The Man Who Sold the World

by Peter Doggett

  Recorded November 1966; David Bowie LP

  * * *

  Another book, Harry Harrison’s popular 1966 science fiction novel Make Room! Make Room!, was a likely source for this ambitious but ultimately unwieldy blend of environmental doom and arch comedy. Certainly their scenarios were similar: a world in which overpopulation has drained its most precious natural resources. It was a timely concern, as scientists calculated that the world’s population had doubled from two billion to four billion in the previous thirty-five years, a rate of growth they believed to be unsustainable.* To halt this rise, experts stressed the importance of birth control, and suggested enforcing limits on the size of families; otherwise war (sparked by shortages of resources) and famine would take their toll. To these drastic solutions, “We Are Hungry Men” added another: cannibalism (or, in his central character’s amendment, exophagy: eating those who don’t belong to one’s own tribe). This was unconventional territory for a budding pop star, which was presumably why Bowie gave the subject a comic treatment, with producer Gus Dudgeon offering vocal impersonations like a cut-rate Peter Sellers.

  Musical connections still being Bowie’s weakness as a composer, the multisectioned nature of “We Are Hungry Men” resembled an awkward rock opera. After the dissonant chaos of the opening monologue, Bowie’s messianic character declaimed a repetitive and restricted verse melody. The populace replied with a hovering (and, again, melodically compressed) sequence of major ninth chords in (appropriately enough) a different key, the droning organ acutely reminiscent of Pink Floyd’s* early experiments with the rock idiom. The menacing unison vocals looked ahead to the eerie ambience of “Sons of the Silent Age” [152]. Yet the darkest moment was still to come: after Dudgeon’s monologue in the style of Sellers’s Dr. Strangelove, Bowie launched into a recitative that veered close to Schoenberg’s Sprechgesang,* while trumpets added anarchic, rootless blasts. The effect was both urgent and disquieting, evoking a situation plummeting out of control, and setting up the final, carnivorous punch line.

  [A27] JOIN THE GANG

  (Bowie)

  Recorded November 1966; David Bowie LP

  * * *

  In the final weeks of 1966, Bowie obtained an imported copy of the Mothers of Invention’s first album, Freak Out! Its blend of social satire, affectionate rock’n’roll pastiche, and Dadaist bricolage established its primary creator, Frank Zappa, as a maverick composer and commentator on contemporary culture. Bowie was shocked and electrified by the anarchic extravagance of tracks such as “The Return of the Son of Monster Magnet,” and set out to create something equally adventurous as a stage act with the Buzz, using an array of backing tapes and sound effects. A primitive precursor of the synthesizer was purchased, but proved impossible to synchronize, and the experiment was soon abandoned. But Zappa’s flamboyant use of sonic collage did prove to be an audible influence on the cacophonous finale to this recording, which also reflected a cynical attitude toward the rock aristocracy that matched Zappa’s own.

  Every sin of contemporary pop stardom came under fire: media hype, indulgence in drugs, arrogance toward one’s audience, underground elitism. To reinforce his playful but pointed message, Bowie borrowed from the heroes of the day, using the drum pattern from the Rolling Stones’ “Get Off of My Cloud” to open the track, and underpinning one verse with the unmistakable motif of the Spencer Davis Group’s 1966 hit “Gimme Some Lovin’.” Musical contempt was signaled via a deliberate use of discord* and by setting most of the song to a jaunty music hall rhythm reinforced by barrelhouse piano in the style of Kinks’ session keyboardist Nicky Hopkins. Amusing though the track was, however, one wonders whether it was inspired as much by feeling like an outsider as it was by genuine outrage; as Bowie would have found at London’s hippest clubs, there was a sharp social divide between the era’s most prestigious stars and a journeyman like him.

  [A28] DID YOU EVER HAVE A DREAM

  (Bowie)

  Recorded November 1966; single B-side

  * * *

  Pure vaudeville, from its chord changes (a variation on the 1920s hit “I Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate,” which Bowie would later perform briefly on American TV [123]) to its strummed banjo and honky-tonk piano, “Did You Ever Have a Dream” owed something to the self-proclaimed “good-time music” of one of his favorite US groups, the Lovin’ Spoonful.* It was delivered by a Bowie in a voice that exuded personality without a hint of self-mockery, and might conceivably have brought him a much-needed chart presence had it been favored above the more Newley-flavored “Love You Till Tuesday” [A39].

