David Bowie R.I.P

If my timeline is correct, that Playboy interview would've been conducted roughly around the time of Bowie's coke nadir.

it certainly reads like it

Bowie was a there-not-there chart presence in the U.S. from 1977-1980. Scary Monsters hit #12 in 1980 after Lodger peaked at #20 and "Heroes" at, jeez, #35. SM was a massive British hit taking advantage of Blitz kids + New Wave, so I wonder if his record comapany promoted the fuck out of it in both countries.

― The burrito of ennui (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, January 12, 2016 10:42 AM (17 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Evidently; he didn't tour in 1980, but promoted SM on The Tonight Show. Rockers were few and far between on Carson, but Bowie delivered some weird, wild stuff:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7E5RTO7b0Vs

(Great as that is, it would've been cool to hear Bowie do those songs with the Tonight Show band.)

Those are some great quotes there (from the playboy interview), one of the things I loved about him is that he can be great and always changing: okay, I did that, that was pretty good, where can we go from there next. Some of the 'new' is gone forever - I obviously can't imagine hearing him at the start of glam in the original context because it's been folded into history*.

Which makes Pin Ups such an odd record - been going through them chronologically (okay apart from Bowie'67) and it just sounds like a massive misstep.

*Tom Ewing, elsewhere: "Bowie wasn't the first star to make me love pop. But the first star to make me love pop was straight up ripping him off. And so was the second. And the third. And the fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh. And even then when I got round to him, he still came as a surprise."

Pin Ups always sounded like his attempt to outdo Bryan Ferry. It's Greil Marcus' favorite Bowie, according to the desert island book.

5 David Bowie The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars Jul 1972
1 David Bowie Aladdin Sane May 1973
1 David Bowie Pin-Ups Nov 1973
1 David Bowie Diamond Dogs Jun 1974
2 David Bowie Young Americans Apr 1975

Not so much as a mis-step, but an album issued 6 months after the previous and 7 months before the next. The other albums had less than a year between each, so consider it a bonus and a way of getting two months longer to do Diamond Dogs..

Released 2 weeks after Ferry's covers album:

Pin Ups entered the UK chart on 3 November 1973 (coincidentally the same day as Bryan Ferry's covers album These Foolish Things)

Harry Nilsson beat both of them to it.

Also from Playboy:

I’ve now decided that my death should be very precious. I really want to use it. I’d like my death to be as interesting as my life has been and will be.

I felt that Pin Ups was Bowie getting meta: presenting those songs less as covers and more as if they made up the tracklist of The Spiders' Greatest Hits LP in their universe.

I remember my brother went to see Bowie at the New Bingley Hall in Stafford in '78 and I thought, years later, that that really reflected a Sinatra-mid-'50s (if not quite Walker Bros late-'70s) commercial dip for DB at the time - back to being a niche critical fave rather than an arena-filling star, slogging around the provinces. But, actually, it was one of three nights in Stafford, that's a pretty big venue, and it seems he deliberately just did a run of shows at four large UK venues (London, Stafford, Newcastle, Glasgow). This was hardly transit van on the M6 stuff.

I saw him at Maine Road, Manchester in 1990. It was pretty great but the SMDH moment was giving up four and a half minutes of a 90min greatest hits set to... Belew's Pretty Pink Rose! FFS.

xp interesting. I have kind of comforted myself over the past 24 hours thinking Bowie surely planned his funeral to be a spectacle (in the spectacular, not pejorative sense).

holy shit re: richard barone & nirvana! that's like the fucking same arrangement

― Amira, Queen of Creativity (upper mississippi sh@kedown)

nice detective work Ned!

― sleeve, Tuesday, January 12, 2016 7:41 AM

Ha, no credit claimed; I had Barone's album for the longest time -- forgot I even had it -- but I only picked up his book on a whim at Powell's last April, and was as surprised as anyone when I read that part and the descriptions beforehand about choosing it for the set and the participation of Scarpantoni -- that was her first rock gig as such and is what caused her to become the cellist of choice for any number of performers since. But damned if he's not right, and it does pretty much solve the minor mystery of not only how Cobain learned about the song but why it sounds the way it does.

I <3 Jane Scarpantoni's playing btw, I met her back when she played with Tiny Lights

okay apparently the meeting of the ziggy/lemmy minds is just another one of those darn internet trick photos. i knew it was too good to be true...

https://scontent-iad3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xat1/v/t1.0-9/12438959_10154459175127137_3479899428669309160_n.jpg?oh=91ef53cffdcb1a755e72df7ca83737ee&oe=573BE2DF

Yeah, the combined does odd things with space if you look closely.

Well a guy from Hawkwind ended up playing with Bowie, so it wasn't so unlikely.

... admittedly not Lemmy though.

They would I'm sure have had a lot to talk about. Not just Nazis, like.

yeah, i would think they would have gotten along okay. they both liked that old time rock & roll. and drugs.

If my timeline is correct, that Playboy interview would've been conducted roughly around the time of Bowie's coke nadir.

― Reckless Recluse (Old Lunch), Tuesday, January 12, 2016 4:01 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

PLAYBOY: How about drugs?

BOWIE: What year is it now?

Another thing the "Bowie Is ..." exhibit (and by the way, supposedly Bowie was not a fan) made me consider was how different my perspective on Bowie was as an American. I often wonder what people would have thought of Bowie, or what his American legacy might have been, were it not for "Let's Dance"/MTV, which of course largely landed well after Bowie's immediate Influence ended. Would he have been just another weirdo to discover?

bcz Alfred demanded it.

