The Man Who Sold the World
Page 44
[A39] LOVE YOU TILL TUESDAY
(Bowie)
Recorded January 1967; unreleased demo. Recorded February 1967; David Bowie LP. Re-recorded June 1967; single A-side. German vocals overdubbed, January 1969; unreleased
* * *
For Bowie and Pitt, “Love You Till Tuesday” appears to have been the most important song recorded for Deram. A late addition to the David Bowie LP, it was rearranged as a single, and still regarded as his most commercial offering more than eighteen months later, as its prime position in his 1969 television special demonstrated. It certainly bore signs of having been conceived as a stage school audition piece,* exhibiting Bowie the comedic song-and-dance man, with a smile on his lips, a tear in his eye, and a nod toward every all-round entertainer from Sammy Davis Jr. to Roy Castle.
Its theatrical bent was obvious: from the coy, self-congratulatory laugh Bowie awarded himself when he rhymed “branch” and “romance,” the almost audible wink that accompanied his Cockney impersonation of the Man in the Moon, the octave leap in each verse, and the jokey aside* that ended the song. When Ivor Raymonde’s orchestral arrangement for the single added a coda comprising a few bars of the “Hearts and Flowers” melody from Alphons Czibulka’s Wintermärchen, used in countless films to signify bathos, he was simply adding treacle to a bag of sugar.
Not that the finished record—especially the LP version*—was without its charm. The melody galloped up and down the scale like an acrobat, a xylophone tinkled a merry theme, followed immediately by an optimistic climb from a string section, and the final progression from a C major chord to C diminished, Ab, Bb, and back to C neatly set up and immediately resolved a moment of drama. Like several of its Deram counterparts, however, “Love You Till Tuesday” helped Bowie by not connecting with the public, as its success—as with “Rubber Band” [A20] and “The Laughing Gnome” [A21]—would have eradicated any possibility that he might become a rock star in the subsequent decade. “I would have been doing stage musicals, I could almost guarantee it,” Bowie reflected thirty years later. “I’m sure I would have been a right little trouper on the West End stage. I’d have written ten Laughing Gnomes, not just one!”
[A40] WHEN I LIVE MY DREAM
(Bowie)
Recorded February 1967; David Bowie LP. Re-recorded June 1967; Love You Till Tuesday film. German vocals overdubbed, January 1969; unreleased
* * *
Like Anthony Newley’s show-stopping ballad, “Once in a Lifetime,” Bowie’s “When I Live My Dream” was an emotional tour de force designed to bring a West End audience to its feet. Unfortunately, it lacked a theatrical vehicle for which it could provide a cathartic climax, thereby curtailing another career avenue for its composer. Its lyrics might sometimes have sounded as if they had been translated too hastily from a continental language, but the universal power of its central image, the frustrated man crying out for the chance to fulfill its destiny, could have overcome any flaws.
Had the song become better known, of course, then critics might have pointed out how indebted the middle section was to the corresponding portion of the Righteous Brothers’ “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin,” using the same I-IV-V chord progression. They might also have carped at the almost desperate efforts of the arranger to modulate into a higher key for dramatic effect and then find a coherent way home—a battle that endured into the final bar. By accident or design, Bowie marked the crucial moments of the song by moving the melody away from the root of the chord: it opened at Ba, accentuating the Fsus4 chord, and soared to its height at high G, against an Ea chord. He negotiated the (almost) two-octave range and complex twists and turns of the key changes with ease, however, reinforcing Kenneth Pitt’s view that the stage was his most promising prospect.
Two days after the David Bowie LP was released, he re-recorded “When I Live My Dream” at a slower tempo, with curt electric guitar chords marking out the third beat of each bar, like many of the “uptown soul” records made in New York around this time. The track was doubtless intended as a single, but instead languished at Decca until Pitt retrieved it for The David Bowie Show in 1969—at which time he also persuaded Bowie to tape a German translation of this song and “Love You Till Tuesday” [A39] in the vain hope they might be required by a German TV station.
