The Man Who Sold the World

by Peter Doggett

  Hearing #3: The master of cunning pastiche, Bowie offered one of his most obvious “clues” on “Teenage Wildlife,” by mimicking the verse structure of “Heroes” [149] so blatantly that it can only have been deliberate. Note, also, the conversational mention of his given name: the last such acknowledgment in his work had been the cheery, “Hi, Dave” in “Can’t Help Thinking About Me” [A14] fourteen years before. Back then, he was indeed nothing more than teenage wildlife, ready to be hunted and mounted as a trophy on a businessman’s wall. Both songs sounded like autobiography, and revealed both more and less about Bowie than they appeared to.

  Hearing #4: “There’s two basses on this, and I hope you appreciate it,” John Lennon muttered as he thought he was waving his career goodbye, completing the last song on his 1975 album Rock & Roll before entering several years of retirement. David Bowie didn’t bother to announce it, but this was the only Scary Monsters song on which he employed both his visiting lead guitarists, Chuck Hammer and Robert Fripp. Let them fight it out.

  Hearing #5: The eighties would, some complained, be a decade of sonic excess—drums too loud, guitar solos too fast and showy, too much echo, too much noise, vocals (think of Spandau Ballet’s Tony Hadley) pretentious and (ill) mannered. “Teenage Wildlife” was Bowie’s final glimpse into the future: a parade of everything we would learn to hate in the years ahead. In which light, the opening line sounded like a sarcastic abrogation of responsibility: you created this world, now you can live in it.

  [187] SCREAM LIKE A BABY

  (Bowie)

  Recorded February–April 1980; Scary Monsters LP

  * * *

  For a song that had begun life as “I Am a Laser” [93], “Scream Like a Baby” always betrayed a mortal lack of focus. With “It’s No Game” [180], Bowie had proved that he could retrieve long-forgotten song fragments and use them to construct something relevant to his contemporary life. “Scream Like a Baby” demonstrated the flaws in this method: unwilling to amend the original, bombastic melody of the song he’d originally written for the Astronettes in 1973, he found himself drawn to compose a set of lyrics that were equally overwrought. The resulting tale of rebel misfits—terrorists, maybe, or political outcasts: it was difficult to care—would have been rejected by those arch mythologists the Clash as being too banal. When delivered in a preposterously self-important tone, across a backing that mixed hard rock guitar with the percussion sound of Motown, circa 1964, the lyrics sounded like a parody of Bowie’s clumsiest imitators. There was only one memorable moment, as the narrator declared himself ready to become part of society, only to find himself unable to spit out the final oppressive syllables of the phrase.*

  [188] KINGDOM COME

  (Verlaine)

  Recorded February–April 1980; Scary Monsters LP

  * * *

  The band Television’s Marquee Moon album, issued in 1977, belied any sense of punk as a restrictive genre. Its fractured, expansive landscape, full of brittle melodies and exploratory guitar lines, was genuinely fresh terrain for rock’n’roll, at a moment when most artists preferred to retreat behind the comfortable old/new wave barricades erected by the media. At the heart of Television was Tom Verlaine, a self-consciously arty lyricist, mannered vocalist, and inspirational guitarist, whose instrumental interplay with fellow guitarist Richard Lloyd has rarely been rivaled on record. The compressed energy of Marquee Moon quickly dissipated, and Television imploded, but as Verlaine began what proved to be an anticlimactic solo career with a self-titled album in 1979, he was widely regarded as someone who would help to shape the decade ahead.

  Hence Bowie’s interest—which dated back to 1974—in Verlaine’s work, reinforced by the suggestion from his own guitarist, Carlos Alomar, that he should consider recording this song. It was an intriguing choice for both Alomar and Bowie,* especially in the context of a record that signaled its own troubled genesis. “Kingdom Come” was a song of frustration, boredom, repetition: exactly the pitfalls that Bowie could no longer ignore. Consciously or otherwise, Bowie reinforced his negativity by a subtle alteration to the original lyrics. Verlaine complained repeatedly that he would be breaking rocks (like a life prisoner or an enchained Greek god) “till the kingdom comes,” with the hope expressed that salvation might eventually arrive. Bowie removed the hope until the very end of the song, by which time it sounded hollow: until then, he could foresee no destiny beyond the endless breaking of rocks, a Sisyphean fate for a man who had always regarded work as a justification for living and a defense against unwelcome psychological urges.

