The Man Who Sold the World

by Peter Doggett

  Crowley’s gargantuan Confessions had recently been published in full, laying bare his belief that humanity should be divided between a Nietzschean elite of supermen and “a caste of ‘men of earth,’ sons of soil, sturdy, sensual, stubborn, and stupid, unemasculated by ethical and intellectual education” to act as their slaves. “After All” recast that differentiation in terms of innocence and experience, leaving the listener to wonder whether the innocents might actually be more corrupt, and more threatening, than their age-tarnished counterparts. Like the chant that ended “All the Madmen,” the refrain here was like a Dadaesque tag for a children’s skipping game, albeit one enacted in slow tempo. Delivered by a crowd of vari-speed “children,” it gradually became menacing with repetition, as if it had tapped into the dark side of the collective unconscious.

  Bowie added to the mystery with a vocal so gentle that one almost needed to apply a mirror to see if he was still alive. There was a constant sense of ebb and flow in the music, as the descending cycle of Em/Em7/A/Am* chords that fueled the verse was replaced by the gradual rise up the scale into the chorus, echoed by a delicious falling away as an A minor guitar chord was augmented by a finger running slowly down the final frets of the first string. It was an intrusion when three sudden notes from Visconti’s bass signaled a modulation into an instrumental revisiting of the verse by synthesizer (“a passion of mine at the time,” Visconti admitted) and pipe organ, a section that sounded as if it had been pasted into Bowie’s sonic picture as an afterthought. “After All” was more rewarding under a delicate touch, such as the Stylophone creeping into the chorus, and the Woody Woodmansey cymbal taps answered each time by a tom-tom salute.

  [21] RUNNING GUN BLUES

  (Bowie)

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

  * * *

  “The seventies are exploding,” announced the Weatherman collective of young American revolutionary activists in January 1970. “Armed violence is in the air. . . . In Seattle, two kids are stopped on the street for a hippie check, attack the pig, rip off his piece, and blow his head off. It’s happening.” They believed that peaceful defiance of the American state had failed: only the gun and the bomb could topple the war machine. Weatherman’s anger was heightened by the belief that American soldiers were committing genocide in the name of freedom: in November 1969, the public had belatedly learned of the killing in March 1968 of several hundred Vietnamese civilians by a company of US infantrymen, in the so-called My Lai Massacre.

  The protagonist of “Running Gun Blues” seemed to have stepped straight from that nightmare, driven to kill “the gooks” with no more compunction than the cast of a zombie movie. Bowie approached him with the same playful amusement he gave the characters on his 1967 album, his gruesome relish in the opening verse a masterful piece of emotional dissociation. An insidious whine from a Moog synthesizer suggested that we had tripped into a twilight zone where murder was a game without consequences. Then a crunching electric guitar entered the scene, representing the corporate military might behind this maverick barbarian. This was the natural territory of the Who, and the resemblance was heightened by the extended drum fills and by Bowie’s melismatic swagger, which it was easy to imagine Roger Daltrey’s voice reproducing. The track became an exercise in hard rock dynamics, highlighting the fearsome power of this short-lived band.

  [22] SHE SHOOK ME COLD

  (Bowie)

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

  * * *

  “Mick Ronson, Woody Woodmansey and I were working out most of the arrangements [for The Man Who Sold the World] by ourselves in David’s absence,” producer Tony Visconti told Bowie biographer David Buckley. In a less guarded moment, Visconti would insist that “the songs were written by all four of us. We’d jam in a basement, and Bowie would just say whether he liked them or not.” Several years after he parted company from Bowie, Ronson was asked whether he felt that he and Visconti had effectively composed the music for the album. He started to agree, and then told the interviewer that he would rather not talk about it.

