The Man Who Sold the World

by Peter Doggett

  Meanwhile, he was writing and recording demos of songs that his publisher, Bob Grace, rated as a commercial proposition. Grace was eager to reap some financial reward for his investment in Bowie’s potential: with Peter Noone’s cover of “Oh! You Pretty Things” [30] not yet in the charts, Grace and Bowie decided to lease two of the demos to the small B&C Records label. They could not be issued under Bowie’s name, as he was still under contract to Mercury. So necessity and fantasy were combined: Bowie’s initial demos of “Moonage Daydream” [32] and “Hang Onto Yourself” [31] would become the vehicle for an entirely imaginary star. He would be able to test out the potency of his dream without risking his own reputation.

  His sacrificial lamb was a nineteen-year-old designer called Freddie Burretti, whom Bowie had met at the Sombrero. He was known professionally as Fred of the East End, and once Bowie began to wear his designs, he was able to open a boutique entitled Play It Cool & Play It Loud. That was exactly the spirit Bowie wanted for his imaginary star. There was one problem: Burretti couldn’t sing. And one solution: he wouldn’t need to. Years before Milli Vanilli scandalized the American rock industry by using two male models to “front” music that they hadn’t made, David Bowie was attempting to play exactly the same trick on the pop audience.

  First the two men appeared together on the cover of the “sex education” magazine Curious, while Freddie also posed with a snake wrapped around his waist. (Bowie was soon claiming that Burretti had come up with the idea before Alice Cooper.) Bowie touted his protégé around the London pop papers, announcing that Freddie was actually Rudi Valentino, the leader of a band called Arnold Corns. “I believe that Rudi will be the first male to appear on the cover of Vogue magazine,” he boasted. “I believe that the Rolling Stones are finished, and that Arnold Corns will be the next Stones. . . . [Rudi] will be the next Mick Jagger.” Burretti wasn’t quite so confident: “Really I’m just a dress designer,” he said apologetically.

  Despite Bowie’s assurances that his prototype of “Moonage Daydream” was “unique, there’s certainly nothing to compare with it,” the first Arnold Corns single was a flop. The experiment was extended to two further songs [43/44], one of which Burretti was allowed to sing (though his voice was carefully buried in the mix). But B&C didn’t release another Arnold Corns single until after Bowie himself had become a star, and because Bowie officially didn’t perform on the records, his management was unable to exert any control over the process of marketing and sales. Neither Bowie nor Tony Defries would make that mistake again.

  [38] STAR

  (Bowie)

  Demo recorded May 1971; unreleased. Re-recorded November 1971; Ziggy Stardust LP

  * * *

  “I believe in fantasy and star images,” Bowie said in 1971. “I am very aware of these kinds of people and feel they are very important figures in our society. People like to focus on somebody who they might consider not quite the same as them. Whether it’s true or not is immaterial.” So it’s surprising that he made strident attempts to dispose of “Star” to other artists, giving a copy of his May 1971 demo to at least two other bands. Maybe he was wary of capitalizing himself on the rock’n’roll star mythology; maybe he distrusted the song’s blatant commerciality. In either case, he heavily rewrote the lyric (as he had “Hang Onto Yourself” [31]) for Ziggy Stardust as a young man’s fantasy, almost erotic in its narcissism, in which reality (joining the British army in Belfast, trying to change the world) paled alongside the “wild mutation” of rock stardom. The final lines revealed the scenario: the narrator was lulling himself to sleep by dreaming of fame, as the fifteen-year-old Bowie might have done when he first joined the Kon-Rads. “Watch me now,” he muttered, echoing the proud boast from the Contours’ early sixties dance-floor anthem “Do You Love Me.”

  There were other ghosts afoot during the recording, with the exaggerated backing vocals mimicking a dozen Beatles songs, from “Baby It’s You” via “Girl” to “Sexy Sadie” and “Happiness Is a Warm Gun”—Bowie claimed it was “Lovely Rita,” though that’s less easy to hear. Like John Lennon, Bowie must have relished the affectionate doo-wop throwback of Frank Zappa’s album Cruising with Ruben & the Jets. There was also a hint of the Who’s “Pinball Wizard” (another sales pitch for a superstar) in the triple contact of Mick Ronson’s plectrum as he hit the power chords beneath the frantic, stumbling* introduction. The song was elegantly constructed, too, with verse and chorus nearly replicating each other (separated by a three-beat pause when four was what the ear expected), a guitar interruption offering a series of abrupt tonic-dominant shifts, and a coda that took an unexpectedly flattened route home from C to the key chord of G as if to signal the transition from daydream to the oblivion of sleep.

