The Man Who Sold the World

by Peter Doggett

  [111] I AM A LASER

  (Bowie)

  [112] SHILLING THE RUBES

  (Bowie)

  Recorded August 1974; unreleased

  * * *

  A spontaneous decision led David Bowie to Sigma Sound in Philadelphia, the base for Gamble & Huff’s sweet soul empire. He booked the studio for two weeks, naïvely assuming that he would be working with the musicians he had heard on hits by the O’Jays, Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes, and the Three Degrees. But they were engaged elsewhere, so it was a mixture of New York players and local singers who accompanied him as he attempted to confect his own facsimile of the Philly soul sound. Beyond that, his agenda was vague. This was not a project built around a concept, unless you included one possibility that flitted across his mind: the enticing but commercially perilous idea of chronicling his feelings about his career, and more specifically his declining relationship with the MainMan, Tony Defries.

  Hence “Shilling the Rubes,” street slang for a form of exploitation that was second nature to any huckster or (as Bowie knew from experience) salesman. Rumor had long suggested this as a possible song title from these sessions, though with no evidence to support it until 2009, when a private vendor on eBay briefly posted samples of these two songs (plus working versions of “After Today” [114] and “Young Americans” [113]) to prove that he did indeed possess original tapes from the Sigma Sound project. And there, at last, was “Shilling the Rubes” (take 1), a slow, dramatic variation on the James Brown ballad tradition (“It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World” being the closest equivalent). Only a minute of the song circulated before the tapes were withdrawn: enough merely to show that Bowie intended to pin a businessman to the wall with bitter humor.

  A slightly longer extract of “I Am a Laser” (marked simply “Lazer” on the tape box) also surfaced, with an entirely different feel to the Astronettes’ version [93], and totally rewritten verses—one of which began by referring to the rumored working title for the album, The Gouster (a youth fashion of the fifties and sixties that could best be defined by borrowing a song title from New York Dolls vocalist David Johansen: “Funky but Chic”).

  [113] YOUNG AMERICANS

  (Bowie)

  Recorded August and November 1974; Young Americans LP

  * * *

  Note the title: it never appeared in this song, where everyone—he, she, I—wanted “the young American.” So did every advertising executive in the nation, every politician, every pop star. As a temporary immigrant, albeit one who was being advised not to return home for tax reasons, and who would never be resident in Britain again, David Bowie knew the pull of the mythical young American only too well, as it had dragged him from South London, via the media of movies, rock’n’roll, and beat literature, to New York, California, and now Philadelphia, in his quest to become what he had worshipped since he was a child. On one level, then, “Young Americans” was the portrait of a fantasy: the global dream of how it would feel to have life laid out before you in the land of plenty.

  Yet there was more to this myth than simple obeisance to the Yankee dollar, and all it could buy. In the summer of 1974, with Watergate in the news, unemployment lines around the block, the economy on the edge, being young and American was a less certain fate than the myth allowed. The dream might already be over, childhood affluence and teenage promise snuffed out in a moment of economic decline, where the young Americans might have to “die for the fifty more” years. After the opening verse of the song, with its moment of sexual passion so transcendent that she doesn’t even care if he takes her behind the fridge,* it’s only a moment before they’re married, and he’s the breadwinner on his knees in despair, not lust. Even the Barbie doll on the poster (movies, records, advertising, it didn’t matter) had suffered a broken heart as the myth disintegrated. Yet the power of fantasy, of the ad man’s game and stardom’s sheen, was so overwhelming that it could replenish itself even at times of national dread, to the point where young Americans had already forgotten their vanquished president (who’d resigned days earlier, prompting his successor to promise, optimistically: “our long national nightmare is over”)—and maybe couldn’t even remember yesterday.

