The Man Who Sold the World

by Peter Doggett

  Taken alongside Farren’s rhetoric, this was practically a blueprint for the punk rock movement. Yet Bowie’s instinct carried him further than that. In the wake of his early 1976 world tour, he effectively vanished for the remainder of the year—recording The Idiot and Low, in fact, but removed from the criticism that was hurled at other rock “dinosaurs,” such as the Rolling Stones and the Who. He reappeared onstage in early 1977, providing keyboards for Iggy Pop. As Iggy was acknowledged as one of the premier influences on punk, Bowie won street-level credibility by association. The sonic gulf between the two albums he released that year and the work of his peers simply reinforced his elite status among rock’s elder statesmen.

  “Punk was absolutely necessary,” Bowie declared in 1979, though as early as 1977 he had warned about the artistic dangers of group identity and uniformity: “a set of people has the most devastating effect on one’s chances of producing anything.” By then, anyone who had sampled the relentlessly conformist sound of most British punk, trapped between its stylistic barriers like a bobsleigh on the track, knew exactly what he meant. In his absence, he had sidestepped any accusations of irrelevance, and also the kind of creative misjudgment that, for example, caused Paul McCartney (only five years older than Bowie) to write a punk song, titled “Boil Crisis.”

  Better still, few connections were drawn between Bowie’s muddleheaded espousal of fascism as a form of social cleansing and the Nazi paraphernalia displayed by many of the original wave of London punks. As journalist Norman Shrapnel noted in his end-of-the-decade survey, “Germanic influences were plain, and anybody wanting to scare themselves with the more shuddering sort of 30s parallel had only to look at the decadent echoes . . . and at the black leather battalions, the storm-trooper uniforms, even the swastikas that broke out like a contagion.” Neither a dinosaur nor the inspiration for punk’s most lamentable lapse in fashion, Bowie had continued to display his uncanny knack for remaining an outsider without losing touch with his audience. They, in turn, began to reflect his influence when they formed their own post-punk bands in the late seventies and early eighties, combining the scorched-earth philosophy of punk with the sonic experimentation of his 1976–80 work.

  [147] BEAUTY AND THE BEAST

  (Bowie)

  Recorded June–August 1977; “Heroes” LP

  * * *

  Bowie’s first twelve months back in Europe was a period of stunning creativity, which produced four albums (two solo, two by Iggy Pop). The last of them—reuniting the team of Bowie, Eno, and Visconti—opened with an electronic growl, as if a computer had been awoken from a deep slumber. Then a piano hit the first two beats of every eight-beat bar (the rhythm tapped out on the edge of a cymbal); African percussion rattled menacingly; a guitar howled into life; the piano erupted to devour each beat; and the creator let out his own ominous groan, extended for five bars. If Low began in low profile, “Heroes” announced itself from the start as an uproarious celebration of man and machine—beauty and the beast, indeed, though the precise identity of each had still to be determined.

  Another contrast: Low couldn’t help but confess, even when it was without words; “Heroes” was a deliberate act of distancing Bowie from emotional disclosure, a show of bravado in the face of an unknown threat. Even when he sounded most open, the performance was under strict control—one calm Bowie (low voice) juxtaposed against one hysterical Bowie (high voice), to show off his range. This was a rambunctious display, then, as the singer tossed off lines from an adult nursery rhyme over a lumbering musical vehicle that was not funk, not rock, not disco, but some futuristic combination of them all. This was minimalism par excellence: one chord to cover the verse and chorus; another (alternating between C major and C7) for the more halting middle section.

  “I wanted to give a phrase a particular feeling,” Bowie explained in 1978. “Each individual line I wanted to have a different atmosphere, so I would construct it in a Burroughs fashion.” Hence the distance; hence the spontaneous relief from the psychodramas of Low; hence the fact that “Beauty and the Beast” was irresistibly obscure, but so cunningly assembled that it didn’t matter for a second.