  [39] KOOKS

  (Bowie)

  Recorded June 1971; BBC radio. Re-recorded July 1971; Hunky Dory LP

  * * *

  As Bowie was launching his initial experiment in creating a rock star, he decided that he was ready to resume his own career as a public figure. He had been using a shifting group of session musicians and acquaintances (some of whom were ostensibly members of Arnold Corns) for his recording work this year, but now he was keen to recruit a full-time band. His initial impulse was to re-form the Hype, but since he was estranged from his previous bassist, Tony Visconti (who was still masterminding Marc Bolan’s star-making machinery), he required a replacement. Mick Ronson and Woody Woodmansey returned to Haddon Hall from Hull with the perfect candidate: another local musician, Trevor Bolder. And so, though he didn’t yet realize it, Ziggy Stardust had acquired his Spiders from Mars. The ensemble debuted at a haphazard but joyful performance for BBC Radio, at which Bowie allowed several of his friends—George Underwood and Geoff MacCormack from Bromley, Dana Gillespie from his Marquee days, and Mark Carr-Pritchard from the Arnold Corns sessions—to share his spotlight.

  Their performances included covers of Chuck Berry’s “Almost Grown” and Ron Davies’s “It Ain’t Easy” [41], while George Underwood sang Bowie’s “Song for Bob Dylan” [40] and Dana Gillespie made his “Andy Warhol” [47] her own. But Bowie also introduced some more personal material of his own.

  “Kooks,” an unfinished song about an unconventional family Bowie had met in Chiswick, swam into sharp focus once his son Zowie was born in May 1971. Four days later, he performed the song—musically inspired by Neil Young’s fragmentary “Till the Morning Comes”—on BBC Radio, and its inclusion on Hunky Dory ensured its enduring appeal among those who were less entranced by his explorations of politics, psychology, and occult elsewhere on the album. The instrumental hook was that guitarist’s favorite, the movement between D major and D sustained 4th, with a subtle switch to D7 for the second line. The rest appeared seamless, with the C-Am drift of the chorus giving way to a more definite set of major chords for the verse. Some flamboyant, rollicking piano heightened the vaudeville* feel of the latter portion of the song, while bassist Trevor Bolder contributed a simple reprise of the melody on trumpet.

  Any minor complication was reserved for the lyrics, with their repeated question—“will you stay”—allowing the subject an element of free will that the more obvious alternative (“won’t you stay . . .”) would have denied. The “story” also suggested an element of fantasy that didn’t, perhaps, bode well for the child’s welfare. Bowie’s bohemian rhapsody included another disavowal of his school days, in the vein of “Can’t Help Thinking About Me” [A14].

  [40] SONG FOR BOB DYLAN

  (Bowie)

  Recorded June–August 1971; Hunky Dory LP

  * * *

  “Dylan belongs in a very personal way to everyone who digs his music,” a British underground newspaper declared in 1970. “He existed in our heads, we absorbed him and his music wholesale.” So deep was this identification that those who aligned themselves with the counterculture needed to believe that Bob Dylan shared their values and ideals. When the singer-songwriter refused to lead protests against the Vietnam War, o
r comment on the repression in Nixon’s America, there was a very real sense of outrage among his peers and fans. Dylan preferred to tease his followers with his indifference to their cause: “How do you know I’m not, as you say, for the war?” he said in a 1968 interview. Country Joe & the Fish issued a song in 1970 titled “Hey Bobby,” complaining, “Where you been? We missed you out on the streets.” By the end of the year, self-styled “Dylanologist” A. J. Weberman had founded the Dylan Liberation Front in New York, whose manifesto was simple: “Free Bob Dylan from Himself.” John Lennon was among those who proudly wore the Liberation Front badge.

