1970@50: THE MAN WHO SOLD THE WORLD - DAVID BOWIE

 

If his 1969 album (various titles: it's the one with Space Oddity) showed an artist emerging into definition as a songwriter his follow up was the first indication that he was going to make moves on his image and sound. With 2020 hindsight it looks like a bold game plan but the thing Bowie picked up between his eclectic 1967 eponymous debut and his rebooted eponymous debut two years later was that a committed record was a better bet. So, on the 1969 one he sounds like one singer songwriter with a band behind him and two sides of whatever he had that had srpouted out of the now tired folk rock genre. Then he made a metal album.

The Man Who Sold the World is the same kind of songs, if more brutal, arranged with even less variation than the previous platter. This album is also the first one on which Bowie worked with the great Mick Ronson, rock guitarist extraordinaire and deft arranger. With a folder bursting with dark themed lyrics and very finished songs the pair set to creating Bowie's blackest record until Diamond Dogs.

The epic Width of a Circle opens with tremulous feedback and a snakey descending guitar riff, joined in cruisey fashion by the band until it grunts into gear as a hard rock groove. Bowie's vocal is the high nasal rock shine he would affect well into the Ziggy Years before abandoning it from Young Americans onward. Immediately, we lose the whole metal goodness of the track and understand that this one doesn't want to play normal. The lyric itself is a kind of debauched pilgrim's progress, taking the narrator from a personal trek of self discovery and self-loathing to a S&M encounter with god or a demon (it's hard to tell) in a second section driven by a more conventional boogie rock growl. There's a kind of ascent into apotheosis in the wordless repeat of the opening figure. Someone's risen.

All the Madmen begins with a quiet fumble on the acoustic which soon articulates as a real chord figure. It's joined by an eerie low profile feedback. We're in Hammer Horror territory. Bowie's vocal is his "other" voice, the one he'd use on half of the next album and all of Ziggy; a kind of comb and tissue paper buzzing tone, kind of camp but also a real character each time. "Day after day, they send my friends away to mansions cold and gray to the far side of town where the thin men stalk the streets and the sane stay underground." The Paul McCartney of Eleanor Rigby would have maimed and killed for that compact narrative. Immediately, the landscape is grim and that's just a few lines. Add a loopy recorder and some robust Les Paul chording and then a shreiking synthesiser and you have a nightmare to beat the band. Except that you can sing along to it because this is Bowie and he never forgets to bring a tune. A horror movie in a song. It wont' be the last. Important to note, this was inspired by Bowie (maybe we should say David Jones for this) visiting his half brother Terry, who was confined in care with schizophrenia. Bowie took his frustration out in song and here it is, pounding at us as we join in the chorus. Getting a vibe yet? "Zane zane zane, ouvre le chien!" Nor do I but I am getting the vibe.

Black Country Rock might seem to those of us who read biographies to refer to the twin hard rock influencers of 1970, Led Zep and Sabbath but the odd thing here is that the vocal is a strangely bitchy take on his friend and rival Marc Bolan. The song might conceivably have been a T-Rex number but Bowie's mordant vibrato and boomy rock revival chords tell of a curious jab. Good song, though.

After All is the song I played the same hour I heard of Bowie's death. How many times had I lain in a teenage dark listening to its earthward dragging waltz with the bowster whispering his Nietzschean lines and demented cockney choirs intoning: Oh By Jingo! Countless. The end of the first side in the old money was a sharp left turn from the arrogance of the hard rock of the rest of the side. It's like we stopped in the middle of the wake and remembered the corpse on the table. There in the great dark that bore this song's idea is the line: won't someone invite them, they're just taller children. It cut me to my ashen blood. A kind of sea dirge for the funeral march of all time. I love it every time I listen and it never gets old.

Side two starts with a simple three chord strum that ends in a surprise tympanum boom. A sinister feedback lingers in the background. Bowie's buzzy voice comes in with a tale about a war veteran who is so used to killing that he can't tell the difference between war and civilian life. Running Gun Blues. It snaps to the moment the tympanum is replaced by the crispest snare drum in recording history. The song doesn't go much further than that but doesn't have to. Why? because Bowie has learned something.