  As usual when tackling outside material, Bowie performed “Kingdom Come” in the same key as the original, though he left his trace on the arrangement, which was an unhappy cross between the classic Motown sound and the sterility of American AOR (the elephants’ graveyard of rock’s vain pretensions to a rebel spirit). The explosive boom of the percussion on this track alone could be used to demonstrate a decade of production overkill to come; likewise Bowie’s vocal, delivered as if he had forgotten how to do anything with his voice except over-emote like the hammiest of actors.

  [189] BECAUSE YOU’RE YOUNG

  (Bowie)

  Recorded February–April 1980; Scary Monsters LP

  * * *

  Bowie explained away this song in 1980 as a message to his son’s generation. “I can’t write young,” he admitted.* Yet there was little in “Because You’re Young” that hinted at an adult’s mature advice. For this was a song of emotional fracture and disunion, sparked perhaps by the aftermath of his own marital breakdown, but tending toward a broader view of a world in which, as Bob Dylan might have said, everything was broken.

  Fragmentation had always been safe territory for Bowie, in lyrical, musical, and philosophical terms. Now he no longer seemed to have conviction in his own ability to control that process and use the pieces of the past to create a future. “Because You’re Young” lived in the shadow of younger talents, most notably Elvis Costello. The introduction of Bowie’s record mirrored that of Costello’s “Watching the Detectives”; the stabbed chords on a cheap organ suggested Costello’s keyboard player, Steve Nieve; the chorus, like Costello’s knowing throwbacks on his This Year’s Model and Armed Forces albums, was pure early sixties; even the off-the-cuff vocal interjections in the fade-out sounded as if they belonged on Costello’s “You Belong to Me” or “Radio Radio.” (The working title for Armed Forces had been Emotional Fascism, incidentally, a title that could usefully have been borrowed by Bowie for Scary Monsters.) To complete Bowie’s debts, the song’s title recalled the Duane Eddy instrumental hit from 1960, “Because They’re Young”; and the track ended with some guitar licks that might have been transported wholesale from the Beatles’ Revolver album.

  Between these reference points, and the entirely predictable melodic structure of the song, there was barely room for Bowie to plant his own flag. Even his choice of guitar accomplice, Pete Townshend,* seemed to represent an abdication of creative power: the Who’s leader neither challenged Bowie nor fired his synapses, probably because of the quantity of alcohol that, as Townshend later admitted, had been consumed during the session. Bowie was equally forthright about his predilections during this period: “My problem was cocaine, and then I went from cocaine to alcohol, which is a natural course of events.”

  “Because You’re Young” confirmed what much of Lodger had suggested: it had become increasingly difficult for Bowie to find inspiration from the creative methods that had served him faithfully for the previous decade.

  SCARY MONSTERS (AND SUPER CREEPS) LP

  Bowie insisted that the techniques of rock ran at least a decade behind their equivalents in fine art. Yet there was an uncanny parallel between this 1980 album and the judgment of historian Stephen Paul Miller on the post-1975 work of the Pop Art pioneer Jasper Johns: “The later paintings systematically generate an ambiguity of surfaces throughout their canvases.” Rock critic Charles Shaar Murray expressed a similar sentiment e
loquently in his New Musical Express review of Scary Monsters, describing “the latter-day Bowie sound” as “a grinding, dissonant, treacherous, chilling noise where standard rock tonalities are twisted until their messages are changed.”