  What’s beyond dispute is that many of the songs on The Man Who Sold the World were recorded in two stages, often several weeks apart. The band (sometimes with Bowie contributing guitar, sometimes not) would record an instrumental track, which might or might not be based upon an original Bowie idea. Then, at the last possible moment, Bowie would reluctantly uncurl himself from the sofa on which he was lounging with his wife, and dash off a set of lyrics. In this haphazard way, his initial batch of completed compositions—three or four at most—was extended to fill an entire forty-minute album, on which Bowie received the sole composing credit for every track. “The only thing that I didn’t think was quite as gentlemanly as it could have been was that he never shared publishing then,” Angie Bowie reflected many years later. “In terms of kudos and feeling that one is valued, it would have been nice for Mick Ronson to have had publishing credits on some of the songs that he contributed a great deal to.”

  Aural evidence alone suggests that, on this song at least, Ronson’s contribution extended beyond augmenting Bowie’s ideas. The lumbering guitar melody that dominated “She Shook Me Cold” was instantly reminiscent of one of Ronson’s musical heroes, Jeff Beck—emulating the style of his 1968 album Beck-Ola. Perhaps it was coincidental that Bowie’s lyric was based around a title (“You Shook Me”) from Beck’s previous album, Truth. The working title for this entertaining medley of hard rock clichés (“Suck”) captured its primitive sexuality, which was the theme Bowie expanded for his vampiric lyrics. He assembled them from fragments of imagination and memory, borrowing “Love in Vain” from Robert Johnson via the Rolling Stones, a violent sexual image from a song he’d later revive on Pin Ups [84], and “Golden Hair” from the title of a recently released piece by one of his own heroes, Syd Barrett. “I see it now as a summary of England,” Bowie declared in a particularly obfuscatory 1971 interview.

  [23] ALL THE MADMEN

  (Bowie)

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

  * * *

  “‘All the Madmen’ was written for my brother and it’s about my brother,” Bowie revealed in 1971. “He’s the man inside, and he doesn’t want to leave. He’s perfectly happy there . . . and he’s always very happy to see us, but he never has anything to say.”

  During 1969, Bowie’s half brother, Terry Burns, was living in the Cane Hill asylum in South London. Like most of Britain’s mental hospitals, it was a vast Victorian institution, whose inhabitants underwent a strict regime of care that involved heavy doses of sedative drugs, electroshock therapy, and, in some cases, a haphazard method of excising parts of the brain, known as lobotomy. Many patients quickly slipped into a culture of dependence that did nothing to aid their return to the outside world: the suppressed emotions and physical torpor induced by their diet of chemicals left them unable to respond to, or with, any state of reality. Others were pacified into a state where they could be released to their families. A more progressive regime was slowly introduced into British asylums during the seventies.

  In the spring of 1970, as the sessions for The Man Who Sold the World began, Terry arrived at the bohemian enclave that was Bowie’s portion of Haddon Hall—shared with Angie, his producer Tony Visconti, and assorted musicians, roadies, and associates. It was a volatile environment for rehabilitation, and despite David’s attempts to provide his brother with security, Terry soon had to return to Cane Hill.

  “Our alienation goes to the roots,” wrote radical psychiatrist R. D. Laing in the late sixties. “We are bemused and crazed creatures, strangers to our true selves, to one another, and to the spiritual and material world—mad, even, from an ideal standpoint we can glimpse but not adopt.” He was describing the world beyond the asylum, where “we who are still half alive” were condemned to “reflect the decay around and within us.” This was the landscape of “All the Madmen,” the song Bowie comp
osed soon after Terry’s departure, in which he channeled his brother’s alienation from the “real” world in a remarkable display of empathy.

  Most commentators have assumed that Bowie was writing from his own perspective, watching his “friends” picked off by madness. He often employed different narrative voices within the same song, but on this occasion his role seemed clear: he had thought himself inside his brother’s head, and captured the insecurity of a man who can endure the prison in which he lives but cannot face the “sadmen” of civilization. What was genuinely chilling was the gradual realization that the narrator had the choice of whether or not to pass as “sane” in the eyes of those on the “far side of town.” He presented himself quite deliberately as “mad,” twisting a familiar pop phrase* to offer behavior that was guaranteed to be considered “insane.” The song ended with a comfortingly meaningless chant, part Dada, part children’s rhyme, that became an anthem for those inside the asylum. But the price that he paid for that comfort was, by the standards of those outside, quite terrible: lobotomy, EST, Librium, loss of libido.

