[31] HANG ONTO YOURSELF
(Bowie)
Demo recorded January 1971; unreleased. Re-recorded February 1971; Arnold Corns single. Re-recorded November 1971; Ziggy Stardust LP
* * *
“I didn’t believe it till I came here, got off the plane,” Bowie commented on his first trip to the United States, in January 1971. “From England, America merely symbolizes something, it doesn’t actually exist. And when you get off the plane and find that there actually is a country called America, it becomes very important then.” Like every British child of the rock’n’roll era in the years before cheap transatlantic flights, Bowie could barely imagine reaching the soil from which Little Richard, Elvis Presley, and Chuck Berry had grown. America’s streets were filled with pop poetry, its cities as resonant as the birthplace of any religion.
After a year of ennui bordering on depression at home, this semi-mythical landscape replenished Bowie’s energy. “I think I’ve been in prison for the last 24 years,” he commented incredulously. “I think coming to America has opened one door.” Over the next few months, he would write as many songs as he had in the previous three years. “I got very sharp and very quick,” he explained in summer 1971. “Somehow or other I became very prolific. I wanted to write things that were more immediate.”
This surge of creativity was stimulated by the music he heard during his trip, especially the garage rock of the Stooges and the Velvet Underground. Before Bowie’s dexterous rewriting transformed it into a key piece of Ziggy Stardust mythology, “Hang Onto Yourself” was born as an instant response to hearing the Velvets’ final album with Lou Reed, Loaded. Extracting the spirit of Reed’s “Rock and Roll,” Bowie combined it with a lyrical steal from the same album’s “Sweet Jane” (although his narrator was on a radio show, not in a rock’n’roll band like Reed’s protagonist) and some classic rock’n’roll reference points. The three-chord guitar opening was pure Eddie Cochran, while the insistent “come on” in the chorus brought back memories of Cochran’s “C’mon Everybody,” Chuck Berry’s “Come On,” and the chorus of the Beatles’ “Please Please Me.”* With its attractively familiar chord changes and instantly accessible structure, “Hang Onto Yourself” fulfilled Bowie’s desire of creating something “more immediate” than the songs he’d written in recent years.
Having taped a multi-instrumental demo in America, Bowie recorded the song with a band a week after his return, alongside “Moonage Daydream” [32]. His double-tracked vocal was an even clearer acknowledgment of his debt to Reed, but the performance lacked the velocity or punch to sell the song’s undoubted commerciality.
Nine months later, it was a very different song that found its way into the repertoire of the Spiders from Mars. (This is a useful point at which to recall Jack Kerouac’s “spiders across the stars” in the most memorable passage from On the Road.) Bowie had raised the melody by two semitones, and written two entirely new verses, excising the borrowed mythology and creating a legend of his own. There was a groupie and the object of her adoration, the Spiders themselves, who could move like “tigers on Vaseline”—conjuring the vision of magnificent cats sliding out of control on a newly varnished floor. The propulsive thrust of the band would be reproduced endlessly later in the decade as the prototypical British punk sound, but there was a swagger and arrogance to Bowie’s performance (the chuckle as he announced his tiger simile, for example) that few in any genre could muster.
[32] MOONAGE DAYDREAM
(Bowie)
Demo recorded January 1971; unreleased. Re-recorded February 1971; Arnold Corns single. Re-recorded November 1971; Ziggy Stardust LP
* * *
Like “Hang Onto Yourself” [31], “Moonage Daydream” would long since have been forgotten had it survived only in the version Bowie recorded in the Radio Luxembourg studio in February 1971. At this point it consisted of a playful science-fiction-inspired chorus, two nondescript verses with a single memorable line, and an arrangement that not only racked his voice like a martyr under the Inquisition, but virtually defined the word shambolic. (That it was still released as a single by the pseudonymous Arnold Corns in May says much about the depth of Bowie’s commitment to this strange side project, more of which later.)
