The Man Who Sold the World

by Peter Doggett

  [46] FILL YOUR HEART

  (Rose)

  Recorded July 1971; Hunky Dory LP

  * * *

  American singer-songwriter Biff Rose is fated, at best, to pass into the history of popular music as a footnote to Bowie’s Hunky Dory album, most listeners being unaware that Bowie was not himself the composer of “Fill Your Heart.” Though Bowie first heard the song on the debut album by the freakishly falsettoed novelty act Tiny Tim, he was led to obtain a copy of Rose’s own LP, The Thorn in Mrs. Rose’s Side. There he found a jaunty tea-party arrangement of Rose’s mock-hip tale of living like a freak, “Buzz the Fuzz,” which Bowie reproduced—copying all of the mannerisms and asides—during several live and radio performances during 1970–71.

  He adopted an equally faithful attitude when covering “Fill Your Heart,” his arrangement of which was practically identical to Biff Rose’s, except that where the American glided and swung, Bowie bounced from side to side like a marionette. Bowie and Ronson did at least have the grace to credit Rose’s original arranger, Arthur G. Wright, on the sleeve of Hunky Dory.

  ANDY WARHOL: Pop to Pork and Back Again

  Like David Bowie, Andy Warhol had started out in advertising—the difference being that whereas Bowie merely regurgitated ideas he’d picked up during his brief agency life, Warhol mastered his trade and turned it into a philosophy of art. Warhol’s trademark was the inauthentic: the flowing signature that appeared beneath his ad-agency drawings in the fifties bore his name, but had actually been drawn by his mother. He shamelessly employed assistants to create “his” art; the Warhol-branded feature films were directed by Paul Morrissey. Though he was a genuinely accomplished artist with a pencil or brush, Warhol chose to manipulate other people’s images rather than create his own. He was hailed as the progenitor of Pop Art, a genre he neither conceived nor introduced to the American public. His achievement was to take a movement that had been propounded as an intellectual critique of prevailing trends in art and turn it into a frothy, cynical, and clever piece of media manipulation.

  Like Bowie in the decade ahead, Warhol had invented a persona with which to fool and manipulate the public—only his character bore his own name, not that of a fictional spaceman. The public Warhol barely spoke or moved, preferring to let the denizens of his Factory studio make the noise. His ethos was that nothing meant more than it seemed to mean: “If you want to know all about Andy Warhol,” he insisted, “just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it.” Just as Christopher Isherwood (in the story sequence Goodbye to Berlin) had likened his gaze to that of a camera, Warhol offered himself as the ultimate voyeur, collecting experiences and people without ever apparently interacting with them. Bowie borrowed Warhol’s rhetoric just after he had portrayed the artist in song [47]: “I’m just picking up on what other people say. . . . I’m not thinking for myself anymore. . . . I’d rather retain the position of being a Photostat machine with an image.” Or, in Lou Reed’s take on the Warhol stance, embodied in a Velvet Underground song: “I’ll Be Your Mirror.”

  Bowie could never have maintained this façade of indifference for more than a few weeks: he was too enthusiastic a participant in the decadent adventure of life. But his choice of Warhol as artistic mentor in 1971 reflected the American’s pervasive influence on British culture. Prints of Warhol’s movies were seized from London cinema clubs by police on the grounds that they might be obscene (when they were merely dull). The Rolling Stones’ 1971 album Sticky Fingers bore a Warhol cover design. There was a sizable retrospective of his art at the Tate Gallery in February and March 1971, when a documentary about his work was banned from British TV. No wonder that, in seeking out modern icons to portray in song, Bowie should alight on the flat surface of Warhol’s bloodless image.

  That May, a play named Pork opened in New York’s East Village. Written and directed by Anthony Ingrassia, it was billed as a Warhol production, having been based, Ingrassia explained, on a twenty-nine-act Warhol script that would have taken two hundred hours to perform. Like Warhol’s “novel” A, his script was merely a transcript of conversations and phone calls made at the Factory, recorded by Brigid Polk (the play’s title was a pun on her name). The Factory regulars were portrayed onstage by struggling actors from the fringes of the Warhol milieu, with Tony Zanetta—soon to become the US president of Tony Defries’s MainMan organization—playing “B Marlowe,” an artist who was wheeled around the stage on an office chair, taking Polaroids of the debauchery unfolding around him.

