David Bowie (born David Jones in 1947) turns 67 today. “Ch-ch-ch-changes,”
indeed. Bowie has always been an odd bird, not easily grasped in totality.
A changeling. And yet always very Bowie. By which I mean, I guess, that he’s
never quite a poseur because he always adapts successfully to whatever he
sets his sights on. Mainly, his changes are in style more than substance,
though at times—as with the
Let’s Dance album in 1983—he manages to grab the
gold, commercially (with, typically, one of his less interesting incarnations).
Other times he’s more like off in la-la land, and other times he’s some kind of
cutting-edge impresario of some place everyone will end up, sooner or later. In
the beginning he was even a bit derivative, with the cloying pop of his
earliest tunes, but no one had a weirder ersatz psychedelia than that debut
eponymous LP (1969), what with “Wild Eyed Boy from Free Cloud” and “Memory of a Free
Festival,” to say nothing of the Dylan meets the Velvets and The Doors of “Cygnet
Committee”; his second album,
The Man Who Sold the World (1970), brought in issues of psychosis and
übermenschen
and same-sex seduction, and great riffs and . . . he was off.
“Song to Bob Dylan” and “Andy Warhol” on his third album,
Hunky Dory, let everyone know where he
was coming from . . . or maybe that should be “where he was going”—to America,
to become a pop sensation.
He didn’t,
quite. He was not a runaway chart meister, but he created a durable and influential persona to
be the sensation he wasn’t:
The Rise and
Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. And for awhile, it
seemed, everything was coming up ziggy.
That’s when I first knew of him because, if you read rock
mags at the time (1972-74), you couldn’t avoid him—which is a way of saying
that Bowie knew how to play the hype machine. The first LP I bought was that
first album, now redubbed, for U.S. markets, Space Oddity and featuring striking shots of His Zigginess in all
his “wild-eyed boy” glory. The title song was a hit (which is why the LP got
re-released), but sort of a novelty hit, and three years old when it made it to
these shores. I don’t remember hearing anything from Ziggy on AM radio, and “Jean Genie” was barely a blip—unlike the
song he gave to Mott the Hoople, “All the Young Dudes,” or his glam-rock
colleague, Marc Bolan, whose T. Rex accosted the airwaves with “Bang a Gong.”
Bowie, like Dylan, was usually a bit more recherché, caviar to the general, y’know.
Today’s selection is one of my favorite Bowie songs of all time. And
may not even be known by more causal Bowie fans. It’s the first song on the second side of Scary Monsters (1980). Which means it
comes along at a time in Bowie’s career when he’s just finished the run of what
would be known as his “Berlin trilogy” (Low, 1977; “Heroes”, 1977; Lodger,
1979) and is, maybe, somewhere else. It’s also the point at which Bowie-ness
(as opposed to Zigginess) will have incurred quite a bit of debt by the
up-and-coming New Wave artistes. Bowie riffs and Bowie coiffs and Bowie
androgynous unisex are all over the place. And this song, in particular, is
Bowie distancing himself from it all (the LP also boasted a hit with a clever
return to Major Tom of “Space Oddity”: “Ashes to Ashes”—“do you remember a guy
that’s been in such an early song” . . .).
In other words, I like this album a lot because, unlike the Berlin LPs,
it's more in line with the earlier Bowie, now having undergone that interesting
sea change that was working with Brian Eno . . . no doubt substances as well,
but I’m not going to get into the heroin vs. cocaine comparisons. Suffice to
say, for my money, in 1980—September, and I’d been living in Philly for less
than a month—Bowie was back. Or, more accurately, I was back to Bowie.
I was also 21, for less than a month to date, and
maybe that’s why the phrase “I’m not some piece of teenage wildlife” resonated
with me so well. It seemed important to shed whatever still clung from those “experimental”
(if that’s what they were) years of 18-20. Time maybe for the next phase, and
who better to inaugurate that than a master of “new phases”? It’s also the case that
the song—with that wonderful ringing guitar riff by Robert Fripp, sounding both
like a clarion and commemoration—is spot on amazing. Bowie never sang like this
before or after. I’m a big fan of the vocal bravado of Station to Station, but
on this track he puts everything he’s got at the service of a chameleonic
account of a chameleonic existence. I believe Bowie is addressing,
deliberately, those New Wave kids “same old thing in brand new drag”—about my
age then, and younger—who are coming along in his wake, “as ugly as a teenage
millionaire, pretending it’s a Whizz Kid world,” the kind who ask their seer for advice “David,
what shall I do, they wait for me in hallways.”
The singer’s insistence—distancing himself from “teenage wildlife”—is, I
believe, meant to be the position of these ephebes, but is also Bowie’s stance
toward them. They’re trying to be taken
seriously. The singer, whether or not he takes them seriously, doesn’t want to be
grouped with them. Or, more importantly, doesn’t want to remain “a teen idol” in those terms.
The song is passionate in its evocation of having
“been there, done that”: “you’re alone for maybe the last time / And you
breathe for a long time / Then you howl like a wolf in a trap / And you daren’t
look behind.” This, we feel, is the
psychic cost of those “changes” our hero has been living out as well as his
fans, vicariously, all these years. There may be any number of songs on the
costs of rock star fame, but this one comes from one whose approach to the
whole phenomenon has always been fraught with a certain existential dread (see “Ziggy
Stardust” and “Rock'n'Roll Suicide” and “Time”). And then, the superb kiss-off, which is a vision of the ephebe, for
all his Whizz Kid charm, breaking under the pressure of it all: “others on the
line filing past whisper low /‘I miss you, but he had to go / Well, each to his
own / He was another piece of teenage wildlife.’”
And O
ces voix … chantant dans le coupole: when Bowie takes it up to his highest
register for “wild / life” with Fripp ringing away, it becomes—as Shelley
Duvall might say—transplendent. What a way to pass the baton . . .
Happy birthday, Mr. Jones (when “Bowie” was actually
born is a bit less certain).
(The YouTube vid, a collage created for the
song by someone out there in Davidland, boasts some interesting images and
seems to stick to this period of Bowie and after.)
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