Chorus and key line—that gloriously emblematic phrase about the holiness of “the church of man-love,” which must have delighted Bowie’s mother—were retained for the Spiders from Mars in November. By then, Bowie had wallowed in another bout of self-mythology, declaring himself an alligator (strong and remorseless), a mama/papa (and thereby fashionably gender nonspecific), a space invader (alien and phallic), and even a pink monkey-bird, gay slang for a recipient of anal sex. His carefree imagery heightened the erotic fantasy of the chorus, a wet dream that was “moonage” for the era of the Apollo missions—and also, perhaps, for the tradition of what Robert Graves called “muse poetry,” linked to ancient cults that worshipped the moon, accessing the imagination without involving the intellect. As existentialist turned occult historian Colin Wilson noted in 1971, “The moon goddess was the goddess of magic, of the subconscious, of poetic inspiration.” Hence a “Moonage Daydream” might represent an ecstatic, instinctive path to creativity—or, more banally, nothing more substantial than a homage to Marc Bolan’s brand of lyrical imagery. His last single under the name Tyrannosaurus Rex in 1970 had, after all, been called “By the Light of a Magical Moon.”
Learning from the vocal agonies of the initial recording, the Spiders tackled the song three semitones lower than before. After Ronson’s declaration of intent with a pile-driver D chord, there was a moment’s pause for the shock to resound before Bowie launched into his vocal, his rounded tone far removed from the metallic rasp of his 1970 recordings. The electric thrust of the opening bars was deceptive, as the first voice was powered by Bowie’s acoustic, and Ronson reappeared only late in the chorus. Saxophone and pennywhistle* danced a prim duet over a sliding major-chord progression for the solo, echoed by electric guitar, before Ronson introduced a lush, hopeful string arrangement for the return of the chorus, climaxing in a steep pizzicato descent. Only in the final moments did Ronson’s guitar provide the climactic release that the daydream demanded, continually returning to the same motifs as if in ecstatic spasm.
[33] LADY STARDUST
(Bowie)
Demo recorded March 1971; unreleased. Re-recorded November 1971; Ziggy Stardust LP
* * *
As America had been robbed of the opportunity to gaze upon Bowie in his “man’s dress” on the cover of The Man Who Sold the World, the singer brought that vision of loveliness to life when he first visited the country. The Bowie whom John Mendelsohn of Rolling Stone magazine met in California during January 1971 was “ravishing, almost disconcertingly reminiscent of Lauren Bacall, although he would prefer to be regarded as the latter-day Garbo.” He was wearing “a floral-patterned velvet mini-gown . . . fine chest-length blond hair and mod nutty engineer’s cap that he bought in the ladies’ hat section of the City of Paris department store in San Francisco.” This exotic creature was both male and female, straight and gay, and even the land that had spawned a male hard rock band called Alice Cooper was taken by surprise.
On his return from the States, Bowie began to erase gender distinctions in his songs. “Lady Stardust” moved painlessly back and forth from “he” to “she” like the hero(ine) of Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando. “She” has long been identified with the late Marc Bolan, who shortly before his fatal car crash in 1977 claimed that he and Bowie had enjoyed a gay flirtation, though stopping short of penetration. Bowie critic Nicholas Pegg astutely remarked on the similarity between Lord Alfred Douglas’s famous admission, “I am the love that does not speak its name,” and Bowie’s “love I could not obey.” In his piano demo, Bowie opened another can of allusions, to Peter forsaking Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane, though this had been removed later in the year. (As “sighed” replaced “lied,” Bowie pushed his ever-expanding vocal
range to a falsetto C#.)
Whether or not Bolan was the intended subject of the song (and the references to his hair and animal grace certainly fitted), the finished record sounded like a pastiche of a mutual acquaintance, and another pop star who was familiar with sexual confusion: Elton John. Bowie could hardly have concocted a more exact imitation of Elton’s mannered tone, the way he held his notes, and the echoed combination of tambourine and snare that were hallmarks of albums such as Elton John and Tumbleweed Connection. Only the slow descent over major chords in the chorus established Bowie’s ownership of the song.