  There was another layer to American mythology that Bowie began to explore only after he’d questioned the nation’s collective memory (and, incidentally, changed the song’s key). He was working in a studio run by black entrepreneurs, with mostly black musicians, on music that was inspired by the sound of black America. As a kid, that had been the most seductive part of the myth, before he knew what it meant to be black in this land. Now, after the official end of segregation and the supposed death of discrimination, what was black America, the youngest America of them all? Was it the high, quasi-feminine falsetto voice of a sweet soul band? Or the pimp and hustler stereotypes that peopled blaxploitation movies? What did it mean to process your hair, or shape it into an Afro, using Afro-Sheen? What was the black identity in America, when the black nation was crippled by fantasy just like the white, and divided between the ghetto and the self-improving middle class? Where did that leave soul music? And, as Bowie sang with a mighty octave-and-a-half leap, was there nothing that could make him “break down and cry”?

  That was merely the last of a series of questions posed by the would-be young American who had grown up surrounded by myths, and no longer knew which one to believe or follow. By the end, he was barely coherent, flashing out images and fragments of sentences that didn’t run together, as a cacophony of American voices and myths filled his mind. All of this was in the song—material for sociological dissertations and psychological reports, a dazzling series of snapshots of real America and mythical America and Bowie’s place in the country and the myth. And none of it seemed to be thought, merely felt, as if it had emerged in automatic writing, and he had found the courage to let it stand as a genuine, unfeigned response to the mystery of what America represented in 1974.

  Bowie could hardly have offered more commitment to the song, vocally or lyrically, if he’d been speaking in tongues: the change of key midway not only refocused the lyrical theme, it also pushed his voice to its limit. Yet for a song of such intensity, the musical framework was refreshingly loose, following a simple I-ii-IV-V chord sequence through the verse and chorus. The band reached out for attention at the start—one of those percussive intros that were ubiquitous in 1974’s soul music, followed by a run down the keyboard—and then lay back, with plenty of space in the arrangement, and only David Sanborn’s word-in-your-ear saxophone coming close to rivaling Bowie’s insistence. As they would throughout the Philadelphia sessions, the backing of Luther Vandross, Ava Cherry, and Robin Clark filled out the vocal spectrum around and against Bowie’s lead, never becoming caught up in his hysteria. Musically simple, lyrically fragmented, emotionally inspired, “Young Americans” presented a Bowie who had never been heard on record before, catching almost everyone who had followed him by surprise.

  [114] AFTER TODAY

  (Bowie)

  Recorded August 1974; Sound + Vision CD

  * * *

  Throughout the sixties, Bowie rarely dared to attempt singing anything above a high G. Yet the chorus of this song barely ventured below that point, provoking one of his most enthusiastic, if erratic, attempts at a falsetto vocal. Like the Bee Gees, whose “Jive Talking” would soon feature even more extreme displays of the art, Bowie was clearly enraptured by the tradition (particularly in Philadelphia) of sweet soul groups with a soaring male lead. While they tended to concentrate on ballads, Bowie let rip on this frenetic disco-funk tune, rather generic in nature, but nonetheless energized for that. Its working lyrics carried a vague message of encouragement to a friend or lover, but would surely have been replaced if “After Today” had become a serious contender for his next album. Throughout, David Sanborn’s saxophone mimicked the physical strain of Bowie’s voice with playful accuracy.

  [115] WHO CAN I BE NOW?

  (Bowie)

  Recorded
August and November 1974; Young Americans extended CD

  * * *

  It was a title that seemed to summarize Bowie’s strange journey. There was a real contempt in his voice as he recalled the drudgery of adopting a new disguise, as if all the allure of “Changes” had been stripped away, to reveal the puppet master going through the motions.

  The boundary lines between spiritual desolation and romantic despair were blurred throughout this exercise in gospel-soul, which was naggingly reminiscent of John Lennon’s 1973 song “Out of the Blue.” The two compositions shared a circularity of structure, and a familiar melodic descent that was most obvious in the bass line. But where Lennon sought solace in love, Bowie’s narrator was concerned with a more profound dilemma about the purpose of existence itself. “Who Can I Be Now?” exhibited many of the trademarks of the Philadelphia sessions: gospel-tinged piano, saxophone as an expression of pain, call-and-response vocal interplay. But despite Bowie’s full-blooded performance, it was perhaps a shade too mechanical (note the additional half bar needed to travel from verse to chorus) to stand up to the scrutiny of a place on the Young Americans album.

