After the rush to complete the record, there was an infuriating delay. “It’s been a waste of a year,” Bowie reflected when the album finally appeared in 1971. Business disputes were to blame: his new manager, Tony Defries, was anxious to prove himself as a major force in Bowie’s career, and also to test the strength of the deal that his client had signed with Mercury Records. Critical opinion was almost entirely positive: Bowie’s longtime supporter, the journalist Penny Valentine, proclaimed, “There can’t be another writer/performer around today who is even halfway near doing what Bowie has achieved,” and added that Bowie displayed “all the melodramatic power of Dylan crossed with the Demon King.” “His unhappy relationship with the world is traced to his inability to perceive it sanely,” wrote Bowie’s most perceptive American critic, John Mendelsohn, emphasizing that—unconsciously, at least—the singer empathized with the theorists of the radical psychology movement.
In Britain, a record that was filled with propulsive hard rock was issued in a cover that, as Bowie noted slightly tongue-in-cheek later, “was a parody of Gabriel Rossetti. Slightly askew, obviously.” He was clad in “a man’s dress” designed by Michael Fish,* recumbent on a chaise longue like Mrs. William Morris in one of the Pre-Raphaelite artist Rossetti’s many sketches of women draped decoratively across furniture (and “slightly askew” because Bowie was, despite his attire, a man). The personality of the record, and that of its cover, were utterly at odds—as were the mock-Rossetti design and the Mike Weller cartoon that filled the US album cover, showing a rifleman in a Stetson (modeled on a photograph of John Wayne) against the backdrop of the asylum in which Bowie’s brother Terry was a resident. That picture did at least chime with the prevailing theme of madness: the “man’s dress” heralded an entirely different mind-set, anticipating the androgynous look that would soon become one of the decade’s prevailing images. For the moment, it simply confused those who might have been attracted by the music.
The Man Who Sold the World charted only after it was reissued in 1972, in the wake ofZiggy Stardust and with a more obvious cover design. Back in 1970, the album’s completion marked the end of Bowie’s brief liaison with the Hype. Mick Ronson and Woody Woodmansey returned to Hull, and Tony Visconti opted to work with the altogether more active Marc Bolan instead. So it was that between August 1, 1970, and June 20, 1971, David Bowie made no public appearances—his second such “retirement” in just three years. It was an unusual way of pursuing stardom.
[27] TIRED OF MY LIFE
(Bowie)
Recorded ca. September 1970; unreleased
* * *
Bowie’s description of his mental state in 1970 was suggestive of a man battling clinical depression: “I used to have periods, weeks on end, when I just couldn’t cope anymore. I’d slump into myself—I felt so depressed, and I really felt so aimless and this torrential feeling of ‘What’s it all for, anyway?’ ” While there were personal reasons for his despair—the hollowness of fame, the Arts Lab debacle, his brother’s illness—Bowie was also mirroring the ennui and disillusionment that were haunting youth culture.
John Lennon reflected at the start of the year that “a lot of people are in what they term as the Post-Drug Depression period, where there’s no hope and they’re all hooked on various whatevers.” The hard rock music that was becoming the lingua franca of young teenagers—epitomized by Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, Uriah Heep, Deep Purple—was loud, relentless, crushing, and best experienced with a dose of a “downer” like Mandrax. Among those who wanted a more lyrical connection with their music, the two most prominent performers of 1970 were James Taylor, a melancholy folk songwriter with a heroin addiction, and Neil Young, whose lonesome, wasted voice was almost a parody of extreme dejection, masking his wit and poetic insight.
Bowie credited Neil Young as an influence on several occasions during this period, and “Tired of My Life”—a gorgeously maudlin acoustic lament, supported by countless vocal harmony parts in the style of Young’s musical associates Crosby, Stills & Nash—clearly bore his mark. It combined the melodic flavor of “Don’t Let It Bring You Down” with the vocal blend of “Tell Me Why,” both featured on Young’s September 1970* album, After the Gold Rush. Had Bowie retained the services of John Hutchinson in 1969, and never met Mick Ronson, this is the music that he might have been selling to the world. Instead he filed this song away, but never forgot it: an entire melodic section, and two full lines of lyrics, were revived for “It’s No Game” [180/181] in 1980.
