Changes didn't start with a power chord from Hell but a jazzy piano chord. A few more and you could smell the cigar smoke and scotch of a jazzy bar somewhere in the midwest of the US. This suddenly jumps to rhythm like a little goblin and plays an old school rockriff but then goes south to an unrock out of key experience. Pause for a smokey vocal with more self reflection that would have been decent in a Sinatra piece before lunching to the stars with a bright stuttering chorus of overlapping melodies. "I know that time may change me but I can't trace time." He's doing what he says on the tin.
Oh, You Pretty Things follows immediately and almost sounds like an extension of the last song but it has its own ideas. The narrator is having a bad morning, seeing a crack in the sky and a hand reaching out for him. Looks like the nightmares are here to stay. A slighty more jaunty piano gives way to a languid ballad arrangement. It's starting to look like the end of the common human as the soaring chorus tells us against thumping piano. "Oh, you pretty things, don't you know you're driving your mamas and pappas insane. Let me make it plain. Gotta make way for the homo superior." Bowie was always a deep reader and Nietzsche left him as wasted as it did most who read it to the end. He knew that ol' Friedrich wasn't a Nazi and knew that his ideas took him into transcendence. So, on David's most poppy sound record since his Cockney Psychedelia one four years before, he wrote a song about that.
This blends seamlessly into Eight Line Poem, a series of images set to a kind of stretched toffee country ballad or distorted reflection of one. A room with the breeze blowing at the curtains, a kind of prairie with the city in the distance. Mick Ronson's lap steel style playing on his Les Paul provides a rich descant to the gentle piano. An elusive image of the city's spirit being as fleeting as seeing the sun behind a tree branch. If there are more personal details to this one I know not nor care. It's a beautiful dozey mooded observation.
The next song, as good as its predecessors are, is the moment where the Bowie of all the years he's been Bowie separate from all the years he will be. There has been nothing like Life on Mars to this point and it is one of his eternal moments and one in his own career that he needed to beat to progress. He knew its importance. The verses describe a descent through F to C, dropping to E to D etc and would have worked easily on his old acoustic twelve string. But here is a case of getting what you pay for as he hired Rick Wakeman for the piano part. Wakeman young but already a lifelong musician was classically trained but an inventive improviser. Between the Strawbs and prog rock titans Yes, he was doing sessions. His fluid enlivening playing around the basic descent has led some listeners to hear chord progressions that aren't there. It is a cinematic performance. Bowie starts softly over it in one of his most subtly complex melodies with words about a debutante makes a scene in front of her parents and wanders listlessly into numbness as the bowed basses start sternly below. The chorus soars to an octave above the starting range as the strings bloom around it. Images of news shows, movies, tv, a world weighed down by its own media and false impressions. A clean high and brief guitar solo gives way to the next verse where Mickey Mouse has grown up a cow and on to more torutured and unstoppable disasters which might as well be fiction as fact. Another massive chorus and the penny drops as to the title line. It's not about humanity's next great adventure but a question: is that all we can do, now?
There is nowhere to put this song easily. It starts like a ballad but its lyric and arragement are so cinematic and fantastical. Despite the orchestral swells there is nothing of prog rock about it. While its brightness and falvoursome melodics and harmonic structure make it instantly appealing it failed several times as a pop single. It's just Life on Mars. (Trivia: the piano that Wakeman plays on this album is the same one Paul McCartney used on Hey Jude.)
A gentle strum with a light rollicking piano heralds Kooks (for small Z.) It's a comfy singalong to his son Zowie and imagines the three-strong family going about a loving and kooky life in a kind of cartoon world. He can go to school as much as he wants and then they can just throw the homework on the fire and go for a drive. He promises the boy belief and love and it's worth noting in this winsome piece that the child is being invited, not instructed, to join them. You might already know but I love the notion that Zowie grew up to be film director Duncan Jones. If you haven't seen Moon or Source Code you should. Guess he took them up.
If Life on Mars was soaring Quicksand is tidal. We are lifted to the crests of waves, float weightless at the crests, slide down and rise again. The heartfelt vocal sings a lyric of imagery of philisophy, faith and belief all of which add up to change. The chorus could be a stadium singalong but when I think of thousands intoning,"knowledge comes with death's release" I see a cult and need to open my eyes again. Bowie is saying goodbye to an attic full of old mind experiments and pathways (there's a word beginning with 's' that I refuse to use here). His mind is on the future and more of those changes from track one in mind. The bulk of the arrangement is layered acoustic guitars. Bowie long favoured acoustic 12 strings and there are a few on show but also moments where a gentle arpeggio on a 6 string tells the story. It's a marvel of balancing near identical voices. Bowie's vocal melody has the epic quality of some of the old stuff like Cygnet Commitee and he is generally left with the guitars to sing it in bittersweet voice. But then the same ranting bowed basses from Life on Mars come in and are joined by a lush full string section and Rick Wakeman's sublime piano improv. The chorus warning against belief hovers between inspiration and exhaustion and is a marvel of much from simple means. You might find yourself welling up with this one without ever knowing why but the sense of farewell to a former self could be as universal as going from adolesence to adulthood. The fade has more dazzling piano and strings as the tide takes the old self away.