  [A29] SELL ME A COAT

  (Bowie)

  Recorded December 1966; David Bowie LP. Vocals re-recorded by Feathers, January 1969; Love You Till Tuesday film

  * * *

  Bowie’s efforts at rebranding himself as a mainstream entertainer didn’t preclude his recognizing trends within popular music. Reprising the first line from the recent Simon & Garfunkel folk rock hit “I Am a Rock” at the start of his own venture into similar terrain was either an artistic homage or a daring display of cheek. Building the song around a descent vaguely reminiscent of that used in the same duo’s previous hit “Homeward Bound” proved how closely he had studied his role models. The sense of sadness it conveyed was quite delicious, and contrasted with the staccato determination of the chorus. Bowie’s vocal was impeccably controlled, resisting the temptation to wallow in emotional dramatics, and aside from some familiar clumsiness in the middle section, “Sell Me a Coat” was a classy exhibition of his versatility. Beginning and ending the song, the melancholy “la la” vocal refrain, rising to the dominant note of the key and falling sadly away, was draped in an echo so delayed that it heightened the sense of alienation.

  The effect of a vulnerable young man, collar turned up against the wind, was somewhat deflated when Bowie returned to the song with Feathers more than two years later, having elected to include it in his 1969 TV special. The similarity to Simon & Garfunkel was heightened by the addition of a vocal counterpoint (in the tradition of the duo’s arrangement of “Scarborough Fair/Canticle”) and delicate use of three-part harmony. Meanwhile, Bowie adopted a harsher tone of voice than on the original recording, as if to distance himself from the emotional root of the song.

  [A30] LITTLE BOMBARDIER

  (Bowie)

  Recorded December 1966; David Bowie LP

  * * *

  The annual banality of the Eurovision Song Contest attracted less attention in Britain in the mid-sixties than at any time since. Sandie Shaw’s victory in 1967 with the relentlessly chirpy “Puppet on a String” opened the competition to contemporary pop stars, and in retrospect it’s surprising that there is no record of David Bowie attempting to write the British entry in 1968 or 1969.* “Little Bombardier,” with its waltz tempo and “oom-pah” arrangement,* demonstrated that he could easily have concocted something with a suitably simplistic melody. Had he entered this song, then more people might have noticed its similarity to the Beatles for Sale song “Baby’s in Black.” (The two songs even employed the same trick of soaring to the octave of the key signature at the start of the middle section.) Eurovision judges might have balked, however, at allowing a lyric that hinted, however vaguely, at the pedophile tendencies of a man who was, in the parlance of the times, “simple.”

  [A31] SILLY BOY BLUE

  (Bowie)

  Recorded December 1966; David Bowie LP

  * * *

  As befitted a man who chose to end his 1966 stage shows with “You’ll Never Walk Alone” or “What Kind of Fool Am I,” Bowie knew the power of a dramatic ballad. He made several attempts at Deram to tame the species, with limited commercial success. “Silly Boy Blue” was the oldest example, having existed in some form around a year earlier as a chronicle of his Mod leanings. By December 1966 he had revamped it as a token of his passion for Tibetan Buddhism. Yet Bowie, who had never traveled closer to Tibet than East Anglia, littered his song with spiri
tual and geographical references that only those steeped in Buddhist lore* could understand. They were personal totems, rather than attempts at communication—a badge of belonging as exclusive as anything the Mod sensibility could imagine. Former pop idol Billy Fury’s decision to record the song in 1967 reflected the strength of its melody rather than its words, which Fury did his best to disguise.

  That melody began at its height (the dominant E in A major) and gently ebbed and soared back home. Trumpet fanfares erupted over calming cello in the first verse, giving way to a percussive rhythm familiar to sixties pop fans from the Ronettes’ “Be My Baby.” A midsection that carried Bowie to the peak of his vocal range fell away as he sang the word die, enabling the key to modulate discreetly to B. There it remained, but after a fade in which Bowie alluded to Dionne Warwick’s improvised ending to her 1964 classic “Walk on By,” a Beach Boys–inspired harmony section provided an elegant coda, sliding back and forth between B and A and thereby resolving both of the song’s active key signatures.

