David Bowie - Pinups

I really loved David Bowie when I was in high school. I still really love the guy, but I can remember arguing music (as I was wont to do back then) and really getting a lot of shit for liking, "that fag." So not everyone liked the guy in suburbia, but I did, and a lot of my friends did (when I get around to Ziggy I'll have a story for ya). Pinups wasn't exactly a smash hit, and I think it was kind of the record that separated the people that had Ziggy Stardust and maybe Hunky Dory from the mildly obsessed Bowie fans of which I was one of.

Pinups is a really accessible album, and even though the whole thing is covers, there's not many musicians that can cover a song like Bowie. He can take a signature song by someone, and twist it around until it's a Bowie song. He almost always seems to get it when he covers songs. Way back in 1978 or so when I was really getting into this album I had heard The Easybeats and Pretty Things, but just in small pieces on weird radio shows. To me, Friday on My Mind was all Bowie, and so was Rosalyn. I loved (still do) those songs and thought they were just a killer way to open up an album side.

My favorite song on the album is Sorrow, and I had never heard The McCoy's version. I don't think I heard it until I was in my 30's, and I essentially hated it. It wasn't the version Bowie had in mind (which was The Merseys), but in my mind, Sorrow is a Bowie song, and one of the best Bowie songs at that. The other one he just owns is See Emily Play, and I like Syd's Pink Floyd so that's saying something. Bowie just seems to be able to keep the weird just under the surface so the song has some room to breathe.

The record itself is a Dynaflex, and I like it. It sounds terrific but I can totally understand the detractors of those types of records. Some of them sound like hell from the get go, and they seem more fragile than standard records so they can get noisy fast with less than careful handling. I've even still got the original inner sleeve, which has a couple of pictures of David in a suit with a saxophone. The front cover is pretty iconic, with Twiggy and Bowie in their makeup masks. One thing I really like is that the record tracks songs right up against each other, so there's hardly a break. Which means when one song ends, the snare crack or guitar riff of the new song just sticks in my memory so when I hear Rosalyn on the radio (once in a very great long while), I immediately hear the controlled chaos that's the beginning of Here Comes the Night, even if they don't play it. Which leads me to what is obviously Bowie's favorite song on the album, Where Have All the Good Times Gone?

I can say that because it's the only song the lyrics are included for, and it's the only song with a pause before it. It always seemed obvious to me, but a friend of mine always said that was just a guess and he probably liked The Who and Pretty Things better because he included two songs by them, but I've always felt that asking the guy that mastered the record to put a pause in front of the last song spoke volumes. I assume that Where Have All the Good Times Gone is Bowie's nod to nostalgia. That's the song that reminds him of those old clubs and people and that's the song that puts him right there in the days before he was famous. Kind of like Sorrow puts me right back in the days before a driver's license among friends was common. Pinups is a terrific album. Not many people can pull off a bunch of covers, and Bowie doesn't miss a step.