[28] HOLY HOLY
(Bowie)
Recorded November 1970; single A-side. Re-recorded November 1971; single B-side
* * *
Billed as “the first haunted song” by Mercury’s plucky PR team, “Holy Holy” might have been better described as “cursed.” Issued as a single, it was intended to be the focus of a six-week marketing campaign, involving copious press advertisements and themed carrier bags. Instead it limped into the shops quietly in January 1971, and promptly disappeared—forever, as (almost alone in Bowie’s catalogue) it has never been reissued.* It was Bowie’s solitary collaboration with the instrumentalists behind the Blue Mink group of session musicians (contemporary hit makers in their own right with “Melting Pot” and “Good Morning Freedom”), but its blatant musical prototype was Marc Bolan’s T. Rex. Bowie’s single was recorded as Bolan’s “Ride a White Swan” climbed the charts, and from the distinctive warble in his voice to the “lie-lie-lie” chorus at the end, “Holy Holy” sounded like a conscious attempt to mimic (or parody) the vehicle for Bolan’s success.
It’s been claimed that the song reflected Bowie’s interest in the occult, but a more convincing explanation is that, like “The Prettiest Star” [13], it was a private message to his wife, signaling devotion within the acceptance of an open marriage. It was more of an exercise in assonance than communication, however, from the first line to the final chorus. It opened with menacing E-F footsteps, which chased the melody through the opening line, and only allowed the song to root itself in the chorus. A repeated flamenco rhythm from Alan Parker’s electric guitar introduced a mock-operatic feel, which had also been present in some of the arrangements on The Man Who Sold the World. But the overall effect was of a basket of ideas that had been thrown together haphazardly without a clear design.
Bowie returned to the song during the Ziggy Stardust sessions a year later, electrifying the clockwork mechanism of the original recording. Under Mick Ronson’s guidance, this rendition was faster, punchier, and more powerful, with Bowie’s voice threateningly echoed and compressed.
[29] HOW LUCKY YOU ARE (AKA MISS PECULIAR)
(Bowie)
Recorded November 1970; unreleased
* * *
If “Holy Holy” [28] retained some of the hard rock dynamics of The Man Who Sold the World, “How Lucky You Are” represented a clear step into a new—and mightily productive—arena for Bowie. Until now, his songs had been composed on acoustic guitar, or simply as melodies, translated into musical form by his accompanists. Now, for the first time, he was writing on piano, an instrument that would transform his style over the next year. If his playing was still rudimentary—triads in the right hand, a single left-hand finger for the bass note—it allowed him to explore harmonic movements that were less obvious on guitar, experimenting with what happened if he retained the basic shape of a chord but simply moved one finger up or down the keyboard. The piano didn’t immediately cure his perennial problem with constructing a song: the middle section of “How Lucky You Are” was as chaotic as anything on his 1965 demo tapes. But the speed at which his confidence at the keyboard progressed was a sign that it enabled him to approach his creativity with a clear mind, unhindered by the risk of tumbling into his own clichés.
That said, “How Lucky You Are” was a strange place to begin, its waltz tempo first resembling a Eurovision Song Contest entry and then a lost song from The Threepenny Opera. Like “Holy Holy,” it ended with a wordless vocal
chorus, building a bridge between Kurt Weill and Paul Simon’s “The Boxer.” Its lyrics were its most puzzling feature, however, their incoherence demonstrating the extent of the erotic fixation and concomitant self-disgust that were apparently their spark. They must have sounded uncommonly strange to the ears of Tom Jones, to whom this song was sent as a possible single by Bowie’s publisher.
Besides his demo, Bowie also supervised a second version of “How Lucky You Are,” sung by his friend Micky King (see [36]).
BOWIE AND THE HOMO SUPERIOR
Bowie was twenty-three years old when he wrote “The Supermen” [19], which, he explained the following year, “was about the homo superior race.” The phrase has been traced back to Odd John, a 1935 novel by science fiction author Olaf Stapledon, in which Homo sapiens does not make way for Homo superior, but attacks him. It was subsequently used by many other sci-fi authors, though Bowie himself was responsible for widening its circulation. In “The Supermen,” however, he was using Homo superior as a translation of one of the most misunderstood concepts in the history of philosophy: the Übermensch described by Friedrich Nietzsche.
