The Man Who Sold the World

by Peter Doggett

  * “There is no such thing as society,” Margaret Thatcher would declare seven years later, as if to explain Bowie’s verbal blockage.

  * Bowie briefly considered tackling Cream’s “I Feel Free” on this album, a song that he had performed live with the Spiders in 1972. He abandoned the idea after recording a backing track, perhaps realizing that the song’s title contradicted everything else on his record.

  * His original demo for the song suggested that he didn’t entirely believe this verdict: lyrically incomplete, it was titled defiantly “Because I’m Young.”

  * Ironically, the song may have left an indelible mark on Townshend after all. Bowie invented the word psychodelicate; more than a decade later, Townshend issued a concept album titled Psychoderelict.

  * This visual motif harked back to the Dalí/Buñuel film Un Chien Andalou and was reproduced by a genuine woman in the clip for Bowie’s 1983 single “China Girl.”

  * Bowie wrote in the sleeve notes: “My personal memory stock for this album was made up from an almighty plethora of influences and reminiscences from the 1970s.” He provided a list, many items on which seemed to date back to his early-sixties exploration of London with his elder brother. He also referenced both T. Rex and Marc Bolan, unfortunately giving his friend’s name as “Mark,” which robbed his tribute of some of its poignancy.

  * The title was probably borrowed from a contemporary single by the Dixie Cups, “Gee the Moon Is Shining Bright,” a theme also included in Bowie’s lyric.

  * Composing on guitar by instinct rather than musical awareness, he incorporated some “borrowed” chords that gave the song a modal and chromatic effect.

  * The bass offered an ominous A-B-C climb against the less decisive Eb-Db-E of the vocal melody.

  * The mention of “playgirl” predated the magazine of that name by several years, and was probably inspired by the Marvelettes’ 1962 Motown hit, and Mod anthem, “Playboy.” Dana Gillespie, meanwhile, pursued her own recording career, reemerging in Bowie’s story in 1971 [47].

  * The term was coined in the early 1970s to describe an aggressive, R&B-flavored form of urban US rock heavily influenced by the Rolling Stones and the Yardbirds. The “punk” tag was then applied to artists such as the New York Dolls and Patti Smith, before becoming tied to the altogether more restrictive sound of young Britain circa 1976–77.

  * The success of the vintage clothes store I Was Lord Kitchener’s Valet, which opened in London’s Portobello Road in 1964 and had extended to five shops by 1966, exemplified this trend. Edwardian jackets became a virtual uniform for the likes of the Jimi Hendrix Experience, the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones in 1966.

  * The mock-baroque introduction in Gm is interrupted by the insistent root of Am, where the track remains for two verses before a trumpet solo and verse in Bm, a final verse in C#m, and a coda in Ebm. The rhythm is equally varied, toying with the constraints of the 4/4 rhythm.

  * One wonders what influence this song might have had on the Beatles, about to begin work on their Sgt. Pepper album when “Rubber Band” was released. They reprised the “out-of-tune” theme on “With a Little Help from My Friends,” while both the Pepper uniforms and the orchestral coloring of several songs on the LP reflected Bowie’s Georgian theme.

  * Bowie wasn’t targeted for special treatment; Pye also succeeded in destroying almost all of the sixties master tapes by the Kinks.

  * “Big Black Smoke,” issued on the B-side of “Dead End Street” in November 1966, offered an equally jaundiced perspective on a young girl’s prospects in Swinging London. There are clear thematic links between the two songs: had Ray Davies perhaps heard Bowie’s original recording at Pye, or was the coincidence merely synchronicity?

  * The writer Kenneth Leach worked in a Soho coffee bar at the time this song was written, and when Bowie was frequenting such clubs: he noted that 1966 was the year when amphetamines were starting to be superseded by LSD and cannabis. His London boys, he wrote, “were either homosexual or experimenting with homosexuality. The average age was about 18–19. There were at this time only a few heterosexual girls, and a large number of ‘chickens,’ that is, very young, pretty boys who were acquired and used by the older ones. . . . Use of amphetamines by kids in the club was closely related to the confusion about sexual identity. There was as much boasting about the number of pills consumed as about the number of sexual acts.”