He's learned, since the often complex stories of the first album lost him an audience and the more searching narratives of the second did the same, that with music it's better if you don't sing the whole story. It's better if you let the music help out. Between the last and this, apart from anything else, the mighty Tommy was released which did just that. Townshend understood that opera is a mesh of meaning, one piece in the words, another in the tune and the orchestration and another still in the implied action. The Man Who Sold the World is Bowie's post-Tommy record. and it remains one of his most tightly coherent. 

Take the next one. Saviour Machine. It's pretty much the story of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Computer goes mad. Bowie narrates a little exposition and then it's over to the computer cam for the rest. It comes from the dark of the vinyl between the tracks in a busy 5/4 gallop but settles into a 6/8 canter as we hear about President Joe and his dream of a digital King Solomon who then finds its life is too easy and decides to rustle up some spice with social chaos. A big spitting synthesiser solo in the middle tells you all you need to know. It might ruin the mood to say that the melody of the break is the same as the opening of the Cilla Black chestnut You're My World but life's tough.

She Shook Me Cold starts with a few grimacing Hendrix style wah wah twirls before the dam bursts into a world of tritonal grunge as Bowie almost vomits his vocal about a debauchee who meets his hedonistic match and can't quite recover. A middle section breaks out the back story but he's met his match and the point at which he admits his defeat and servitude is the moment that takes this way out of a Sabbath soundalike. "She don't know I crave her so" is a screech of anguish that ends in a few seconds of tight breathing before the final verse kicks in like the first. As I've pointed out in the articles on Sabbath's first two platters in this series, they were far from a metal chug machine but Bowie's take adds a moment of tension that is pure cinema that they never got to.

The title track begins with a pleasant Latin shuffle which is taken over by a phased-out Bowie who tells a weird tale of meeting a stranger on the stair who tells him that his life has left him spare. Has he sold the world in the literal sense, to an alien race? Or has he sold his potential, his reality for the fury of the chase to sex, drugs, rock and roll, power, fame, expertise....? It's hard to tell but we are left as spooked as the narrator, especially in the fade which keeps the Latin side-to-side going but adds an epic wordless choir as the song seems to sink slowly into a vortex. If you speak to a later X-er you'll hear them think of it as a Nirvana song. I wonder, though, did Cobain find something familiar in its brief depths that his fans could only guess at, something lightless and endless that he saw in awe and sought to touch, at least once?

The Supermen is a closing track that will surprise no one who reads a Bowie biography but spooked me. It's earth-bowel drums and prehistoric male choirs mixed with a crunchy Les Paul and Bowie's buzzy voice tell of rites and conflicts of the ubermensch. Extremely effective use of limited resources turn this song which might have come off as petulant and silly into a tiny epic of imagination. the final words are in the Ziggy voice and reach to the dark heights: "So Softly a supergod dies."

This is the second Bowie album I owned on vinyl. It disappointed me. I bought it the same day as I bought the Who compilation Meaty, Beaty, Big and Bouncy which also disappointed me. I wanted the Who to have been stadium-ready deafening rockers from the start but they sounded like The Beatles. I had read that this Bowie album was a "real explosion into heavy metal" but it seemed so noncey. It was months before, listening to both, that I came to understand how writers found things in music that were hard to sing to and defied all dancing but cut through the packaging plastic and into the sharp and jolting electricity within. I came to that and finally felt reverence. And then punk happened and I woke up in the late '70s.

Listening notes: for this article I listened to the incredible 2015 remaster as a hi-res download. Vinyl can never compete. My late '70s copy had the RCA packaging with the NME article on the back and the Ziggy era front cover. It created a very different impression from the original one.

1970@50: LOADED - THE VELVET UNDERGROUND

And then there were three. And Doug Yule. Same as the previous except drummer Mo Tucker left to have a baby. All songs by Lou Reed and four lead vocals by Yule. If you don't want to look it up, Doug Yule sounds like a younger Lou Reed. Three years at the top of the hip world and the bottom of the charts had taken their toll. The previous record had used the absence of John Cale's avant gardism to present a cleaner sound and this one was meant to be the pop breakthrough. The title not only referred to being intoxicated but also Loaded with hits.