  [148] JOE THE LION

  (Bowie)

  Recorded June–August 1977; “Heroes” LP

  * * *

  In 1974, performance artist Chris Burden had himself nailed to the roof of his Volkswagen Beetle in Venice, California. Such was the jolting shock inspired by his concept piece (called Trans-Fixed) that many people erroneously recalled having seen him driven around the city streets that day, when in reality his VW traveled no more than a few feet from his garage. His crucifixion maintained a theme that fueled his work in the early seventies: risk and danger as a form of self-expression, entailing voyeuristic guilt from his audience. In that spirit, he was shot in the arm by his assistant in 1971, and in a 1974 piece named White Light/White Heat, after one of Bowie’s favorite Lou Reed songs, spent twenty-two days lying on the floor of a New York gallery without eating. The fact that he remained out of sight throughout this latter performance, insisting that his audience take his pain on trust, merely added to the ambiguity.

  Three years later, Trans-Fixed was transferred to Bowie’s “Joe the Lion,” who expressed his (or Bowie’s) pain in psychological terms. Whatever noise escaped from Burden’s mouth as the nails pierced his flesh was surely matched when Joe/Bowie conjured up “your dreams tonight” as a threat, not a delicious promise. Yet even self-mutilation wasn’t enough to keep an audience amused. “Thanks for hesitating,” Bowie muttered sarcastically, as if standing and watching the artist at work was the greatest sin of all.

  “Joe” was also the name that Bowie used for the child that he and his wife had christened Zowie: “Boy,” he shouted twice (emphasizing the word IN BLOCK CAPITALS on the album insert). Was this a subliminal connection?

  There were at least two levels of reality at work here, conscious and unconscious; most of us get up and sleep every day, avoiding the nagging of our creativity and our subconscious awareness. Bowie had been reading the work of Colin Wilson, whose insistent message was still: you could connect with the occult, with the potential of one’s own psyche and artistry, if you would only WAKE UP.

  But when you wake up, it’s Monday, and the deadened Cockney of Bowie’s voice demonstrated that he could still remember the drudgery of daily life as a work-slave. Yet the alternative was to be an artist and have nails driven through your hands. No wonder that “Joe the Lion” began with an explosion of guitar noise across both channels, followed by a riff that seemed to be scurrying like a robot into dark corners in search of anyone hiding there. From there—and except for the interlude of daily tedium—the track grew more and more intense, prompting one scream from Bowie that was every bit as agonized as John Lennon’s wail for his parents on “Mother” in 1970. This was a performance of utter conviction that—on the unconscious level, at the very least—found Bowie investigating the consequences of his chosen profession with a level of honesty so scathing that it took courage to continue.

  [149] “HEROES”

  (Bowie/Eno)

  [150] “HELDEN”

  [151] “HEROS”

  Recorded June–August 1977; single A-side and “Heroes” LP (UK [149]; Germany [150]; France [151])

  * * *

  Courage requires heroes,* and not all “heroes” are heroic—which was why Bowie chose to cloak his characters in a protective layer of irony, and quotation marks. Enough has been written elsewhere about the biographical inspiration for this song: Bowie watching out of the Hansa Studios window in West Berlin as two lovers met surreptitiously by the Wall, two lovers who may—or may not—have proved to be (married) record producer Tony Visconti and Antonia Maass. Important though that incident must have been in personal terms, it diminishes the song to have it reduced to a factual account of an affair.

  For Bowie clearly had more at stake than a romantic photograph (even if the snapshot of the tryst alongside the ultimate symbol
of a divided planet was every bit as romanticized as his lovers in a doorway, or by the river’s edge, in the “Sweet Thing” medley [100]). He claimed as the album was released that the song was about the heroism of facing up to reality and staring it down. He was referring to political oppression, but that remark would have had a peculiarly personal resonance to the creator of Low. “The shame,” he howled at one point, once again channeling the spirit of John Lennon* at his most agonized. There was certainly a discrepancy between the initial scenario of the song, which seemed to be nothing more edifying than a pickup by a man trying to convince his soon-to-be-lover that one night of adultery was a heroic act, and the extent of Bowie’s emotional investment* in its later stages. Early in the song, Bowie was playful and intimate; later he sang as if his soul were on fire. “People like watching people who make mistakes,” he had noted the previous year, “but they prefer watching a man who survives his mistakes.” After the track was released, he preferred to distance himself from the song’s emotional content, claiming he was trying to capture the heroism of the Turkish community living in the poorest quarters of West Berlin.