  * These basically followed—with occasional substitutions—the “circle/cycle of fifths” found everywhere from Bach to the Beatles’ “Lovely Rita.”

  * Bowie had clearly read the book: though he changed the characters’ names, he retained the location of their illicit adventures, in the rhubarb fields. Coincidentally, the leading role in the 1961 BBC radio adaptation of this story was played by another David Jones, the future star of the Monkees.

  * For a more formal reaction to the problem than Bowie’s, see Paul R. Ehrlich’s controversial 1968 book The Population Bomb, which aroused widespread alarm and argument. Ehrlich predicted that overpopulation would force the rationing of water and food in the United States by the end of the seventies.

  * Bowie may have seen Pink Floyd’s performances at London’s psychedelic clubs, though their first record was not released until March 1967. His exposure to an acetate of the Velvet Underground’s debut album is another probable influence, with Fearnley’s organ mirroring the emblematic viola drone of John Cale.

  * Sprechgesang is a style of voice projection pitched between conventional singing and recitation, first used by Schoenberg in 1912 in his pioneering atonal composition Pierrot Lunaire.

  * Bowie’s character essayed an octave jump to a high E, and landed in a heap somewhere between D and Eb.

  * Their major 1966 hit was “Daydream”; their first LP included a song titled “Did You Ever Have to Make Up Your Mind.”

  * Elton John and Bernie Taupin reached the last six in the 1969 competition, only to lose out to “Boom-Bang-A-Bang.”

  * Or, in this case, to be exact, “oom-pah-pah.” Though we tend to associate the term with German folk/pop music, it refers specifically to the movement between tonic and dominant, usually performed on tuba, but here exhibited on accordion.

  * A quick guide: Lhasa is the Tibetan capital; a chela is a religious disciple; Tibetans create statues out of yak butter to mark religious festivals; the overself is a universal spirit beyond the everyday. Online collections of Bowie’s lyrics claim the second line refers to “Botella [or, more amusingly, Bordello] lanes”; he actually sings “Potala,” the palace near Lhasa that the Dalai Lama occupied before the Chinese occupation of 1959.

  * It should be noted, however, that Bowie’s original demo, featuring several layers of vocals, was more in keeping with Pete Townshend’s blueprints for the Who from the same era.

  * Bowie may have been inspired to add this by Eartha Kitt’s similar finale to “Apres Moi,” on Down to Eartha, the album that also included a song he considered for his cabaret repertoire, “The Day That the Circus Left Town.”

  * The single added an orchestra, and an unnecessary modulation, sounding more like a Eurovision contender than a potential pop hit.

  * Bowie later claimed, however, that he added the Fugs’ “Dirty Old Man” to his live repertoire, alongside songs from the Mothers of Invention’s Freak Out! LP.

  * More than a year later, the company refused to allow the Rolling Stones to issue an album cover portraying graffiti around a lavatory.

  * The word is appropriate: the melody that ended the first chorus was repeated in the middle of the “Changes” [48] refrain four years later. Note also in this song the unusual verse of structure of four 4/4 bars followed by one in 2/4: instinctive rather than studied, as ever with Bowie.

  * Bowie first taped the song for BBC Radio in December 1967, with no sign of the rock instrumentation that would dominate the Decca recording, and some even more painful imagery that he later excised.

  * Bowie’s lyrics for “Love
Is Always” and “Pancho” were issued in Belgium by the female singer Dee-Dee, the original co-composer of the tunes. “Pancho,” the tale of a biker whose tough exterior belies his love for his girl, was a particularly amusing offering, which required Bowie to incorporate the French endearment chou-chou. His lyric also echoed a phrase about highways and byways from the Hollies’ 1965 single “Look Through Any Window.”

  * Much of the language was reminiscent of the sixties gay slang known as palare/polari, as heard regularly on the “Julian & Sandy” sketches on BBC Radio’s Round the Horne comedy show.

  * The chorus melody in D was then repeated exactly in the verse, in the new key of C major.

  * Unless, of course, you read autobiographical resonance into the title of “DJ” [169].

  * In later years, Bowie would occasionally toy during rehearsals with Kitt’s standard “An Old-Fashioned Girl,” which had been adopted as an anthem by her gay following.