The Man Who Sold the World
Page 37
[171] BOYS KEEP SWINGING
(Bowie/Eno)
Recorded September 1978–March 1979; Lodger LP
* * *
If “Fantastic Voyage” [164] treated Bowie’s favorite chord sequence of the Lodger sessions with sensitivity, “Boys Keep Swinging” bumped it around like a bumper car, particularly when Bowie and Eno suggested that the musicians should swap roles—leaving Carlos Alomar, as the wonderfully chaotic percussionist, to turn the beat around, and Dennis Davis on minimalist bass (subsequently repaired by Tony Visconti). It’s difficult at this distance to separate the track from its remarkable promotional film. In isolation, “Boys Keep Swinging” was a romp that either satirized—or, more worryingly, reinforced—the male gang mentality, which Bowie would have known well from his mid-sixties spell as a Mod.* The chorus swaggered along to a single chord (unlike “Fantastic Voyage,” with its more melodic shifts), while one of the basses played the riff from Larry Williams’s 1957 rock’n’roll classic “Bony Maronie.” Then Adrian Belew contributed a guitar solo that sounded as if it had been flown in from another dimension: which, thanks to Bowie’s involvement, it effectively had. He explained: “What I do is, say, use four tracks for a recorded solo and then I cut them up, knock up a little four-point mixer clipping the solos in and out. I give myself arbitrary numbers of bars in which they can play within a particular area, and go backwards and forwards from one track to another. The effect is somewhat histrionic.” So was the entire performance, from original conception to ramshackle delivery.
[172] REPETITION
(Bowie)
Recorded September 1978–March 1979; Lodger LP
* * *
Repetition was the cornerstone of American minimalist music; of disco and funk; and of the popular music that attempted to marry these diverse approaches to sound. Brian Eno had introduced Bowie to the New York band Talking Heads, whose skeletal reproduction of funk through the prism of art school aesthetics was undoubtedly influenced by Bowie’s work, with and without Iggy Pop. Bowie later acknowledged that elements of “D.J.” were intended as a homage to Talking Heads leader David Byrne, but he didn’t mention the more overt debt he owed on this track, with its clipped vocal and relentless use of simple, two-chord motifs.
The man who had rued his own behavior toward women on “Can You Hear Me” [108] and “It’s Gonna Be Me” [116] now focused unwaveringly on a fictional case of domestic violence. A powerless angel watching lives unfold, he intervened just once, asking so softly for the violence to cease that there was no danger the protagonists would listen. Eno’s electronic treatment was equally subtle, and a powerful if grim performance was undermined only by the melodic similarity between the line that expressed the assailant’s frustration and the chorus of America’s 1972 soft rock hit “Horse with No Name.”
[173] RED MONEY
(Bowie/Alomar)
Recorded September 1978–March 1979; Lodger LP
* * *
An album rife with self-cannibalism and self-depletion ended with a symbolic demonstration of both traits. “Red Money” was built on the backing track of “Sister Midnight” [132] from Iggy Pop’s The Idiot, and proclaimed the unsettling message: “project cancelled.”* By sheer coincidence, Bowie’s pronouncement was released just two weeks after the British general election in which Margaret Thatcher led the Conservative Party to a resounding victory. Her government would soon polarize cultural values in Bowie’s homeland, signaling the death of the liberal consensus that had unified the political establishment since the end of World War II. It would be unwise to propose Bowie as a political prophet, especially when it came to the fate of a country he had left five years earlier. But he did not require expert knowledge about British affairs to sense that the very notion of community was under threat: in his own family, as he launched divorce proceedings against his wife; in rock culture, where punk had effectively erased the last faint echoes of the sixties counterculture; and in the wider societies of the West beyond. Lodger began with Bowie insisting plaintively that life was a valuable commodity, and concluded with the resolution that it was our responsibility to preserve everything that constituted that value. At the end of a decade dominated by strains of individualism, Bowie had still not quite given up on the power of collectivism.
