David Bowie R.I.P

that cover is so beautiful, it is almost like a classic sci fi pulp jacket. he truly is an alien.

it is!

i was struck by the decline in bowie's album cover design. he had some of the most iconic covers of all time, culminating (IMO) in that very New Wave "heroes" cover. even the cover to "let's dance" has an appealing '80s pop energy to it.

cf.:

http://assets.rollingstone.com/assets/images/album_review/e3d14217b90410613f8f86ebf90168c652f8ed6c.jpg

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/7b/David_Bowie_-_Reality.jpg

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Even Christgau, who began as a fan, mellowed: http://noisey.vice.com/blog/robert-christgau-remembers-david-bowie

He gets some facts wrong in this article: Eno producing Low and Heroes, Bowie playing lead guitar on the Iggy '77 tour.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/93/Low_(album).jpg

dat orange sky.

The ...hours sleeve is second worst (only David Live is worse) of all. An old guy with bad hair, flip flops, and an ugly snake.

RE: Bowie w Iggy...on the Dinah Shore show 1977
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdciK2Axc4A

xp is David Live that bad?

my first experience with a lot of records i deeply love is usually one of initial alienation that's also seductive enough that i'm drawn back in, so that i can figure it out. this was my initial relationship with cupid & psyche, etc. it's hard for me to access what it was like hearing "station to station" for the first time but i really want to, it's an incredibly structured song, and i'm certain i felt that initial alienation toward its first half, just nothing resolving at all, all these intense asymmetrical drop-offs arranged at the edge of space; it communicated a kind of infinite possibility, but from an untraversable distance. but i'm also certain i responded to the second half immediately, that is just my kind of melody, this ecstatic, soulful vocal which in its own way refuses to resolve and could go on forever and is kind of powered by its own internal energy, idk i was listening to the live version from stage today and it felt like hearing it for the first time again, such a fucking thrilling song, how does it exist

I like the sleeve for ...hours, the one for Reality less so. My favourite sleeve is probably Station To Station, but the full colour picture on the CD reissue rather than the original vinyl.

xp Stage version also benefits from some killer guitar by Belew, I think ILX turned me on to that

i think Bowie's work with Iggy was probably the kind of thing he wished he could do all the time, just disappear into the work and write and produce. in that NPR article he even says he would rather not even sing it. "The Idiot" and "Lust For Life" are BRILLIANT examples of this, maybe the best of his career. plus you have the collaborative singles "Under Pressure" (Queen) and "Fame" (John Lennon) and both of those are really top-tier Bowie as well.

it is funny to see people put so much emphasis on his ego and his persona in a lot of these remembrances. to me like he seems far more conceptual.

Josh in Chicago
Posted: January 12, 2016 at 3:43:58 PM
Those Ryko Bowie and Costello reissues were like the peak of listening to music for me. It just didn't get any better.

Yeah, and the Rhino reissue campaign for Robyn Hitchcock a couple of years after that. I'd wait for each month's new one like a kid at the comics store

xp Stage is much better than David Live

David Live is ALL THE SAXOPHONE iirc.

I still love one idea from Tin Machine - a band playing really heavy music in really nice suits.

xp Stage is much better than David Live

― Brad C., Tuesday, January 12, 2016 4:37 PM (13 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i agree, but is the cover of David Live really the worst in Bowie's catalogue?

a band playing really heavy music in really nice suits.

I admit I find this appealing too

i really hate the next day cover. just bc the font is bad

that's why i was a fan of The Godfathers in the 80's. the heavy rock in suits thing. still like them better than Tin Machine too...

the cover to Heathen is pretty iconic though

Oh wait, I am thinking of the bands appearance at something weird called the rock awards? I remember living colour doing Johnny B Goode.

― Josh in Chicago, Tuesday, January 12, 2016 4:27 PM (14 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yep, the International Rock Awards! This aired in the spring of 1989. In addition to Living Colour and Tin Machine, the Replacements did "Talent Show" (which was a huge deal for me; I rewatched their performance many times). The award statuette was an "Elvis." Pretty sure this only lasted for two years.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FoxGZhv9wik

Always thought these guys sounded better on TV than on record (no absurdly-reverbed drums).

the cover isn't bad but easily the most hideous bowie imagery is the outside booklet/singles art

i agree, but is the cover of David Live really the worst in Bowie's catalogue?

