David Bowie - The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars

Well David Bowie died the other day and everyone and their brother has posted about him ad infinitum.  I suppose that's to be expected and to be truthful I'm pretty happy to see that so many people had good things to say about him, and that everyone seemed to see that the guy was a genius, even if they didn't like parts of his career (like me).  To me, Bowie will always be the guy from the 70's that constantly was changing and pushing the envelope of Rock Music and essentially challenging us to keep up with him for as long as we could.  He was cool with it if you didn't want to keep up anymore.  Someone would take your place.

Now I find it odd that despite not really caring for his later music (and by later I mean pretty much my entire adult life), his newer music hasn't detracted from his legacy to me.  Hell, with some bands if I hear a bad album or two in a row I'm done and don't even listen to their older stuff that I liked before.  I don't know why that is, and I'm sure it's an issue with me and not them.  It's something I never faulted Bowie for, though.  He didn't need to prove anything to me, because he is a titan just for the 70's music I grew up on.

Bowie really was a titan, too.  He was like our cool yardstick.  If you weren't into Bowie, we weren't into you.  I said somewhere the other day that when I was growing up it seemed to me that you were either into Bowie and new, cool things or you were into Ted Nugent and beating people up.  That probably over simplifies things but that's certainly how I feel looking back at it, and I think I felt that way back then.

I'm not kidding when I say he was like a litmus test for us, and the album that you needed to know was Ziggy Stardust.  You needed to know a lot more than the fact that Moonage Daydream was on it, too.  You needed to know the whole album.  You needed to know it like the back of your hand, too.  It was okay to flub some lyrics here and there because who really knows what Bowie was on about half the time anyway, but you needed to know that record.  We could be friends without it, but we were tight if you knew it.

One of my favorite memories of high school is driving around in my friend's old Ford and I can't remember where we met these girls, but they didn't go to our school and they agreed to go hang out with us and drive around and do whatever stupid crap it was that we were going to get into that night. I was in the back with one girl and the other girl was up front with my friend.  I think my normal job was manning paraphernalia and handling the tunes as copilot but since this girl was up front she got to pick the music and I told her, "You can just play the radio or pick any tape outta here," and I handed her the tape box that held something like 36 cassettes.  I was the one that kept my friend's tapes organized and I remember her saying that she didn't know many people that kept everything alphabetical and then by release date (right about then i wished she was in the back with me!).  I told her it just made copiloting easier for me and that my friend just messed them up and left them lying around outside the box and I had to clean it up every time I got in the car.

Anyway, who cares, ya know?

So this girl says, "Wow! You have a lot of Bowie tapes!  Can I play Ziggy Stardust?"

"Uhhhh....yes.  Yes you can!"

So we put it in and the four of us drove around and smoked a bit of Happy and the four of us sang every single word to every single song to the best of our ability.  We may have messed up some lyrics but all that singing and smoking fogged up the windows (it was winter) and we were fucking cool as hell.  We sang Five Years.  A little to ourselves at first, but then when we all could tell that we all knew it, we built up some confidence and let it out a little.  I rolled another.  We sang Soul Love. These girls knew all the words to Soul Love?  Then Moonage Daydream and Starman.  We just aimlessly drove around, singing "It ain't EASY," and it was just weird and cool.

The auto-reverse kicked in and we sang Lady Stardust.  We sang Star and Hang on to Yourself  and it was good.  We practically cheered when we sang Ziggy Stardust and the girls sang the "Hey, man!" parts of Suffragette City and we sang, "Oh! Leave it alone!" and it went like that throughout the song. We sang, "The smell of that chick just puts my smile out of place" together and then went back to our "parts."  It was really something.

We finished with Rock N' Roll Suicide and it was the second coolest time I ever heard that song. We sang it kind of quietly because it was the end of the record (actually tape in this case).  When it was over the girl in front just turned off the stereo and we just talked for awhile until someone absent mindedly turned on the radio.  I don't remember where we went after that, I know we didn't actually make out with these two, which I'm sure was the goal when we started out, but we just hung out and had a really good time.

I never saw those girls again and I don't remember their names.  I wonder if they remember that night.  I wonder if my friend does?  Probably not, and that's okay.  Most people don't remember stuff like that, I guess.  I remember because I thought it was really worth remembering, and I still think so. When I heard Bowie had died it was the first thing I thought of.  I thought, "Thanks, Dave.  That memory is a really good one.  Looking back, I can't think of any single album that meant more to me when I was seventeen than Ziggy Stardust and I still love this record like it's a part of me.

My copy of this was a gift from my wife, who wasn't one of those girls from that night.  She probably doesn't remember giving me this particular record, but she did, and I'll never part with it because I think it's one of my favorite gifts ever.  Partly because I like that she bought something that she knew means a lot to me, but also because she likes Bowie, too.  We don't like that many of the same things musically but we like Bowie.  If I would have a Top Ten list of records I know that Exile on Main St. and Ziggy Stardust would be on it for sure, but I don't know about the rest.

