The Man Who Sold the World
Page 41
[A2] LIZA JANE
(Conn)
Recorded by Davie Jones & the King Bees, May 1964; single A-side
* * *
When entrepreneur Leslie Conn was introduced to Bowie’s second band, the King Bees, he saw not only an energetic bunch of young men who might, perhaps, rival the Rolling Stones, but also a quick source of music publishing income. It was a tradition in the fifties for managers, agents, producers, and publishers to be listed as composers of rock’n’roll and pop songs, regardless of their creative input: the businessmen were assured of a potentially lucrative cut of the record’s royalties, while the artists were usually too ignorant or intimidated to complain.
This plague was in decline by 1964, but Leslie Conn still argued that he deserved the meager earnings from the King Bees’ debut single because he had hammered the tyro efforts of Bowie and George Underwood into commercial shape. In fact, none of the would-be composers could claim much originality, as “Liza Jane” was based on a tune passed down through both the folk and gospel/blues traditions (usually as “Little Liza Jane”). Bowie could easily have heard earlier renditions by Lonnie Donegan, Nina Simone, or Fats Domino, though his version owed more to white predecessors than black. It was clearly intended to rival the Rolling Stones (compare the guitar solo and wolf whistles to the Stones’ “Walking the Dog”) and the Yardbirds, though without the finesse of either. At seventeen, Bowie hadn’t learned how to roar without rasping, and his R&B vocal style was painfully rough, often indecipherable (the second verse evades transcription) and ultimately clumsy. Tackling the final verse a major third above the melody line was a vain attempt to fabricate extra excitement—and it failed to convince more than a few hundred record buyers to invest in the King Bees’ solitary release.
[A3] LOUIE LOUIE GO HOME
(Revere/Lindsay)
Recorded by Davie Jones & the King Bees, May 1964; single B-side
* * *
The successor to the Kingsmen’s hit “Louie Louie” by the slick US garage band Paul Revere & the Raiders wasn’t issued in Britain, so the King Bees must have been sold this generic R&B romp by its Tin Pan Alley publisher. While the Raiders had aped a key feature of the Isley Brothers’ “Shout”—briefly softening the mood before a tempestuous finale—the King Bees’ pedestrian cover never slackened its relentless plod. Bowie’s inadequacy as a blues shouter was exposed even more nakedly than on “Liza Jane,” with an occasional London vowel escaping his mid-Atlantic growl.
[A4] I PITY THE FOOL
(Malone)
Recorded by the Manish Boys, January 1965; single A-side; alternate take on Early On CD
* * *
David Jones was introduced to the Manish Boys, an R&B band from Maidstone in Kent, as a recording artist who already had the offer of an American tour under his belt. This entirely imaginary promise was enough to convince the Manish Boys (named after a Muddy Waters blues tune) to accept Bowie as their frontman.
There being no perceived shame in British R&B bands covering songs by black American blues artists, the Manish Boys were happy to follow the example of their more successful peers, such as the Rolling Stones (who had recently reached No. 1 in Britain with “Little Red Rooster”) and the Animals. Originally recorded (and probably written, despite the credit on the record) by R&B veteran Bobby “Blue” Bland in 1961, “I Pity the Fool” hinged around the contradiction between the dismissive lyrics and Bland’s despairing vocals. Producer Shel Talmy recommended the song to Bowie, whose seasoned delivery, variation of attack, and acute sense of timing displayed an admirable flowering of technique since his first single and showed how swiftly he could step into character with unfamiliar material. The tightly controlled arrangement—with Bowie alternating between an elegant croon and a pleading cry an octave higher—created a sense of tension sustained by a typically pointed guitar solo from session musician Jimmy Page. The near-identical alternative take differed only in the order that Bowie tackled the verses.
When “I Pity the Fool” was released, Conn and Bowie reprised the “long hair” scandal of November 1964 to some effect, with the cooperation of the BBC—all sides agreeing to pretend that the group would not be allowed on-screen unless Bowie cut his hair. An honorable compromise was reached, and the Manish Boys duly appeared on the quaintly named “youth” show Gadzooks! It’s All Happening. But it wasn’t, for the Manish Boys at least, and Bowie quickly abandoned the group. “He was probably aiming higher than the rest of us,” keyboardist Bob Solly reflected. “He was more ruthless. At the time, his departure seemed bloody-minded and disloyal. But I think he was a nice fellow who sometimes had to be nasty in order to get on. He had no other thought in his head than success. He was absolutely positive that he would succeed.”