  So attached was Bowie to the song that he reprised it twice for BBC Radio sessions, rewrote the lyrics for his 1969 TV special (though it wasn’t filmed for the show), and revamped it for his unfinished album Toy thirty years later. “Silly Boy Blue” also formed part of the soundtrack for his 1968 mime piece “Jetsun and the Eagle.”

  [A32] MAID OF BOND STREET

  (Bowie)

  Recorded December 1966; David Bowie LP

  * * *

  Besides reading like a “poor little rich girl” digest of a screenplay that could have been called The Loneliness of the Long Distance Model, “Maid of Bond Street” (as in Joan of Arc, the Maid of Orléans) offered a snapshot of the sixteen-year-old Bowie. Who else could have played the supporting role of the envious boy desperate to become a star? Whether the song was based on a real-life crush who’d been out of his league as a trainee, or whether he was simply jumping onto the “Eleanor Rigby”/Cathy Come Home bandwagon of urban loneliness, Bowie fashioned this vignette into a gorgeous miniature of social satire. The Rolling Stones would have treated the Maid with contempt (compare their ventures into similar territory, on the Aftermath LP); Paul McCartney would have turned her into soap opera (as on “She’s Leaving Home” from the Pepper LP, or his later single “Another Day”). Bowie chose instead to highlight the gulf between image and reality, as if he were tearing down a poster he’d helped to design three years earlier.

  His utterly assured vocal performance—lingering on some phrases, rushing others as if hurrying for a train—was supported by perhaps his most convincing marriage to date of melody and subject. The song began deceptively in E major, then walked tentatively up the scale, looking for assurance, before finding sanctuary among a familiar I-vi-IV-V chord sequence in C major. But the relief was short-lived, as the middle section left the maid hovering uncertainly between major E and D chords, unable to find security. As both boy and girl were exposed as victims of the Swinging London myth, Bowie steered the song into a four-chord sequence that clearly alluded to the climax of his earlier visit to those same streets, “The London Boys” [A21]. The minor chords of that song were replaced here by their major equivalents, slamming the door shut on the characters’ dreams.

  [A33] COME AND BUY MY TOYS

  (Bowie)

  Recorded December 1966; David Bowie LP

  * * *

  Guitarist John Renbourn, who was about to form the folk rock group Pentangle with Bert Jansch, provided the stylish finger-picked accompaniment for Bowie’s attempt to mimic the ageless mystery of the English folk tradition. If there were hints of Wordsworth and Blake in his idealistic view of childhood (compare “After All” [20]), they sounded borrowed—assembled piecemeal, perhaps, from images in a book of young people’s verse. Another source provided Bowie’s “Cambric shirt,” also to be found in Simon & Garfunkel’s “Scarborough Fair/Canticle,” which was released in Britain four weeks before this song was recorded. Renbourn was clearly under instructions to replicate Paul Simon’s guitar technique, exploiting the potential of some familiar folk chord progressions, but he could do little to rescue the middle section from its melodic clumsiness.

  [A34] BUNNY THING

  (Bowie)

  [A35] YOUR FUNNY SMILE

  (Bowie)

  Recorded December 1966; unreleased

  * * *

  Bowie made full use of Renbourn’s services, also featuring him on “Bunny Thing,” which chronicler Kevin Cann describes as a recitation “in the style of a beat poet, complete with an improvised musical section.” “Your Funny Smile,” meanwhile, was (in Cann’s account) “like an unpolished recording from David’s spell with Pye Records.” Both songs were included in the initial track listing for Bowie’s debut LP, but quickly deleted, and he has blocked subsequent attempts to release them.

  [A36] OVER THE WALL WE GO

  (Bowie)

  Recorded December 1966; unreleased demo. Recorded by Oscar, January 1967; single A-side

  * * *

  “I’ll sing you a song, it’s not very long, all coppers are bastards.” That, in its entirety, is the traditional Cockney tune that was the source for this novelty song—and which also found its way around the world, in a multitude of different forms, all intended to tweak the nose of authority. In his original demo, Bowie turned the “bastards” into the child-friendly “nanas,” and added a prison escape scenario, complete with an impression of British heavyweight boxing champion Henry Cooper, some Goons-inspired dialogue, and a flash of Scouse. The song was picked up by Oscar Beuselink, the singer-actor son of a music publisher, who persuaded Bowie to add backing vocals to his rendition. Oscar’s cast of characters (but not Bowie’s) included a dramatically camp “poofta.” Despite its novelty appeal, and similarity to subsequent hits by the Scaffold, Oscar’s record wasn’t a hit, though he enjoyed more success in later years as a singer and comic actor under the name Paul Nicholas.