  The music expressed the value of that bargain. As the chorus proclaimed the narrator’s sense of belonging with the insane, it surged into a defiant A major chord, finally escaping the narrow straitjacket (between Dm and G) that had confined the opening verses. The guitar solo maintained that theme of playful liberation, as if announcing a courtly dance. Instead, Bowie employed an unexpected jump cut: a disarming glimpse of madness seen from outside, as four speaking voices competed for attention. Two of them were recognizably Bowie, and unmistakably “simple,” in the parlance of the times, offering eloquent nonsense; a third reinforced them in the stuffy tones of a BBC announcer. The sense of disconnection was profound; only a small child,* a gentler incarnation of a vari-speed gnome, could relate to this unreality. “He followed me home, Mummy,” the child’s voice explained. “Can I keep him?” It was every parent’s nightmare, every sane man’s stereotype of the threat posed by those who were different from you and me.

  The other side of madness was what endured, however, as a Moog synthesizer traced gamboling violin melodies, and the final chorus—a surreal cousin to the coda of “Memory of a Free Festival [9]—revealed its roundelay in B minor.* It was a stunning conclusion to a masterpiece, all the more impressive for having been constructed around a rhythm track that had impatiently been awaiting its burden for several weeks.

  [24] SAVIOUR MACHINE

  (Bowie)

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

  * * *

  Stripped of its vocal—in the shape, therefore, which it assumed until Visconti chivvied Bowie into composing a song—“Saviour Machine” would have been a highlight of The Man Who Sold the World purely as an instrumental. It faded in as if we were eavesdropping on some secret collaboration between Cream and Carlos Santana, matching the British blues band’s sturdy dynamics with the Latin-rock guitarist’s joyous fluidity, while the spirit of Jimi Hendrix guided Ronson’s solo. The album’s very own savior machine, a Moog synthesizer, ran lightning-quick string arpeggios that would have boggled Vivaldi’s imagination, before reincarnating itself as a trumpet. And then it all faded into the distance: you could imagine that in some other dimension, the band kept playing, for the delight of any planet that strayed momentarily across their path.

  It was a testament to Bowie’s skill, then, that under duress he was able to concoct a composition that did not betray the intensity of the track. Like the well-intentioned but ultimately destructive Mountain of “Wild-Eyed Boy from Freecloud” [7], the computer created by President Joe (shades of Major Tom) is damned by its own omnipotence. A world without evil and want is too dull for the Saviour Machine, which hates the species that gave it life, and urges them to destroy it before it allows its boredom to wipe them out first. Bowie’s vocals reinforced the irony: metallic and machine-like as the human narrator, crooning like a martyr to give the computer voice.

  [25] BLACK COUNTRY ROCK

  (Bowie)

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

  * * *

  The creation of this track spotlighted the haphazard nature of Bowie’s creativity during these sessions. He arrived at the studio with a fragment of a melody, a repeated phrase that ended with a swift rise and fall. Then he guided Visconti and Ronson as they fleshed out his theme into a song structure. Reckoning that it sounded like the Birmingham band the Move, he spontaneously named the wordless backing track “Black Country Rock” in their honor. Only in the final days of the album sessions did he arrive with a skeletal set of lyrics that—bar another fleeting reference to madness and its unique perspective—were merely functional.

  His approach to the vocals epitomized his casual attitude to the song. For the verse, he imitated the way in which Ray Davies satirized the aristocracy on songs such as “Dedicated Follower of Fashion,” before switching his attention to an old friend. “David spontaneously did a [Marc] Bolan vocal impression because he ran out of lyrics,” Tony Visconti recalled. “He did it as a joke, but we all thought it was cool, so it stayed.”

