The Man Who Sold the World

by Peter Doggett

  [95] THINGS TO DO

  (Bowie)

  Recorded by the Astronettes, November 1973

  * * *

  After two songs that displayed little flair for melody or structure, “Things to Do” did at least provide the Astronettes with an adventurous backing track—the only indication in Bowie’s song catalogue of his passion in 1973 for the Latin music he’d heard in New York’s clubs. Musically, this was strongly inspired by the Cuban standard “Oye Como Va,” recorded by Santana on their Abraxas album in 1970. Its basic chord sequence (Cm-Eb-Fm) and bubbling percussion were pure Latino, but Bowie had yet to learn that on a track dominated by congas, the drummer did not need to match their frenetic pace, and “Things to Do” sometimes suggested that the Muppets’ puppet Animal had entered the studio. The Astronettes grasped the special harmonic blend of the Latin sound but were hampered by a melody that merely filled the track, rather than enhancing it.

  [96] 1984/DODO

  (Bowie)

  Recorded ca. September 1973; Sound + Vision CD set

  [97] DODO (AKA YOU DIDN’T HEAR IT FROM ME)

  (Bowie)

  Recorded September 1973; Diamond Dogs extended CD

  [98] 1984

  (Bowie)

  Recorded October 1973–February 1974; Diamond Dogs LP

  * * *

  “I’m an awful pessimist,” David Bowie conceded in 1973. “That’s one of the things against me. I’m pessimistic about new things, new projects, new ideas, as far as society’s concerned.” He was not alone. In America, the Watergate scandal was undermining the public’s faith in the nation’s most trusted institutions. Across the West, a new era of austerity loomed, as the Yom Kippur War sparked an energy crisis that soon led to what the British chancellor of the exchequer, Anthony Barber, described as the nation’s “gravest economic crisis” since World War II.

  It was a season for visions of apocalypse and repression, which for Bowie reinforced the impact of a train journey across the Russian continent in April and May. The grim bureaucracy and acute poverty of the fabled communist paradise stoked his prevailing sense of panic and claustrophobia in the run-up to his final tour as Ziggy Stardust. Back in London, he told his wife, “After what I’ve seen of this world, I’ve never been so damned scared in my life.” So intense was his feeling of dread that he vehemently resisted the notion of compressing his experiences into an album. “If I ever wrote about it, it would be my last album ever,” he said. “I don’t think I’d be around after recording it.”

  It was hardly a coincidence that instead he chose to map out a rock musical around George Orwell’s fictional re-creation of a Stalinesque society, Nineteen Eighty-Four. Other musicians had flirted with Orwell’s theme, notably the rock band Spirit, whose “1984” single was banned by many US radio stations in 1969 for its political content, and jazz drummer Hugh Hopper, who issued an instrumental album titled 1984 in 1973. But Bowie’s fantasies, as ever, were fashioned on an epic scale: a Broadway revue with a huge cast, and perhaps a television film to document it for posterity. Instead of resting after completing Pin Ups, he threw himself into a weeklong frenzy of writing and emerged with a skeleton script and several songs that would propel the action forward.

  There was a certain irony in Bowie’s attempting to translate the devious operations of Orwell’s (or more accurately Big Brother’s) Ministry of Truth into song. Minitrue’s constant rewriting of history was no more audacious than Bowie’s ability to fashion a fresh version of his own past whenever he was confronted with a microphone. But his sincerity was transparent: nothing he had conceived since the original blueprint of the Ziggy Stardust project had exerted such a hold over his imagination. So his sense of disappointment—almost betrayal—when the proposed musical had to be abandoned was crushing.

  The problem was simple, and intractable: “Mrs Orwell refused to let us have the rights, point blank. For a person who married a socialist with communist leanings, she was the biggest upper-class snob I’ve ever met in my life. ‘Good heavens, put it to music?’ It really was like that.” Not that Bowie was given singular treatment: so protective was Sonia Orwell of her late husband’s legacy, and so appalled had she been by a 1955 film adaptation, that she had turned down everyone who approached her wishing to translate Nineteen Eighty-Four into another medium. As her biographer noted, “Rejected applicants inevitably found her approach tiresome and high-handed.” Bowie was left to mold his Orwell-inspired rock musical into something equally apocalyptic, but sufficiently removed from the original to keep Sonia’s lawyers at bay.

