The Man Who Sold the World

by Peter Doggett

  The fundamental structure of this epic was simple enough: “Sweet Thing” was based around a conversation between variations of C and D major chords, occasionally rising to E minor at moments of emotional stress. Its chorus introduced the sequence (Dm-Am-G) that also ran throughout “Candidate.” And when “Sweet Thing” returned, so did its familiar chords. Connecting these elements were interludes that explored more foreign territory, switching their key signature at will but inevitably reverting to the original root. In the end, the most jarring of these interruptions veered into quasi-mechanical noise (worth comparing with the conclusion of Eno’s “Dead Finks Don’t Talk,” taped a few months earlier), with a slippery bass line that prepared the ears for the simple chord change at the heart of the next track, “Rebel Rebel.”

  That was merely the landscape for the drama, however, which began with what sounded like an homage to the famous crescendo from the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life” (a song that Bowie would later reference in “Young Americans” [113]). Slowly the colors emerged: sustained and phased guitar, synthetic (Mellotron) woodwind, Bowie’s almost conversational croon. After the pinched yet desperate vocal harmonies of the chorus, the scene expanded to rival any of Phil Spector’s “Wall of Sound” extravaganzas, filling out the sonic and emotional palettes from a Japanese koto to a rainbow of saxophones. And so it continued: a perfectly restrained but emotive guitar solo, the marching drums that introduced the “candidate” motif, a growling fuzz bass guitar, eventually every instrument in the studio hammering the beat as Bowie’s multidubbed vocals neared a hysterical climax. And there was still the reprise of “Sweet Thing” ahead, with electronic strings rising tentatively and falling quickly away as Bowie considered the snowstorm, Garson’s piano reeling off epic flourishes, and the final climb to a vocal pitch that even Bowie could not have believed that he could reach, a high D that dragged saxophones and keyboards in its wake—until the almost banal rock cacophony of the transition stripped away the humanity and left nothing of the romance but the squeal and grind of machinery.

  [101] REBEL REBEL

  (Bowie)

  Recorded January 1974; UK single A-side. Overdubbed/remixed April 1974; US single A-side

  * * *

  Within the context of Diamond Dogs, “Rebel Rebel” acted as the musical continuation of the “Sweet Thing/Candidate/Sweet Thing” [100] medley: it began with the chord change (D to E) that had been prefigured by the bass guitar slide underpinning the medley’s final chaotic moments. In isolation, it was a magnificent pastiche of the Rolling Stones’ sound, with the same timeless quality as “The Jean Genie” [65]. But whereas “The Jean Genie” was as tight as an overwound alarm clock, “Rebel Rebel” had a swaggering insouciance, reinforced by the deliberate indifference of Bowie’s vocal. Its axis was a simple guitar riff around D, E, and A chords, concocted by Bowie and then augmented by session musician Alan Parker, who added the downward trail at the end of each line. (The melody of the verse followed Bowie’s guitar line, not Parker’s.)

  Bowie had begun to socialize with the Rolling Stones in 1973: Mick Jagger had attended Ziggy’s farewell party, like the king acknowledging and recognizing a distant claimant for his crown. The intention behind “Rebel Rebel” was to outdo the tired self-parody of the Stones’ most recent album, Goats Head Soup, and Bowie duly emerged with a stronger and more enduring* single than Jagger’s next offering, “It’s Only Rock ’n Roll.” Its wordless vocal riff repeated and therefore satirized the hook of the band’s recent US single, “Doo Doo Doo Doo (Heartbreaker).” Meanwhile, the key line of the lyric, about the ambiguity of sexual identity, harked back to the insults that the Stones’ appearance had provoked back in 1964.*

  The track was certainly worthy of inclusion on any of the recent Rolling Stones albums, its raw-edged guitar being introduced against a click track, and then the visceral punch of bass and drums, while acoustic guitar and piano languished deep in the mix. “Rebel Rebel” was pure attitude from start to finish: the essence of adolescent defiance, guaranteed to bring out the teenager in all who heard it.

  Bowie wasn’t satisfied with creating a perennial dance-floor anthem. For US consumption, he treated the track to a Latin dub mix, issued as a summer 1974 single, two decades or more ahead of its time. He effectively buried the signature rock riff of the original beneath phasing, sine waves of percussion, acoustic guitar, and an otherworldly bank of backing vocals, each line preceded by a rush of backward echo, as if time were being sucked into a vacuum.

