBC concert in February 1970. This rendition opened with Bowie establishing the key via an E/E7 variation on acoustic guitar, followed by a simple Ronson riff running down the scale of A but ending short of the root, which emerged as the first of just two verses began. Then the focus was on Ronson’s skills as an improviser, on both electric and acoustic instruments. A month later, at another BBC appearance, the song had grown a Hendrix-inspired feedback introduction, reminiscent of “Purple Haze”; a wordless vocal motif, echoing Ronson’s riff, first in unison, then in wildly erratic harmony, finally as a group chorale; and a three-chord-trick instrumental passage that set up the last return to the Valkyrie vocal chorus.

  “We had been playing [it] live,” bassist Tony Visconti claimed in his memoir, “but we felt like it needed another section . . . after one take we broke into a spontaneous boogie riff. Afterwards, we listened to a playback of the boogie jam for a laugh, and we decided to make this a permanent part of the song. We put the track ‘to bed’ with the promise that David would come up with lyrics and melody at a later date.” As the second BBC recording proved, half of the “boogie jam” was already present in skeletal form before they reached the studio; what Ronson and Visconti added, in their role as musical directors, was a structure that provided a dramatic pause at the end of every four repetitions, breaking the jam into verse form.

  Establishing a pattern that would hold for most of the tracks recorded for The Man Who Sold the World, Bowie then had to create a song to fit the musical structure.

  What emerged was a disturbing fable that mixed violent homoeroticism with an occult sense of the uneasy balance between god and demon.

  “A lot of my compositions are very much fantasy tales,” Bowie conceded in March 1970, and the original two-verse skeleton of “The Width of a Circle” fitted this description. In a whimsical manner reminiscent of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, his narrator met his alter ego in the form of a monster, engaging in a circular dialogue as unenlightening as Mr. Jones’s efforts in Bob Dylan’s “Ballad of a Thin Man.” As augmented three months later, though, the tale took a turn into darkest night, as the narrator “smashed my soul,” flirted with fleshly pleasures, and met a God who carried him into the depths of Hell. But this was no ordinary inferno: its language was intensely physical, mingling fear with ecstatic lust amid imagery that suggested a shocking, eviscerating, thrilling baptism into anal intercourse. Through it all, the Bowie character repeated greedily, “Do it again,” while a Greek chorus warned, “Turn around, go back.” There was nothing camp here, nothing suggestive: this was a dangerous sexual encounter, painted in lurid, compelling detail. Or was it? Though the erotic intensity was unmistakable, it is just as easy, in retrospect, to read this tale as Bowie’s attempt to rationalize his new business relationship with the enticing but intimidating Tony Defries; or as a graphic account of spiritual crisis; or as low comedy. “I very much doubt whether anyone could decipher that song correctly on my level,” Bowie admitted in 1971. His own explanation didn’t help: “I went to the depths of myself in that. I tried to analogise the period of my life from when I left school to that time . . . just for my own benefit, not really for any listener’s benefit.” Forty years on, the circle remains unbroken.

  During the pause between recording the accompaniment and the vocal of “The Width of a Circle,” Bowie had—almost accidentally—engineered a cou
p in his management setup. Kenneth Pitt was ousted, after four years of loyal devotion, and replaced by two show-business lawyers, Laurence Myers and Tony Defries. Myers ran Gem Productions from an office in Regent Street, and initially both Defries and Bowie were Gem employees. Soon Defries assumed control of the singer’s affairs, ultimately buying out Myers’s stake in Bowie and forming his own organization: the modestly titled MainMan. Defries, so Pitt said acidly, “is a man with legal knowledge who set up a business wherein they had a product to market called David Bowie.” Myers was more generous in his appraisal of his onetime partner: “[Defries] absolutely believed that David was, and would be, the greatest star in the world, and he acted accordingly.”