Who Loves the Sun? begins with a sweet Yule vocal and Mammas and Pappas backing vocals. There's an edit towards the end that's so rude it sounds like a hard tape splice where the band falls into a Beach Boys style a cappella break before resuming. Whatever the intention this mostly appealingly sugary number sounds like something from half a decade before. That and the jolting vocal break make it sound like the most sneering attempt at writing commercially imaginable.

It tinkles and jangles into a fade that gives way to one of the most iconic of all Velvet Underground Songs and one that would effectively be the source point of Reed's career beyond the band. While a few of the lines lifted from the lyric might promise drugs and cross dressing this is more of a Diane Arbus photo rendered in song and has more to say to the hippies ridiculing the squares of the previous generation that those pre boomers have life in them, didn't invent sex or hedonism either but got there before the flower children. Reed has and eats his cake with this one. Sounds risque but it's not what you think. The editing of the track on the first release of this album leaves out a bridge and an ecstatic choral coda and Reed often cites it among the reasons why he upped and left before it was in the shops. What remains is a fabulously catchy song that pays the patient listener with depth that it pretends it doesn't have.

Rock & Roll treads path already familiar and would continue to be as a band puts the term Rock and Roll into a title or a chorus, mentions teenagers and the radio. This one adds a circular chord progression. The major reason this doesn't sound dated to me is that the formula was in place for decades and seemed to stretch into my adulthood. Or is it that this kind of boomer anthem was as go-to as a Chuck Berry knockoff is to every single garage band that ever practiced under the house or in a bedroom? History will decide.

It's here that I'll stop going track by track and say that the first impression I had of this record has never been superseded by a closer listen later. The concept of making a record stuffed with hits condemned it to sounding of its time and once you've done that you fall behind the times. In the interest of full disclosure I find most of the rock music released between 1969 and 1976 grating and regressive and, while this album is by no means a poor effort it sounds more like that kind of rock music than any of the three previous VU albums. 

Exceptions are New Age that could fit comfortably on any solo Lou Reed album form the '70s, I Found a Reason and Sweet Nuthin' which continue the gospel influences that helped make the third album so strong. These don't sound like Boomers on the Radio but they do hark back to the days of a better band.

So was it the further dissipation of the membership, the influence of new and straight-minded members/musicians, weariness with the game of it, that makes this one sound like a contract filler rather than a statement by a group? All and none, probably. The next studio album to bear the band's name was effectively a Doug Yule solo effort and, while it's a perfectly creditable set of songs, it is mired in that flavourless swamp that was most of early '70s rock. When Reed left for his solo career he redesigned himself faster than Bowie for a little while until settling on a premature rock sage role with records like Berlin. And when it came to do the live album mandatory for all successful rock acts of the '70s (even The Beatles had a couple of posthumous live discs) Rock 'n' Roll Animal it was unusually a single album and featured an almost all Velvet Underground set list.

Many fans of the band put this at the end of the studio albums and have no issue with its sound or writing, thinking of it as a kind of cynical progression. Me, I can listen to it but almost always stop it near the end of the old side one. I keep wanting to listen to Transformer or Berlin. But this record also poses questions along the lines of the ship of Theseus. Huh? Well, Theseus had a ship and over the years it had all of its parts replaced. Was it still the ship of Theseus? Was the Velvet Underground of Loaded the same one as the Banana album? Decidedly not but closer to the self-titled one. But the self-titled one was a set of heavily crafted pieces that continued the raw emotional shocks of the earliest recordings which survive as ghosts of the afternoon on Loaded. If "and Nico" is a warehouse apartment with the windows blacked out Loaded has them all smashed in. The sunlight's blaring in but it's just not the same place.

1980@40: ICEHOUSE/FLOWERS/FLOWERS/ICEHOUSE

I saw this band before I knew who they were. A massive line up at Festival Hall that included XTC, Magazine and a pre-fame INXS. Flowers, as they were then, took the stage with a thick crisp mix and a fashionably static performance style. Singer Iva Davies proved gymnastically adept. He sounded like Marc Bolan when they did a T-Rex cover and Bowie when they did one of his. At first I thought that was pretty good but this was in the era of DIY style and behaving like a cover band made the band lose points. The songs were catchy enough but that note perfect vocal sampling had to go.

