The Man Who Sold the World

by Peter Doggett

  [162] REVOLUTIONARY SONG

  (Bowie/Fishman)

  Recorded 1978; single A-side and Just a Gigolo film

  * * *

  Bowie had been unable to secure the role of soundtrack composer for his first full-length film, The Man Who Sold the World. For Just a Gigolo, in contrast, he found himself obligated to provide one piece of music—a condition he satisfied with the least imaginable degree of effort. Musical director Jack Fishman was presented with a tape of Bowie singing a thirties-style marching tune, with “la la la” vocals, over rudimentary piano, street violin, and ramshackle percussion. Realizing that was all he was going to get, Fishman proceeded to dress Bowie’s skeleton up in fancy dress, creating a song (for which he, not Bowie, penned the lyrics) with the aid of musicians known as the Rebels, who added a suggestion of flamenco to the European stew. In retrospect, “Revolutionary Song” was of interest only because it represented an initial stage in Bowie’s creative process: had this task (or tune) piqued his curiosity in any way, he would surely have built around his initial fragment, removing the melodic similarities to the Rolling Stones’ “Mother’s Little Helper” along the way.

  EXIT THE ACTOR: Stage LP

  After a year or more of compulsive hedonism in Berlin, David Bowie had arrived at a position of stasis, from where there was nothing to be gained by continuing with his experiments in psychological dismantling. He had, he told journalist Timothy White in late 1977, “taken some realist attitudes to try and stabilize my own personality. My real personality. It must still be in there somewhere.” White’s verdict was both reassuring and chilling: “The celebrated chameleon is transformed into an ordinary sight. He could be swallowed up in a crowd. For perhaps the first time in his protean career, David Bowie is emptied out.”

  What would fill the space? Bowie clearly did not trust his ability to withstand temptation. In January 1978, he told Michael Watts: “I get scared stiff of the idea of touring again because of all kinds of experiences that one has. . . . The testing of one’s personality to the fullest: can you cope on a tour? When you’re shouldering the responsibility of the whole thing, it’s quite easy to break up. Either way, you close up or you let loose. My tendency goes either way.” As he spoke, he was preparing to reveal plans for a touring schedule that would last—with a long summer break to begin work on a new album—for almost nine months, and reach more than one million people. The old impulse to keep himself busy as a means of avoiding mental disintegration was hard to disobey.

  Once he had completed Just a Gigolo, he took a safari vacation in Kenya with his son, and then joined his band in New York, where Carlos Alomar had been guiding the initial rehearsals. It was clear from the outset that this was not a tour on which Bowie was keen to stamp any personality. This, he insisted, was the “real” David Bowie, from which every hint of image and persona had been excised: “I think the only thing that’s false about my stage presence at the moment is an actual knowledge of stagecraft, which I do utilise. But apart from that, there’s no conscious attempt to portray anybody other than myself.” It was as if everything associated with David Bowie had vanished apart from songs, and he had employed David Jones to present them in public. There was a hint of Jones’s own experience, from the years before Bowie, in the way that the tour was advertised. Bowie, or Jones, had sketched a representation of the pose from the cover of “Heroes,” in the style of Egon Schiele—its integrity spoiled only by the three little stars that had been drawn over his head, as if this were a teenage pop annual from the early sixties. It was a technique that Jones might have learned during his time in an advertising agency, half a lifetime earlier, but it seemed strangely anachronistic in 1978.

  Bowie could certainly not be accused of selling himself cheaply at these lengthy shows, which were documented on the low-key, almost emotionless double album, Stage. The performances began in glacial fashion with extracts from Low and “Heroes,” the ambient instrumentals being forced to masquerade as arena entertainment. After an intermission, the “real” David Bowie delivered a suite of songs from Ziggy Stardust, rendered into tame nostalgia by the lack of Spiders and showmanship. Aside from a raucous Brecht/Weill medley [163], the show slipped into a comfortable, impeccably professional, but rarely compelling selection of hits and anthems. There was none of the brash swagger of the Ziggy years; none of the psychodrama of 1974; none of the relentless momentum of the Station to Station tour. Just Bowie: straight, purposeful, uneventful.