  Without access to Bowie’s notebooks from the period, it’s impossible to determine how thoroughly he had sketched out the scenario for Nineteen Eighty-Four. Several songs—“We Are the Dead” [102] and “Big Brother” [103] among them—explored themes or phrases that can be traced back to Orwell’s novel. Others, composed during his experimentation with lyrical cut-ups, were sufficiently vague to fit into almost any category, and could perhaps have been revised to make them more specific. Some (“Rebel Rebel” [101] is the most notable example) were difficult to imagine inside even the loosest Nineteen Eighty-Four frame. It was also not clear whether Bowie was intending for the narrative to be carried forward entirely in song, or whether he would create dialogue to link the musical segments.

  The medley of “1984” and “Dodo”—his first studio work on Nineteen Eighty-Four, and his last with both producer Ken Scott and the remnants of the Spiders—provided a clue as to how the album might have been constructed, if not the stage musical it was meant to accompany. With its cinematic scoring and constant iteration of the title, “1984” would have provided a striking theme for the project, even if its links with Orwell’s book were more suggestive than representational. “Dodo,” meanwhile, was a tightly assembled series of snapshots and incidents that could be located (with some musical license) in the novel. It is possible to imagine an entire album in a similar vein: a collage of emblematic fragments linked by repeated themes, spotlighting selected crisis points and characters from Orwell’s imagination, carefully scored to ensure continuity of tone as much as story line. But it would have required a degree of concentration and focus that was perhaps beyond the mercurial Bowie at this stage of his career.

  “1984” and “Dodo” were clearly intended from the outset to stand as one discrete piece of music: they were previewed in that form during Bowie’s last television appearance with the Spiders from Mars, in October 1973. Issued as a single, it might have altered the public perception of Bowie, and certainly banished all memories of Ziggy Stardust. It would have revealed him as the first major rock act to incorporate the stylistic innovations of a generation of US soul performers who had been invited to score so-called blaxploitation movies in the early seventies. Instead, it languished in Bowie’s archives until it was exhumed for the retrospective Sound + Vision project in 1989.

  With its chattering wah-wah guitar deep in the mix, and its dramatic, percussive blend of bass and piano, the “1984” theme was instantly reminiscent of Isaac Hayes’s “Theme from Shaft.” The use of strings evoked another blaxploitation soundtrack, Curtis Mayfield’s Super Fly. But there was much more to the arrangement than pastiche: the repeated use of a cavernous bass-drum beat that was detuned as an eerie commentary on the landscape; the four-note piano motif that underpinned the verses; the almost visual impact of the strings, from the cellos introducing the middle section to the spectacular swirl and fall of the violins that ended it; and the way in which the vocal chorus filled out the sound palette, from baritone to soprano, building on the root of the first verse, and then a harmonic third in the second.

  Drums and piano (the latter offering a variation on the opening to Strauss’s “Also Sprach Zarathustra”) signaled the switch to the much sparser soundscape of “Dodo.” The song focused initially on Orwell’s doomed lovers, Winston and Julia, before switching to Winston’s neighbor, the hapless Mr. Parsons (who is betrayed by his own child in the novel), and the
n to the world that those children would inherit. Cellos and electric piano dominated the arrangement, while Mick Ronson laid a surf-guitar motif under the chorus in a surreal juxtaposition of moods. Then the “1984” theme returned, its rhythmic string score acknowledging the pioneering work of Philadelphia soul producers Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff.

