The Man Who Sold the World

by Peter Doggett

  * For example, Bowie used collocate instead of organize, for no apparent reason except to show off his vocabulary; coincidentally, or not, T. S. Eliot had talked of “collocation” in the notes to The Waste Land. Another obscure reference may have been sparked by the death of the Polish “outsider” artist Nikifor in October 1968.

  * Bowie briefly intended to re-record “Janine” as a follow-up single to “Space Oddity” [1], incorporating parts of another Beatles song, “Love Me Do”—which he later added to “The Jean Genie” [65] in his 1973 concert repertoire. “Janine” could certainly have been retooled for the Ziggy era with only a modicum of effort.

  * The unexpected surge into an E major chord at the start of the verse’s second line added a macho defiance to an already abrasive lyric.

  * This cannot help but recall the romantic bathos of the Beatles’ “Norwegian Wood,” though Bowie was referring to the dream of Scandinavian bourgeois comfort marketed today by the Ikea chain.

  * The title told its own story: this was a Conversation Piece, or conceptual artwork, and also nothing more than a “conversation piece,” hardly worth anyone’s attention, in the same protest-too-much tradition as “I’m Not Losing Sleep” [A19].

  * Rumor has it that Lesley Duncan was Bowie’s lover in 1968; “Love Song” was later recorded by another of Duncan’s friends, Elton John.

  * He wasn’t alone in this complaint: Kevin Ayers’s “Song for Insane Times” pursued a similar theme.

  * Speaking in America more than a year later, Bowie claimed: “I basically wanted [the song] to be a cry of ‘fuck humanity,’ ” before adding with more than a degree of creative imagination, “it’s a dialogue between a left-wing capitalist and a real revolutionary.”

  * And “older”: he held the first syllable, his voice cavernous with echo, with a keening croon that would reappear at the climax of “Wild Is the Wind” [131].

  * Compare the “Cygnet Committee” [8] nightmare of a “love machine” on “desolation rows.”

  * It was a Rosedale chord organ, played by Bowie; he could press buttons to trigger wheezing chords, though he was restricted to a choice of twelve, the major and minor chords of A, Bb, C, D, F, and G, which—apart from a solitary Em—determined the structure of the song.

  * The music reflected the abrupt transition, veering from the soft, hanging and heavily echoed twelve-string chords of the opening bars, accompanied only by the tap of a cymbal and an electric guitar heavy in reverb, to the rough-edged knife of a rock band.

  * The Dylan references didn’t end there: the title was only an adverb short of sounding like a refugee from Blonde on Blonde, while the track was performed with the same chaotic daring, all missed changes and dropouts, as the most anarchic moments of Highway 61 Revisited. Some other moments to treasure: the voice steering left for the first verse, right for the second, and eventually finding the middle of the road; Bowie’s American pronunciation of tomatoes; and the way he defused the incendiary (for 1969) word phallus, by pronouncing it “fey-less.”

  * This throwaway song was gifted to Bowie’s friend George Underwood but did nothing to revive a recording career that had extended to one 1965 single under the pseudonym “Calvin James.”

  * American singer John Denver recorded the song in 1970: he doesn’t piss but “spits.”

  * Walker claimed that he originally learned the songs from Brel’s original recordings, as translated for him by a German girlfriend, a claim that led him into dispute with Shuman.

  * This represented a minor variation on the D/D7/G/Gm pattern that opened “Lover to the Dawn” [6], which was itself a transposition of the E/E7/A/Am of the Beatles’ “Dear Prudence,” released about a month before Bowie wrote his song.

  * The first line of the Beatles’ “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away,” in fact.

  * The child/madman nexus of innocence was explored further in “After All” [20].

  * The chord quartet achieved the illusion of constantly rising, like the Penrose Stairs in Escher’s Ascending and Descending.

  * In the same year, novelist J. G. Ballard noted that “the exterior landscapes of the 70s are almost entirely fictional ones created by advertising. . . . We move through a landscape composed of fictions.” In that context, it would be simple for someone to be there, and not there at all.

  * The owner and designer of the Mr. Fish store in London also created man’s dresses for Mick Jagger.

  * Kevin Cann’s admirable Bowie chronology suggests this song dated from the May sessions for The Man Who Sold The World. If so, it displayed Bowie’s uncanny ability to predict the future.

  * The 1990 CD of The Man Who Sold the World claimed to include this track but contained the 1971 re-recording instead.

  * Bowie admitted to being “overwhelmed” by the Nazis’ methods, which he described as “diabolical”—the same adjective he applied to the advertising industry.

  * Nietzsche’s book inspired Richard Strauss to compose the music that became the theme to the film 2001: A Space Odyssey—a connection that may also have brought the philosopher to Bowie’s attention.

  * Though they came from Manchester, the Hermits had enjoyed huge success in the United States with revivals of Cockney music hall novelties, which may have encouraged Bowie to explore similar themes during his Deram years.