  When the tour was over, Bowie was living in Switzerland rather than Berlin, having won custody of his son from his emotionally distressed wife. The couple’s relationship had never recovered from Bowie’s refusal to join Angie in Switzerland when he returned from America in 1976, and since then he had become increasingly alarmed about her lifestyle, and its effect on their seven-year-old son. By remaining in Switzerland, Bowie not only maintained some continuity in the boy’s education, but was also able to take advantage of the country’s less than punitive tax system.

  He was, he proclaimed, “learning to be happy. . . . I’m even practising walking down the street.” He was writing a book of short stories, and planning an album that might be called Despite Straight Lines. He had revised his past one more time: his creative peak was Diamond Dogs, he declared, whereas Young Americans, the album he’d proclaimed at the time as his most honest, was now said to have come from his “cynical period.” And he was learning to come to terms with the fact that, on the basis of his performance in Just a Gigolo, critics did not believe that he could act. Meanwhile, his record company was promoting his back catalogue, under the headline “And one man in his time plays many parts.” This begged the question: what future was there for a David Bowie who could not—or did not want to—act?

  [163] ALABAMA SONG

  (Brecht/Weill)

  Recorded July 1978; single A-side

  * * *

  During his stay in Berlin, Bowie had been introduced to the music of the German cabaret artiste Lotte Lenya, best remembered as an interpreter of songs by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht. “Alabama Song”—a medley of two starkly different melodies, known individually as “show me the way to the next whisky bar” and “moon of Alabama”—was taken from the Brecht/Weill musical The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. Although the medley had been introduced into the rock repertoire a decade earlier by the Doors, Bowie’s phrasing and tempo were clearly guided by Lenya’s 1956 recording.

  There were several minor differences between the two arrangements: Lenya’s “pretty boy” became female in Bowie’s rendition, for example, lending a rather alarming tenor to the insistent call for “a little girl”; Lenya’s juxtaposition of spoken and singing voices in the final verse was replaced by Bowie crooning histrionically over a lush chorus. But those were textural changes alongside the startling shifts in rhythm that Bowie imposed on the song. While his vocal kept perfect time, the accompaniment was wildly chaotic, with drums, saxophone, and guitar each obeying its own deliberately haphazard metronome. Meanwhile, Bowie displayed an equally bewildering set of vocal personae—Germanic or Cockney, crooning or ranting—to demonstrate that there were more ways of invoking the spirit of chance in a song than simply taking a pair of scissors to a lyric sheet.

  [164] FANTASTIC VOYAGE

  (Bowie/Eno)

  Recorded September 1978–March 1979; Lodger LP

  * * *

  Station to Station, Low, and “Heroes” had all announced themselves with noise. The first sound heard on Lodger was the gentle tap of percussion—a hint that this was likely to be less intense than recent adventures. One of three songs recorded during these sessions with exactly the same chord sequences (one was jettisoned; the other became “Boys Keep Swinging” [171]), “Fantastic Voyage” based its metaphorical exploration of Life with a capital L around a subdued replay of the “Heroes” [149] drone, lightened with piano and (according to one account) multidubbed mandolins, though it’s not easy to distinguish their exact contribution
to the song. That was perhaps a hint that Bowie was all too consciously returning to the recent past, offering a hint of the emotional tumult of Low (with the line about depression) and also a defensive self-justification for his more outré political comments of recent times. His efforts to pass as a textbook liberal—outraged by nuclear missiles, appalled by the Holocaust—were too obvious to pass as art. But his vocal mastery, particularly his ecstatic rise up the scale to a resounding “will we?,” compensated for these flaws. So excited was piano player Sean Mayes by the prospect of Bowie’s second climb that he peaked too early, and was left to wait for his leader to join him at the top.