I thought very little of them after that until the video for I Can't Help Myself appeared on Sounds one afternoon. The band setup in a big concrete multi-level carpark and synched through the song. I loved how the chorus was delayed with a brief guitar instrumental and seemed to be about the dangerous side of mental illness. The charts at that stage offered far fewer love songs than most of the years of the '70s: Enola Gay was about the plane that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, Underpass was about a kind of Ballardian isolation, Counting the Beat was about masturbation, and so on. This joined the stream but did so with a singable chorus and a staccato keyboard hook in the verse. So, no more Bowie vocal party tricks, then.

Cut to Schoolie's Week 1980. I was staying at a friend's family unit high above Broadbeach. Through the floor to ceiling windows you could see all the other cells, expensively dimly lit, each one a screenshot from the kind of neo noir film we'd be seeing in cinemas around the corner of the opening of the decade. We went to late night bars for drinks and pre-dawn cafes for toasted sandwiches after the drinks. We went to parties where no one was unwelcome. The endless beergardens in the afternoon and whatever you could get away with after sundown. We slept when we had to, regardless of the position of the sun. It was overcast for the second half of the week and it didn't bother us at all. Two songs will always bring that back for me. Holiday in Cambodia and We Can Get Together. After I made a tactical move to another flat on Mermaid Beach I heard the album that the second one came from. And in the middle of a loud night of drunken girls and boys I listened and liked what I heard.

You think the volume's too low at first. A single bass note on the synth coils out of the dark for a little too long until the vocal comes in with a strings like figure on the keyboards. "It's always cold inside the icehouse. Though the rivers never freeze ..." There's also a girl waiting outside waiting for a boy who'll never come. The Devil lives inside the icehouse, at least that's what the old folks say. As the parts of the verse develop the keyboard figure adapts to the chord changes and the bass keeps barrelling on. A pause for each chorus, a single line: there's no love in side the icehouse. This big lightless nightmare of a song moves slower than a funeral cortege until the palm muted chugging guitars push it into the territory of a tank battle. The images flash and soar into life.

Next came the song I mentioned before. A chunky electronic chug gives way to a shiny hot lead riff and a power chord announces the singer. "There must be something we can talk about..." And ends the verse with the first half of the chorus. The repeated plea, "No matter what your friends say, don't go too far..." Could have been written for us except that we really did need our friends to stop us (and they did, just quietly). The song was all teen fear, the fear that becomes indistinguishable from excitement and turns a night sky into a tide of wishes and the lights below it a ragged map. There's a great lust in the middle of it as there's a great lust at every party every night where everyone's well under twenty and changing like a chameleon as often as they have to get whatever it is they need. But it's also 1980 and three years of punk and punk-influenced pop have taken adolescent courtship from oafish rock unchanged since the '50s to this blend of angsty hesitation and bursting will. And at the end, finally with a high climatic sustained wordless vocal note beneath the chorus is the explosive refrain: WE CAN GET TOGETHER! And then, because it's still 1980, it finishes with chit chat and a rounded chord.

And that's what most of the album turns into, two streams of electronics and anthemic rock. The single after that was Walls which had a cinematic video to it. They attracted a lot of attention at the Countdown Awards and mimed Icehouse from within a wireframed neon cube. Whether it was a single or not the song Sister was on Countdown more than once. And the rest is success with a sharp ear for a hooky chorus enough to fill a good sized compilation album.

These aren't the only good songs on this first one and very few feel like filler. A disco version of Can't Help Myself didn't impress me but at least it was a different one. Nothing to Do was Iva back to his old cover version days in a Lou Reed mode. Pretty standard if enjoyable fare that helped my first Christmas holidays back in Townsville that bit more fun. What lifted it above standard was that sense of cinema it offered so boldly. No surprise in learning later that the producer was Cameron Allen, a film composer whose score for the political thriller Heatwave could do with a contemporary release.