  [102] WE ARE THE DEAD

  (Bowie)

  Recorded February 1974; Diamond Dogs LP

  * * *

  Winston and Julia embark on their forbidden romance in Orwell’s novel in the knowledge that “what was now happening could not last long. There were times when the fact of impending death seemed as palpable as the bed they lay on.” In their final moments before discovery, Winston considers the closed lives of those who exist in the world of Big Brother with the hope of freedom for their distant descendants. “ ‘We are the dead,’ he said.” And with that pronouncement, their illusion of freedom is ended.

  Like Winston and Julia, Bowie’s “We Are the Dead” was constantly at war between two spheres of existence. Its verses fleshed out the stunted humanity of Winston’s life, from his first encounter with Julia to his vain hope of marking their union with a child. Its chorus, an amalgam of accident and intention from Bowie’s experiments with cut-ups, evoked menace and confusion in equal proportion, while beneath the relentless decline of the chords,* a chorus of soulless voices crooned that they were the new boys, the dogs, the dead.

  The treatment of Bowie’s voice brilliantly reinforced his lyrical intentions. It entered with a slap across the electric piano introduction, and was then heavily echoed throughout the verse, almost half a beat behind, to emphasize Winston’s tentative belief in Julia. The chorus, however, was an ocean of emotional commitment, bringing all of Winston’s anguish to the surface—and, with the references to bankers and the bankrupt, resonating beyond the Oceania of 1974 into the second decade of the twenty-first century.

  [103] BIG BROTHER

  (Bowie)

  Recorded February 1974; Diamond Dogs LP

  * * *

  “Big Brother is watching you” was the warning—or perhaps promise—that restrained the characters in Orwell’s novel. Big Brother may not have existed; it was enough that his subjects believed that he did. Orwell portrayed his image as a grim bureaucrat, “black-haired, black-moustachio’d, full of power and mysterious calm.” Bowie’s narrator—perhaps one of the subjects of Oceania deranged by the enforced hysteria of the “Two Minutes Hate” (see [104])—envisaged him as the Apollo of Greek mythology, the exemplar of beauty and light. Like Orwell’s “little sandy-haired woman,” who cries out “My Saviour!” when she sees Big Brother’s picture, the chorus echoed a passionate cry for belonging from an artist who was a natural outsider. Only with a reference to chemical excess that sounded like an uncanny prediction of Bowie’s immediate future was there any personal resonance. The fact that its unembellished voices and acoustic guitars sounded like an addendum to “The Bewlay Brothers” [51] merely added to the surreal sense that this fragment belonged elsewhere.

  That diversion aside, “Big Brother” was as expansive as its subject’s powers, opening with a vocal chorus produced by a machine, alongside a Mellotron trumpet motif*—an immediate sign that humanity was in the shadows. Bowie compensated with a soaring vocal, doubled by a voice an octave higher that might have been on the edge of insanity—or simply trying to connect with its emotions within the restraints of Big Brother’s society.

  [104] CHANT OF THE EVER-CIRCLING SKELETAL FAMILY

  (Bowie)

  Recorded February 1974; Diamond Dogs LP

  * * *

  From the cry for “Big Brother” [158], Bowie’s electronic soundscape led inevitably into the ritualistic “chant of humanity”—his equivalent to the “Two Minutes Hate” in Orwell�
��s novel, in which the citizens of Oceania were required to vent their anger and contempt for Big Brother’s enemies. As the final track on Diamond Dogs, it was an uncompromisingly bleak portrait of mankind.

  Orwell’s Hate began with “a hideous, grinding screech, as of some monstrous machine without oil,” and climaxed in “a deep, slow, rhythmical chant . . . a heavy, murmurous sound, somehow curiously savage.” Bowie’s musical equivalent was pitched somewhere between a robotic, futuristic dance track and an inhuman assault on the senses. Every iota of sound was under stress—reversed, synthesized, phased into a distortion of reality. Eventually the recognizable instruments (electric guitar, bass, Latin percussion) were suppressed beneath a reverberating rhythmic effect that was sound itself, the aural equivalent of a barrage of strobe lightning. To reinforce the banality and repetition of this mindless convulsion, Bowie added the most skeletal and meaningless dance lyrics, before the cacophony focused into the brutal metallic rasp of mutated syllables—“bro” and “riot” merged into an aural weapon.