  [116] IT’S GONNA BE ME

  (Bowie)

  Recorded August, November, and December 1974; Young Americans extended CD

  * * *

  One of the most remarkable performances of Bowie’s career, “It’s Gonna Be Me” was a consummate display of his vocal artistry, a naked revelation of the man behind the art, and a dexterous piece of character acting—beginning the question of who exactly was holding this thinnest of masks. It staked his claim to be ranked as a soul singer alongside the likes of Aretha Franklin and Dusty Springfield, over a perilously sparse gospel-soul track that apparently left him nowhere to hide. And it raised the tantalizing question of whether he could (or indeed should) have taken a train to Tennessee with this song, “Who Can I Be Now?” [115], and “Can You Hear Me” [108] in his sack, and begged a southern producer like Chips Moman or Dan Penn to help him record a Bowie in Memphis album, the way that countless others before him had done (Dusty Springfield, Elvis Presley, Cher, and Lulu among them).

  Not that Moman or Penn could have improved on this Tony Visconti production,* which reinforced the Bible-fearing starkness of piano, bass, and drums and let the human voice carry the emotional burden—either Bowie’s alone, racked with guilt and self-doubt, or supported by the tonal richness of the background vocals through the chorus. At its confessional peak, there was just singer and piano, which held back as if to give Bowie room to feel. There was nothing modernist about this arrangement, nothing of the 1970s; this was how the gospel of truth had been presented for decades in the churches of the South, and that tradition lent Bowie’s crisis an eerie sense of a soul at stake. He responded with a voice that signified reality, rather than artifice: “pure” soul, not the crooning, whispering persona who inhibited the other ballads from these sessions.

  But this was simply a performance. Like “Can You Hear Me,” “It’s Gonna Be Me” was ostensibly the confession of a casual seducer, who had suddenly awoken to the audacity of his crimes, glimpsed his own hollowness, and realized that he had let slip the possibility of authentic love. His victim had been robbed of her virginity, her purity, her holiness, qualities that his false display was bound to destroy. He was pleading for a second chance, to be born again in a world of understanding and compassion. He traced out the scenario—he’d run to her door, she’d dissolve tearfully into his arms, and then what? She’d forgive him? He’d apologize? No, he’d be strong, time and again. In the end, it was all about the man, and when the key changed in the final bars of the song, the penitent was once again the smooth seducer, awaiting another victim in another city. Was the penitent Bowie? Only if in the purity of his soul, he talked like Frank Sinatra in a saloon, calling “Hit me, Jack” to the band. But the artifice was full of artistry.

  [117] JOHN, I’M ONLY DANCING (AGAIN)

  (Bowie)

  Recorded August and November 1974; single A-side

  * * *

  Critics and fans alike were alarmed by the radical reinvention of several of Bowie’s most distinctive songs during his 1974 US tours. These qualms would have multiplied exponentially had he remained faithful to his original decision to include this lengthy mutation of his 1972 hit single [63] on the album he was recording in Philadelphia. Perhaps feeling that he had never quite reached the core* of the song—which had, moreover, yet to be released in the United States at this point—he stripped it bare of everything but the essentials of the chorus, and remodeled it as a lengthy genre exercise in disco. If the original arrangement was pure London, the product of nights at the Sombrero Club, then “Again” owed its life to his hedonistic nights in venues like the drag queen capital of the East Village, Club 82 (or the Anvil, or Club 220)—the long, ecstatic play-out matching the stimulant-fueled excesses of the midnight hours. The reference in the revised lyrics to “Charlie” suggested at least one illicit source of inspiration. There was no hint as yet of Bowie’s later proclamation that the “endless numb beat” of disco was “really dangerous”; for the moment, he preferred the interpretation that disco broke down social barriers between black and white, male and female, gay and straight. As one historian noted, “It obviously threatened suburban white boys who found it too feminine, too gay, too black,” although “the black musical establishment hated disco just as fervently as the white rock-and-rollers did . . . they dismissed it as bleached and blue-eyed funk.” By the late seventies, when Bowie had lost his enthusiasm for the genre, performers black and white alike were being forced to assimilate disco into their natural style, from the host of soul performers who sacrificed their individuality in favor of generic dance-floor fodder to the cash-in maneuvers of the Beach Boys (“Here Comes the Night”) and Paul McCartney (“Goodnight Tonight”).