Academics are still debating the implications and meaning of Nietzsche’s noun, often translated into English as “superman” or, more literally, “over-man.” Bowie subsequently admitted that he had skimmed Nietzsche’s work at the start of the seventies, and pretended to understand it—intrigued, it seems, by the influence that Nietzsche had on the philosophy of the Nazi Party. In that 1971 interview, Bowie made the connection explicit, before burbling unintelligibly about Hitler* and “the Magic Wine,” and the risk that modern man might “have given birth to Homo superior prematurely.”
So it’s not surprising that Bowie’s grasp of the Übermensch was partial and confused: that he missed Nietzsche’s contrast between two avenues that mankind could follow now that God was dead—the letzte Mensch, or “last man,” a mediocrity brought to a state of apathy and exhaustion by the mirage of democratic equality, and Übermensch, a flash of lightning strong enough to exist beyond the comforting illusion of equality and ethics, who will illuminate the truth for those bold enough to follow him. Nietzsche animated this choice in Also Sprach Zarathustra,* in which the prophet’s warnings are ignored by weak humans who prefer the “last man” to the “over-man.” It was much easier for Bowie to gloss over the philosophical debate and hold firm to the attraction of the Übermensch—or, in sci-fi terms, the Homo superior—as a superior species with powers excelling our own. Hence the link with the Nazi Party, and its dream of Aryan storm troopers and maidens, who could populate an ideal Reich that would last a thousand years.
By toying with Nietzsche’s terminology, Bowie was indirectly reflecting a surge of interest in the philosopher’s work that pervaded the work of French theorists in the decade ahead. There were new editions of the philosopher’s works; a collection of his letters; a sense that, twenty-five years after the end of World War II, the core of Nietzsche could be retrieved from the Nazis’ deliberate perversion of his writings.
This enthusiasm somewhat incongruously tumbled into the field of rock music, where it became a commonplace for artists and critics with a smattering of education to talk knowledgeably about the gulf between Dionysian and Apollonian qualities, again using terms employed by Nietzsche. Foremost among these philosophical pretenders was Jim Morrison of the Doors, who quite deliberately fashioned his public persona as an embodiment of Dionysian frenzy and spontaneity. The same tag was soon applied to Bowie’s future friend Iggy Pop of the Stooges.
Imagine, then, the confusion in Bowie’s head at the end of the sixties, with a dangerous smattering of Nietzschean knowledge colliding with a (perennially) fashionable obsession with Hitler and the Nazis, a sense of disillusionment about the hippie movement, and a feeling of drift in his own life. Beyond his personal experience, the daily newspapers reported on Britain’s economic and political lethargy, alongside summaries of the rabble-rousing speeches given by maverick Tory MP Enoch Powell. This was a time when, as historian Andy Beckett has indicated, “a certain feverishness seized some of those involved in British right-wing politics . . . [with] the belief that British decline had worsened into national crisis; the need for a strong, quite possibly authoritarian right-wing government to stop the slide.”
So it was that Bowie, attempting to condense these vague ideas into a philosophy, could utter these comments in a December 1969 interview aimed at a teenage pop audience: “This country is crying out for a leader. God knows what it is looking for, but if it’s not careful it’s going to end up with a Hitler. This place is so ready to be picked up by anybody who has a strong enough personality to lead. The only person who is coming through with any strength is Enoch Powell. He is the only one with a following.”
Bowie didn’t imagine that Enoch Powell was the Homo superior; nor Hitler, for that matter. But like his infatuation with the occult, his fascination with Nietzsche and the Nazis tapped into his nagging belief that there was more to life (and his life) than the daily obsessions of the media and the herd; that there was an additional dimension beyond the everyday; that the people needed to be led by a “superman,” whatever that might entail. Later in the decade, these elements would combine with extreme cocaine paranoia to send Bowie’s political thinking into a state of crisis. Before then, they would congeal in his mind and help to create the conditions whereby he would seek to portray that “superman”—not as a political dictator but as a rock star.