[A41] PUSSY CAT
(unknown)
Recorded March 1967; unreleased
* * *
Bowie chronicler Kevin Cann reckons that this song, recorded immediately after the completion of the Deram LP, was a cover of a noncharting 1964 single by the novelty pop crooner Jess Conrad, of “This Pullover” infamy. If it was a nonoriginal, then a more likely source might be a 1966 soul single by Chubby Checker, “Hey You! Little Boo-Ga-Loo,” of which it formed the B-side. Whatever the case, Cann (the only researcher to have heard the track) makes it sound less than appealing, calling it “a true oddity . . . David’s vocal deteriorates as he appears to tire of the song.”
[A42] LITTLE TOY SOLDIER (AKA SADIE’S SONG)
(Bowie/Reed)
Recorded with the Riot Squad, March/April 1967; unreleased
* * *
If, as the novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald contended, “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function,” then Bowie’s Janus-headed enthusiasm for the furthest extremes of popular music in spring 1967 suggested the presence of genius. While concocting novelty song-and-dance tunes and romantic ballads, he was also searching for a way to incorporate sonic distortion and sexual experimentation into his repertoire.
In November 1966, Kenneth Pitt visited New York in search of new avenues for Bowie to explore. He returned in mid-December with, so Bowie recalled in 2002, “two albums he had been given by someone. . . . Not being his particular cup of tea, he gave them to me to see what I made of them.” One was Virgin Fugs by the Fugs, a shambling collective of beat poets and hippies whose anarchic approach to melody, performance, and common decency did not directly influence Bowie’s music.*
The other record, Bowie explained, “a demo with the signature Warhol scrawled on it, was shattering. Everything I both felt and didn’t know about rock music was opened up to me on one unreleased disc. It was The Velvet Underground & Nico album.” He would claim in the early seventies to have known nothing about Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground until he met Reed in 1971. That was patently untrue, as in the early weeks of 1967 he composed a song incorporating an entire verse written by Reed. Known variously as “Little Toy Soldier” and “Sadie’s Song,” it was taped at a rehearsal with the Riot Squad at a North London public house in March, alongside “Silly Boy Blue” [A31], “Silver Tree-Top School for Boys” [A43], and another Reed composition from that Velvet Underground album, “Waiting for the Man” [A44]. Three weeks later, three of those songs were also recorded at Decca, for private rather than commercial consumption.
It is certainly impossible to imagine Decca* contemplating the release of “Little Toy Soldier,” a darkly comic and suggestive tale of sadomasochism. The fact that it included a sizable extract from the Velvet Underground’s “Venus in Furs,” sung by Bowie in an impression of Reed’s Long Island monotone to the accompaniment of whip cracks and cackling laughter, merely added legal problems to the central issue of vulgarity. Subject aside, the track opened like one of John Entwistle’s more mischievous excursions into black humor with the Who, and incorporated a Mothers of Invention–inspired “freak-out” featuring bomb blasts, airplane engines, traffic, and a healthy bout of coughing. Even the GPO’s Speaking Clock telephone service made a cameo appearance.
Although Bowie’s interest in Reed’s work was maintained into the seventies, his adventures in experimental music were effectively laid to rest after this session for almost a decade. It is intriguing to wonder what might have happened if he had continued to work with the Riot Squad beyond the release of his debut album. He would, after all, have made a worthy replace
ment for Syd Barrett when the mercurial singer-songwriter left Pink Floyd in 1968.
[A43] SILVER TREE-TOP SCHOOL FOR BOYS
(Bowie)
Recorded with the Riot Squad, March 1967; unreleased demo
* * *
Alumni of the independent school Lancing College in Sussex include cabinet ministers, generals, bishops, ambassadors, and the novelist Evelyn Waugh, whose work influenced “Aladdin Sane” [70]. The school governors might be less willing to celebrate another distinction: rumors of a sixties drug bust among pupils that apparently inspired Bowie to write “Silver Tree-Top School for Boys.” The lyrics mixed a satirical response to the incident with imagery reminiscent of more utopian visions of childhood, from William Blake and Lewis Carroll.