― flappy bird, Tuesday, January 12, 2016 4:38 PM (1

the worst drugs of Bowie's career

the International Rock Award were so lol eighties.

xxp oh yes, all those pictures processed with the Emboss filter

Great lil' hot take: https://axischemicals.wordpress.com/2016/01/11/david-bowie-digital-reggae-kingpin/

my wife wanted to re-watch Velvet Goldmine last night and I was struck by how much of an asshole the Bowie-analog Brian Slade is, just in the way he treats and uses other characters - he leaves behind a lot of v bitter people. Which struck me as quite different from descriptions of actual Bowie. I mean maybe this is all just rosy nostalgia for the recently departed clouding obscuring people's recollections but unlike, say, Lou Reed or Dylan, Bowie just never seems to have had that rep, even while he was alive his former collaborators seemed to speak quite highly of him both as an artist and a person.

like I'm at a loss to recall famous incidents where Bowie treated someone like shit or acted really unprofessional or otherwise burned personal bridges

He got Gary Numan thrown off a TV show once.

Velvet Goldmine is a gay fantasia on glam themes, as Tony Kushner might put it. not meant as a roman a clef any more than Inside Llewyn Davis is.

DB seemed like an unusually nice dude for someone so famous

or #slashFic xp

yeah I know, I love it and understand it's not a documentary - Slade as an asshole serves the narrative of the film (without his "betrayal" there's no mystery, no conflict), just a digression from source material (one among a great many) that I had no noticed before.

DB must've been awful on coke but no one spilling the beans rn

LOL and on cue (linked by Tom D on the Cardew thread):

http://slippedisc.com/2016/01/cornelius-cardew-on-david-bowie/

I love 70's Bowie the most, especially Ziggy & Aladdin. Glam stomp! The swagger & posing is so perfectly in my wheelhouse, all those hooks & riffage, it's beautiful

It's kind of a thrill listening to MWSTW -Hunky Dory-Ziggy, musically it's like the climbing the incline on a rollercoaster & then hitting the drop. Everything comes together and shazam! off we go

e got Gary Numan thrown off a TV show once.

― Turrican, Tuesday, January 12, 2016 5:08 PM

in the Buckley biography Numan talks at length at how nasty and chillingly Bowie behaved; he saw him as a threat.

that doesn't exactly seem uncalled for though - Numan was a clone in almost every sense of the word (and I say this as someone who loves early Gary Numan), and he's always come off as something of a chilly prick himself afaict

never given any credence to the "nazi salute" scandal personally, seems like manufactured controversy, quite different from something like Clapton's onstage anti-immigrant rant

Seeing a clone of yourself calls for pity, not rancor.

xp did anyone ever really take seriously the coke fuelled rantings of a rail thin clearly off his pale-as-fuck face pop star? Gary Numan said something to the effect of "of course if you take a series of pictures of someone waving with a motor driven camera then one of those pictures will look like a Nazi salute".
Certainly I don't have any problem at all listening to the songs Bowie recorded during that period. It's clear the guy was tripping balls - he kept his own urine in the fridge to prevent devil worshippers stealing it for use in rituals, ffs!

the betrayal in VG -- a combo of Haynes' sourness on Let's Dance Bowie + maybe 'i was only experimenting' self-de-queerifying, which i def remember the activist anger around.

he kept his own urine in the fridge to prevent devil worshippers stealing it for use in rituals, ffs!

wut

we've all been there

yeah and that feeling of betrayal makes sense on a cultural-political level, but in VG its extended to the personal

xp

I think it's funny how in VG they went to the trouble to create a Marc Bolan surrogate who's in the movie for all of three seconds.

It was also cool how they responded to Bowie blocking use of his music by licensing the Transformer version of "Satellite of Love", which is practically a duet between him and Lou.

According to the nice Belew FB anecdote above, Frank Zappa might have had opinions on Captain Tom.

he said he subsisted on milk and green peppers in 1975, all while living in a house w/shades drawn. Reminds me of the ambience described in The Hissing of Summer Lawns.

yes there is the cracked actor documentary where he is drinking milk

Also blatantly obvious, but regarding the first time listening experience moments mentioned several kilometres above:
Considering I'm only dealing with his output seriously for a comparatively short time (since 2006, being in my mid-twenties back then, I seriously don't know what took me so long), and so was in a situation to take in all the albums more or less at once, it now in retrospect feels like what made the process of working through his discography so very unique and fascinating is the unreal consistency especially in terms of the lesser known songs. It's not only the wealth of hits (which often enough were pretty unknown to me as well, German radio/public consciousness focusses on his 80s hits only), a few hidden gems and then some decent to strong fillers - the deep cuts literally never stopped and added so much to the overall picture.

Personally I cannot recall any similar musical experience which would be comparable to the sheer bewilderment evoked by listening for the first time in detail to Station To Station and suddenly getting to know Word On A Wing in the process, or Lodger with Red Sails and Repetition and Move On and African Night Flight, or Teenage Wildlife, Blackout, Sweet Thing/Candidate, Breaking Glass... The list is endless, not to speak of the b-sides mentioned above.
To this day I am in awe of this insane richness, the picture always got more colorful and weirder the deeper one digged, and it's still that way.

Frank Zappa might have had opinions on Captain Tom

Assholes tend to think everyone else is also an asshole ime

xp