  This deliberately outrageous production (promising “explicit sexual content” and “offensive” language) transferred to the London Roundhouse in July 1971. The cast of Pork visited a Bowie concert; he repaid the compliment, and took them to his risqué nightspot of choice, the Sombrero. Pork star Wayne County complained later: “All the while he was studying our make-up for his own future use. His whole look came from us.” County was nursing a grudge against MainMan for not making him a star. But Bowie undoubtedly learned about New York’s peculiar brand of decadence from the Pork ensemble, many of whom would subsequently join his manager’s staff. He was already acting out another Warhol obsession, by gathering a collection of friends and admirers around him and branding them as “superstars”—a scheme that resulted in attempts to launch two mates from school, a former girlfriend, and a Sombrero rascal as recording artists, albeit with minimal success. Within weeks, Bowie was in New York himself, meeting Warhol (who thoroughly disapproved of Bowie’s tribute in song) and the artist’s former protégé Lou Reed. By then, the London boy was beginning to feel like an insider rather than a voyeur, assuming a thick coating of self-confidence that would fuel him through the years ahead.

  [47] ANDY WARHOL

  (Bowie)

  Recorded June/July 1971; Hunky Dory LP

  * * *

  Within a few weeks* of Warhol’s retrospective exhibition at the Tate, Bowie penned this ambiguous tribute to the man he would describe later in 1971 as “one of the leaders” of “the media of the streets, street messages.” He offered it immediately to his longtime friend Dana Gillespie, the current partner of his manager, Tony Defries. She performed it in the strident style of Curved Air vocalist Sonja Kristina at a BBC performance in June. Her studio rendition, produced by Bowie, appeared on an acetate LP that Defries utilized to promote both Gillespie and Bowie in America, but Bowie instantly undercut its value by recording it himself for Hunky Dory as a late substitution for the crass “Bombers” [42].

  Like Warhol’s art, the song hinged around the act of repetition, and the haphazard consequences of reproducing an original concept. All commercial songwriting depended, to some extent, on repeating a phrase, or a motif, or a melody; the purpose of a chorus was to focus the audience’s attention on something familiar. “Andy Warhol” employed those inevitable tricks, then reinforced them with a calculatedly repetitive melody, a playful spoken-word introduction that dissolved Warhol’s very name into a collision of random syllables, and a coda of endless open-tuned chords, as similar and different as Warhol’s subtly varying screen prints. Meanwhile, the lyrics emphasized Warhol’s blurring of life and art.

  The deceptively simple structure of the song also erased boundaries, as a six-string acoustic ran repeatedly (of course) up the scale of Em, while its twelve-string counterpart pushed the verse and chorus, in flamenco style, toward A major (in an E Dorian mode). The coda was a delicious medley of hand claps, guitar harmonics, and chords reminiscent of Led Zeppelin’s acoustic material (notably “Friends”) on their recently released third album. A more famous example of Pop Art (in both senses of the term) bracketed the song, with the introductory laughter and closing applause recalling the sound effects on the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper album.

  [48] CHANGES

  (Bowie)

  Recorded c. June–July 1971; unreleased demo, and Hunky Dory LP

  * * *

  Changes: emotional, psychological, existential, c
hanges in style and sound, but undeniably, and primarily, physical. This was a song, after all, built around minute shifts of the fingers on the keyboard, a process of experimentation by a man whose technical inadequacies as a pianist liberated him to face the strange* if he found it and embrace the obvious just as readily. As he revealed onstage a few months later, he didn’t know the chord changes on guitar. He didn’t know them on piano, either, but he followed his fingers as they crept, slowly up and down the keyboard, augmenting familiar shapes or simply reproducing them a step or two along the ivories. As its title suggested, “Changes” was constantly changing, sometimes in the left hand (where he followed the diatonic major descent of “Oh! You Pretty Things” [30] in the chorus, all the way through the bass scale from C down to D), and almost always in the right. It was as if the piano accompaniment was scared to rest in one place for more than a couple of beats, in case it would be hemmed in or halted. By restlessly moving, it kept its options open and its spirit alive. Perhaps there was a deliberate irony, though, involved in composing a song called “Changes” in which the opening chords were repeated—in reverse—over the final bars, so that after several minutes of constant mutation, the pianist’s hands began exactly where they had started, tracing the symmetrical shape of a C major 7th chord, with four fingers equally spaced along the keys.