  Once the Nineteen Eighty-Four musical was abandoned, “Dodo” was isolated as a possible duet vehicle for Bowie and sixties pop star Lulu (for whom Bowie had recently produced a hit version of his own “The Man Who Sold the World”). That might explain Bowie’s casual vocal on the surviving mix of the separated song, pitched two semitones above the original recording. (That was presumably for Lulu’s benefit, although Bowie was not there to hear the results. “No Bowie?” Lulu said when she arrived at Olympic Studios, before adding her voice like a true professional.) There was no such prevarication about “1984,” which was stripped of its “Dodo” elements and retooled for the Diamond Dogs album, at a harsher tempo and with the Shaft-inspired wah-wah guitar of Alan Parker at the front of the mix. The full dramatic potential of the piece was laid bare here, from the tinkling siren (played on electric piano) that introduced and closed the track to the eight-to-the-bar cymbal rim shots that sizzled beneath the keynote riff. Once again, Bowie found room amid the drama for subtle, sometimes almost puzzling sonic touches—the harpsichord that was audible during the verses, the Byrds-inspired electric guitar beneath the middle section, and the electric piano decorations in the final verse that operated in a different key to the rest of the track, perhaps meant to symbolize Winston Smith’s separation from Big Brother’s society. The only weakness of the track was the rather redundant third verse, added when the two halves of the medley were separated. One mystery remained: was Bowie warning of the “savage jaw” of 1984—Big Brother’s harsh words, perhaps, plus the image of a rabid, slobbering hound—or the “savage lure,” which enabled Big Brother to retain power? The naked ear suggested the former; the printed sheet music insisted the latter.

  [99] (ALTERNATIVE) CANDIDATE

  (Bowie)

  Recorded January 1974; Diamond Dogs extended CD

  * * *

  The deluxe Diamond Dogs reissue of 2004 unveiled this “Alternative” version of a song that was subsequently incorporated into a medley with “Sweet Thing” [100]. It was described as “a demo for proposed 1984 musical,” although its thematic link with that project was difficult to determine. Some courageous fans have provided elaborate and highly creative “interpretations” of the lyrics, linking them with the Nineteen Eighty-Four narrative.* But there was little internal evidence to support such a theory, beyond a mysterious sense of dissatisfaction, as felt by Orwell’s Winston Smith (and characters in thousands of other novels). More persuasive was the idea that this was one of Bowie’s first experiments with the cut-up technique, to fill out a track for which he had a title but no song. Everything operated just outside the realm of logic, though Bowie’s self-description as the “Fuhrerling” not only was alarming and prophetic, but also predated Nick Lowe and Elvis Costello’s “little Hitlers” by half a decade. The very title of “Candidate” was emblematic at a time when the Watergate scandal was beginning to bite, however, and Richard Nixon’s defiant words (“I am not a crook”) were slowly being stripped of their sincerity.

  Only the first two lines of this composition reappeared in the later incarnation of the song, set to a different melody. No musical element of the “(Alternative) Candidate” track survived the transition, in fact: while the released “Candidate” revolved around a single three-chord sequence, the “Alternative” comprised several different sections welded together. But there was musical promise: not in the very lackadaisical melody, but in the syncopation of the drums and piano in the introduction, and the way in which the strings oozed eerily beneath an aggressive wah-wah guitar line. Note also the second use of the “detuned” drum sound first heard on “1984/Dodo” [96].

  THE ART OF FRAGMENTATION

  The primary source for Bowie’s lyrics during the Diamond Dogs sessions was a collection of notebooks, in which he had written hundreds of phrases and lines. Flashes of inspiration were recorded there, alongside images borrowed from books, TV advertisements, even the labels stuck on the Olympic Studios mixing consoles. Bowie had already discovered the value of introducing chance into his creative process, but on this album, and again in 1977 on much of “Heroes,” he elected to rely explicitly upon an accidental collision of images rather than orthodox narrative techniques. He was encouraged in this direction by his November 1973 meeting with the author William S. Burroughs (motto: “mix your own linguistic virus”), an encounter engineered by the editors of Rolling Stone magazine. To prepare for the interview, Bowie immersed himself in Burroughs’s novel Nova Express, the third of his books (after The Soft Machine and The Ticket That Exploded) to depend on the cut-up technique pioneered by his friend Brion Gysin. He in turn acknowledged the influence of Dada and surrealist writers such as Tristan Tzara, who had assembled poetry by cutting random words out of newspapers. “Cut up everything in sight,” Gysin once wrote. “Make your whole life a poem.”