  Bowie’s decision to add his name to those placing responsibility for social change on Dylan’s shoulders was intriguing, to say the least, especially given that he was also beginning to explore the demands of stardom in his songs. One wonders whether he connected the fate of “Ziggy Stardust” [35], killed by his fans, with the pressure that was being exerted upon Dylan.* His excuse was that the song was written to reflect the views of his friend George Underwood, who duly performed it during Bowie’s June 1971 BBC concert in an attractively Dylanesque voice. By 1976, however, Bowie had concocted a faintly ridiculous rationale: “It laid out what I wanted to do in rock. It was at that period that I said, ‘OK, if you don’t want to do it, I will.’ I saw the leadership void.” However much sense this made to him retrospectively, there was nothing in the song to support this explanation.

  Not that the song was fully coherent, in any case. The simple finger-pointing of the verses (constructed around chord changes familiar from Dylan’s work) and the final lines of the chorus were separated by a shift of perspective that gave the song its working title (“Here She Comes”), and muddied its narrative. Who, for example, was the person masquerading as a friend who could tear everything to pieces with his cat claws? This was purely personal iconography, which read like a lost fragment from “Queen Bitch” [45], especially as its original title recalled a song by Lou Reed, the ostensible inspiration for the latter composition.

  More intriguing was Bowie’s decision to address Dylan by his real name of Robert Zimmerman, just as John Lennon had done on “God” a few months earlier. By distinguishing “artifice” from “reality,” he was begging a comparison with his own multiple identities of David Jones, David Bowie, and, very soon, Ziggy Stardust.

  [41] IT AIN’T EASY

  (Davies)

  Recorded July 1971; Hunky Dory LP

  * * *

  American singer-songwriter Ron Davies introduced this song on his eponymous 1970 album as a slice of Louisiana folk blues. The US band Three Dog Night, who had a penchant for translating rock iconography into Top 40 pop, softened the song’s rural edges. But it took David Bowie’s band of old school friends and new collaborators, at his June 3, 1971, BBC concert, to bring out the gospel-soul potential of the chorus, with Dana Gillespie’s powerful voice evoking comparisons to Bonnie Bramlett’s adventures with the Delaney & Bonnie big band. This was mainstream early seventies Americana, a sound that was re-created on British records by Joe Cocker, Eric Clapton, and Elton John, making it all the more strange that Bowie chose to revisit the song in the studio—considering it first for Hunky Dory, and then imposing it on Ziggy Stardust, when it had no sonic or thematic links with either. Though Gillespie’s wailing voice ensured that the chorus, at least, was respectable, Bowie doomed his performance by assuming a strangulated vocal tone that was, presumably, meant to sound both southern and intense, without achieving either aim. As this performance proved, he was never less convincing than when trying to be the kind of transatlantic rock star that he was usually content to parody.

  [42] BOMBERS

  (Bowie)

  Demo recorded ca. June 1971; unreleased. Re-recorded July 1971; Hunky Dory extended CD

  * * *

  “Kind of a skit on Neil Young” was how Bowie described this song in early 1972, more than six months after he had first taped a solo demo and performed it for BBC Radio. Aside from a couple of lyrical references* that might be coincidental, however, the comparison did little to elucidate a strangely theatrical song about aerial warfare, as if the London music hall of the 1930s had decided to tackle the conflict in Vietnam. Bowie’s voice was gleeful, sardonic, clipped, exaggeratedly mock English—a whole spectrum of hyperbolic mannerisms, in fact, as one might expect from a mime artiste suddenly allowed to speak after a lifetime of silence. As Bowie admitted, it was positively “queer,” and decidedly camp, placing “Bombers” into the same satirical territory as the 1969 film Oh! What a Lovely War. Camp, too, was the final, vaudeville verse, in which Bowie soared to a falsetto C reminiscent of one of his musical heroes of the time, Tiny Tim. The air of mockery was reinforced by the musical subversion of modulating suddenly into a flat key at apparently random moments of the melody—as in the rise to the chorus, where a predictable set of chord changes, C-Dm-Em-F, slipped back into an unexpected Ea before achieving the obvious safety of the final G chord.