Bowie’s demo of the song is not in circulation, leaving rival versions by the Beatstalkers (arguably the stronger of the two) and the Slender Plenty as our only evidence of how it might have sounded. The Beatstalkers accentuated its similarity to contemporary material by the Kinks, complete with a descending bass line reminiscent of their hit “Sunny Afternoon,” and an opening riff in the style of another English band who left a mark on Bowie, the Move. The slightly awkward chord sequence in the middle section undermined a melody that might otherwise have fitted onto Hunky Dory.
[A44] WAITING FOR THE MAN
(Reed)
Recorded with the Riot Squad, March–April 1967; unreleased
* * *
Bowie described this song as the “linchpin” of the first Velvet Underground album, lauding its “throbbing, sarcastic bass and guitar.” He incorporated it into his stage repertoire with the Riot Squad (and sporadically since then), later boasting that this was “the first time that a Velvets song had been covered by anyone, anywhere in the world.” His attempt to replicate the Velvets’ sonic propulsion in the studio was only marginally successful, however. Both his harmonica and saxophone detracted from the sleazy urban ambience he was essaying, while bassist Brian Prebble veered away too obviously from the relentless key notes of the original recording. Bowie’s vocal was a passable re-creation of Lou Reed’s sound, though his efforts at transcription weren’t: one of Reed’s lines emerged as “a good friendly behind” in Bowie’s mouth, anticipating his later excursions into sexual adventurism.
[A45] EVERYTHING IS YOU
(Bowie)
Recorded April 1967; unreleased demo
* * *
Bowie intended “Everything Is You” as a gift for Manfred Mann, but could only persuade his friends the Beatstalkers to record it: in pop terms, the equivalent of aiming for an Aston-Martin and coming home with a Morris Minor. Like many of his compositions written for outsiders, it suffered from an extreme discordance between music and lyrics, with an ultracommercial (for 1967) melody linked to a lumberjack’s lament that belonged alongside “Bars of the County Jail” [A10] rather than in the Top 40.
His skills as a pop confectionist were not in doubt, however, as “Everything Is You” opened with a radio-friendly wordless harmony line over three basic rock’n’roll chords in the tradition of Buddy Holly (whose “Heartbeat” bears close comparison). Though Bowie delivered the song with the jaded air of the John Lennon of “I Don’t Want to Spoil the Party,” it had a natural effervescence that might have made it ideal for a group such as the Tremeloes. Bowie also indulged himself with a series of short, rhymed lines in the middle section that were heavily influenced by Bob Dylan.
Also written and demoed around the same time was another Bowie pop concoction, “A Summer Kind of Love” [see A54].
[A46] GOING DOWN
(Bowie)
Recorded circa May 1967; unreleased demo
* * *
It was not surprising that none of David Platz’s Essex Music clients elected to record this bizarre exercise in avant-garde pop, which was as chaotic as some of the final recordings by one of Bowie’s heroes from this period, Pink Floyd frontman Syd Barrett. The surviving performance of the song stopped and restarted almost at random, with the most basic of melody lines and lyrics (little more than a repetition of the title) interrupted by Bowie stamping his feet, hitting the microphone with his hand, or rattling any percussion within his reach. If completed and crafted, it wouldn’t have sounded out of place alongside the more melodic elements of the Who’s 1967 album, Sell Out, but in its existing form, it would probably have proved too unorthodox for even Frank Zappa to consider.