  [165] AFRICAN NIGHT FLIGHT

  (Bowie/Eno)

  Recorded September 1978–March 1979; Lodger LP

  * * *

  There was autobiography on Lodger, just as there had been on Low, but it was comprised of picture postcards from exotic lands, not an account of a mind at the end of its tether. Bowie claimed to have spent six weeks in Kenya before he was inspired to write this song, in which everything imaginable was going on, but nothing was actually happening. “I took a straightforward safari and spent a few hours with the Masai tribe,” he explained late in 1978. “It’s predictable that it will surface in the future . . . [but] I wanted to understand what I was seeing and what I was dealing with before I was presumptuous enough to start recording it.” Instead, he wrote this bizarre pastiche of Gilbert & Sullivan—or, rather, Todd Rundgren’s version of Gilbert & Sullivan (think “Song of the Viking” from Something/Anything), crossed with Paul McCartney’s own entry in the “Me?-I’ve-just-been-to-Africa” stakes, “Mrs. Roosevelt” (from Band on the Run, recorded in Nigeria).

  So we were given African percussion and jungle noises and Eno’s “cricket menace” (the insect, not the sport) and a tribal chant and some Swahili lyrics (wrongly transcribed: they basically say, “Thanks, hello”), and a dictionary’s worth of internal rhymes. Vocals, keyboards, and bass all entered on the seventh beat of a bar (to emphasize that we were dealing with an alien culture). Bowie’s defense: “I would have thought it was pretty transparent that it was me trying to relate to that particular culture. Not in my wildest dreams would I think I was trying to represent them.” Which begged the question of why his response to Africa needed a traveler’s bag full of Swahili words and native chants. Eno extended this method with David Byrne on the 1981 album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. Compare this to the way in which the German band Can’s Ethnological Forgery Series treated “world” music, from Asia to New Orleans, with lack of authenticity evident in both the concept and the deliberately “unreal” reproduction of these “alien” music forms. Yet it was Bowie’s influence that would prevail in the decade ahead, when the decorations of “world music” would become a common embellishment to rock careers that were becoming jaded with repetition.

  Midway through this perfectly listenable, image-crammed but ultimately lightweight song, something altogether stranger occurred. Bowie effectively declared himself tired of being David Bowie, and tired of having an audience with expectations of him. He had, he said, a “lust for the free life.” After which the song*—and the album—suddenly seemed to make sense, even if the fact that he had recorded Lodger at all suggested that the “free life” was still some distance away.

  [166] MOVE ON

  (Bowie)

  Recorded September 1978–March 1979; Lodger LP

  * * *

  After his “African Night Flight” [220], what else to do but “Move On”? This song sounded perilously as if it were intended as the manifesto of Lodger, with its restless traveling between cultures and landscapes. But in his efforts to prove himself a citizen of the planet, Bowie descended into rampant generalizations about Africans and Russians, like an instant expert who’d learned everything from a documentary on TV. (Nothing quite so crass had been heard in the popular music canon since Paul Simon categorized all the animals “At the Zoo” in 1968. But Simon had the excuse that he was joking.) It didn’t help that the “move on” refrain was so melodically uninspired, an unworthy vehicle for a set of chord changes that Buddy Holly would have recognized. Bowie delivered his verdicts in a pompous and self-satisfied voice, before a final outburst of passion as he recognized the obvious: his unrelenting traveling was just a disguise for “drifting” helplessly in the wind.

  As a symptom of his creative frustration, he grasped desperately at his own past: the central section of the song was based around the chorus of “All the Young Dudes” [62], but with the tape reversed, Carlos Alomar deciphering the “new” chord sequence. Bowie and producer Tony Visconti actually sang the “Dudes” refrain, and then ran their efforts backward beneath the song. Other inspiration was taken from the midsection of the fifties R&B standard “Kansas City,” while Buddy Holly’s “Peggy Sue” was the obvious parallel for the track’s chattering rhythm accompaniment.

  [167] YASSASSIN

  (Bowie)

  Recorded September 1978–March 1979; Lodger LP

  * * *

  “Turkish for: Long Live,” explained the lyric sheet for Lodger helpfully. More accurately, the Turkish word is yaşasin (pronounced “yashasin”), though perhaps it was unrealistic to expect a cultural tourist to master a foreign tongue so quickly.