  That almost indecipherable sound was then repeated al fin in an eerie homage to the pioneering minimalist music of the American composer Steve Reich a decade earlier. Reich’s “It’s Gonna Rain” used tape loops and time delays to create a pulsing hammer of noise from the voice of a Pentecostal preacher. Kevin Ayers, whose musical path often crossed with that of Bowie in the early seventies, had already exploited Reich’s example on “When Your Parents Go to Sleep” a few months earlier, but Bowie extended the technique to confrontational ends.

  [105] ROCK ’N’ ROLL WITH ME

  (Bowie/MacCormack)

  Recorded February 1974; Diamond Dogs LP

  * * *

  Only one song on Diamond Dogs could reliably be located as a contender for the lost Ziggy Stardust stage musical. Its subject was the ambiguous liaison between star and audience: the pull between the ecstatic lure of the stage and the pressurized capsule of fame. Bowie triumphantly located a door marked OUT, as if voicing Ziggy’s intention to escape the spotlight. The gloriously commercial chorus,* which would have guaranteed substantial success had this song been issued as a single, signaled Bowie’s (and Ziggy’s) awareness of the gulf between the image and reality of fame. Later in 1974, Bowie summarized the song’s message to his Messiah-hungry audience: “You’re doing it to me, stop it!”

  The prevailing mood was anything but exuberant. Though the refrain begged for a stadium of flag-waving fans, Bowie’s voice was fired with desperation to be released, while the backup singers sounded distinctly resigned to their fate. Even Bowie’s baritone sax seemed to be acting as a depressive, while the gospel-flavored piano emphasized that there was at least one soul at stake. Relief came only in the smallest of signs: the gorgeous texture of the acoustic guitar, for example, filling in the pauses between lines with delicious passing chords.

  The credited co-writer, Geoff MacCormack, told David Buckley that his contribution to the song was minimal: “I started fiddling around with a chord sequence [on piano]. . . . David said, ‘Hang on a minute, play that again!’ So it was very much accidental. . . . I wouldn’t have dreamed of sitting down and saying, ‘Oh, let’s write a song together.’ ”

  [106] FUTURE LEGEND

  (Bowie; inc. “Bewitched” by Rodgers/Hart)

  Recorded February 1974; Diamond Dogs LP

  * * *

  Alongside his cover of John Lennon’s “Across the Universe” [168], this brief prelude to the Diamond Dogs album ranked as Bowie’s greatest creative misstep of the decade. The transitory allure of its mutant iconography and sub–William Burroughs imagery quickly palled, becoming more laughable with every passing year. Equally silly was the climactic “genocide” line, which was presumably meant to match the impact of the Rolling Stones’ self-congratulatory introduction to their Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out live album.

  Beyond the zombie chic and (Burroughs’s) Wild Boys derivatives, however, “Future Legend” did offer some signposts, forward and back. Its surreal collage owed something to Frank Zappa’s “Help I’m a Rock,” a Bowie favorite of 1966. Even more distant was the Rodgers & Hart tune “Bewitched,”* one of three guitar themes running simultaneously beneath his monologue. The title of “Future Legend” was suggestive in itself: the apocalypse was no longer “Five Years” [56] ahead, as on Ziggy Stardust, but any day now. (Looking forward to his reincarnation as a soul singer, Bowie briefly imitated the melody of the hit song of that name from 1962.) Most significant, in the context of what was to come, the sonic landscape of this track was severely distorted—a clamor of phasing, echo, synthesized sound, vari-speed vocals, and feedback, all contributing to a canvas that was rotting from within.

  [107] DIAMOND DOGS

  (Bowie)

  Recorded February 1974; Diamond Dogs LP

  * * *

  The song existed before Guy Peellaert’s cover artwork for the album, begging the question: who or what are the diamond dogs? They could be the canine equivalents of Burroughs’s Wild Boys; or, as one rock journalist of the era suggested, a reinvention of the loyal beast from Harlan Ellison’s apocalyptic science fiction tale “A Boy and His Dog.” Historians of science might remember Isaac Newton’s dog Diamond, which unfortunately destroyed manuscripts detailing twenty years of his master’s research. Those of a more metaphorical bent might recall that dogs are man’s best friends, and diamonds are a girl’s best friends: at least according to cliché and popular song.