  Changes as a statement of purpose: it was the first song on Hunky Dory, the first his audience had heard of him since The Man Who Sold the World, and where was the doom-racked rocker and his metallic power trio? Neither was this a throwback to the atmospherics of “Space Oddity” [1], or the unwieldy prophecies of the David Bowie [Space Oddity] album. This was pure, unashamedly melodic, gleefully commercial, gorgeously mellifluous pop. It could have been called anything—imagine he sings “ch-ch-ch-chases” instead—and it would still have been a musical metamorphosis of Kafkaesque proportions.

  Changes as a manifesto: this was the retrospective interpretation, after a decade of innovation, in which Young Americans could not have been predicted from Diamond Dogs, or Station to Station from Young Americans, or Low from Station to Station. Bowie was the so-called chameleon of pop, and look! He’d already predicted the future back in 1971. But he could just as easily have been looking back from that vantage point at his equally bewildering reincarnations since the Kon-Rads, the stuttering sense of identity that had allowed him to be mime artiste and blues-wailing rocker, prophet of doom and cheeky clown. And think for a second of the self-confidence required to launch yourself at the world with a manifesto of change, when you have no idea whether anybody will even notice your existence.

  Changes as a faith in fate and chance: Bowie was intrigued by the lessons of the I Ching, the Chinese Book of Changes, founded on the polarization of Yin and Yang, positive and negative, good and evil, action and stasis, and, as Colin Wilson noted in 1971, “the creative drive of the conscious mind and the receptive quality of the subconscious.” When these two forces were separated from their Yin/Yang relationship, Wilson insisted that the result was “a condition of vital stagnation”—life mired in quicksand, no less. Yet this polarization could take place against the constant flowing of the river of impermanence: as Christmas Humphreys wrote, “Life is flow, and Zen is the flow of it.” Humphreys again: “Satori [already referenced by Bowie in his “Free Festival” song, (9)] is the world of perpetual now and here and this, of absolute, unimpeded flow.” And in this flow of perpetual nowness, change was not a choice but a fact of life, however the I Ching fell.

  Changes as self-healing: you could take the first verse of the song as the heart of a musical drama, in which we’ve already witnessed our hero in hot pursuit of himself, with a cast of oddballs at his heels, unable to realize until the closing number that the only way he can locate his real identity is to stop for a second, and just be himself, and realize that—look, the typist at the next desk, she’s actually the girl of his dreams. That’s “Changes” as the story of Billy Liar in Keith Waterhouse’s novel of the same name (and Waterhouse was one of Bowie’s favorite authors in the 1960s). Or you could read “Changes” as pure Bowie autobiography (except that experience tells us there is never anything “pure” about Bowie’s accounting of himself). It was all there: the dead-end streets of Bromley, Beckenham, Soho, and Kensington; the success of “Space Oddity,” which proved to be “not so sweet”; the withering awareness of himself as a faker (or, as he credited himself on the sleeve of Hunky Dory, “the actor”). And it was all out of his control: he knew that time would change him, but he couldn’t trace time. His life was impermanent, but every reincarnation would leave him unchanged. It was the curse of eternal life, played out at the speed of light—or life, as Bowie would suggest in a title on Low [188].

  Changes as rock criticism: the stammering voice of the Who’s “My Generation” was the obvious reference point, as Pete Townshend’s Mod narrator wanted to “die before I get old.” In the final chorus of “Changes,” Bowie warned Townshend and his fellow rock’n’rollers that aging was the fate that awaited them all (Townshend and Daltrey are in their sixties as I write, still performing “My Generation” for money). Rock, he complained around the time he wrote the song, “has become the new extension of factory work.” Bowie had stepped off the production line: he could look forward to a life of “strange fascination” (at least until 1980).