  All of those adjectives were justified for a record that dealt so nakedly in extremes—high emotions, wild passions, grating sheets of noise, sweeping judgments of self-criticism. No wonder that, a decade after its release, Bowie said that “Scary Monsters for me has always been some kind of purge. It was me eradicating the feelings within myself that I was uncomfortable with.” It was as if he had rounded up all the schemes and pretensions that had obsessed him during the previous ten years, exaggerated the most mannered elements of his music making, summoned up and then dispatched his legendary “characters,” and then exposed the hollowness that was left when all illusions were dispelled and all artifice uncovered. It was a record that announced, in word and in deed, that its creator had reached the end of the road; that there was no more mileage to be gained from continuing this particular experiment in combining confrontational art and lavish entertainment. As such, it was one of his most valuable statements, annulling his audience’s expectations while setting out a warning for those who might dare to follow in his footsteps. Bowie proved to be as fearless in chronicling his own exhaustion—and the exhaustion of what Joni Mitchell once called “the star-maker machinery”—as he had been in extending the horizons of popular music and what it could achieve.

  The contrasting arrangements of “It’s No Game” that opened and closed Scary Monsters set out its emotional terrain perfectly: here be desperate screams and rigid control, each equally telling about the artist’s sense of his identity. He now had to face the biggest dilemma of his entire career: how to continue without leaning on the props—the identities, concepts, and drugs—that had sustained and protected him for the previous decade. He would no longer be the Bowie of the seventies: but what else did he have to sell?

  SOUND AND VISION #4: A New Career in a New Medium

  The traditional set of skills required of a rock star—record making, live performance, posing for photographs—expanded with the advent of the music video. During the late seventies, videos moved beyond their original remit as a convenient means of promoting a new record to emerge as an independent branch of the entertainment industry. The next decade would introduce the phenomenon of the video artist, for whom musical or performance skills mattered less than the ability to convey an image and a lifestyle within a four-minute clip. In 1979, however, only the most modern and farsighted artists were coming to terms with the demands and potential of the format.

  It seems obvious in retrospect that David Bowie would be a video pioneer: he believed in both art and entertainment, the twin poles of the director; he had the mime skills to accentuate and dramatize emotions; he knew how to advertise and brand himself; and he was schooled in the history of twentieth-century visual art. Video was an entirely fresh art form, one that could rediscover the techniques of surrealism and Dada as if they were newly minted.

  There had been a brief flowering of rock promotional films in the late sixties, allowing the likes of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones to spare themselves the chore of touring the world’s TV studios when they issued a new record. Both groups had hired visually inventive directors to produce films for songs such as “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “We Love You.” But few of their contemporaries and successors had taken up the challenge. When Bowie invited photographer Mick Rock to shoot cheap but striking clips for singles such as “John I’m Only Dancing” [63] and “The Jean Genie” [65] in 1972, what was radical was Rock’s lack of pedigree as a film director, not the visual content. Later Bowie clips, for “Be My Wife” [138] and “Heroes” [149], were no more daring, paling alongside those prepared by (for example) Queen for “Bohemian Rhapsody” several years earlier.

  Bowie’s leap into the future came in 1979 with David Mallet’s video for “Boys Keep Swinging” [171]. It began conventionally enough, with the singer miming an extravagant performance in a suit that his younger Mod self would have relished in 1965. But then Bowie appeared as a trio of drag queens, ranging from a vamp to an aged actress. One by one they took center stage, the first two routines ending as he angrily tore off his wig and smeared his lipstick across his face in a gesture* of total contempt. If his videos for “DJ” [169] and “Look Back in Anger” [170] were less iconoclastic, they still allowed him to explore intimations of significance that were not necessarily present in the songs themselves.

