David Bowie R.I.P

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

I suspect Bowie's treatment of Numan was more to do with the fact that, in the UK at least, Numan was massively outselling Bowie at the end of the '70s/beginning of the '80s. I don't think being a "clone" had much to do with it, shitloads of musicians were wearing their Bowie influence on their sleeves at that time. I don't recall any tales of Bowie treating Peter Murphy like shit, for example.

xp well bowie was trying to poach zappa's star guitarist ... funny that belew was such a hot commodity for a couple years there. everyone wanted BELEW.

Anyone know Bowie's late period recreational habits? The last reported instance of coke snortin' was during the Glass Spider tour, his last cig in 2000 (I'll assume relapses happened), but I wondered if he drank at all. Hard to be in Manhattan events without a glass of wine.

He replaced his addictions to porn and chocolate .

Anyways, his biographer aims he had six heart attacks ?! Is that even possible ?

xpost:

Yeah, in Cracked Actor he's drinking milk, but I'm sure you can see lines of coke chopped out on a table in one scene.

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

FZ was an asshole to anyone and about anything that didn't further FZ's aims, though. It's always stood out like a sore thumb that he didn't release many Belew-era live recordings beyond Baby Snakes and Sheik Yerbouti. This Belew anecdote from today seems to shed a little light on what might have been a vindictive move on Zappa's part.

several xposts

Indeed pretty obvious who the baddie in this story is. Everybody should be able to have a slice of the Belew.

FZ probably shouted until he was belew in the face

I don't think I've been this emotionally affected by the loss of a musician since George Harrison died. Like, in comparison to when Lou Reed went earlier I was definitely sad and upset and felt the impact, but Lou's prickly bastard persona meant there was some emotional distance there, something that made it easier to accept. with Bowie I feel like I lost a friend and a guiding light.

He was so good at putting people together, like who else would have dreamed of pairing sweaty, up and coming roadhouse blues revivalist Stevie Ray with the very out of fashion king of disco Nile?

― Amira, Queen of Creativity (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Tuesday, January 12, 2016 4:20 AM (10 hours ago)

Teena Marie!

Greg Tate with a great one here:

http://www.mtv.com/news/2727414/brother-from-another-planet/

Our ace boon Arthur Jafa likes to say that ”Andy Warhol was so white he was black.” Bowie (who played Warhol in Schnabel’s film Basquiat) was likewise so avant-garde he tipped over into the Avant-’Groid — that Afro-outré dimension where Little Richard and Sun Ra define how far out you can go and command love from the folk. Like Joni Mitchell — another unguilty pleasure of many boho blackfolk — Bowie double-crossed back over to black culture by being his own transcendently pan-everything creation. But not even Queen Mother Joni can say she provoked James Brown to copycat action twice in his career. JB was so blown away by Bowie’s ”Fame,” he cut his own carbon-copy track, ”Hot (I Need to Be Loved, Loved, Loved),” and, years later, when Bowie optioned his publishing for stock points, the Godfather of Soul got the news about how lucrative the deal proved and quickly followed suit. Bowie once said, “The secret to my success was I was always the second guy to come up with the idea.” All hip-hop junkies can relate: How you flip secondhand wisdom to make the meta go mega-pop takes genius, too. (FYI, the ”Fame” story is further complicated by the fact that Brown remembered Bowie’s co-writer Carlos Alomar playing the main riff at the Apollo years before — but chase down the long version here.

This reporter got to hang out with Bowie a few times in the aughts. Iman commissioned moi to write an essay for her cosmetics company’s catalogue. During our initial meeting, Iman leaned in with her cell phone and said, ”My husband wants to talk to you — he’s a big fan of your work.” Say WTF? It was truly the GTFOH gobsmack moment of a lifetime in music journalism. If only because, arrogant as we journos can be on the page, only an idiot thinks anyone of musical consequence actually reads our cantankerous sheet! Upshot is, because of that bizarre turnabout we got to get turnt out in person, as most were, by Bowie’s singular alchemy — utter nobility combined with an easygoing lack of pretension. Later came revelations about this highly irregular regular guy’s generosity of spirit.

During our first convo, Bowie related how he’d recently met P. Diddy — a man so impressed by Bowie’s handshake he inquired as to who Bowie’s trainer was. Whereupon the Thin White Duke informed Mr. Bad Boy, ”That grip isn’t from training, Puff. That’s from 40 years of trying to hold on to your money in the music business.” Talk about pulling a tyro’s coat tail.

Zappa is always the bigger asshole, I thought that was just a rule of thumb

the International Rock Awards... starring a bunch of people from two English-speaking countries.

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.

― The burrito of ennui (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, January 12, 2016 4:20 PM (28 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

what's the bill callahan line...? "I'll only ever be a Gary Numan"

and he was only 69! lou was 71, Dylan is 74, and they abused their bodies just as much as Bowie... the thing that's so so so incredibly sad is that quote from the director of Lazarus that "he did NOT want to die..." like someone said way upthread, it's stating the obvious about someone that had cancer for years, but to have it emphasized that way....it's fucking with my head. and he was ill for several years before the liver cancer diagnosis from what i understand, from townshend's comments, and all the hush hushing in 2013 around the release of The Next Day.

also boring story but i heard bowie's cover of 'waiting for the man' in a cafe today and was like 'shit, they're both dead'

i am kind of queasy with 'how he left us' rhetoric. you don't boss cancer around.

you know, most humans act like assholes every now and then

"The secret to my success was I was always the second guy to come up with the idea.”

A+

i am kind of queasy with 'how he left us' rhetoric

yeah. it's not like he willed himself to succumb for some sort of formal symmetry.

it's a combination of the uncanny coincidence of him having died very soon after having released an album on his birthday (and the general silence around his health that had preceded this) and the fact that bowie is/was perceived as someone skilled at the theatrical, yet cryptic gesture.

by "it's" i mean, the reason people seem to be treating his death like his last "performance"

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

― Οὖτις, Tuesday, January 12, 2016 5:23 PM (41 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

As someone on fb pointed out, when Bowie got off the coke, he recanted his pro-fascist statements; whereas, after Clapton got sober, he doubled-down on his support for Enoch Powell, calling him "outrageously brave."

xxpost:

The early bird catches the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.