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.
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