  Eno’s biographer David Sheppard described how this track was created: “three oscillating VCS3 drones” from Eno, plus “triumphal arcs of guitar [by Robert Fripp] filtered through Eno’s extensive treatments . . . to freight the song with its towering opulence.” Structurally, “Heroes” was as simple as anything Bowie had written: it was based on a two-chord (D-G) progression, with a brief excursion to other familiar chords from the key of G. The combination of Eno’s synthesizers and Fripp’s guitars (three of them, apparently, all retained in the mix) created that strangest of contradictions, a peaceful cacophony of feedback and noise, with guitar notes sustained to infinity. The drums heightened and withdrew the drama, as required, occasionally skipping a backbeat to prove that some humanity was involved. But all the emotional weight of the song rested on Bowie, who successfully journeyed from seduction to existential despair as if it were the most hackneyed route of all.

  For the first time since “Space Oddity” [1], Bowie reached out beyond the English-speaking audience, recording single-length versions of “Heroes” in French and German. His vocal on the German edition, “Helden,” was astonishingly intense; on the French “Heros,” however, he sounded defeated, by the language as much as the despair.

  [152] SONS OF THE SILENT AGE

  (Bowie)

  Recorded June–August 1977; “Heroes” LP

  * * *

  Bowie arrived at the sessions for his second Visconti/Eno collaboration with this solitary song, which (perhaps inevitably) he intended as the title track for his successor to Low. “Heroes” would have been a very different record had he continued in this direction, for “Sons of the Silent Age” revisited themes and sounds from the previous decade, rather than focusing single-mindedly on the contemporary. While some of his references were personal—he provided his best vocal impression of Anthony Newley since 1967, while the robotic characters of his narrative belonged to some hybrid of Diamond Dogs and Fritz Lang’s (silent age) Metropolis—others had surprisingly obvious antecedents. Of these, the Beatles were the most recognizable, with the backing voices in the long melodic descent of the middle section evoking their 1968 recording “Sexy Sadie,” while Bowie’s final vocal flourish echoed the closing bars of Paul McCartney’s hit single “Jet.” All of which explained, perhaps, the feeling of spiritual emptiness that pervaded the lyrics, as if everything in life were stale and repetitive—whether one was listening to music by Sam Therapy or King Dice (both acts that existed only in Bowie’s imagination). The song’s chorus reflected that feeling, with its bored drift back and forth between G and F major chords. The only disruption to the mundane (however attractively expressed) was the initial saxophone-driven climb from the A to D major chords, omitting only C# along the way.

  [153] BLACKOUT

  (Bowie)

  Recorded June–August 1977; “Heroes” LP

  * * *

  As “Beauty and the Beast” had already made clear, Bowie was determined on this record to keep autobiography at bay. “I still incorporate a lot of [William] Burroughs’ ideas,” he said, “and I still purposely fracture everything, if it’s making too much sense.” That has not prevented biographers from assuming that “Blackout” was inspired by an incident in 1977, when Bowie was hospitalized, believing erroneously that he was suffering a heart attack. Equally intriguing, for those who wanted to conflate life and art, was the fact that this was the fourth consecutive song on “Heroes” that referred to drinking: by his own admission, alcohol was one of the pulls on Bowie’s addictive personality during the late seventies. Yet searching for a definite meaning was not always a fulfilling pastime: when Bowie declaimed himself to be under Japanese influence, was he revealing the depth of his immersion in Japanese culture? Briefly assuming the persona of Yukio Mishima, the novelist and nationalist who died in a particularly gruesome ritual suicide in 1970? Or merely tossing off the kind of boast that comes easily to the lips of the wit and bon viveur when they’re being faced with a disgraceful exit from a bar?