[34] RIGHT ON MOTHER
(Bowie)
Demo recorded March 1971; unreleased
* * *
“Right on Mother” was presented to Peter Noone at the same time as “Oh! You Pretty Things” [30], and was indeed taped as the singer’s next single, though without repeating its predecessor’s success. Beneath its kitchen-sink drama scenario of a young man daring to live with his girlfriend before marriage, it had a personal edge for Bowie, suggesting that his mother had suffered some difficulty in accepting his increasingly camp persona of recent months. As he declared proudly “I’m a man,” his voice soared defiantly to a high C, as a demonstration of how he had liberated himself in recent months. His piano accompaniment, similar to that on his earlier gift to Noone, carried this song deep into the territory of Paul McCartney’s “Martha My Dear” and “Honey Pie.”
[35] ZIGGY STARDUST
(Bowie)
Demo recorded March 1971; unreleased. Re-recorded November 1971; Ziggy Stardust LP
* * *
Written within days of each other, “Lady Stardust” [33] and “Ziggy Stardust” were always intended as partners. They offered starkly different portraits of the same protagonist: while “Lady Stardust” left the tale unfinished, with no hint at a denouement beyond a vague air of melancholy, “Ziggy Stardust” was a birth-to-death chronology, from his shocking, Hendrix-like arrival to the moment when “the kids” killed “the man.” It was the equivalent of finding a complete gospel among the Dead Sea Scrolls, giving context to everything around it on the Ziggy album. If Bowie was, as he later claimed, thinking from the start about fashioning a theatrical rock opera, then this song could have acted as its overture—or, if he preferred to keep the ending a surprise, it could have reappeared throughout the musical as a running commentary on its star.
As early as his spring 1971 demo, Bowie recognized that a song this pivotal required a fanfare: a simple but stunningly effective combination of tonic and dominant chords (the latter with a hammered 4th), followed by the familiar (for guitarists) shifting-bass run from C to Am, and assuredly back to the root. Bowie’s acoustic twelve-string survived onto the record, beneath Ronson’s electric fuzz guitar and, almost unnoticeable unless you knew it was there, a “jingle-jangle,” Byrds-inspired riff from a second electric. Then Bowie’s voice arrived, like a meteor from a distant galaxy, with the phrase that defined his hero: “Ziggy played guitar.” Whether his inspiration was Hendrix or Bolan mattered less than his checklist of rock star characteristics: the drugs, the enormous cock, the too-wasted-to-leave-the-room pallor. The climax was inevitable, as it has been played out countless times before and after Ziggy: ego, alienation (who would want to get close to a leper messiah?), disintegration. Ziggy was, after all, the Nazz, a name that neatly referenced early bands led by contemporary rock stars Todd Rundgren and Alice Cooper (who also fronted his own set of Spiders in 1965), but ultimately led back to the hip raconteur Lord Buckley and his tales of Jesus of “Naz.” That story also resulted in death, followed by a mysterious afterlife, acolytes, skeptics, and all the other paraphernalia associated with the premature demise of modern-day icons, from Monroe and Dean to Hendrix, Presley, Lennon, and Cobain. If the biblical gospels were an attempt to prejudice the verdict of history, then “Ziggy Stardust” had the same clinical effect upon Bowie’s creation, who has passed into legend as the ultimate rock superstar.
Even within the song, however, a multiplicity of voices offered their testimony—heavily echoed in the first and last* verses, intimate and close in the second, then doubled in the chorus like a zealot shouting in each ear. That chorus was already eerie, creeping down to the oscillation between E and F chords that found a happier home here than on “Holy Holy” [28], and also rekindled memories of the Who’s “Boris the Spider” scurrying across the floor. The final masterstroke, the one major addition to the song after Bowie’s original demo, was the reprise of the announcement that “Ziggy played guitar.” Bowie held the note defiantly, his voice finally sliding away from the note, and prompting Ronson’s guitar to offer the same tribute. Then, after one of the most perfectly judged pauses ever captured on vinyl, there was “Suffragette City” [59]—a last-minute addition to the mythology.