  Changes as immortality: not just the satisfaction of summarizing your life at the age of twenty-four, past and future, without narrowing down any of your options; but also of knowing that you have created a perfect pop record, with an unforgettable chorus, and enough sonic scenery to ensure that it would never stale through repetition. His ramshackle piano demo, taped in the Radio Luxembourg studio, demonstrated the strength of what he’d written; though he stumbled over the piano chords, his multidubbed harmonies and vulnerable handclap percussion would have sold the song to any Peter Noone who’d been lucky enough to wander within earshot.

  But the record was something else entirely, a masterpiece of production (credit Ken Scott, whose first record in that role this was) from Rick Wakeman’s flowing piano to Bowie’s beautifully poised alto sax solo over the final descending chords. The saxophones were there at the start, in fact, alto and tenor side by side in the lead-up to the first verse; so too were the strings, the sole accompaniment for the piano during that verse. Bowie’s voice was the purest instrument on display, however. It entered warm but hushed, almost impossibly intimate through headphones, then soared as Bowie “turned” (and it was impossible not to see him on a West End stage, throwing his arms wide to the audience). Every syllable was perfectly clear, the hallmark of a trained actor. Then, the chorus: and suddenly a rush of voices from either side, not the accentless English we’d heard so far, but the unmistakable sound of London, as many as five different Bowies combining to give him, and us, the command to face the strange. We know now that the strange was only just beginning.

  [49] EIGHT LINE POEM

  (Bowie)

  Recorded June/July 1971; Hunky Dory LP

  * * *

  Designed to sound like a continuation of “Oh! You Pretty Things” [30], “Eight Line Poem” was, at least, eight lines long. (The change in piano tone proved that the two were recorded separately.) Was it a poem? Well, there was a metaphor linking the cactus and the prairie; an internal rhyme (“tactful cactus”); and a striking image in the last line. None of it opened out, however; it was a lock with only one key.

  “Eight Line Poem” was more intriguing as a performance: sparse and sometimes uncertain piano, wobbling across the speakers like a sine wave, country-tinged guitar, and a vocalist who crammed five different personae into those eight lines. Two highlights: the Hank Williams–inspired yodel of the cacti and the way that his “collision” fell almost an octave, echoed as if it were plummeting down a mine shaft. The inspiration? Haiku; the imagist poets; or perhaps Bowie had been playing Neil Young’s “Birds” idly to himself, and allowed himself to dream—but not to rethink
what he had written.

  [50] QUICKSAND

  (Bowie)

  Recorded July 1971; demo and Hunky Dory LP

  * * *

  THE ONLY THING THAT EMERGES WITH ANY CERTAINTY FROM THE STUDY OF SPIRITUALISM AND OCCULTISM IS THAT OUR NORMAL, SANE, BALANCED STANDPOINT IS BUILT UPON QUICKSAND, SINCE IT IS BASED UPON A COMMONSENSE VIEW OF HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS THAT DOES NOT CORRESPOND TO THE FACTS.

  —Colin Wilson, The Occult, 1971

  How could Bowie complain that he had lost his creative power on a song (and an album) that demonstrated precisely the opposite? Because “Quicksand”—like “Sound and Vision” [136] five years later—was written about a lack of inspiration, as a means of accessing the inspiration that he had been searching for. Like “Oh! You Pretty Things” [30] and “Changes” [48], it chronicled his confused but dogged attempts to explore the limits (if they existed) of human potential. Through the index of possibilities that the song (re)presented, Bowie held fast to one core belief. Conscious, intellectual thought would not allow him to penetrate beyond the realm of everyday existence, into whatever lay beyond: spontaneous creativity, self-awareness, spiritual discovery or transcendence. Thought, as Wilson suggested, was a form of quicksand that allowed consciousness—with all its traps of self-doubt and self-deception—to keep the unconscious beyond reach. So Bowie’s “Quicksand” was a song to himself, and his unconscious (what the poets of old would have called his muse): a plea to be shown the way, or ways, of reaching through, or beyond, or above—whatever metaphor worked for Bowie to be able to touch a realm that his conscious mind told him was an illusion. The very existence of this song (and its neighbors on Hunky Dory) demonstrated how profoundly his plea was answered.