Also, they need to be good albums. They are not always both.
The Yardbirds Remember feels hastily compiled and poorly planned. The industrial metallic lettering and silly seagull photo on the cover testify to that but there is just too much to skip once it's on the turntable. This, however, is indicative of the band's recording career which played out as a few extraordinary moments in a near featurelessly because unsympathetically recorded field. So, it's instructive but not a great listen overall.
Changesonebowie, on the other hand, is both.
There is a dud: I cannot fathom why John I'm Only Dancing is on here (it wasn't just because it was a single, he released others during this time: Sorrow isn't on this, though it wasn't written by him) or reworked more than once in later years; for all of any significance it holds it always felt like a mosquito turning up.
But it's just one dud. The other ten are masterpieces and there is a strange effect of walking through a hall of great marble columns at the same time as the best party of the year.
This record is how I heard most of these songs for the first time.
Space Oddity drifts in and grows brighter and colder until it seems like a tiny explosion disappearing in and joining the distant star field. The soaring harmonies and the sudden downer of the central section, the whispered countdown in the opening verses and the takeoff made out of ... I still haven't dared to work out what they used for it. Not knowing anything of the many careers of Bowie at that moment I heard the song up close like that I assumed that this was the first thing he ever recorded. That, in the mid 70s when this album was released, was the point.
John I'm Only Dancing.
Changes begins with such sophistication and cinematic intrigue it seems to stand outside of time itself. The cool, jazzy verses and the big boppy choruses don't gel at first but before the end of the first listen they're both at home with each other. The languid sax at the end sounds like cigarette smoke in a detective movie.
The Ziggy songs bring the tight chill of a story. Razor sharp fuzz guitar playing a riff that sounds more like a fanfare. Bowie flying in from outer space on a high oh yeah. A cool cruel song that fades in sadness before the jet engines of Suffragette City scoop us up all the way to the rollercoster chorus and A-F powerdrive.
Less than a breath later it's Jean Genie like an old time rave up by the Yardbirds but kinkier and tougher. Don't know what it's about but need to walk around in it unseen for awhile. DududududududududuDUD!
Side two. "This aint rock and roll. This is genocide!" The scrawning guitar riff, the cowbell and we're into the Stones doing sci-fi with a robot chorus. Don't know what's going on here either but don't know if it's safe to step in.
Rebel Rebel. This I had heard when someone put it on over the school PA while we were waiting to get split into PE teams one morning. Someone knew it was Bowie but couldn't tell me the song. I only cared about the riff which was so engrossing it seemed to go forever and still feel too small a serve. Here it was. It took me by surprise. I played it twice in a row the first time.
Young Americans. Cold plastic funk which I didn't skip but didn't like either (until decades later).
Fame. Funk but with something weird and heavy about it. It sounded like the kind of thing he'd sing in the then new movie where he played an alien. That's where I went whenever I heard it. the video had him singing in a suit. His hair was impossibly orange and he seemed too thin to be alive. Life on his planet was a strange thing.
Golden Years. Funk but with Gregorian chant and something light and modal overhead. More about fame? I couldn't tell. The gold in the years didn't seem to be about riches. There seemed something oddly demonic about it like someone listening to a tempting inner voice. The happy rhythm of the verses seemed a taunt. The whistling in the fade another. Creepy. Beautifully creepy.
There is no real anecdote to go with this one except that in the May holidays when I bought it I found a new galaxy of images to add to my daydreams and knew I would be finding every last album these songs were from and greedily gouge out even more. Even the lesser numbers here felt brash and new. They could only be topped toward the end of that year by something I claimed for my own, new, coloured like cake icing and harder than ship rivets: Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols. Until then changesonebowie would fill me in on the world to come.
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