  Instead of the original two-chord guitar shuffle, the 1974 arrangement began with a defiantly machine-made vamp up and down the scale, vocoder, electronic keyboards, and synthesizers combining to abstract effect. Then humans intervened, with bass and drums thudding eight-to-the-bar to introduce the frantic funk rhythm of the verse, with its parade of seventh chords, chattering guitar motifs, and syncopated breakdown as a finale. Bowie’s pleasure at being able to toss off lyrics based on nursery rhymes, innuendo, and improvisation was plain to hear. He reduced the Watergate crisis haunting the American nation to a banal remark, alluded to a line from the standard song “Ain’t She Sweet,” and even sneaked in a reference to the Velvet Underground’s “White Light/White Heat.” The chorus pitched one of Bowie’s more elegant vocal personae against crooning background voices (one of them his own), using more ethereal variations of the original chord phrasings. In its unexpurgated version, however, the song was dwarfed by the dual-phase play-out, the first dominated by almost hysterical interplay between Bowie and his singers, the second devoted to equally madcap instrumental revels. The results still sounded sufficiently strange, and au courant, to produce a hit single five years later.

  [118] SOMEBODY UP THERE LIKES ME

  (Bowie)

  Recorded August and November 1974; Young Americans LP

  * * *

  REALLY, I’M A ONE-TRACK PERSON. WHAT I’VE SAID FOR YEARS UNDER VARIOUS GUISES IS, “WATCH OUT, THE WEST IS GOING TO HAVE A HITLER!” I’VE SAID IT IN A THOUSAND DIFFERENT WAYS. THAT SONG IS YET ANOTHER WAY.

  —David Bowie, August 1974

  Aldous Huxley was the first commentator to recognize the similarities between the techniques used by the advertising industry and the way in which Adolf Hitler was “sold” to the German public in the thirties. His account of Hitler’s emotional manipulation of his audiences read like an account of a performance by a teenage pop idol: “Strong emotion (as every actor and dramatist knows) is in the highest degree contagious. Infected by the malignant frenzy of the orator, the audience would groan and sob and scream in an orgy of uninhibited passion. And these orgies were so enjoyable that most of thos
e who had experienced them eagerly came back for more.” The next step was to “brand” Hitler as an ad agency would brand cigarettes: “Hitler induced the German masses to buy themselves a Fuhrer, an insane philosophy, and the Second World War,” Huxley concluded. The historian of fascist iconography Steven Heller has taken the comparison further: “It could be argued that this self-proclaimed artist [Hitler was an aspiring painter] conceived his horrific plans as a massive socio-political Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art) built on the notions of racial purification, nationalist regeneration, and world domination. These were integrated in an overall graphic scheme . . . [that] ultimately became a textbook example—indeed, a perverse paradigm—of corporate branding.”

  Bowie recognized the insidious attraction of the Nazi brand, allowing it to influence his iconography (the “SS” lightning flash across his face on the cover of Aladdin Sane) and staging (the stark spotlighting of the stage on his 1976 world tour). He also knew the potency of his own branding as a star: what else was Ziggy Stardust but a demonstration of that effect? “Somebody Up There Likes Me” (its title purloined from a 1956 Paul Newman movie about boxing champ Rocky Graziano) explored his confusing relationships with advertising, stardom, and power. It built upon the melodic framework, though with a revised chord structure, of “I Am Divine” [192]—a song that, like his more recent “Shilling the Rubes” [112], seemed to have a specific predator in mind. Now Bowie was casting his net into an ocean of sharks, himself included.