The Man Who Sold the World

by Peter Doggett

  * Aladdin was an intriguing choice of name, in any case: a pantomime favorite—indeed, portrayed onstage by Cliff Richard, no less—he was first encountered in The Arabian Nights, as a poverty-stricken young man who had been given a magic ring with which he could achieve his heart’s desires. All comparisons with the life of a rock star from a working-class family in South London were, of course, coincidental.

  * Compare the retirement speech given by Ray Davies of the Kinks less than two weeks later, at the end of their performance at the White City festival. In severe mental distress, the Kinks’ leader announced that this would be his final gig, but his words were masked by applause and extraneous noise over the PA system. Davies had taken an overdose of pills before he went onstage, but survived, and was back on the road within two months.

  * This music now held several layers of resonance: besides its use in the soundtrack to 2001, and its links via Wagner to Nietzsche and Hitler, it had also been borrowed by Elvis Presley to signify his imminent arrival onstage—neatly linking several areas of Bowie’s obsessive interest.

  * The teenagewildlife.com forum hosted one such discussion in 2003.

  * One of the hazards of chance was demonstrated when they reassembled the pieces of tape and discovered that the result sounded too similar to the original recording. So their cut-up had to be manipulated quite deliberately to replicate the effect they had hoped to create by accident.

  * It was listed as three separate pieces on the album cover, but finally recognized as a single entity when Bowie assembled the iSelect compilation in 2008.

  * Bowie’s original lyric sheet indicated that this was a late addition to the song. Indeed, he continued to alter the words until recording was completed. The first two lines of “Candidate,” which set up the song title, weren’t included in the lyric sheet he took into the studio, which contained references to the French revolution that—aside from a line about the Tricoteuses, the women who knitted as heads rolled—were excised from the final performance.

  * In Britain, at least, Bowie also outsold the Stones. Journalist Roy Carr saw “Rebel Rebel” as “a premeditated rewrite” of the Stones’ “Satisfaction” and noted: “Seemingly, the only explanation for such a ‘lift’ is Bowie didn’t want to risk covering a Stones hit for Pin Ups.”

  * Bowie had, of course, exploited exactly that controversy with his “long hair” media hype that winter. To add to the saga, Wayne County—briefly a client of MainMan at this point of his/her career—later claimed that Bowie had based his song on elements of a demo tape that he had recently sent to Tony Defries. One of County’s songs, “Queenage Baby,” questioned whether the protagonist was a boy or a girl, a dilemma that could just as easily have been applied to County him/herself.

  * The very structure of the song exemplified the split in perspective: the chorus ran grimly down the scale of Db major—a chord that never appeared in the song—from Cm to F, before walking up a different scale (C major) back to the original Cm. Meanwhile, the backing chorus started its fall on F, against the C minor chord, and finished at C, against the F chord, as if all polarities had been reversed.

  * Despite what some critics have written, this was not a quote from Miles Davis’s Sketches of Spain album.

  * The repeated journey from C major to F and back to C offered only a slight variation on the structure of Bob Dylan’s “Girl from the North Country,” incidentally.

  * “Bewitched” was the epitome of a hit song: no fewer than nine different versions reached the US chart in 1950, five of them appearing in the Top 10. Bowie would most likely have heard the song from Frank Sinatra, in the 1957 movie of Rodgers & Hart’s stage musical Pal Joey.

  * Adults in ill health were advised not to attend screenings when the film originally opened in America. Bowie relished the explorations of similar territory in the uncompromising photography of Diane Arbus, who committed suicide in 1971, apparently unable to bear the gulf between her vision of humanity and that shared by the masses. A major retrospective of her work opened in New York the following year.

  * Tony Visconti, who helped Bowie complete the album, explained that Bowie’s voice had been mutated by a primitive electronic sampler known as a Keypex: “We used the Keypex to key the vocal to a 20-cycle-per-second oscillator tone, which created a quavering effect.”

  * Indeed, Bowie originally intended to make the connection quite obvious, by titling this record We Are the Dead, after both a song [102]. and a memorable line of dialogue from Orwell’s book. He was persuaded that this might antagonize Sonia Orwell’s lawyers into claiming that he was trying to pass off his record as an interpretation of her husband’s novel.

  * Or maybe the bridge, which is what one printed lyric sheet suggested; Bowie definitely sang “fridge” every night onstage, though. Contemporary reviewers were equally baffled by whether “your mamma” was suffering from “cramps” or “crabs,” one ungracious British pop paper suggesting that the latter must be a reference to Bowie’s wife.

  * Visconti preferred the arrangement with overdubbed strings, heard on the most recent reissue of Young Americans, to the unadorned mix included on the 1991 CD.

  * His second recording of the song had been intended for the Aladdin Sane album but was omitted at the last minute.

  * He was perhaps following the lead of the Ohio Players, originators of “Here Today and Gone Tomorrow” [110], whose hits included “Pain,” “Pleasure,” and, perhaps inevitably, “Ecstasy.”

  * He recorded it in 1976 as leader of the vocal group Luther, scoring a minor hit on the US soul charts.