[A5] TAKE MY TIP
(Jones)
Recorded by the Manish Boys, January 1965; single B-side; alternate take on Early On CD
* * *
Bowie’s unexpectedly sophisticated baptism as a songwriter on record is unlike anything else in his catalogue, owing more to jazz-inspired hipsters such as Jon Hendricks and Oscar Brown (and their British counterpart Georgie Fame) than to the R&B standards in his early repertoire. The core of the song was simple: a two-chord vamp over which Bowie dropped slick Americanisms as if he’d melded the spirits of Jack Kerouac and Frank Sinatra. Only the errant vowel sound of “act tall” took him out of his depth. The conspicuous blue note (C in the key of A) in the horn/vocal melody en route to the chorus suggested that Bowie had written the basics on saxophone, and asked the group to arrange it—perhaps supplying the three-semitone descent with which the song opened, and the more surprising three-chord slide that guided them back from B major toward the original F#. Shel Talmy was sufficiently impressed to pass the song to Kenny Miller, whom he was grooming as a potential teen idol, and who duly became the first outsider to record Bowie’s material. Fresh from a No. 1 single in similar vein with “Yeah Yeah,” Georgie Fame might have been a more profitable target.
[A6] YOU’VE GOT A HABIT OF LEAVING
(Jones)
Recorded by Davy Jones (and the Lower Third), July 1965; single A-side
* * *
Moving relentlessly on, Bowie swiftly assumed control of the Lower Third, as he had the Manish Boys. Though American R&B remained their primary source of inspiration, their role models were closer to home, in the form of two London bands with whom they shared a producer, the Kinks and the Who. The teen aggression and Pop Art pretensions of the Who certainly left their mark on the sound of this record, which appeared—to the alarm of the Lower Third—as a “Davy Jones” solo release. Meanwhile, the Kinks’ trademark shift from the tonic chord to the major second (“You Really Got Me” being the most memorable example) was the root of this flagrant attempt at echoing Ray Davies’s composing style. Lyrically minimal, harmonically banal, the song briefly established a hint of tension that dissipated with Bowie’s maudlin admission, “sometimes I cry.” The Who’s influence was highlighted as Bowie imitated Roger Daltrey’s macho vocalizing, before a briefly explosive guitar solo that was clearly intended to rival the “auto-destruction” of that group’s “Anyway Anyhow Anywhere” [see 86], after which the tune subsided painfully back into its undistinguished theme.
[A7] BABY LOVES THAT WAY
(Jones)
Recorded by Davy Jones (and the Lower Third), July 1965; single B-side
* * *
Nineteen sixty-five was the year when the Detroit-based Motown label extended beyond a Mod cult in Britain and entered the mainstream, leaving its mark on everyone from the Small Faces (“Whatcha Gonna Do About It”) to the Rolling Stones (whose cover of Marvin Gaye’s “Hitch Hike” showed how difficult it was to reproduce the effervescence of the Motor City sound). In keeping with his freshly coiffeured Mod aesthetic, Bowie channeled Gaye’s peacock pride into this jaunty blend of Motown and the Kinks (the guitar solo had all the anarchy of a Dave Davies creation). The song opened with a stuttering variation on
a D chord that anticipated the launch of “The Jean Genie” [65], sold the chorus immediately like a soap commercial, and settled into a two-chord swagger in which the confusion of the narrative (who’s actually in control?) was overpowered by the easy precision of Bowie’s phrasing. Like the best of the Small Faces or their more obscure Mod rivals the Action, “Baby Loves That Way” is a time capsule of London’s mid-sixties clubland.