  “Over the Wall We Go”—written in skeletal form by late 1965—owed its appearance on record to music publisher David Platz, who signed Bowie to his Essex Music roster when his Sparta deal expired in autumn 1966. It was now in Bowie’s financial interests to deliver as many commercially oriented songs as possible to Platz, who tirelessly attempted to interest recording artists famous and obscure in his material. At his most ambitious, Platz sent demos of songs such as “Silly Boy Blue” [A31] to American bands who were quite capable of writing their own material, like the Jefferson Airplane. Over the next two or three years, a huge quantity of “lost” Bowie compositions were presented to Platz in demo form, and presumably sent out to artists and managers on a speculative basis. Some of them have survived on scratchy acetate discs; others remain a mystery. Among the missing titles from Bowie’s mid- to late-sixties output are “April’s Tooth of Gold,” “C’est la Vie,” “Lincoln House,” “Say Goodbye to Mr Mind,” “Something I Would Like to Be,” “Take It with Soul,” and “The Girl from Minnesota.”

  [A37] THE LAUGHING GNOME

  (Bowie)

  Recorded January/February 1967; single A-side

  * * *

  Just as Les Paul deserved the credit for pioneering vari-speed and multitrack recording techniques, American comedian Ross Bagdasarian was the man who discovered the comic potential of speeding up the human voice to sound like a cute animal (or, indeed, a gnome). After premiering this trick on “Witch Doctor” in 1958, he launched a trio of lovable sound effects named the Chipmunks, whose debut single established sales records that would be broken only by the Beatles. Britain had its singing pig puppets, Pinky and Perky, while Lou Monte’s “Pepino the Teenage Mouse” established the scenario of a human being annoyed by a high-pitched interloper.

  So the invasion of hysterical gnomes—playfully voiced by Bowie and producer Gus Dudgeon—was merely the continuation of a long tradition. The circulation of a rough mix demonstrated that many groan-worthy gags were considered for inclusion and discarded; the completed track included a sly refere
nce to Mick Jagger’s time as a student at the London School of Eco-Gnom-Ics, and also referenced another popular variety act of the era, the Singing Postman (whose mysterious catchphrase, in Norfolk dialect, was “Have you got a loight, boy?”).

  If Bowie had been auditioning for a career as a children’s entertainer, “The Laughing Gnome” ought to have guaranteed him a lifetime’s employment; it’s easy to imagine his becoming the puppet’s sidekick in The Basil Brush Show, or joining the cast of BBC-TV’s perennial Friday-afternoon romp Crackerjack. Strangely, the single didn’t catch the attention of the producers of BBC Radio’s Children’s Favourites, thereby robbing us of an alternative future in which Bowie became the British equivalent of Danny Kaye. Only when reissued in 1973 did it achieve the success it deserved, while prompting cynics to question how Bowie could be taken seriously as a rock star with skeletons this bony in his closet. An embarrassment for Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane, however, was merely another feather in the cap for the versatile entertainer of 1967.

  Bowie would revive the vari-speed vocal trick, to much eerier effect, on songs such as “After All” [20], “All the Madmen” [23], and “The Bewlay Brothers” [51].

  [A38] THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO TONY DAY

  (Bowie)

  Recorded January/February 1967; single B-side

  * * *

  Presumably to avoid typecasting, Bowie ensured that the B-side of “The Laughing Gnome” could never be mistaken for a children’s song. “The Gospel According to Tony Day” was lugubrious and cynical, with a melody that barely stretched to five notes, sung low, then an octave higher, and with the minimum of variation. The eight-bar verse, with a two-bar interlude, returned dolefully to the progression at the heart of “Good Morning Girl” [A17]. Behind Bowie, an equally jaded rock rhythm section—reminiscent of Phil Spector’s arrangement of “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah” for Bob B. Soxx & the Blue Jeans—supported the surreal inclusion of oboe and bassoon, where a blues guitar might have seemed more obvious. If the much-loved English comedian Tony Hancock had made a rock record at the height of his mid-sixties depression, it might have sounded like this, complete with its sarcastic mockery of the clichés of R&B (“gotta, gotta”) and psychedelia (“your mind, blow it”).