David Bowie - The Man Who Sold the World

I think I’ve already mentioned how many people I knew in school that hated David Bowie because he was supposed to be this evil gay guy.  Now, I wasn’t some enlightened, way ahead of my time middle class white teenage boy.  I’m sure I was a complete asshole to people on more than one occasion.  Because I think empathy is something you learn, not something you just have.  When I had a tutor for math that was a teacher with a “roommate” is when I first figured out I knew someone that was really, actually gay.  I mentioned it to my parents (thinking I could get out of math tutoring) and I found out that my parents knew, didn’t care and had nothing but respect and admiration for the teacher that was my tutor.  In fact, the guy was on my dad’s bowling team.  So I was told at a pretty early age to get over myself.  So I think I did.  As I get older I think I get better at understanding other people’s problems.

Back then, I used to hang out at a friend’s almost every day.  I slept there as much as I slept at home, and we spent a lot of time listening to music.  One of the cool things was that his dad had a night job as a janitor in an office building.  Yeah, you’re thinking, “what’s so cool about that?”  Well, Capitol Records had an office there, that’s what!  My friend’s dad had a good memory and remembered a lot of artists I used to tell him I liked, and the dude came home with stacks of promo records and posters all the time.  I didn’t get to keep the records because it was my friend’s dad, after all.  I got several posters, and my friend and I put posters up over every square inch of his room.  We thought it looked really, really cool.

One of the records in my friend’s bin was David Bowie's The Man Who Sold the World.  It was the one with the black and white cover.  This was probably one of the first Bowie albums I ever heard, and they played very little of it on the radio, even here in Cleveland.  They did play a little, mostly late at night.  WMMS took all the credit for breaking Bowie in the US (Rush, Springsteen outside of the Jersey Shore, Alex Harvey and Roxy Music were all claimed WMMS’ own, too).  I remember I really loved The Width of a Circle (still do) and I thought Black Country Rock and All the Madmen were fantastic as well.  The title track did get a little play on WMMS, and I know Nirvana laid claim to it (Kurt did a great job on it).  But I remember playing this album and some people just looking at me like I was goofy or something.  I never really thought this was such a weird record, but as I’m listening to it right now, I guess it kind of is.  After All is some strange stuff, but I think I really thought it was more mature than weird.  I don’t know if I agree with that assessment these days, but I really wanted to be older than I was when I was a kid, which is funny, because I don’t want to be older now, nor do I want to be younger.  I’m good with what I am and I just want to be happy.

And lemme tell ya, The Man Who Sold the World makes me very happy.  Running Gun Blues is super cool.  The Width of a Circle is still one of my favorite songs, and Saviour Machine is one of those songs that as I’ve gotten older I’ve really grown to appreciate.  I think Saviour Machine’s kind of cheesy keyboards could have wrecked everything, but they don’t.  They’re dated, yeah, but so is the whole album.  The Man Who Sold the World is definitely a product of its time, but that’s okay with me.  I don’t need everything to be timeless or even a step forward.  Just being good is good enough, ya know?

I mean, the sleaziness of She Shook Me Cold never really goes out of style, does it?  If it has for you, you should probably rethink your style, because this is some cool, heavy stuff.  Mick Ronson has such a great sound all over this record, and Bowie’s lyrics are both dumb and perfect.  I think that’s something Bowie does really well, dumb and perfect lyrics.  He gazed a gazely stare and strange fascinations fascinate me are inane things to say, but when Bowie sings them it’s okay.  Hey, it could be a lot worse!  I can also remember that when I actually got to hear The Supermen on the radio I’d be pretty excited.  I like the way the tension builds and fades in that song.  It’s like it’s stretchy music, and I can really get behind stretchy music.

The other thing about this record is that there’s multiple covers.  Not cover songs, but album covers.  The original has Bowie wearing a dress.  I guess in 1970 that was as bad as having an anatomically correct dog body on a Bowie drawing a few years later.  So they came out with the black and white cover, I think.  I’ve got another cover, like a comic or cartoon.  That one has been widely faked!  I was really worried after I bought one not too long ago because it was a good price and it’s a cool cover.  But I checked and mine’s the real deal (I guess the matrix numbers aren’t stamped on the fakes, and mine are stamped).  Sound wise, I could probably look for a more perfect record because mine’s been loved by me for a long time, but I think I’m good.  I’ve got the Rykodisc cd and the black and white and comic covers, so I probably have enough.  The Rykodisc is an excellent sounding cd, with some bonus tracks that don’t matter much.  Both of my records play with a little noise on them, but it’s not very noticeable.  I think for a record I dragged around to parties, the black and white cover one I have is pretty nice, actually!

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.