  [19] THE SUPERMEN

  (Bowie)

  Recorded April–May 1970; The Man Who Sold the World LP. Re-recorded November 1971; Glastonbury Fayre LP

  * * *

  Now that Bowie had shed his allegiance to the underground, having appeared at the Beckenham Arts Lab for the last time on March 5, 1970, his mind was focused entirely on esoteric interests. For the next year, he would view the world from a perspective that was obsessed with mythology, the limits of human power, and the mysteries of the occult. Like “The Width of a Circle” [18], “The Supermen” betrayed his recent speculations. Though Friedrich Nietzsche’s Übermensch was the initial spark for this song, it occupied an entirely different metaphorical realm: a science fiction reenactment of the trials of the Greek pantheon of gods, or the deities of H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos. Their curse was immortality—punishment, perhaps, for their perfection. Yet “The Supermen” was less a narrative than a series of ghastly images, its words chosen for their assonance and rhyme, for effect rather than meaning.

  John Cambridge later attributed his axing from Bowie’s group to difficulties with this track, and his drumming on its initial airing, a BBC Radio 1 session in March 1970, was anything but propulsive. To deepen the wound, his replacement opened the studio recording by skipping expertly around his kit and onto some heavily echoed timpani. A rowdy monkish chorus announced the portentous two-semitone rise at the heart of the song, while Ronson’s guitar churned as if it were stirring cement. Bowie’s voice entered like a South London devil, twisting his vowels into mutations of Cockney dialect, his phrasing clipped and triumphant. For the chorus, his voice was doubled, one fiend in each speaker; by the second verse it had become an inhuman rant, made all the more ominous by the relentless cohesion of a band. This was a new persona for popular music: eerie, compelling, utterly contemporary, and as far removed from the Bowie of “Space Oddity” [1] (let alone “Love You Till Tuesday” [A37]) as it were possible to imagine. To heighten the sense that an old order was being expelled, the track crushed a path from the opening F and G major chords to the climactic C of the chorus with scant regard for the niceties of key signatures, while Ronson’s extended guitar solo was enacted over mock-orchestral barrages of chords in pairs with the same reckless abandon for convention. “We came up with outrageous sonic landscapes,” Tony Visconti told Bowie biographer David Buckley, “which was kind of prescient for the sound that Queen eventually came up with.” Only the dying fade of Bowie’s voice at the end of each chorus, plummeting nearly an octave into the depths, hinted that even the gods might be stricken by human emotions.

  The song was re-recorded with the Spiders from Mars, with an acoustic opening verse, the following year, and included on the album that commemorated the first Glastonbury festival. Bowie had originally agreed to give the festival organizers, Revelation Enterprises, a song from his performance there in June 1971, but then decided that it might muddy the Ziggy Stardust brand. “It’s a shame,” said Barry Everitt, who assembled the album. “He didn’t like [his live tape], because it was very simply, beautiful and gentle. It was David on his own, David the man, not Ziggy.” Revelation announced solemnly: “The tape will remain in our vaults until the revolution.”

  THE LURE OF THE OCCULT

  A sense of the occult—the hidden, the esoteric, the satanic, the alien, the mythological, the divine—pervaded Bowie’s songwriting in 1970 and 1971, from the graphic imagery of “Width of a Circle” [18] to the parade of possibilities that was “Quicksand” [50]. In seeking out information and answers about the unknown, Bowie was reflecting a wider obsession in the culture around him. It was a multifaceted quest, which ranged from a cultish interest in witchcraft or devil worship to a profound exploration of the limits of human consciousness. Running through it all was the conviction—already a manifesto among the youthful counterculture—that conventional explanations of the world, and mankind’s place within it, were ineffective and partial.

  This dissatisfaction was displayed in a bewildering variety of ways and arenas. The late sixties saw a dramatic rise of interest in witchcraft, not least because relaxed censorship laws allowed the distribution of sensational films that claimed to reflect the witch trials and inquisitions of earlier centuries, but were actually a smoke screen for nudity and sexual violence. The endlessly popular “satanic” novels of Dennis Wheatley found a fresh audience among teenagers eager to be scared and titillated. The Rolling Stones toyed with demonic imagery in their songs and stage performances, and were briefly taken seriously as representatives of the devil, until the weakness in their façade was exposed by the tragic fiasco of the Altamont festival in December 1969.