[A8] THAT’S WHERE MY HEART IS
(Bowie)
Recorded ca. October 1965; Early On CD
* * *
David Jones became David Bowie for professional purposes in September 1965, but he retained his given name for legal purposes (and has ever since). It was Jones, therefore, who signed a one-year publishing deal with Sparta Music, to coincide with the Lower Third’s move from Parlophone to Pye Records. The Sparta contract required him to emulate Lennon and McCartney by providing material that other artists—with, the publishers hoped, a higher commercial profile than Bowie himself—might be able to record. He duly set out to prove himself a one-man hit factory, while borrowing shamelessly from all around him. Five of the songs he wrote in late 1965 were retrieved from Shel Talmy’s archive for an anthology of Bowie’s early work, revealing that his ambitions extended far beyond the R&B/soul mood of his singles. Regardless of their style, what linked these songs was their clumsy sense of structure and melodic development.
“That’s Where My Heart Is”* epitomized the best and worst of Bowie’s calculations, mixing an amusing impression of P. J. Proby’s histrionic baritone with a Burt Bacharach–style chorus apparently fashioned for the equally hysterical Gene Pitney, and a mock-religious “middle eight” that served only to extend the song beyond ninety seconds. Straining in the upper register, however, Bowie hinted at how he would croon “Wild Is the Wind” [131] a decade later.
His earliest efforts at songwriting were crafted at home, where he discovered the joys of overdubbing for the first time: “I borrowed someone else’s tape recorder. I’d just record a basic track on one tape machine, then play that back through the speaker, sing to it and play guitar parts over it onto the other tape recorder, backwards and forwards until there was nothing left but tape hiss, with the idea of a melody for a song way in the background.” From there he graduated to a demo studio “that Bill Wyman used . . . because it was very, very cheap,” before being encouraged by Talmy to work at his IBC Studio in central London. No matter where they were made, however, none of these demos provoked any interest from other artists.
[A9] I WANT MY BABY BACK
(Bowie)
Recorded ca. October 1965; Early On CD
* * *
Another borrowed title (from a macabre US hit by Jimmy Cross, covered in Britain by the Downliners Sect) adorned an attractively maudlin venture into the falsetto-led sound of contemporary hits by the Rockin’ Berries (“He’s in Town”) and the Tokens. With its double-tracked vocals and confident use of familiar chord progressions from the vocal group era of the 1950s, “I Want My Baby Back” used many of the tricks employed by the Beatles on their With the Beatles LP in 1963. Even the surge from D minor to D major in the approach to the chorus had a Lennon-McCartney flavor. Sadly, an almost incoherent middle section spread contagion on everything around it, dooming the song to obscurity.
[A10] BARS OF THE COUNTY JAIL
(Bowie)
Recorded ca. October 1965; Early On CD
* * *
The popular taste for western-themed story songs in 1959–60, such as Johnny Horton’s “Battle of New Orleans” and Marty Robbins’s “El Paso,” coincided with Hollywood’s epic ventures into similar areas—not least The Alamo, the indirect source for Bowie’s choice of pseudonym. “Bars of the County Jail” was (appropriately enough for a narrative that ended in a hanging) a doomed attempt at reviving that country-folk tradition. For a rank failure, though, it was not without interest: the rowdy Cockney vocal chorus was a tentative step toward the multidubbed chorales of songs such as “The Bewlay Brothers” [51]; the schoolroom-clever rhyme of “gold/stoled” evidenced an early playfulness with language; and the midsection switch from the dominant G# to an unexpected F#6 (“wherever I can”) presaged the more sophisticated melodic progressions of his debut album.
[A11] I’LL FOLLOW YOU
(Bowie)
Recorded ca. October 1965; Early On CD
* * *
Built around an attractive slide down the minor scale, with a brief excursion into the major, “I’ll Follow You” lent an air of poignancy to a scenario that—like the Police’s “Every Breath You Take” many years later—came closer to stalking than romance. Each verse ended with a wordless harmony motif reminiscent of the Searchers’ 1964 hit “Some Day We’re Gonna Love Again.” But the formulaic middle section, always Bowie’s weakness in his early composing career, was merely filler, while the guitar solo—one flourish, then incoherence—confirmed that this demo was designed to sell the song, not the group.