Whatever “red money” represented in Bowie’s personal symbolism—Russian rubles or bloodstained lucre—it roused him from stridency to near hysteria by the end of the song, as he bellowed the title like John Lennon reliving his childhood agonies at the start of the decade. The “Sister Midnight” track was treated to sonic distractions, in an effort to disguise its origins: a tumult of electronic noise, a series of funk riffs, a set of vocal harmonies that revisited the most intense moments of “Breaking Glass” [134], and a final flurry of backward guitar, as if Bowie were trying to reverse direction. It was too late for second thoughts, however: project canceled.
LODGER LP
By his own exacting standards, Lodger was Bowie’s one serious failure of nerve during the “long seventies.” Expectations had been raised—not necessarily by Bowie himself—that the album would complete a trilogy alongside Low and “Heroes.” Although he briefly tried to puncture this idea, suggesting that the set would be completed by an album titled Fame (which would have been an intriguing title for Scary Monsters, in retrospect), he eventually allowed himself to be caught up in the hype surrounding a supposed “Berlin” triptych of collaborations with Eno. The fact that only one of the three had been entirely recorded in Berlin was merely a minor distraction to the publicity campaign.
In fact, Lodger was made in Switzerland, Bowie’s latest haven. Eno arrived bearing a copy of the Walker Brothers’ Nite Flights album, and a concept: the pair would consolidate the aleatory theme of their previous experiments by fashioning a record with the deliberately contradictory title of Planned Accidents. Elements of Lodger enacted that scenario perfectly, notably the switching of instruments on “Boys Keep Swinging” [171] and the way in which visiting guitarist Adrian Belew was plunged into action without the safety of having heard the tracks that he was being asked to decorate.
The missing ingredient was songwriting—or, to be accurate, songwriting that aroused its composer’s enthusiasm. “If I’m bored, then people can see it,” Bowie had admitted in 1974. “I don’t hide it very well. Everything I do, I get bored with eventually. It’s knowing where to stop.” Much of Lodger sounded as if Bowie had arrived at the sessions knowing exactly where his Planned Accidents would stop, and had fleshed out pages of his travel diary to fill the spaces. Lodger was his first studio record since Pin Ups that didn’t need to be made, as critics swiftly recognized. It was treated with disdain by many reviewers, a representative sample of accusations including “a piece of self-plagiarism . . . his last eight or so albums cut up, played backwards and then reassembled”; “the most enervating and enervated album Bowie’s made . . . Bowie is miserably confused”; and “frustrating but well-crafted . . . ordinary by Bowie’s recent standards”—none of which is easy to rebut. The final critic was right, however: Lodger was impeccably well crafted, very listenable, and more commercial than its predecessors. It also proved to be more influential, proving easier to imitate in the decade ahead than Low or “Heroes” (not least by Eno, when in the company of David Byrne). Its assimilation of “world music” influences has become a standard ploy for rock musicians ever since, leaving Lodger in the unusual position of being an album that exposed its creator’s loss of direction while simultaneously offering his successors a clear signpost to the future.
Lodger was also the first record for which Bowie produced promotional videos that were as radical as the songs they supported (more of which later). And its rather alarming cover art, photographed by Brian Duffy, outstripped any of the music for boldness. After one album with a deliberately low-profile jacket, and another on which Bowie chose to mimic the subject of an expressionist painting, Lodger represented a deliberate step into a world in
which Egon Schiele became the art director for a futuristic horror movie, directed perhaps by David Cronenberg. Bowie’s body was depicted across the gatefold sleeve, prone like Schiele’s Portrait of Friederike Maria Beer, distorted like the same artist’s lacerating self-portraits. It was as if the turmoil of the previous records had been focused onto the artwork of Lodger, leaving the music itself unsettlingly free of emotion.