  * He emerged with a set of chords that were perfectly feasible for a piano player but fiendishly difficult to transpose to guitar.

  * It has been alleged that “Please Please Me” was actually a song about mutual masturbation, which lends a new frisson to the title of “Hang Onto Yourself.”

  * This element of “Moonage Daydream” was adapted from the introduction to the Hollywood Argyles’ “Sho’ Know a Lot About Love,” the flip side of “Alley Oop,” from which Bowie quoted in “Life on Mars?” [52].

  * And double-tracked here, too, leading to the strange effect of two voices both declaring that “I” had to break up the band.

  * So did several older Beach Boys tracks, though, from “409” onward.

  * The stuttering effect was achieved by piano and bass playing quavers in 4/4 time, and Woody Woodmansey mimicking the distinctive drum motif from Jimi Hendrix’s “I Don’t Live Today.” Once Ronson was added to the mix, the impression of manic impatience was unmistakable.

  * There were hints in “Kooks” that Bowie might have been familiar with Kevin Ayers’s earlier exploration of similar musical territory, “The Clarietta Rag.”

  * Later that year, Dylan responded by recording a protest single, “George Jackson,” only for his Liberation Front to complain that he was being insincere.

  * The old man could have come from the first line of Young’s “Don’t Let It Bring You Down,” also an apparent influence on “Tired of My Life” [82], while “Right Between the Eyes” was the title of a recently released song by Young’s CSNY bandmate Graham Nash, though it was also where Captain Marvel zapped the tiger on the Beatles’ “Bungalow Bill.”

  * Besides the reference to the “V.U.” on the back cover of Hunky Dory, “Queen Bitch” utilized a variation on the central riff of Reed’s “Sweet Jane.” Bowie also referred to Sister Flo, an obvious reference to the Velvets’ “Sister Ray.”

  * The song was carbon-dated perfectly; Britain’s currency was decimalized, and “new pence” substituted for old, on February 15, 1971.

  * I can’t be the only person who bought the album without a lyric sheet and assumed for years that Bowie was singing “Turn and face the strain” in the chorus.

  * Bowie’s “Bardo” wasn’t a French actress but the situation of the human soul between death and rebirth in Tibetan Buddhism.

  * John Lennon had played the same trick on the Beatles’ “I Am the Walrus” and “Glass Onion,” both of which, coincidentally, were engineered by Scott.

  * The RCA deal had been secured by Tony Defries in September 1971, after he had agreed to buy Bowie out of his Mercury contract, and hence secure the future rights to
his 1969 David Bowie LP and The Man Who Sold the World.

  * The gay seventies was effectively delineated by the Stonewall riots in Greenwich Village in June 1969—the same week that Judy Garland died in London—and the murder of Harvey Milk in November 1978.

  * A ban on sales of the book in Britain was overturned on appeal in 1968.

  * Lennon’s offending photo—it prompted a police investigation—was on his Two Virgins collaboration with Yoko Ono. More than thirty years after “Velvet Goldmine,” the proudly “out” Rufus Wainwright talked of being “baptized by cum” in “Gay Messiah,” and people were still shocked.

  * That role may originally have been intended for Freddie Burretti, the effectively nonsinging front man of Arnold Corns.

  * Lewis sabotaged his career in 1958 by bringing his thirteen-year-old wife on a British tour. Maybe he had just arrived too soon: by 1972, the British underground press was openly carrying advertisements for child pornography, with one “naturist photographer” in Northampton offering “deprived town kids” the chance of “free weekend holidays” in a “well-known naturist club” if they would model for him in the nude. Magazines legally available by postal subscription in the early seventies included Kidds and Boys International.

  * As Dylan historian Clinton Heylin subsequently revealed, the song was actually composed before the Cuban standoff: Dylan was as keen a mythologist of his own life as Bowie.

  * One possible source for this line was a television drama in the BBC’s Doomwatch series, broadcast around the time he wrote the song: as one of the characters proclaimed, its theme was “We’ve got twenty years!” before mankind was destroyed.

  * The book originally appeared as a hardback in 1967, when Cohn was twenty-one, and was then rewritten, with scarcely a sentence remaining intact, for the 1970 paperback edition. The original text, reissued by Savoy Books during the eighties, is almost fascist in its attitude to violence and glamour; the revised version is more subtle, and more convincing.

  * He would more recently credit the American rocker Vince Taylor, and the madcap Legendary Stardust Cowboy, as Ziggy’s prime inspirations, preferring to name the obscure rather than the obvious.

  * “Wham Bam Thank You Ma’am” appeared on the jazz bassist’s 1961 album Oh Yeah, and it was also the title of a Small Faces rocker in 1967. The Small Faces were an underrecognized influence on this era of Bowie’s career, from Steve Marriott’s Cockney delivery of “Lazy Sunday” and “Rene” to their regular combination of rich acoustic and raunchy electric guitars, as heard throughout Ziggy Stardust.