  * “Fame” topped the Billboard Hot 100 for two weeks in late 1975. In Britain, however, where Bowie hadn’t performed live for two years, it barely scraped into the Top 20, continuing a run of comparative failures that stretched back to “Diamond Dogs” [107] and was ended only by a reissue of the six-year-old “Space Oddity” [1].

  * Brown brazenly used the “Fame” backing track, or at least a close facsimile of it, as the basis of his 1975 single, “Hot.” Bowie was prepared to sue him for plagiarism, but didn’t bother when Brown’s single proved to be a comparative commercial failure.

  * This arrangement remained in place until the mid-nineties, when Bowie made a one-off payment to release himself from any financial obligations to Defries and MainMan.

  * Almost inevitably, he soon changed tack, suggesting that he had written a Young Americans screenplay, about a non-American astronaut signed up for the US space program. Bizarrely, he claimed that the movie would be set in 1952, five years before the launch of the first space rocket. Needless to say, nothing more was ever heard of the project.

  * The novel was republished in a slightly amended form after the release of the film. The time frame was shifted from 1972–76 to 1985–90; the “LP albums” became, in a mistaken glimpse into the future, “quadraphonic albums”; a record company lost its tag as “merchants of the really far out”; and Tevis inserted a single ironic reference to the Watergate scandal. Unlike most film novelizations, however, no attempt was made to iron out the discrepancies between the novel and the screenplay, or to add any descriptions of Bowie or the other actors.

  * This allowed the film’s designers to mock up a more conventional sleeve for an imaginary “Bowie” LP titled The Visitor.

  * Bowie has always protected the identity of this individual. It cannot have been his wife, Angie, as the pair were effectively leading separate lives at this stage, or his girlfriend of recent months, Ava Cherry, as their relationship had just ended. The most likely source of this vital advice was one of his loyal school friends, Geoff MacCormack or George Underwood.

  * There is a long tradition of darts, or arrows, being used as a weapon in combat between deities, or between God and the devil: see, for example, St. Paul’s epistle to the Ephesians, in which he offers “the shield of faith” to “quench all the fiery darts of the wicked one” (6:16).

  * The missing link between these two songs, in thematic t
erms, was provided by an artist in whose work Bowie had immersed himself around 1974: Peter Hammill. “(In the) Black Room,” from his 1973 album Chameleon in the Shadow of the Night, was preoccupied with various adventures of the spirit, from the tarot and religious belief to psychedelic drugs.

  * Carlos Alomar created a three-chord riff out of those two majors in the left-hand channel, voicing his F# with a barre C chord on the sixth fret before moving to the more predictable barre E chord on the second.

  * His unadorned vocal, briefly harmonized at the end of each verse, was later joined by a humming chorale and an occasional interjection of what sounded like “chew,” but was more likely “Jim,” in honor of Jim Osterberg—Iggy Pop—who had provided Bowie with the song’s scenario.

  * The Miami Herald review of a Bowie concert in November 1972 noted that his voice “has an original timbre, so far as rock is concerned, though it derives from the Beatles and possibly Johnny Mathis.”

  * There was another potential source for Bowie’s fascination with white light: Alice Bailey’s book A Treatise on White Magic, which suggested White Light (her capitals) as a source of transcendence and healing.

  * A quest that, it transpires, was the invention of seventies writers: although SS leader Heinrich Himmler did encourage the Ahnenerbe group to investigate the prehistoric origins of the Aryan race, this did not entail a search for a secret/symbol that might bring the Nazis supernatural power, despite what Indiana Jones might believe.

  * Several songs from this tour were included on the subsequent live album TV Eye, which—like Bowie’s Stage—was motivated by the need to fulfill a recording contract.

  * Instead, Bowie made a fleeting visit to the recording sessions for Pop’s 1979 album, Soldier, encouraging him to concoct a libelous account of adventures in high society. Iggy subsequently rewrote the lyrics under the no doubt ironic title “Play It Safe.”

  * Kent’s recent memoir, Apathy for the Devil, suggests that he was describing his own late-seventies life as much as The Idiot. In a 1976 interview, Kent recalled meeting Bowie three years earlier: “He was getting into his King of Decadence trip and I didn’t like it. . . . I got a bad feeling from him—he had this Nazi aura, very unfeeling and very unhuman.” He went on to accuse Bowie of being “a real plagiarist . . . a very over-rated figure.”

  * These suggestions depended upon the belief that the “Tree of Life,” and the Kabbalah beyond it, were intrinsically “awful” because of their occult connotations, and moreover that Bowie agreed with this verdict. Case not proven on either count.

  * Tony Visconti revealed in his autobiography that the track had originally featured several other verses, which were edited out during the mixing process.

  * The initial syn-drums mirrored those on Kraftwerk’s Radio-Activity album, paced between the title track and “Geiger Counter.” Ralph Hutter described his band’s rhythm as “this metallic, metronomic beat,” adding proudly, “We play automatic music.”

  * For Robert Fripp’s interpretation of the same idea, listen to King Crimson’s “Larks Tongues in Aspic (Part 1).”