[174] I PRAY OLE
(Bowie)
Recorded ca. 1978–79 (and 1990?); Lodger extended CD
* * *
Retrieved from a 1979 tape for the 1991 CD reissue of Lodger, “I Pray Ole” gave every aural indication of having been completed, if not fully formed, closer to the latter rather than during the sessions for Lodger. The drum sound—bombastic and intrusive—was certainly redolent of the late 1980s, while the style of Bowie’s vocals, which were strangely conventional, didn’t match anything else from the Lodger era. The lyrics were minimal and mock clever; the underlying chord sequence borrowed from Cream’s late-sixties hard rock anthem “White Room”; even the use of cacophony as a means of interrupting expectations sounded perfunctory.
[175] PIANO-LA
(Bowie/Cale)
[176] VELVET COUCH
(Bowie/Cale)
Recorded by John Cale and David Bowie, October 1979; unreleased
* * *
It was perhaps inevitable that Bowie would eventually collaborate with John Cale, one of the few British musicians of their generation who could match (and perhaps outstrip) his maverick spirit. Bowie revered Cale as an original member of the Velvet Underground, and the two men were linked by their respective friendships with Brian Eno. With hindsight, it’s sad that their partnership does not seem to have survived beyond a single session in a New York studio, during a break in Cale’s touring schedule with his uncompromising Sabotage/Live band, and a cameo appearance by Bowie (playing outrageous violin) at a Cale concert in the same city.
These two low-fidelity recordings of semi-improvised songs—named by a bootlegger, rather than by either of the participants—escaped from the session. Through the sonic gloom, it was just possible to hear Bowie singing a wordless melody over a mournful Cale piano melody (“Piano-La”) that reflected both men’s love of the Beach Boys; and a more structured piece in the style of Cale’s Vintage Violence or Bowie’s Hunky Dory, over which Bowie contributed almost indecipherable lyrics (“Velvet Couch”). Incomplete though they were, these fragments were enough to whet the appetite for a more formal collaboration.
Bowie might also have resumed his partnership with Cale’s former colleague Lou Reed in 1979. They shared a meal in London that April to discuss the idea of Bowie producing what proved to be Reed’s Growing Up in Public album, but the occasion ended in a fistfight after Bowie insisted—rather hypocritically, one might feel—that Reed would first have to abandon his intake of alcohol and drugs.
[177] SPACE ODDITY
(Bowie)
Recorded December 1979; single B-side
* * *
A decade after “Space Oddity” [1] had introduced Bowie to the perilous lure of stardom, he returned to the song for a decade-ending TV performance, shown in Britain on Kenny Everett’s New Year’s Eve Show and in the United States on Dick Clark’s Salute to the Seventies. “Having played it with just an acoustic guitar onstage early on,” he explained, “I was always surprised at how powerful it was just as a song, without all the strings and synthesisers. I really wanted to do it as a three-piece song.” Those three “pieces”—piano, bass, and drums—mirrored John Lennon’s instrumentation on his 1970 album Plastic Ono Band, which had already left its mark on Bowie’s vocals on the “Heroes” album. Indeed, after a spare opening that pitched his voice (an octave above the original record) against lush twelve-string guitar, and ten seconds of silence where the launchpad countdown had once been, Bowie produced an exact replica of the sound that Lennon and Phil Spector produced on “Mother”—bass and drum locked together in brutal unison, and the most basic of chords stabbed out on heavily echoed piano. The pause before the guitar showcase in the center of the song was marked out with the thud of a bass drum, the same effect introduced the middle section of “Isolation” on the same Lennon album. This was design, not coincidence, and it raised a tantalizing possibility: what if Bowie had chosen to record his next album in Plastic Ono Band style?
By stripping bare a myth originally assembled in 1969, Bowie was effectively sealing off the seventies as a source of anything more than memory, nostalgic or otherwise. “Space Oddity” had been written as an antidote to the mindless idealism of the late-sixties counterculture; it reemerged in a (British) society governed by a conservative clique whose guiding ethos was the erasure of everything that bore the taint of the sixties—the era that Margaret Thatcher’s party held responsible for moral and social chaos and decay. Hence the relevance of reintroducing a spartan musical style that, in Lennon’s hands, had signaled the end of a dream. The oddity was no longer the individual ostracized from society but, in the Britain of Thatcher’s government, the person who still dared to believe in the power of collective action and the ability of society to care for all of its members, however alienated they might be.