[36] RUPERT THE RILEY
(Bowie)
Recorded by Micky King’s All Stars, April 1971; unreleased
* * *
The mock-Californian vocal harmonies and lovingly recorded car engine on this playful tribute to Bowie’s vintage motor suggested that during his first trip to California in January he had bought a recent Beach Boys’ single, the B-side of which (“Susie Cincinnati”) was an affectionate celebration of a taxi driver that opened in remarkably similar style.* Like all good car songs, it carried some sexual innuendo, but its intention was merely to amuse. Bowie hoped that it might spawn a musical career for his friend Micky “Sparky” King, a rent-boy whom he and his wife had met at the gay mecca of the Sombrero Club in Kensington. (“I would try and get anyone who would open their mouths to do my songs,” Bowie recalled in 1998.) In the event, the track wasn’t released, but it lingered in Bowie’s memory: its “beep-beep” chorus (borrowed from the Beatles’ “Drive My Car”) not only reappeared in “Fashion” [185], but was probably the melodic ancestor of the “transition/transmission” refrain in “TVC15” [129].
[37] LIGHTNING FRIGHTENING (AKA THE MAN)
(Bowie)
Demo recorded April 1971; The Man Who Sold the World extended CD
* * *
Given unwarranted prominence in Bowie’s catalogue by its inclusion on the 1990 CD of The Man Who Sold the World, this simple three-chord jam session, with minimal lyrics, was notable only for its antecedents: Marc Bolan’s equally simplistic compositions for T. Rex (though he rarely committed anything this labored to tape), and, more specifically, “Dirty Dirty” from the debut album by Neil Young’s backing band, Crazy Horse. The CD on which this appeared credited it as a collaboration with Tim Renwick, Tony Visconti, and John Cambridge, suggesting a pre-spring 1970 date; Bowie archivist Kevin Cann opts for April 1971, and claims that its actual title is “The Man.” Imported copies of the Crazy Horse LP would have reached British stores by that date, supporting Cann’s theory.
THE MAKING OF A STAR #1: Arnold Corns
Lady Stardust,” “Ziggy Stardust,” and soon “Star” [38]: the recurrent symbolism in David Bowie’s songwriting during the early months of 1971 was not a coincidence. Since the beginning of his career, he had been putting into practice the rudimentary theories of advertising and marketing that he had learned as a teenager at his Bond Street agency. He knew how to present and sell an image, how to win publicity, how to rebrand his product—himself—if the public didn’t like it. He had also experienced, in the wake of “Space Oddity” [1], the discomfort of achieving success on other people’s terms.
He was now, effectively, a performer without an audience. He had no regular band, a recording contract with a label that had been unable to sell his two previous albums, and an image that had won him more notoriety than respect. But he had, at last, conceived the ultimate product, a brand that he could sell to the world with utter sincerity and conviction: the perfect rock’n’roll star. He would be male and female, king and queen, alien and human, transcendental and sublime; he would inspire his audience and belong to them, ultimately be them, become the incarnation of their dreams, lusts, and fe
ars.
His star would be, in the jargon of the advertising industry, a “trade character,” a brand so powerful that it would demolish everything in its path. And it would arrive fully grown, already invested with the glory that lesser mortals—such as David Bowie—could spend precious years trying in vain to achieve. Bowie would be creating not just a star, but a guaranteed route to stardom.
He was not yet ready to assume this role himself, however. His manager, Tony Defries, was telling him to wait for a more lucrative recording contract to be signed. And there was also a hint of reticence, of insecurity, in Bowie’s actions: a feeling that, after his hollow success with “Space Oddity,” he lacked the confidence or the will to put himself forward as the focus of all this desire and expectation.
The Man Who Sold the World Page 13