After the whispered countdown behind the vocals, Major Tom lifts off, wonders at the sight of his home moving into the distance. Something goes wrong and his ship is set to drift away from the earth forever as he contemplates his complete isolation in a tin can far above the world. A mellotron string section (thank you, Rick Wakeman) and glissandi on the stylophone and more spacey vibraphone and sparse drumming work for a song that seems to float in zero G the way its protagonist does.
Bowie would phase out his quaint weird tales over the next few albums and was already beginning on this album with songs that feel far more personal than any he'd released. The President Joes with the Running Gun Blues and Supermen to come would drift off into the dark matter the same as Major Tom while our Div explored the benefits of narrating as though from experience.
Unwashed and Somewhat Slightly Dazed gives us a promising title but begins as though it's going to be a sensitive ballad with sawshy acoustic guitars and a gentle vocal. Before you know it the gears crank up and it starts a kind of Bo Diddly shuffle with a full band and becomes a kind of Dylan/Velvets rant. He's a poor hippy and she's the daughter of riches, craning her neck to see him from the height of her window. But he's dangerous and sexy and he draws her attention (though her own attraction to him makes her sick). It drags into a jammy chord progression of guitars and blues harp until it ends.
Don't sit down is a joke that came out of a jam session that should have been erased. It's a little like seeing an interview with the stars of a new whacky comedy gad about and then cringing when you see the trailer. Anwyay...
Letter to Hermione is a gentle, sensitive ballad about a lost love that still burns in the spurned narrator. It's personal (and autobiographical, by the way) and heartfelt if a little precious. After the previous track, its discipline and melodic performance are welcome.
Cygnet Committee begins in stately fashion with Bowie chugging an acoustic guitar as the pieces of a roack band seem to wake around him (some of them backwards). The sense of an epic is clear and lifts as we hear the initial lines about a kind of exhausted love. Something tells you it isn't about a boy and girl but an individual and a population. The song deftly progresses through a set structure a few times but never quite feels like it as a lot of thought has been given to dynamics and momentum. The narrator is at times a fallen messiah or cult leader and at others just another hippy pressed into fatigue by the futility of trying to generate mass creativity. At one point slogans like All you Need is Love and Kick Out the Jams are directly quoted. The age is at its end and it's a mess. Musically, it is heavily influenced by Jacques Brel's creepier moments like My Death but it sounds like much more than a copy. It sounds like someone who has found a genuine path from influence through inspiration to originality. Space Oddity aside, this is the first song on this album that sounds like a lot of the decade to follow will sound in terms of its boldness, scale and sense of progression. By the time the drums find the bolero beat under Bowie's increasingly impassioned plea for life he has well and truly arrived ... as himself.
Janine, which would have opened side two of the original vinyl, seems a straighforward bright boy/girl song with a catchy chorus and guitar riff. He holds off being open with her, feeling it might be too much. By the time you get to lines like, "but if you take an axe to me you'll kill another man," we are in a place darker and more dangerous than bohemian Chelsea in the still Swinging Big Smoke.
An Occasional Dream begins as a quite jolly whimsy with bright acoustic guitars bearing a light vocal. An electric bass comes in, then drums, and then a hippy dippy flute section. The song describes an old affair with real longing, leading to the chorus which plays broad and stately. It's beautiful but sounds like a doomed version of Bowie and I can never remember more than the chorus.
Wild Eyed Boy From Freecloud emerges as another acoustic ballad but soon transforms through extra orchestration, developed structure and vocal performance into what, for all the world, sounds like a show tune. The people of a small village imprison the wild eyed boy who has come preaching love and communion with nature. He is brought to deliverance by his mystical home and the villagers seem to turn toward him. But having already made their decision to hang him the villagers get flattened by the bouldering rage of Freecloud. Once back home the boy kicks pebbles off the clouds in shrugging disgust. There are several sections and the orchestral arrangement builds through them. And one of the things that happens is a shift from Bowie's usual voice, familiar from the first full LP to the strong stage-ready wail that would serve him through Ziggy to Diamond Dogs. We're hearing the first of many epics that, though they shifted from Broadway to the rock theatre he would begin to develop as a main approach from the next album onward. Bowie liked the song so much (there's more than a little autobiographical allegory happening in it) that he put it in the set of his last gig as Ziggy, years later.
God Knows I'm Good begins with lush acoustic chords. Bowie comes in with a straightforward vocal about an impoverished old woman caught shoplifting. As the shoppers and staff close in judgementally and the woman collapses she intones the title phrase which is also the chorus. That Bowie narrates this from a first person perspective is notable as he didn't really pursue this avenue, moving on to explore storytelling from deeper within his characters. It's not a bad song and the chorus is compelling but it is rendered near colourless by the peaks of the songs either side.
Memory of a Free Festival is announced after Bowie asks the producer if he should. He describes in a plain melody a joyous occasion of music, drugs and love which seems to have included a mutually acceptable alien abduction. The arrangement begins with a simple harmonium which holds Bowie's invoking tone well. The slow chant, whether solo or choral has a pleasing build: Sun machine is coming down and we're gonna have a party, uh huh...
I think I've been clear about my bias here. This is the Bowie of the golden shoulder length perm of Dylan-worshipping hippies. The look and lifestyle might well have suited him but its time was gone by this set. The new one emerging from beneath it was far more exciting. Taking the goofy novelty songs he was happy to do the last time but blending them with compelling stories gave us Space Oddity which still sounds fresh. Cygnet Committee, with a little work, could have been on Diamond Dogs or Station to Station. Most of the rest falls between the world he was leaving and the one he was planning. That one, the one that produced a decade of brash and inventive greatness, could dazzle even when it misstepped.
Tony Visconti, near lifelong producer and arranger was here for all but Space Oddity which he felt was gimmicky. Undersung when other collaborators were around like Brian Eno (still incorrectly assumed by many to have been the producer of Low), Visconti proved a fine arranger and sound production thinker. The peaks of this record have the sound of a great artist forming and emerging from the artistic suicide of pleasing a peer group and that sound has a lot to do with the musicality and coaching of Tony Visconti.
When this album was rereleased it was with a Ziggy-era photo on the cover, IBM font and named after the opening track. You could feel the embarrassment just holding it. As for Bowie himself, next stop was a rock outing that approached metal, and after that a poppier effort which showed more clearly than anything how far he had come from sensitive new age laments to intense epics like Life on Mars or deceptively gentle malefactions like Quicksand. Bowie was turning a little to such greatness in this album but he had a skin or two to shed before he could. That is also the sound you hear here, and not for the last time.
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