[178] PANIC IN DETROIT
(Bowie)
Recorded December 1979; Scary Monsters extended CD
* * *
Whereas his remake of “Space Oddity” [177] appeared as the B-side of a single, a second revision of the past remained unheard for more than a decade. That was probably because the 1979 version of “Panic in Detroit” [67] was nothing more than fun, illuminating nothing beyond the fact that Bowie no longer took the song remotely seriously. The evidence for the prosecution: a hysterically mannered vocal (“panic innnnnn Dee-Troit”) in the style of a mad (cracked?) actor; a cameo from Tony Visconti as a computer obsessed with correct spelling; and an arrangement that was dismissively quick, weirdly echoed, and punctuated with slowed-down cymbal crashes. An album like this might have worked, as an Agent Orange–style destruction of his past images, but one track in isolation merely sounded like an aberration.
[179] CRYSTAL JAPAN
(Bowie)
Recorded February–April 1980; single B-side
* * *
This instrumental (used as a drinks commercial in Japan, in Bowie’s most blatant acceptance of the advertising ethos) was recorded during the sessions for Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) in 1980, and originally intended as the album’s closing track (at which point it would have been titled “Fuje Moto San”). It demonstrated that Bowie no longer needed Brian Eno to create electronic soundscapes, even if Eno’s influence was unmistakable (alongside that of the British sonic pioneer of the early sixties, Joe Meek, who might have written the melody of “Crystal Japan” for one of his instrumental combos, such as the Tornados). The most conventionally “pretty” of Bowie’s experiments with ambient music, it set a striking melody (with key changes signaled by a plummeting bass tone) against a drowsy hum. The “alien” motif from the hit science fiction movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind made a cameo appearance in the piece, suggesting that Bowie’s intentions here were not entirely serious.
[180] IT’S NO GAME (PART 1)
(Bowie; trans. Miura)
[181] IT’S NO GAME (PART 2)
(Bowie)
Recorded February–April 1980; Scary Monsters LP
* * *
The Scary Monsters album began and ended with the noise of a tape* being rewound and then spinning freely on its reel: an admission that this was, in the end, merely an artifact, a barrier between artist and audience rather than a bridge. It was, moreover, an artifact of ambiguous purpose, commenting on its creator’s past while being constructed out of random pieces of that heritage.
Take, for example, “It’s No Game,” which utilized the structure, melody, and several lines of lyrics of “Tired of My Life” [27], a song that Bowie insisted he had begun to write as early as 1963. Certainly its most chilling line
, about notoriety and suicide, dated from 1970 rather than 1980. His lyrical additions to the song, besides the title’s insistence that this was a serious business, really, were either accidental couplings of phrases (the first verse) or banal assertions of liberal humanism (the references to fascism and the Third World). As with “Fantastic Voyage” on Lodger, it was difficult to avoid the feeling that Bowie was altogether too anxious to prove his political credentials after the embarrassment of his remarks on Hitler and fascism in the mid-seventies.
So words were not the purpose of this song—offered at either end of Scary Monsters in arrangements so contrasting in mood that they were almost baffling.
“Part 1” presented the lyrics in emphatically spoken Japanese (by actress Michi Hirota), while Bowie delivered half of each verse in a voice that ranged between distraught and agonizing. Three lines in, he was already screaming like a man undergoing the extremes of torture, while Robert Fripp’s guitar played a howling, no-exit riff behind him. The song ended with Fripp delivering an excruciatingly atonal guitar loop, while Bowie roared “Shut up!” with the last shreds of his vocal cords. The effect was stunning, scarifying, relentless—the product, it seemed, of a soul in torment.