  Bowie must have realized that he could now express himself more adventurously with visuals than on record. Nothing on Lodger, for example, matched the daring, Dada-inspired performances of “Boys Keep Swinging,” “TVC15” [129], and “The Man Who Sold the World” [26] that he staged for the US television show Saturday Night Live in December 1979. For “Boys Keep Swinging,” a cigarette-thin puppet was visually attached to his human head and literally kept swinging as Bowie manipulated the controls. He was carried forward to sing “The Man Who Sold the World” in a full-body manikin, its angular construction the offspring of the strange coupling of Dadaist Hugo Ball and new wave performance artists Devo. Bowie’s handlers, Klaus Nomi and Joey Arias, had been plucked from the milieu at Fiorucci, the New York fashion store that (according to commentator Eve Babitz) gathered “the whole 20th century in one place.” Its Day-Glo, fluorescent colors and self-conscious hedonism resembled a decadent form of Pop Art that could only have arisen from fin-de-decade New York—achieving a gothic poignancy when AIDS began to ravage the community that gathered at its East Fifty-ninth Street location (Nomi becoming one of the first such casualties). Bowie carried that spirit into his 1980 videos for “Ashes to Ashes” [184], where he donned a Pierrot suit to be followed along a bleak English shore by London’s equivalent of the Fiorucci kids and (of course) a giant bulldozer; and “Fashion” [185], a mock-performance clip featuring similar robotic moves to those pioneered by Nomi and Devo. By the time that he offered spirited, if ragged, renditions of “Life on Mars?” [52] and “Ashes to Ashes” on The Tonight Show in 1980, it was a surprise that he chose not to embellish the songs with anything more visually dramatic than the expression on his face as he reached for the high notes. (He would never perform “Life on Mars?” in its original key again, subtly lowering the pitch for his eighties tours—a decade of smoking and six years of cocaine having exacted their revenge on his throat.)

  His video making seems to have renewed Bowie’s faith in the power of the visual, which had been jolted by his experience with Just a Gigolo. As he completed work on the Scary Monsters album in New York, he took what was arguably his bravest artistic decision of a risk-filled decade, accepting the lead role in a nonmusical play, The Elephant Man. As a teenager, Bowie had read about the plight of John Merrick in Frank Edwards’s book Strange People, and had watched the initial production of the play on Broadway. The role required him to become a man trapped in the misshapen ghastliness of his own body, but without (unlike John Hurt in David Lynch’s contemporaneous movie based on the same story) the aid of appropriate makeup and costume. Here, at last, Bowie was able to reveal how much he had learned from Lindsay Kemp. Onstage, through subtle movements that betrayed the intensity of his plight, he became one of the twisted, distorted figures he had admired in the work of Egon Schiele, his voice a half-blocked caricature of a “normal” man, the enormity of his character’s ordeal conveyed all the more dramatically for his conscious lack of theatricality. This was one of Bowie’s finest performances—musical or otherwise—of the long seventies, and tellingly, perhaps, also the only one to which he contributed not an ounce of irony. He was simply himself, not the reflected shadow of his own past, and simultaneously not himself, but John Merrick. He could finally justify the title he had awarded himself in 1971: the Actor.

  AFTERWORD

  I

  It was the Actor who learned, on December 8, 1980, that his friend John Lennon had been
murdered, a mile and a half from where Bowie had just left the stage of the Booth Theater. The killer, who had attended an earlier performance of The Elephant Man, later admitted that he had considered Bowie as a target, before opting to kill the emblematic figure of the sixties, rather than the seventies.

  Security at the theatre was strengthened, and Bowie was able to fulfill his commitment to The Elephant Man, though he declined the offer to extend his run beyond early January. Then he flew home to Switzerland, the manic tumult of New York City having lost its charm. Lennon’s death encouraged him into seclusion, removing any temptation to stage the world tour he had vaguely promised for 1981. And there was another equally compelling justification for retirement. As mentioned earlier, Bowie’s 1975 settlement with Tony Defries ensured that his ex-manager would receive (in perpetuity) 16 percent of Bowie’s income from all his recording projects and acting engagements until September 30, 1982, and 5 percent of his earnings from concert appearances. The 16 percent share also applied to any songs that Bowie wrote before that deadline. So there was a clear incentive for him to refrain from composing or recording a hasty successor to Scary Monsters until his obligations were at an end.

  Yet Bowie was incapable of absolute silence. The same drive that had impelled him toward work as a defense against madness was now focused on protecting him from his addictive urges. He recorded a theme song for the film Cat People, and was persuaded to collaborate with the rock band Queen on a recording session that produced a chart-topping single, “Under Pressure.” Even when trying to avoid boosting Defries’s earnings, he could not escape the commercial power of his self-created mythology. His fame also won him roles in the films The Hunger and Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, which helped to erase memories of his unfortunate part in Just a Gigolo.