The old side two begins with a cover that sounds like it comes from a musical. Fill Your Heart is so light and boppy and sugary that it sounds like a parody but that would be too much at odds with this record. Bowie's vocal ranges from the earnest to the impish as he tells us that being nice and gentle will clear you and make you free. While it sounds like a number written for one character to cheer another up, in context here it sounds like Bowie finding a similar promise to the one in Qucksand and changes about breaking away from burdensome normal life. Tight reed sections, springy piano and self harmonising give it the tang of a song made from sorbet. It ends, curiously on a saxophone squawk that falls into tape echo on to the opening of the next track.
Andy Warhol comes out from under the beaky echo with a sinister chromatic ringing melody and an engineer announcing the take, and title. Bowie speaks in a voice so affected you can feel the lights of the makeup mirror and the press of the greasepaint. A short back and forth about the pronunication of the name Warhol and you understand what's happening but if you didn't the take proper begins with peals of self-directed laughter. A forceful two guitar attack with Bowie on his 12 string and Mick Ronson on the 6 and taking the lead with a Flamenco-style minor run. Bowie throws out images of the artist who made his persona as much his art as the art itself, who pushes to the edge with semen fixes and imagines being a cinema where people could pay to look into his brain. Warhol himself was offended by the song, thinking it was a pisstake but Bowie was describing what he saw when he thought of the artist. Bowie never pulled the punch, not considering it to have been one and the pair did make up in the course of history. The Song ends on an exended acoustic thrash with Ronson chiuming harmonics overhead. Studio applause at the end. Worth noting here that the studio environment sounds and opening dialogue are not just a tribute to the glitz of the art life but also a nod to another of Bowie's inspirations Syd Barrett. The track If It's In You on The Madcap Laughs has a very similar false start where Syd flubs the opening twice and chats to his producer before his statement, "if we could cut," is cut and the song begins. I remember hearing the Barrett album long after being familiar with the Bowie one and the closeness of it popped right out. It's a clear and lovely tribute.
Song for Bob Dylan begins with acoustic strumming and a bendy electric intro. Bowie, stretching himself to invoke the Zimmerman and call him from his then current hiatus. Bowie wasn't alone in going to the extent of using an album track to say, come back and tell everyone what's what. Some folk think the painted lady of the chorus was the Factory's Edie Sedgwick but it really doesn't have to be. While the title does state the addressee this, like any song that uses an archetypal figure this one really speaks most through metaphor. Of course, Dylan fans tend to be fanatical enough to be that earnest (and Bowie might have been) so ...
Queen Bitch is a self avowed tribute to The Velvet Underground. An acoustic strum is taken up by a much ruder amp distorted electric guitar crunch with a strident 1-5-4-1 progression. This calms temporarily for Bowie's Lou Reed style spoken verses. The verses are all Reed and co. about the antics of a trans figure. An extended prechorus takes us into a joyous descriptions of frou frou in darkened rooms, tatts and bippity boppy hats. This song is nothing but utterly enjoyable and forms its own meta bridge between Bowie's admiration for the group and his production the following year of Lou Reed's masterpiece Transformer. The sound of this arrangement played by the band Bowie would take on tour and record with for the next two years and albums is the sound of those years and albums, a hard edged acoutic/electric stride.
A gentle strum opens The Bewlay Brothers. It's joined by a muted electric guiar using amp tremolo which echoes the vibraphone on the side one closer Qucksand. Bowie's voice come in dry with images of intrigue, campaigns and secrets. The chorus is a hard strum with some lyrical electric licks that might be either recorded backwards or just played and treated as though they are. The song follows the verse chorus pattern, returning to the quiet verses and building up for each chorus the same way. The exploits of the brothers of the title take on more cinematic bredth. And then, abruptly at the end of the final chorus the song is interrupted with a chorus of cockneys: Lay me place and bake me pie, I'm starvin' for me gravy. Leave my shoes and door unlocked, I might just slip away. It's gone from the Bewlay Brothers to the Kray twins. But really, it's Bowie himself and, more prominently, his half brother Terry whose schizophrenia was still galloping away from the mention on the previous album (All the Madman on Man Who Sold the World). Bowie would return to writing songs that stated his motion to understand his brother's condition. The two chord tension strumming into the fade of this song is accompanied by those cockney voices and is augmented by increasingly meanacing voices intoning variations of the words "come away". The sadness of the song is not just in the contrast it depicts between the brother's imagination and creativity and his inability to express it and Bowie's own swiftly developing capacity to do so. David cannot reverse Terry's troubles, he can only describe them.
This brings us to the end of David Bowie's most enduring statements, an undeclared concept album about change. After the earnest singer songwriter of Space Oddity (really, his second LP to be brought out eponymously, the first one presumably swept under) and after the metaloid sci-fi black-rocker he came to this point where he was shedding much of his training and the notion of being in training. Change begins at home and Bowie straight up learned piano to write most of these songs which is a major reason why they aren't structured in quite the same way as the previous albums' songs. There is a clear intention to forge the music through greater discipline with arrangements and performance (there are no extended guitar solos like on the previous outing and the epics are kept to a minimum and then with greatly trimmed running times). This is the record more than any of the others that finds the artist ready to put the hours in and work for his place and sweat for his stardom. It's a statement of change and it would not be the last. And that's kind of it. I mean, what could he have possibly done next?
We'll take that up next year. On that, as I've found over the past two years of examining 50 year old albums the era has diminished in importance while some artists have risen to the top of my attention. So, instead of Year@50 it will be Ablum by Artist@50. If you've been reading so far, thank you, and let's take it higher and further. Happy NY.
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