But the thing about Flowers was that, regardless of how the band started it very soon became a group with a line up that changed around Iva Davies. A look through the songs credits on the record sleeve have him in every one and mostly solo compositions. As much as Tubeway Army really had just been Gary Numan and players so this band was Iva and friends. Oh, and it feels like they went in one way and came out another during my holidays but what had been a band called Flowers became the same band called Icehouse. Considering the font on the cover art no change was necessary, just now the album was called Flowers by a band called Icehouse. And when the Oz Rock wave flowed into the commercial FM stations in the decade to come there was no real way of using that much image to tell them apart from Australian Crawl or Mondo Rock. The songs were still better than those others' but that's where they moved and lived ever after.

So, while Flowers were never cool they appealed with the same crossover ease as the mainstreaming Split Enz were at the time, even going to rival that band's egg Crowded House with honours. I am the last to whinge about bands selling out but quick to point out that some were not doing so but reaching stated ambitions. See also The Police or The Pretenders. No shame in that. But I recall as though it were art directed by my own nostalgia, the pleasure of qualifying my affection for a hooky single, a Street Cafe or Great Southern Land, without ever needing to commit to fandom. It was a smirking nod across the picket line and felt as good as all smirks do. But now, with facial muscles that need to do more to show less I can listen to the songs and briefly run back out into the night of the Gold Coast canals and jump into the shadows before anyone sees me.

1970@50: LED ZEPPELIN III

 

I've already written about this one in my series on the band here so this shorter entry will have other concerns.

Led Zeppelin's third album was loaded from the off. After getting a lot of guff in the more popular press for being too monolithic and heavy the chief songwriters, Plant and Page holed themselves up in a Welsh cottage to absorb the dew and leafy goodness of the rustic life and breathe it out as a new album. This was it: not a tight loaded cartridge of road-tested goodies but a planned pregnancy.

But people like to simplify. LZ III is supposedly their first acoustic record or side one is rock and side two is folk or ... But, really it's a mix from the get go. The barnstorming Immigrant Song gives way to Friends which is heavy but acoustic (with Bonzo on the tablas!). Already the record is both the lofty Zeppelin and the lead in the band name. But if anything this album's mix of styles is less eclectic than confident. If the first was the campaign broadside and the second another first than this is what happens when they draw breath and see what they might want to do next.

What that was turned out to be a mix of folk with mandolins and 12 string guitars like Gallows Pole, plumbing pipe stompers like Out on the Tiles or weird blue freakouts like Hats Off to (Roy) Harper. It feels like comfort more than bravado. They would hone it to perfection in the next album before closing the door and starting freshly with the next one. If that's true why bother, why not just take a whole year off and make the fourth album?

Well, because it was 1970 and rock music for its most successful practitioners became something that could be developed through trial and error, a forgivable misstep here or a bold failure there. The era of Tommy and the White Album was one of disregarding limits and getting it out for a public, not some notion of an ocean of teenyboppers but a public. LZ III's energy rises and falls eccentrically: the hoedown of Gallows Pole fades before the gentle strum (after a false beginning) of Tangerine; the juddering monster Out on the Tiles explodes from the silence after the emotional wrenching of Since I've Been Loving You (which would have been a perfect side closer). The record dozes and wakes up violently again and again but even that has no pattern. After all the formalism leading to a Sergeant Pepper there needed to be more of an artist's choice about an album, a song after song rather than a solid core going from an imagined audience and tuning orchestra to the great coffin lid closing of A Day in the Life. Not a reaction against, just a restart. 

That's what this is. Instead of a more satisfying three album climb it's just the first of two. As the first two showed a refinement of their own. After Houses of the Holy everything changes from that again as circumstances demand pragmatism and triage. But at that point when the band that made this record were preparing for tours and more musical adventures to come they offered this. If it weren't so substantial I'd call it a sketchbook but take almost any of its tracks and play them outside of the sequence and they still work.

This is worth noting at this stage as it's not so easy to define what a pop music album is or should be. That has been the case since the early '00s when genres variously merged or splintered into ever finer fragments and the public became all of what they only partially had been before, the consumer base. That's not a rant from an old man as much as it is a recognition that moments like this album are more the norm and offering a concept (like Flaming Lips or Arcade Fire were still attempting in the late '00s) has not yet reached its quaint retro charm status. 