  * The word may have been lodged in Bowie’s memory since his teens, when he first came across the Robert Heinlein science fiction novel Starman Jones. As with Philip K. Dick’s The World Jones Made, how could the young David Jones, already a sci-fi aficionado, resist books that included his name in their title?

  * One wonders whether Bowie watched a BBC-TV film called Herostratus, screened in 1967 and again in 1970: its hero wishes to commit suicide in public and hires an advertising agency to promote the event. It’s such an archetypal Bowie theme that it would be disconcerting to learn that he didn’t see it. In the interests of historical accuracy, one should also note that Lou Reed claimed that Bowie had written this song “for” him—though whether that meant “about him” or “for him to sing” isn’t clear.

  * Bowie admitted in March 1972, just after he’d written this song: “I get worried about dying. . . . Last month, it was being killed on stage. Not here [in Britain] so much. In America. I know that one day a big artist is going to get killed on stage, and I know that we’re going to go very big. And I keep thinking—it’s bound to be me.”

  * Bowie credited Baudelaire as the source for the “time takes a cigarette” line, though this was definitely not the case. Bowie encyclopedist Nicholas Pegg, with his typically rigorous research, identified a similarity with a verse by the Spanish poet Manuel Machado that begins with “La vida es un cigarillo . . . ,” or “Life is a cigarette. . . .” There is only one problem: as far as I know, Bowie could not read Spanish in 1972, and I have been unable to locate a prior English translation of the poem, which is titled “ ‘Tonas’ y Lavinias.” So the final piece of this mystery remains.

  * By the rock press, at least. Theatrical reviewers were altogether more perceptive, and less surprised. The magazine Plays & Players compared Bowie’s performance at the Rainbow Theatre in London to that of Joel Grey, the arch, camp master of ceremonies in the film Cabaret, and concluded that “the entire evening seemed like a tribute to Judy [Garland].” Bowie must have been delighted.

  * Bach’s “Air on the G String,” as heard for many years on the television advertisements for Hamlet cigars, was the obvious comparison.

  * That sexuality was to be seen in a different light many years later, after Glitter’s imprisonment on charges of possessing child pornography. As one of his former press agents told me on the day Glitter was arrested, “We always knew Gary liked young girls, but we didn’t realize how young.”

  * “A Star Is Born!” exclaimed the Melody Maker headline, in another of Bowie’s increasingly frequent comparisons to Judy Garland; Record Mirror announced that Bowie “will soon become the greatest entertainer Britain has ever known.”

  * His arrangement used the same chord sequence as the opening section of “After All” [20].

  * Bowie’s memory of this riff may have been jogged when it was revived as the central motif of “Keep That Fire Burning,” on a 1971 album by Tucker Zimmerman, who not only performed alongside Bowie at the Beckenham Arts Lab but was also a friend of Tony Visconti. Zimmerman was not, however, Bob Dylan’s cousin, which was how he had been billed in Beckenham.

  * There was a playful allusion to the line from John Lennon’s “I Found Out”—“a throwback from someone’s LP,” as Bowie put it—about being harassed on the phone, previously referenced on “Suffragette City” [59].

  * Bowie’s narrator merely wants the autograph of the man who has inspired him to destroy a slot machine: not exactly the overthrow of the military-industrial complex. And why else would Bowie tell us about the rebel’s diesel van if not for comic effect?

  * Dylan played Am-G-F; Bowie used Bm-G-A.

  * This theme was mined for comic effect in the TV series Happy Days and the movie Grease—itself based on a musical play that hit Broadway in summer 1972.

  * Vocal group hits of the fifties were invariably built around the I-vi-IV-V chord sequence; the verses of “Drive-in Saturday” utilized I-vi-iii-V instead.

  * Alias Billy Murcia, original drummer of the New York Dolls, who died—ostensibly of a drug overdose although no drugs were found in his body—in November 1972, little more than six weeks after Bowie had partied with him in Manhattan.

  * “I just work out probabilities,” Bowie explained as he was finishing the album, “pick incidents that happen in the 30s and 40s and push them through to the 80s and see what conclusions could come from what happened then.”

  * Other Japanese designers of the time also left their mark, notably Kenzo Takada and Issey Miyake.

  * At its most extreme, this trend could encourage the singer-songwriter Gilbert O’Sullivan to brand himself as a deprived working-class kid, in ragged pullover and schoolboy shorts.

  * “The idea was to fuck the sound up, give it some, ‘whoa, what’s that?’ ” Bowie recalled in 1991. “That was the first time I used synthesisers, the wobbly noise on the break.” He was forgetting that Visconti, Scott, and Ronson had already played synthesizers on his earlier records.

  * Small wonder, then, that Keith Richards took great delight in erasing Bowie’s handclapped contribution to the basic track of the Rolling Stones’ 1974 single “It’s Only Rock ’n Roll,” which had been recorded during a session at which Richards was absent, and replacing it with his own.