  Bowie intended the song as a tribute to the Turkish immigrants massed in the Berlin suburb of Kreuzberg. But his attempts to think himself into their mentality were simply patronizing to both sides. In an effort to capture the simple-hearted nature of Turkish life, he resorted to archaic English: his narrator’s love was “afeared,” like the heroine of a traditional folk ballad.* But there was no flesh to his Turks: they were merely symbols, and flat ones at that.

  To counterfeit the music of Turkey, Bowie built “Yassassin” around a simple switch between two adjacent chords (E7 and F7), while encouraging violinist Simon House to play in recognizable “Eastern” scale progressions. Violin and vocal both escaped the 4/4 time signature in another bid for ethnic authenticity. The blend of American funk and Jamaican reggae in the backing, however, suggested that for Bowie every foreign signifier was of equal value: his Turks might as well have been Caribbeans or African-Americans.

  [168] RED SAILS

  (Bowie/Eno)

  Recorded September 1978–March 1979; Lodger LP

  * * *

  Feeling seasick? Not sure about the language? Wish you’d stayed home? You need (rev up the new-wave-by-numbers riff) . . . red sail action.

  The usual luggage was on board: synthesized strings, feedback howl, Kraftwerkian rhythm, a rich chorale of David Bowie voices, Adrian Belew’s deliberately askew guitar solos. Despite being required to perform without having heard the track before, Adrian Belew didn’t feel seasick: “The one particular song I remember where I lucked out was ‘Red Sails,’ cos I started the guitar feeding back and it was right in key.” Bowie recalled that he had described the sound of NEU! to Belew before he added his solo, and that the guitarist had captured the perfect tone without ever hearing a note of the German band’s music.

  And the trip? Destination random: even Bowie didn’t know or care what he meant by the “hinterland,” to which his final chorus was devoted. This was the cultural tourist’s vacation, with no conclusions, no stereotypes, only a constant party with guests he would never meet again.

  [169] D.J.

  (Bowie/Eno/Alomar)

  Recorded September 1978–March 1979; Lodger LP

  On its release in 1979, “D.J.” was widely classified alongside Elvis Costello’s altogether more obvious “Radio Radio” as an assault on the banality and blinkered mentality of US Top 40 radio stations. Costello accused radio programmers of trying to drug their listeners: Bowie’s DJ was also in search of anesthesia, but with more at stake than the conservatism of American radio formats. His challenge was also existential: “what do I know?” Like David Bowie (alias David Jones, or DJ), he had people who believed in him, and felt trapped by the responsibility. Nothing was certain anymor
e: even the rhythm was insecure, as the song began with a stray half bar, synthesized violins circled around an invisible center, and Bowie’s vocal entered what felt like a beat too soon. It added to the feeling that pervaded the entire album, in fact: where exactly are we? It was a pertinent question for the cultural tourist, adrift in the debris of other people’s lives. Suitably enough, the track was littered with references to familiar musical themes, borrowed from the Rolling Stones, Neil Young, the Beach Boys, and, of course, Talking Heads, with Bowie deliberately mimicking David Byrne’s vocal style in the opening lines.

  Appropriately, then, it was Byrne who would succeed Bowie as the intelligent person’s rock star of choice in the early eighties, collaborating extensively with Brian Eno, dabbling with “ethnic” rhythms and motifs, and combining urban anxiety with compelling art rock that was tinged with the sensibility of minimalism.

  [170] LOOK BACK IN ANGER

  (Bowie/Eno)

  Recorded September 1978–March 1979; Lodger LP

  * * *

  In which our hero witnessed “the Angel of Death, hanging about in cafes waiting for people to die.” His tale read like prose on the page, and the transformation into song forced Bowie into an exaggerated vocal persona that would soon be imitated by eighties New Romantic performers such as Spandau Ballet. The aural center of the piece was the chorus, though lyrically it added nothing but bombast to the effect: even its chord sequence was identical to the verses. Meanwhile, Tony Visconti and Bowie added maudlin voices of complaint in a strangely Liverpudlian tone—another stray Beatles reference to follow all the vague allusions to the group on “Heroes.” Propulsive and impatient, the track spotlighted Bowie’s guitar during an instrumental break of such speed and dexterity that it must have been recorded in a lower key and at a slower pace and then artificially accelerated to fit.