  It became deeply fashionable to be fascinated by Aleister Crowley, the so-called Beast of British occultism: Crowley’s long-suppressed manuscripts were published, and rock stars competed to drop his name. In 1967, the year in which his face appeared on the cover of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper album, he became something of a posthumous icon among the British underground, as familiar a hero as Timothy Leary or Allen Ginsberg. Crowley was joined in the occult pantheon by the veterans of such long-defunct organizations as the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (from which he had been expelled in 1898). Figures such as Madame Blavatsky, Annie Besant, Gurdjieff, and Rasputin were revered for their teachings, and even more for the exaggerated tales surrounding them.

  There was a more peaceful strain of mystical exploration, stretching from Big Sur’s Esalen community in California to Glastonbury Tor, which would later be gathered together under the rather baggy heading of “New Age.” There were bestselling books about the lost continent of Atlantis, about alien visits from far-flung stars, about the myths of King Arthur, and the prevalent belief in flying saucers (alien abduction would become an obsession only later in the decade). People pursued ley lines, rubbed crystals, revived long-dead pagan rituals, and prayed to gods once feared and revered by their distant ancestors. In London there was sufficient interest in this multifarious field to inspire the opening of a shop devoted to the esoteric, Dark They Were & Golden Eyed.

  As Bowie recorded The Man Who Sold the World, a weekly magazine titled Man, Myth & Magic was achieving enormous sales (not least because of its regular pictures of naked witches). Tabloid newspapers also discovered that being able to uncover witches’ covens and blood-drinking cults in rural English beauty spots was a guarantee of increased circulation; once again, the promise of nudity and orgies was a heady attraction. Alex Sanders and his wife, Maxine Morris, became notorious as the monarchs of British witchcraft; Sanders even issued a record of his incantations (which was swiftly withdrawn from sale). Rock bands such as Black Sabbath and Black Widow traded on their supposed involvement with spells and demons.

  In California, meanwhile, notoriety on the Crowley scale attended the Church of Satan, founded in 1966 by the self-styled “Black Pope,” Anton LaVey. He declared the time of the church’s inauguration to be Year One, Anno Satanas, and flaunted the names of celebrities who had previously expressed even the mildest interest in his activities, notably film stars Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield (both of whom had soon met untimely ends), and song-and-dance-man Sammy Davis Jr. In 1969 LaVey published The Satanic Bible, which was a veritable instruction book for a lascivious lifestyle. “Instead of com
manding our members to repress their natural urges,” he explained, “we teach that they should follow them. This includes physical lusts, the desire for revenge, the drive for material possessions.” A rock star’s bible would surely have carried a very similar set of commandments.

  All this was sensationalism, and was exploited as such. But besides these lurid attractions, David Bowie became engrossed in a more positive area of exploration, as exemplified by Colin Wilson’s panoramic study The Occult, published in 1971. It’s difficult to imagine that Bowie did not read this book, as it explored all of his interests in the field over the next few years, from the I Ching to the Kabbalah, Crowley to Rasputin, alien visitations to reincarnation. Through it all, Wilson propounded a simple message, which was effectively reproduced (in negative form) in the chorus to Bowie’s “Quicksand”: human beings must escape the habit of allowing self-imposed restrictions to limit their awareness of the world beyond everyday consciousness. Exactly that quest would intrigue Bowie throughout the next decade, to be achieved by any means necessary.

  [20] AFTER ALL

  (Bowie)

  Recorded April–May 1970; The Man Who Sold the World LP

  * * *

  The only song on The Man Who Sold the World that suggested it might have been fashioned for Bowie’s original concept of a half-acoustic album was “After All,” a companion piece to “All the Madmen” [23] insofar as it explored the nature of innocence beyond the corrupting claims of adulthood. Its protagonists were children; its ostensible moral, almost banal in its simplicity, was that children represented the pure spirit of mankind, and adults were merely children in aged skin. Those poetic champions of childhood, the Williams Wordsworth and Blake, would have approved: Wordsworth’s tale of the “strange adventures” of “The Idiot Boy” made explicit the links between the equally innocent pleasures of childhood and insanity. But as the song unfolded, the child narrator mouthed more unsettling concepts from the realms of Zen Buddhism and the satanist dilettante Aleister Crowley.