But this wasn't itself offered as a concept, just two sides of songs. The big cohesive statement with its levees of doom and stairways to the misty mountains was yet to happen. I know, the gimmicky cover with its planters wheel made a meaningless fan-service picture show is at odds with that but that was not in the band's control. Even if it had been it would still make a kind of cheeky kind of bait and switch. And the joke in that would have been that this was the sweetest and most sincere sounding Led Zeppelin records to date. So, I guess I still like it.

1980@40: TRUE COLOURS - SPLIT ENZ

 

Muffled voices, instruments warming up and suddenly a punky barre chord buzzes out with tight but light drumming. Tim Finn's urgent vocal does easy local gymnastics around a deceptively simple melody when the verse ends with the cry of the title: Shark Attack! Add momentum for each verse and race on. A brief break to add some orchestral drama and then an impossibly rapid piano solo before the last verse flies past to the fade. Split Enz have burst through the door and let us know that they made it into the '80s, leaner and meaner and are ready for their closeup.

Proof? Neil Finn takes the mic after an introduction on still fashionable palm muted chords. Neil's vocal is more fluid and warmer than big brother's and his way with a vocal melody and songcraft are going to win him more a-sides and take the band further away from their prog rock cabaret than they'd so far dared go. I Got You is all hooks and charm. A keyboard solo with a quirky turn away from the main progression pays tribute to both the old prog and the new wave at the same time. The song is pure joy.

And so is the rest of it, from the punchy rage of What's the Matter With You? to the quavering comic book figure of Nobody Takes Me Seriously Anyway, the soaring instrumental Choral Sea, the classically strong I Hope I Never. This set in its sleeve of spiky, Dutch tilted artwork and compressed production is a manual of assimilation that couldn't be approached as the generational kin like Billy Joel tried to do with some yelps and palm muting. With Split Enz the cultural exchange rate felt like dollar for dollar. Very slight shifts to their look but such a paring of their arrangements and songcraft made them indistinguishable from bands much younger making bigger splashes.

Neil Finn's influence cannot be underestimated here as he emerged as the kid brother that could and continued to prove his chartability in future singles like One Step Ahead and History Never Repeats. Brother Tim, no slouch himself, seemed outclassed and perhaps it wouldn't be until Neil's Crowded House years that he could break from the constraints. Until then, his fast, snappy songs that had fewer quirks than hooks sounded like everything else on the top 40.

But what did this mean? The next LP sounded much like this and the one after was more expansive with real orchestras and folk instruments and had a kind of concept to it. The direction suggested the kind of development that the boomers who ran the big radio stations and the record companies that fed them would recognise as orthodox; a little Beatles never hurt anybody, after all? Back in the land of the long white cloud the mighty mice of the Flying Nun label were producing miniature wonders for the ages with the likes of The Clean and The Chills aided and accessorised by the great Chris Knox who seemed to do what he did for the love of it. As the Enz grew and broadened they must have felt this pinch and even sting. In Australia, The Go Betweens were still quirky and low key and Nick Cave returned to Melbourne with a better defined bad boy saunter that you didn't have to believe for a second to enjoy it. Where could Split Enz go after they had finally cracked the code of charting in the new, short haired video arcade of post punk? They went boomer because the boomers finally gave them the money they'd been starving for over the decade just gone and cared to starve no more. They were selling to fans half a decade younger than their first fans had been and that's how you build a consumer base.

Until then, this disc, forty plus minutes of joyous hard edged pop that you will still like and sing along to forty years later, still stands. If you don't know any of the context that's all you need to hear. The band that had gone from obscurist art rock to teenybopper without ever going through a cool phase could at least write a good song and fill two sides of vinyl with them.

I'm saying all this as I didn't have this record at the time and a little later picked up the singles second hand as they worked so solidly well. My face might redden to admit that I turned my nose up at them for being oldies while really enjoying the songs. Well, I was seventeen and you're allowed to be as shallow as the bounds of human interchange will permit. Finally hearing the record after decades of all but forgetting it had been released was a strange experience as it felt old and familiar and unheard at the same time. But I still play it now because there are songs because there are songs because there are songs.