David Bowie R.I.P

Tim Renwick

There's no Keith buried somewhere in "Rebel Rebel', right?

That's all Bowie, innit?

Guitar-wise at least

Oh, plus the ubiquitous Alan Parker.

Marc Bolan

...which reminds me that this hasn't been posted yet.

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

Had not known 'til recently that this was from the very last episode of "Marc", filmed about a week before Bolan was killed, and originally aired a couple weeks after that.

Erdal Kızılçay
xx-post

xpost so good! and the episode also has Generation X's first tv appearance :D

Pete Townshend (on two songs, one in 1980, one in 2002).

xxxp

bowie and his band doing a pretty great velvets impression on heroes there, until bowie actually starts singing of course

That's Monder doing the Bill Nelson / Fripp muted noodling in I Can't Give Everything Away, right? I love that. Reminds me of Gone To Earth-era Sylvian.

xxxxp

Chuck Hammer (synth guitar on Ashes to Ashes and Teenage Wildlife).

David Torn (sort of a super-digital ambient Fripp) played on the last few.

Jimmy Page on these two:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUXj2aZPXrA

I'm the latter.

David Torn (sort of a super-digital ambient Fripp) played on the last few.

Torn, Fripp and Frisell definitely travel in similar session circles. All three have played with David Sylvian, sequentially: Fripp on "Gone to Earth," Torn on "Secrets of the Beehive," and Frisell (with Ribot) on "Dead Bees on a Cake." There's a cadre of avant ambient guys who always seem to play this role. Fripp, Torn, Frisell, Michael Brook ...

bowie and his band doing a pretty great velvets impression on heroes there

I thought maybe that was that final lineup of T. Rex playing there?

Never knew Bolan played "Debora" on TV a week before he died, wow.

What?

Sorry misread that as Desdemona.

My copy of the 3CD Nothing Has Changed arrived in today's mail. I really like the newest-to-oldest track listing.

(F)Rip(p) Torn

Torn, Fripp and Frisell definitely travel in similar session circles. All three have played with David Sylvian, sequentially: Fripp on "Gone to Earth," Torn on "Secrets of the Beehive," and Frisell (with Ribot) on "Dead Bees on a Cake." There's a cadre of avant ambient guys who always seem to play this role. Fripp, Torn, Frisell, Michael Brook ...

http://www.montrealjazzfest.com/images/artistes/biographies/1995_Pat_Metheny-016-bio-400.jpg

http://40.media.tumblr.com/a5d10c30a065dea6e2fe385c7353db01/tumblr_nnj68qQ9vQ1uu21xco1_1280.jpg

<3

Good new interview with Oursler

http://www.vulture.com/2016/02/tony-oursler-on-david-bowies-art-world-ties.html

Five Years gone from Hulu but seems to still be on YouTube.

Or is it? Seems to be scrambled. However there is something else called Sound & Vision of about the same length.

That Ferry and Bowie picture makes me happy. It's like FDR and Churchill meeting.

Five Years has gone off the net because of you.

Found it. Love him imitating Warhol's speaking voice.

http://artvod.com/music/david-bowie-five-years-documentary/

That Ferry and Bowie picture makes me happy. It's like FDR and Churchill meeting.

Considering the fact that, until three weeks ago, I wouldn't have described myself as a Bowie fan particularly, we know own 18 Bowie albums, comfortably more than any other individual artist. Even pre-demise we owned a dozen, and I think only Miles Davis and The Beatles could compete with that in terms of shelf-space.

now not know

Yeah, I believe I only ever once bought a "new" bowie issue once, it was the cassette single of "Let's Dance"..

but reckoning up I have eight CD albums, and about six LPs, which is a lot for an artist I wasn't that fussed about..

and a bunch of singles: Changes, Sorrow, the Baal EP, um..

Fascinating, I know..

I'm having the opposite response: the Nothing Has Changed 3CD compilation arrived this past weekend, and I have been slowly trudging through it and coming to the realization that I don't ever need to hear anything he did between Let's Dance and The Next Day again. I like Low and "Heroes" well enough, and Blackstar is amazing, but the pre-Berlin albums never did anything for me, and everything past the '80s falls somewhere between dull and actively awful.

you're missing out on outside

My current ranking from the classic period through '95 (as far as I've gotten in my recent voyage through his discography) would be:

Young Americans through Scary Monsters > Hunky Dory through Aladdin Sane > Diamond Dogs/Pin Ups >>> Man Who Sold The World > Outside > '80s soundtrack songs and 'Loving The Alien' and 'Blue Jean' > Let's Dance > '87-'93 (in roughly reverse chronological order) >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Tonight

I can't decide whether Outside is amazing or a mess. Maybe it's just an amazing mess.

It's like a peanut butter stack: you see it and think "omg that looks so good, I'm going to enjoy this" and you eat it and you're thinking "OMG this IS good, my dreams are real" but by the time you get to the end you think "OMG I am so STUFFED I feel SICK I never want another peanut butter stack again, I should just stick to those Snickers peanut butter cube things, they are so much smaller and less sickly".

http://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/660/cpsprodpb/D513/production/_88074545_bowie.jpg

🗻

:/

I can't decide whether Outside is amazing or a mess. Maybe it's just an amazing mess.

I think this post, which I’ve been noodling on for most of the last week, is probably more relevant to this thread than the Outside one. But here goes:

A lot of has been written about Bowie’s legacy since his passing, but for me, the thing I keep coming back to is the fact, or perception anyway, that Bowie was the guy who spotted trends before they were trends and brought them into the mainstream. Outside very clearly—and very self-consciously—was designed to explore that side of Bowie's persona. Yes, it was a celebration of “outsider” art and the sordid characters that produce it, but even more than that, a tribute to Bowie's own mythology for championing, popularizing, consuming, and, ultimately, discarding those artists and movements before moving on to something else.

Candidly, I think Bowie understood the significance of that role—as Lester Bangs wrote about Young Americans, Bowie's best work often seemed to be when he failed at something so wildly that it became something else entirely—but don’t think he was ever entirely satisfied playing it. Deep down, Bowie really did wish he could be a pop hermit like Scott Walker or a performance artist like Chris Burden physically harming himself for his art. But as his copious interviews on the talk show circuit reveal, he also wanted to be loved, admired and appreciated.

I realize now that this is one of the reasons I have always found Outside so fascinating, because it not only self-consciously exploits that tension — but the project itself was consumed by it, transforming from the ambitious, careening, improvised opera about “outsider" art it was initially conceived as into a messy, overstuffed “gothic non-linear hyper-cycle” into an art rock concept album, the subject of which is "David Bowie."

That’s why, even tho PAotD judges Outside to be something of a failure … I’m not sure it actually is. The songs are great. The bootlegged Leon sessions that started it off are completely unique. The story is intentionally batshit and incomprehensible. Not everything works and some of it is baffling, but it’s never boring. As a result, the project as a whole feels like…pretty much everything Bowie ever did. And on those terms, I feel like it has to be judged as one of his most important releases.

Wow

Yeah, like I said, I'd been tossing that around for a week.

I have no trouble ranking 1. Outside as his best since the late seventies.

Digression but:

Bowie's best work often seemed to be when he failed at something so wildly that it became something else entirely

Thisis absolutely why I feel like Young Americans, as an album, is the true precursor of the class of 79 postpunkers: Gang of Four, PiL, The Pop Group, The Fall, The Slits, no wave...to my mind YA p much is the turning the point, the exact moment when the ebb of the 60s ended and the fliw of the 80s began...