  Then again, who is Halloween Jack, aside from a character who lives atop a mansion that bears the name (reversed) of a major US bank, Chase Manhattan? Many Bowie aficionados credit Jack as a Bowie “identity,” following Ziggy and Aladdin, but there was little hint in this song that Jack occupied more than a cameo role. Could he have any ties to Robert Neville, hero of the 1971 movie The Omega Man, a futuristic man/dog/apocalypse film that was set in March 1975—“any day now,” indeed, in 1974? Or, as elsewhere on the Diamond Dogs album, was Bowie merely using cut-up chance and a little sleight of hand to create an appropriately fantastic but vague vision of what Alvin Toffler’s 1970 best seller called “future shock”? The lyrics were certainly full of allusions, notably referencing Tod Browning’s controversial* 1932 movie Freaks, which had been a cult item in London’s cinema clubs since finally being deemed fit for public exhibition in 1963. But why Tarzan? And why mutate Donovan’s “Season of the Witch” into a bitch? Literal translation of the song did not bring you any closer to its heart, and Bowie’s after-the-fact explanations were no more convincing than the spontaneous Ziggy Stardust myth that he related to William S. Burroughs during their meeting in late 1973.

  For a real sense of civilization collapsing, the music was a more reliable guide. It began in applause, cheekily stolen from the Faces’ recently completed Overture and Beginners live album, beneath which the scratchiest of rhythm guitars (one loud and confident, the other soft and erratic) embarked on a precarious series of slides between major chords. Eventually the track fell cacophonously into the key of A, over a drum pattern last heard on a late fifties Bo Diddley record. While Bowie happily spewed out his lyrical disconnections, he was accompanied by wildly distorted* backing vocals. That dislocation paled alongside what happened next: “will they come?” the strange voices asked, and in reply the drums began to play between the beats of the bar, as if time had come off its hinges. The track kept building from there: layer upon layer of keyboards, guitars, saxophones, dog imitations, noise, none of it centered around anything. So primal was its interpretation of rock’n’roll that it was easy to make comparisons—to the Velvet Underground’s “Waiting for the Man” [A44], perhaps, or a loose rendition of the Rolling Stones’ “Brown Sugar,” or, given that Bowie seems to have studied the work of Kevin Ayers with some care, the opening of “Stop This Train” from Ayers’s Joy of a Toy album in 1969. Ultimately, though, “Diamond Dogs” created its own universe: ramshackle, amateurish, weirdly compelling, as jarring in its way as punk would become two years later.


  DIAMOND DOGS LP

  When Diamond Dogs was complete, MainMan promised that the record “conceptualises the vision of a future world with images of urban decadence and collapse.” That sounded like an all-purpose description, which might just as well have been applied to the Nineteen Eighty-Four project.* In fact, what was striking about Diamond Dogs was how consistently it avoided direct political and social relevance: the individual images that Bowie had assembled carried less cultural significance than their fragmentary state. So this was neither a soundtrack for a lost musical (although that didn’t prevent Bowie from dreaming) or a work of social analysis, but an attempt by the artist to explore the impact that those themes had exerted on his psyche. Diamond Dogs also explored some of the fixations of the Pop Art school of the fifties—the nexus between science fiction, catastrophe, and consumerism, for example—but within an entirely personal landscape.

  That dream of Bowie’s, the notion (shared by Pete Townshend of the Who and Ray Davies of the Kinks) that an album needed stage or screen to assume its full, three-dimensional power, led him to boast almost immediately that there would soon be a Diamond Dogs musical or movie. To facilitate the latter idea, he constructed a miniature landscape and models of his intended characters in his New York hotel room, and then filmed them, all the time narrating the key elements of his screenplay. “I wanted to make a film of Diamond Dogs so passionately,” he revealed in 1980, when he was still hoping to issue his trailer as a videocassette. “I had the whole roller-skating thing in there. We had no more cars, because of the fuel crisis. . . . Also, I had groups of these cyborg people wandering around looking so punky.” But the narrative needed to fuel a movie was more difficult to grasp.