  * Many supporters refused to believe that their icons had killed themselves after the Lufthansa hijacking failed to bring about their release, preferring to believe that the RAF leaders must have been murdered by the state.

  * Bowie teased his audience by printing his near lyrics, thereby inviting interpretation. It is tempting to believe that the “share bride” line was actually a comment on the 1975 marriage between Cher and keyboardist Gregg Allman.

  * New Age is easy to recognize, virtually impossible to define: it exists on the mellow fringes of jazz, world music, classical music, and ambient dance/trance. Originally linked with “new age” spirituality in the late seventies, and then expanded into a marketing genre by the mid-eighties, it rapidly assumed a pejorative edge, as much for its attendant lifestyle as for its nonconfrontational nature.

  * Another “Hero” was to be found on an album Bowie had certainly relished, NEU! ’75. Sonically, however, that track exerted more influence on, arguably, “Beauty and the Beast” [147] and, unmistakably, “Red Sails” [168].

  * Bowie certainly admired the John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band album, calling it “very straight from the shoulder”; he clearly listened to it often in 1976–77.

  * Angus MacKinnon, in the New Musical Express, pronounced this “Bowie’s most moving performance in years.”

  * Few rock stars had dared to express themselves in the visual arts by the mid-seventies, the exceptions including John Lennon, who married a conceptual artist; Joni Mitchell, whose talent as a painter was exhibited on her album covers; and Bob Dylan, whose ability as a painter did not yet merit the description of “talent.”

  * Length is rarely a good measure of art. One can’t help recalling the occasion when Bob Dylan was asked, “What are your songs about?” “Oh, some are about six minutes . . .”

  * Several critics have assumed a connection between this song and Scott Walker’s “Nite Flights,” the title track of a 1978 Walker Brothers album, covered by Bowie on 1993’s Black Tie White Noise. Bowie and Eno were certainly struck by the album, Bowie later describing it as including “quite the most lovely songs that I’d heard in years.” But there are no musical or lyrical resonances from Walker’s song on “African Night Flight.” If anything, Walker’s contributions to the Nite Flights LP sounded as if they were indebted to Bowie’s “Heroes,” and in turn inspired several of the performances on Scary Monsters.

  * For any students of British pop history, the narrator’s claim that he was not “a moody guy” inevitably brought to mind “I’m a Moody Guy,” the first hit by early sixties pop star Shane Fenton—better known in the seventies as Alvin Stardust.

  * Bowie promised that his Boys could never be cloned, though by 1979 the Mod revival was doing exactly that to the more individual Modernist tradition of the early sixties. And, talking of cloning, this track began life as a tribute to an old friend, under the working title “Louis Reed.”

  * The following phrase, “tumbling centre,” was presumably a rendering of W. B. Yeats’s often-quoted line “the centre cannot hold.”

  * As a keen student of the three LPs by the German band NEU!, Bowie would have remembered the second side of NEU! 2 beginning with the click and hum of a needle landing on a vinyl record.

  * To be exact: seven bars in 7/8, followed by one bar in 3/8.

  * Bowie insisted as the album was released that he had seen the phrase “scary monsters and super heroes” on the back of a Kellogg’s Corn Flakes packet. His story revived memories of John Lennon basing the Beatles’ “Good Morning, Good Morning” on a TV commercial for the same cereal.

  * One line of “Ashes to Ashes” paraphrased a manifesto from a letter by Franz Kafka: “A book must be an ice-axe to break the frozen seas inside us.” As an autodidact, Bowie found it hard not to show off his learning.

  * Not at the beginning: the song’s original working title was “People Are Turning to Gold,” as if King Midas rather than Major Tom might have been the protagonist.

  * “The next religion might come from the world of fashion,” opined the novelist J. G. Ballard in 1970. Or indeed from rock’n’roll: the death of Elvis Presley in 1977 provoked a gradual blurring of reality and myth that prompted cultural critics to ponder whether he might ultimately become the subject of religious frenzy. By 1992, the BBC’s religious affairs correspondent could write a book, Elvis People, with a blurb that claimed: “It poses a serious question: are we witnessing the birth of a new religious movement?” Presleyism may one day have to fight for spiritual space with Jacksonism, Lennonism, and of course Cobainianity.

  * That phrase had been the title of an Astronettes song seven years earlier [94], while the “beep beep” refrain came from the decade-old “Rupert the Riley” [36], and from the Beatles before that.

  * Gary Numan is a prime example of how context and time alter the meaning of art. For anyone over the age of fifteen whe
n the preternaturally awkward and robotic singer emerged in 1979, Numan was a joke. He’s now acclaimed as a formative influence on industrial metal and a dozen related genres.

  * One phrase, “midwives of history,” took an elliptical route to Bowie’s song. The title of a 1940 poem by the American writer Lionel Abel, it was based on a common misquotation from Karl Marx’s Das Kapital, to the effect that it is violence that forces the birth of a new society from the belly of the old. The phrase was brought into general political discourse via an essay by Hannah Arendt and is often repeated as “war and violence are the midwives of history,” something that neither Marx nor Arendt wrote.