  Then there were the musical references on this most cacophonous of performances, which began with what sounded like a large shipment of crates being dropped at enormous height from a dockside crane. Wasn’t the introduction reminiscent of Paul McCartney’s “Beware My Love” (unlikely listening for Bowie and Eno, one would have thought)? Weren’t the falsetto vocals at the end a pastiche of the Beatles? And in particular, didn’t Bowie’s ecstatic cry of “woo-hoo” sound as if it belonged on John Lennon’s “I Am the Walrus”? (Maybe John Lennon was the one under Japanese influence . . .) If the Beatles references were too much, then how about the Velvet Underground, and the combination of thin, stabbing guitar and pounded piano in the style of “White Light/White Heat”?

  This is where speculation takes you. It was enough to label this a study of someone’s psychological decay, and relish the glorious intensity of Bowie’s performance—perhaps the most carefree he had sounded on record since “Let’s Spend the Night Together” [72] nearly five years earlier. An entire generation of British rock bands was listening closely, as the insistent keyboard motif whining beneath Bowie’s procession of different vocal personae recurred throughout records by the likes of Echo & the Bunnymen and the Teardrop Explodes.

  [154] V-2 SCHNEIDER

  (Bowie)

  Recorded June–August 1977; “Heroes” LP

  * * *

  Conceptually simple and sly, “V-2 Schneider” combined the name of a German missile from World War II with the surname of a member of Kraftwerk. Though it was a far more disruptive piece than anything the German band would have attempted, its vocal chorus—evolving slowly from the synthetic to the human—added some flesh and blood to the robotic refrains of Kraftwerk songs such as “Autobahn” and “Trans-Europe Express.” Before then, the horror of the V-2 rocket had been represented by howls of feedback (a homage, perhaps, to guitarist Michael Rother of NEU!)—and white noise, supported cinematically by the rat-tat-tat of percussion. Guitars and saxophones maintained the assault over a falling chord sequence, before the vocal respite. But the track ended with another descending roar of sound, symbolizing the murderous advantage held by machine over man. It was a somber message for a phase of Bowie’s career on which he was entirely dependent on machinery.

  [155] SENSE OF DOUBT

  (Bowie)

  Recorded June–August 1977; “Heroes” LP

  * * *

  Brian Eno remembered that this instrumental took shape under the influence of his Oblique Strategies cards. (Eno’s cards; Bowie’s and Eno’s overdubs; Bowie’s writing credit.) “It was like a game,” he told Ian MacDonald. “We took turns working on it; he’d do one overdub and I’d do the next. Effectively [my card] said, ‘Try to make everything as similar as possible’ . . . and [Bowie’s] said, ‘Emphasise differences.’ ” That clash of concepts was effectively the whole of the piece:
not only was “Sense of Doubt” as unsettling as its title suggested, but it was based around the contrast between a repeated four-note piano motif (echoed on synthesizer) and the constant variations that greeted it. Each repetition prompted a different set of chords as a synthesized fanfare, while across the barren landscape roamed a menagerie of noises and effects—some vaguely human, some purely mechanical, all ominous and unnerving. Before and after it all were washes of sound, as if nature itself had been conquered by the machine, and even the tides and winds survived solely at the whim of a computer.

  [156] MOSS GARDEN

  (Bowie/Eno)

  Recorded June–August 1977; “Heroes” LP

  * * *

  Eno’s biographer, David Sheppard, suggested that Bowie’s initial input into “Moss Garden” was “restricted to impressionistic scene-setting”—in this instance, a place of remembrance located in tranquil surroundings in Kyoto, Japan. Though the music that Eno created was appropriately restful, gently drifting between F# and C# with the hum of synthesized strings, it was not entirely idealistic: the world interrupted the reverie in the form of an airplane flying across the channels, a dog barking, the distant throb of a gong slowed and echoed. All these sounds were created electronically. Bowie then augmented the piece with an improvisation on the Japanese instrument the koto, first tracing the downward spiral of a scale, before playing amid the possibilities opened by the prevailing keys. Depending on your point of view, his contribution either reclaimed the “Moss Garden” carefully for humanity or subverted Eno’s original concept of an entirely electronic soundscape.