[30] OH! YOU PRETTY THINGS
(Bowie)
Demo recorded January 1971; unreleased. Re-recorded June/July 1971; Hunky Dory LP
* * *
Bowie had spent years attempting to craft hit singles for other performers, his failure a cause of much frustration for his loyal publishers. As part of Tony Defries’s “new broom” approach to his client’s career, Bowie signed a five-year publishing deal with Chrysalis Music in October 1970, thereby removing his new songs from David Platz’s Essex Music and assigning them to a newly formed Chrysalis affiliate Titanic Music. Under the contract, Bowie was given an advance of five thousand pounds (20 percent of which went straight to his managers), a very substantial sum for the time. He was now freed from the necessity to scrape a living on the road, and was able to concentrate on his songwriting.
“All of a sudden, all these great songs started appearing,” recalled Chrysalis executive Bob Grace. “We used to do all his demos at the Radio Luxembourg studios in London, which was cheap, and that suited us, because David was writing so much stuff.” “Oh! You Pretty Things” was one of the first songs Bowie completed under the new deal, and Grace took the demo tape to the Midem music business gathering, where he gave it to producer Mickie Most. Within a matter of weeks, Bowie had finally achieved his aim of writing a hit for another artist, with a song that was vividly personal. The recipient of this attractive but lyrically unwieldy gift was Peter Noone, whose boy-next-door looks and voice had brought him fame in the 1960s as the lead singer of Herman’s Hermits.* His approach to the song involved a total lack of engagement with its darker, occult-inspired themes, altering the word bitch to beast, and, more significantly perhaps, beginning his record with the chorus.
For it was the descending diatonic major progression of the chorus (repeated by Bowie in “Changes” [48] and “All the Young Dudes” [62], and a familiar motif in the work of Paul McCartney) that undoubtedly sold this song, and has ensured its enduring popularity among those who have never grappled with its philosophical conceits, and probably assumed that Noone and Bowie were singing “gotta make way for the wholly superior.” Only the lyric sheet revealed that Bowie’s fixation was actually the Homo superior, his conception of Nietzsche’s Übermensch. Others have noted his references to The Coming Race (a prophetic nineteenth-century novel by Bulwer-Lytton), and the Golden Ones (probably inspired by the 1890s occult obsessives of the Temple of the Golden Dawn), while there was an H. G. Wells resonance to his concern about “the world to come.”
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There was no doubting the extent of Bowie’s interest in the occult, or his preoccupation with the fate of Homo sapiens. Yet, as journalist Michael Watts noted perceptively in 1972, “His other great inspiration is mythology . . . he has crafted a myth of the future.” It was derivative, and peopled with other people’s characters, but its fatalism was entirely Bowie’s own. So was the domestic scenario of the opening verse, in which Bowie either inherited or revisited a vision of the earth cracking open that had been experienced by his brother, Terry. In a 1976 BBC Radio interview, Bowie all but admitted that the vision had been his own: “According to Jung, to see cracks in the sky is not really quite on. . . . I thought I’d write my problems out.” But then Bowie has often been, by accident or quite consciously, his own least reliable chronicler.
Nor was he an infallible pianist, though the experiments he’d begun on “How Lucky You Are” [29] came to fruition on “Oh! You Pretty Things.” Having played piano on Noone’s record (albeit proving unable to perform the song in its entirety without running aground), he had become sufficiently proficient by summer 1971 to prefix his own recording with a 2/4 introduction in F, feeling his way through some appropriate chord changes,* via a brief stop at 3/4 time, toward the final destination of Gb in a 4/4 tempo. The results were charmingly naïve, if occasionally faltering, and quite free of the flourishes that a more accomplished musician might have provided. As if in keeping, Bowie’s vocal was also quite unadorned, presented so starkly, in fact, that it was almost unsettling. He accentuated the evil word bitch as if to revenge himself for Peter Noone’s timidity, and stretched himself to new levels by hitting a high B at the top of the chorus. That had unexpected consequences when he was unable to rise to the challenge at a BBC concert in June 1971, his voice cracking apart in an eerie replica of the ground in the opening verse. For subsequent performances—at a BBC TV studio in January 1972, for example—he would carefully avoid taking a similar risk, and aim low rather than high.
The Man Who Sold the World Page 12