  That “tribute” aside, the track was memorable for the musicality that the band introduced, notably the distressingly brief circular guitar lick that acted as a prelude, the expanding density of the central guitar riff (first doubled, then trebled, and finally harmonized as well), and the machine-gun stutter of Woodmansey’s drum fills.

  [26] THE MAN WHO SOLD THE WORLD

  (Bowie)

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

  * * *

  There were precursors: a Robert Heinlein science fiction tale from 1949 titled “The Man Who Sold the Moon”; a 1954 DC comic, “The Man Who Sold The Earth”; a 1968 Brazilian political satire that flitted across the arthouse movie circuit, The Man Who Bought the World. None of them has an apparent thematic link to one of Bowie’s most enigmatic songs, written and vocalized over an existing backing track while the clock counted down for completion of the album to which it lent its name. Its lyrics have proved to be infuriatingly evocative, begging but defying interpretation. Bowie himself has contributed nothing more helpful to our understanding than a teasing suggestion that the song was a sequel to “Space Oddity” [1], an explanation designed to distract rather than enlighten (as the song said, “Who knows? Not me”). Looking back on this period from the vantage point of 1990, however, Bowie reflected that “I felt very ephemeral. I didn’t feel substantial. I didn’t feel a particular sense of self. It seemed that I had to extract pieces from around me, and put them onto myself to create a person. I was having a real problem. I felt invisible.”

  “The Man Who Sold the World” was essentially an unconscious reflection of a piece of self-knowledge that was beyond Bowie’s reach in 1970. At the time, there was probably no conscious design in a set of words that suggested more than they defined. Any concrete meaning had to be imposed to the listener’s satisfaction. For example: it would be possible to read the song as an acknowledgment of the mysterious connection between David Bowie (who isn’t there, because he doesn’t actually exist) and David Jones (who does exist, but is effectively dead to the world). Which is the man who sold* (himself to) the world? Maybe they both are. Or neither of them. Like the question of who killed President Kennedy, or what happened to the crew of the Mary Celeste, the mystery is more satisfying than any solution.

  But not as satisfying as the track, a compact, elegantly assembled piece that featured none of the metallic theatrics found elsewhere on the album. It was hypnotic from the start, when Ronson’s guitar nagged repeatedly at the same riff while Bowie’s acoustic shifted ground beneath it. The chord structure was equally treacherous, repeatedly augmenting its key of F with an A major chord borrowed from the relative minor scale of Dm. Every musician played his part: Visconti’s bass ran scales under the chorus, and a melody elsewhere; Woodmansey left ecstatic drum rolls deep in the mix, and Latin-flavored percussion trembling o
n the surface; Ronson conjured a momentary howl of feedback to announce the chorus. But it was the human voice that conveyed the true strangeness of the song, heavily phased during the verse (and briefly doubled, which came as some surprise, as Bowie slyly admitted), compressed (and again double-tracked) for the chorus, and then bursting into a haunting chorale in the final refrains, more rushing to join the crowd with each repetition, filling out the spectrum from bass to alto—facets every one of the single, tangled identity that was the song’s enigmatic subject.

  THE MAN WHO SOLD THE WORLD LP

  Recorded April–May 1970; released January 1971 (US), April 1971 (UK)

  Disconnections provided the shattered backdrop for this record, almost every element of which was fragmented and ambiguous. “It was meant to be our Sgt. Pepper,” claimed producer Tony Visconti, who in the same interview noted: “David didn’t really care too much about this album.” His verdict was based on the memory of countless recording sessions at which the artist was, at best, a fleeting presence. “David was so frustrating to work with at the time of this album,” Visconti concluded. “I couldn’t handle his poor attitude and complete disregard for his music.” Producer and musicians were left to assemble many of the tracks around the hint of a Bowie melody, or a muttered suggestion of a mood. Then, with the studio budget about to run dry, Bowie forced himself to compose the songs that would fill the backing tracks. This modus operandi proved to be unusually effective, and The Man Who Sold the World introduced many of the themes and obsessions that would fill his work for the decade ahead: madness, alienation, violence, confusion of identity, power, darkness, sexual possession.