  The “poem” of Burroughs’s Nova Express was obscure to anyone who wasn’t under chemical influence or acutely alert to the sound, rather than the meaning, of words. Bowie qualified on both counts, describing the cut-up technique as “a very western tarot” and using it as a substitute for the random significance of the I Ching. “My thought forms are already fragmented, to say the least,” he admitted in 1975. “I’ve had to do cut-ups on my writing for some time, so that I might be able to put it all back into some coherent form again. My actual writing doesn’t make a tremendous amount of sense.” Faced with a society that he imagined was deconstructing itself, and a personality that was in danger of fragmenting, he found a rationale in cut-up that eluded him elsewhere.

  He was hardly the first musician to utilize similar techniques: Stravinsky had compressed fragments of folk tunes into The Rite of Spring; Pierre Boulez pioneered the operation of chance as a compositional method in the fifties; the Beatles* chopped up tapes of fairground organs and threw them to the ground during the recording of Sgt. Pepper. Steve Reich’s pioneering minimalist piece “It’s Gonna Rain” evolved when two recordings of the same speech pattern accidentally ran out of phase with each other. Brian Eno would later incorporate elements of chance into his fundamental theories of composition: hence the working title of the third album he made with Bowie, Planned Accidents. Bowie met Brion Gysin in 1976, and for the next decade Gysin pursued the dream of persuading Bowie to star in his screenplay of Burroughs’s most famous novel, Naked Lunch. Meanwhile, Bowie would return to cut-up—this time facilitated by a computer program—in the mid-nineties, as a way of triggering a creative leap of faith during the assembly of the 1.Outside project.

  Back in 1973–74, however, when Bowie allowed cut-up to shape the “Sweet Thing” medley [100] and the title track of Diamond Dogs [107], the technique he’d borrowed from Gysin and Burroughs performed a different set of functions. It allowed him to convey a sense of apocalyptic decay, one of the themes that followed him from Nineteen Eighty-Four into Diamond Dogs. More pertinent, perhaps, it was a way of distancing himself from his work—or, to be more accurate, shifting the location of his involvement. On the cut-up songs, there was no personal disclosure or commitment in the lyrics, but on “Sweet Thing,” in particular, Bowie invested almost frightening levels of passion in his performance, which spoke more eloquently than his words. Only when he adopted the musical language of American soul later in 1974 did he find a more satisfying way of combining words and music as a means of emotional expression.

  [100] SWEET THING/CANDIDATE/SWEET THING

  (Bowie)

  Recorded January/February 1974; Diamond Dogs LP

  * * *

  Nothing on Diamond Dogs illustrated the album’s creative enigma—emotional commitment, lyrical dissociation—as vividly as this extended* exercise in
romantic image-mongering. All attempts to squeeze this musical extravaganza into a narrative form, whether inspired by Nineteen Eighty-Four or Diamond Dogs, were doomed to failure: there was no sweet thing, no candidate, no characters at all.

  Yet the song contained several of Bowie’s most enduring images: photographs (taken with instinctive perception by Robert Doisneau, perhaps) so emblematic that it is difficult to believe one hadn’t witnessed them being played out. There was the couple caught in a doorway, or, later, the same pair glimpsed as they threw themselves into a river, hand in hand. There was Bowie himself, crooning in a voice drenched in despair, or conjuring up “papier mache” icons of semimythical figures such as Charles Manson or Muhammad Ali. And finally, one stunning piece of self-revelation (or was it prophecy?), as Bowie asked himself about life in the “snowstorm” of cocaine, at a time when rock’n’roll life was in total, unquestioning thrall to tooting and snorting the septum-rotting, brain-shrinking powder.*

  That ultimate self-condemnation aside, what mattered in this song was sound and the visions it implied, not the literal meaning of the words. Bowie was effectively painting with the colors of music—the tonal scope of his own crooning voice, the comfortable growl of a baritone saxophone, the crisp richness of an acoustic guitar, the gamut of sounds that could be created by his Moog synthesizer, and above all the rococo flourishes of Mike Garson’s keyboards. You could replace Bowie’s English words with any other language, and lose none of the effect; even the voice was merely a constituent part of the canvas, no more or less important than any other.