  [43] LOOKING FOR A FRIEND

  (Bowie/Carr-Pritchard)

  Recorded June 1971; BBC radio and Arnold Corns single. Re-recorded November 1971; unreleased

  * * *

  Whether performed with Mark Carr-Pritchard at the BBC, attempted in the studio as an Arnold Corns single, or briefly considered for Ziggy Stardust, “Looking for a Friend” was doomed to sound like a reject from the Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers album—Mick Ronson heightening that impression with some Mick Taylor–inspired lead lines on the radio performance. After a nod to Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” the lyric swiftly degenerated into a coy, camp collection of clichés, which Bowie didn’t even attempt, as he had with earlier Arnold Corns songs [31/32], to revamp for his own purposes.

  [44] MAN IN THE MIDDLE

  (Carr-Pritchard, possibly with Bowie)

  Recorded June 1971; Arnold Corns single

  * * *

  The last of the four Arnold Corns recordings relegated Bowie to the role of supporting player, while the song’s chief composer, Mark Carr-Pritchard, offered a gloriously detached lead vocal. The lyrics might easily have been a portrait of Bowie in his “I’m gay” persona.

  [45] QUEEN BITCH

  (Bowie)

  Recorded July 1971; Hunky Dory LP

  * * *

  “It’s time to be proud of making it with other guys, time to get out of the guilt-ridden ghettos of the gay world,” wrote underground journalist Jim Anderson in 1970. He continued: “So long dinge queens, toe queens, leather queens, size queens, cottage queens, hair fairies, fag hags and chubby chasers. There’s no need any longer to shriek or camp about like hysterical birds of prey, no need for that bitchy defiance. You can relax. The world in the 70s will be one vast erogenous zone with that most natural and persistent of sexual variations, homosexuality, an integral and vital part of the kaleidoscopic world of human sexuality.”

  For those flirting with the naughtiness of those “guilt-ridden ghettos,” however, the old stereotypes were too attractive to abandon. Hence “Queen Bitch,” a cornucopia of camp terminology, overtly pitched as a tribute to Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, the only rock artists at ease in this louche milieu.* So the song has been widely assumed to be directed at Reed himself, even though in 1971 there was no sign of his mincing in satin and tat, as Bowie claimed.

  It is possible to propose a different reading, and suggest that in “Queen Bitch”—and perhaps the chorus to “Song for Bob Dylan” [40] as well—Bowie was acting as a “queen bitch” himself and revenging himself on an old friend. When the song was written, Marc Bolan had escaped his own ghetto as a hippie pixie poet and become the most successful British pop star since the Beatles. Music journalist Penny Valentine, a longtime promoter of Bowie’s cause, would soon note that Bolan occupied “an amazing position unequalled by anyone else in contemporary music. [He represents] the new Presley image, surrounded by the same fanatical devotion that James Dean once reaped.” That quote was printed a few days before H
unky Dory was released and widely ignored by the public.

  Having known, and competed against, Bolan since 1964–65, Bowie was understandably jealous when his rival achieved such startling success. “We were all green with envy,” he recalled many years later. “It was terrible: we fell out for about six months. And he got all sniffy about us who were still down in the basement.” The fact that Bolan’s hits were being produced by Bowie’s estranged friend Tony Visconti can’t have eased his pain. So it’s not far-fetched to imagine that Bowie might retaliate in song. As Bowie mistrusted his rival’s sincerity, he could easily have imagined that Bolan could slash with his claws while masquerading as a friend, as the chorus to “Song for Bob Dylan” suggested; likewise, Bolan could have been the painted lady whom Dylan could destroy with a return to his mid-sixties acerbity. Extend the fancy, and look at “Queen Bitch” in that light: the track opened with a Bolanesque piece of scat, used a Bolanesque turn of phrase to describe a hat, and concluded jealously that he could do better than that—as Bowie had proved on the (British) cover of The Man Who Sold the World. Add in some malicious gossip from the London clubs, and a sense of bitterness that it could have been him . . .

  Far-fetched or otherwise, this theory doesn’t account for the superbly simple production of the finished record, trebling the basic riff with two electric guitars and one acoustic, that blend being an intrinsic part of Bowie’s sound in 1971–72. (Note how Bowie chuckled as he sang “false claims,” followed instantly by the guitar in the left-hand channel fumbling its chords.) Like a method actor, he tossed in perfect, apparently off-the-cuff interjections between lines, the epitome of the streetwise rock star, and typical of this remarkable pastiche of rock spontaneity.