[A47] LET ME SLEEP BESIDE YOU
(Bowie)
Recorded September 1967; The World of David Bowie LP
* * *
Between the completion of Bowie’s first album and this conscious attempt to create a single that would steer him in a fresh direction, a recognizable culture of British “rock” emerged from its uncomfortable gestation in the pop scene. It provided the soundtrack for the underground and counterculture, two terms for attempting to herd the era’s multifarious retreats from “straight” society into a homogeneous whole. Musically, it was oriented toward the album rather than the single; it favored volume and aural assault over instantly appealing melody; it was unafraid to take its inspiration from blues, jazz, literature, folk, and beyond; and it was not concerned to limit itself into two-minute teenage melodramas. It self-consciously aimed at a slightly older, grubbier, perhaps better-educated audience: sixth-formers and students, in other words, rather than the pubescents and prepubescents who dominated the pop audience.
For the next decade, Bowie would attempt to span the divide, with varying degrees of success and acceptance. “Let Me Sleep Beside You” was a tentative step into the new world, and (not at all coincidentally) his first session with producer Tony Visconti, who exerted a major influence over Bowie’s lifestyle for the next three years. It signaled its intentions with a guitar signature from jazz-rock pioneer John McLaughlin, and eschewed all the novelty elements heard on previous Deram releases. But the song still worked its way around familiar chord changes, with a dominant-tonic-subdominant progression supporting the understated chorus. Double-tracked for the middle section, Bowie held two notes (“void” and “hap-pen”) in a way that would become a trademark of his seventies records, while his strident call of “Would you?” anticipated the vocal persona that would stride out of the Ziggy Stardust era.
Ultimately, it was another “rock” characteristic, its willingness to step across bourgeois moral boundaries, that would keep this song from being released in 1967. Bowie later joked that his mother had told him it was indecent, but that anti-Oedipal explanation disguised the record company’s misgivings.
[A48] KARMA MAN
(Bowie)
Recorded September 1967; The World of David Bowie LP
* * *
Tony Visconti’s primary contribution to this charming piece of science fiction was to follow the example of producer George Martin, whose arrangements for the Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby” had shown the potential of a string section as an active, almost aggressive vehicle, rather than (as was customary on pop records) lush decoration. Lyrically indebted to Ray Bradbury’s story sequence The Illustrated Man, in which cinematic tattoos spell out the characters’ fates, “Karma Man” worked its way elegantly through an ambiguous series of changes,* with only the leap back to the opening D at the end of the chorus sounding abrupt. It was one of Bowie’s most creative marriages of words and music to date, the anxious staccato of the verses giving way to the melancholy acceptance of the chorus, reflecting the narrator’s isolation from his unseeing companions. The song might have fitted perfectly in an alternative world in which the self-conscious “progression” of rock could still have been focused on the pop charts.
[A49] IN THE HEAT OF THE MORNING
(Bowie)
Recorded December 1967; BBC radio session. Re-recorded March–April 1968; The World of David Bowie LP
* * *
“In the Heat of the Morning” represented a valiant attempt by Bowie to merge the epic ballad style of “When I Live My Dream” [A40] with the mo
re restrained approach of “Let Me Sleep Beside You” [A47]. In its Decca rendition, which required markedly more studio time than anything he’d recorded to date, it incorporated elements of pop (the string accompaniment, and a passionate hook line, which sadly wasn’t the title), progressive rock (Mick Wayne’s guitar motif, and some prominent Hammond organ), and even soul (the repeated wordless vocal riff, like a late-night response to the R&B standard “Land of 1000 Dances”). If the words spilled into over-romanticism,* there was a passionate engagement in his vocal that cut through his verbosity. His range was stretched further than before, to a high A, and the force with which he declaimed the phrase “like a little soldier” anticipated the central sound of the Station to Station album eight years hence.
Deram’s refusal to accept either this song or “London Bye Ta-Ta” [A52] as a potential single betrayed the fact that their interest in Bowie as an artist was exhausted, regardless of what he offered them. Despite that, Kenneth Pitt recalled that he and Bowie were still assembling material for a second Deram album. Songs such as “Angel Angel Grubby Face,” “Threepenny Joe,” and “The Reverend Raymond Brown” survive only on a tape loyally retained by Pitt. Their titles suggest that Bowie was continuing to stockpile “character” songs in the mistaken belief that they held his commercial future.