"Can you do Bowie for my 5th period class?"

Paris Goodrum, my high school drama teacher, loved my David Bowie. It emerged from a class assignment in lip syncing. Paris stressed that he wanted something more than just mouthing lyrics. He wanted performance, and this I took seriously.

This was 1975, Lawrence, Indiana... I prepped in the men's room. Applied rouge, lipstick, and eye shadow. Covered my face in glitter. Wore a frilly blue shirt with bright red suspenders and denim shorts. Yellow knee socks and platform shoes. Feather necklace and hoop bracelets. Naturally, there were stares on my walk back to class. But I felt empowered.

http://dennisperrin.blogspot.com/2016/01/oh-you-pretty-thing.html

Paris Goodrum! bit Nabokovian

>>>Pin Ups always sounded like his attempt to outdo Bryan Ferry.

I believe those records were released if not on the same day then more or less in tandem. (I know they entered the UK charts the same week.)

Adrian Belew on how he went from working with Zappa to Bowie in 1978, oh man.

https://www.facebook.com/AdrianBelew/posts/10150588871654995

I'm not a fan of Pin Ups, but I find it remarkable that in 1972 he was already able to glom onto both the importance of the VU as well as Springsteen, even if those covers weren't really released at the time.

xpost to Ned: King Crimson just posted this on Facebook: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lm8xCYZjB-M

Nice.

http://pitchfork.com/news/62870-deerhunters-bradford-cox-talks-about-his-lifelong-love-of-beautiful-christ-like-david-bowie/

i like Bradford's write-up. i always get huge Bowie vibes from Deerhunter.

So sweet----meeting her heroes always sucks, but not this time---an important/necessary recharge:
https://www.facebook.com/lordemusic/posts/1141095715908147

lol @ that Belew anecdote

I can't wait for the postscript!

FATHER OF SLENG TENG! hell, why not?

https://axischemicals.wordpress.com/2016/01/11/david-bowie-digital-reggae-kingpin/

New album very hard to listen to today. It's taken on a an entirely new identity. "Dollar Days" breaks my heart.

What made Bowie so interesting in the 70s: he had so many radio hits, but refused to settle into one predictable approach. Some of this was going against the grain--- coterie singer-songwriter goes glitter and glam, when most Brits are still bringing us denim mustache boogie, etc----but there was also a sense of restlessness, which went with the shrewdness: especially after, bout even before, his production helped elevate Reed, Iggy, Mott, he moved away from "Queen Bitch" pastiche, "Panic In Detroit" Creem/Midwestern commentary, hard rock itself, for Young Americans, then rock and dance with Station To Station, way before post-punk etc---but still looking for something, working with Eno etc. When he finally seemed to go pop all the way, in the early 80s, the albums didn't work as well as the singles, then he walked away. Came back with much more uneven albums, and no more big singles, but he sure tried with the albums, even though the balance of speculation (in the art and commercial senses) was off.
But he kept plugging away, long after many of his contemporaries ran out of energy and/or ideas. And everything I've heard from Blackstar (haven't had time for the whole thing yet) is lovely, and was before I got the news.

"Against the grain" as marketing decision, I meant (he'd already been plugging away since pre-Beatlemania, so learning to think hard about these things, and make tough calls).

huh that sleng teng claim is ... interesting

"*but* even before" etc. etc. (typoing on phone, sorry)

Still working my way through the discography.

-Diamond Dogs is such a weird dip (I think I even prefer Pin Ups as an album) and feels like he's running out of steam...and then Young Americans happens and he's right back in it. He could've done a straight soul album and I'm sure it would've been great but YA is such a wonderful synthesis of that thing and his own thing.

-I'm listening to the Rykodisc reissues and realizing that I've really unfairly slighted some of these b-sides and otherwise-unreleased tracks. I might prefer some of the extras on Diamond Dogs to stuff that made it onto the album proper.

-I'm hard-pressed to think of many 10-minute songs that breeze by as quickly as 'Station To Station'. A fantastic groove succeeded by a fantastic rave-up.

I was listening to a bunch of his albums on shuffle last night and when "Young Americans" came on it was so great, that was one of the records I came to last as a punk rocker and it totally won me over.

https://youtu.be/8nKb2JC7Qn0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nKb2JC7Qn0&feature=youtu.be

Great interview here, good comments on the nascent internet:

https://www.facebook.com/FACTmagazine/videos/10153819928364687/?fref=nf

i went to amoeba yesterday to honor bowie with a couple of acquisitions but blackstar was sold out, as was literally everything else (it had opened only 30 min before) but i found a nice copy of station to station in the employee picks section and grabbed it. so good.

also on my way there i flipped through all the L.A. radio stations to find one that was doing a Bowie marathon (you'd think) and finally landed on one playing 'Young Americans' and settled in for a listen sesh, but then they followed it up with something by Capitol Cities(?) and then Sheryl Crow and then...idk, i put on a cd at that point.

the DMCA prevents any station that does streaming from playing more than 2 cuts by an artist per hour, FYI -a maximum of three cuts from an artist in 2 hours is allowed.

(I hate this rule so much)

ugh

there should be a new rule when a musician dies, call it 'the bowie exception'

OTM