[A12] GLAD I’VE GOT NOBODY
(Bowie)
Recorded ca. October 1965; Early On CD
* * *
Bowie’s continuing difficulty in turning melodic fragments into a coherent structure was acutely obvious on this generic pastiche of the British beat sound that had dominated UK pop in 1963 and 1964 but was now beginning to sound anachronistic. It opened like a maudlin retread of one of the Kinks’ more lackluster early singles, “Everybody’s Gonna Be Happy,” and moved through a series of sections that bore no apparent lyrical or musical connection.
[A13] BABY THAT’S A PROMISE
(Bowie)
Recorded ca. October 1965; unreleased
* * *
The most promising of these early demos sadly escaped Shel Talmy’s archive excavations in the late eighties, and therefore wasn’t included on the Early On CD. “Baby That’s a Promise” was clearly indebted to the Small Faces (friends of Bowie’s on the London Mod scene), and beyond them to the Motown sound. If this song—built around a similar two-chord transition to “You’ve Got a Habit of Leaving” [A6]—might have fitted into the repertoire of the Small Faces, Bowie’s vocal performance was altogether less focused, flitting between the almost parodic excess of P. J. Proby and the smooth swagger of Marvin Gaye. This combination would find a more suitable home a decade later on Bowie’s Station to Station album.
The Lower Third performed “Baby That’s a Promise” at an audition for the BBC in late 1965, alongside covers of James Brown’s “Out of Sight” and—reflecting Bowie’s bravado, if nothing else—the novelty song “Chim-Chim-Cheree” from the Julie Andrews musical Mary Poppins. The BBC’s Talent Selection Group delivered a brutal verdict on Bowie’s potential: “A singer devoid of personality. Sings wrong notes and out of tune.” It would have been little compensation for Bowie to know that they had been equally damning about Paul McCartney three years earlier.
[A14] CAN’T HELP THINKING ABOUT ME
(Bowie)
Recorded by David Bowie & the Lower Third, December 1965; single A-side
I’M NOT VERY SURE OF MYSELF WHEN IT COMES TO THINKING ABOUT ME. I TRY AND LEAVE “ME” ALONE. . . . IT’S MUCH MORE OF A REALISM FOR ME TO THINK THAT THIS [POINTS AROUND ROOM] IS ALL ME, THAT THERE’S NOTHING ELSE IN HERE. IT’S ALL OUTSIDE. I PREFER THAT WAY OF EXISTENCE.
—David Bowie, 1973
* * *
Part autobiography, part emblematic snapshot of the narcissistic Mod psyche, “Can’t Help Thinking About Me” launched Bowie’s enduring pseudonym with a wry reflection that he’d “blackened the family name.” Whatever the crime—his effeminate appearance, sexual misdemeanors, or simply abandoning his identity as a Jones—his exile set up an intriguing scenario that flitted back and forth between insecurity and swaggering self-confidence. The uncertainty captured by the sustained fourth adaptation of the opening A major chord gave way to a sense of freedom emphasized by Bowie’s joyous romp through the key of E,* only for the song to enter a cul-de-sac with the frustr
ating circularity of the chorus (the banality of which probably damned its commercial chances). Its brief appearance in the Melody Maker singles chart was, according to his co-manager Kenneth Pitt, achieved by bribery, belying the fact that its sales were meager at best.
That was scant reward for a record that, despite its structural flaws, was infused with energy and personality. Its lyrical ambiguities caught all the indecision of adolescence, with Bowie pining nostalgically for his childhood while remembering how he had hated school. His vanished Eden was a fantasy, as conceded, perhaps, by the punning reference to “Never-Never Land,” where Peter Pan and the Lost Boys were presumably repaying their hire-purchase bills. The narrative was assembled with some literary skill, launching the listener headfirst into the heart of the drama in the opening line, and spotlighting Bowie’s vulnerable humanity with his girlfriend’s disarmingly casual greeting, “Hi, Dave.”
This was also his first great vocal performance, rich in passion, his soaring delivery of the simple line “I’m guilty” proclaiming his pride in having escaped from the conventions of his upbringing. Like “The London Boys” [A21], written around the same time, “Can’t Help Thinking About Me” leaves one regretting that Bowie wasn’t commissioned to compose a concept album about teenage London life in 1965.