Another thing going on here is that Bowie is giving a kind of expressionistic portrayal throughout the album of the 1972 tour of the U.S. Watch that Man is related to Bowie's experience of seeing the New York Dolls in NYC and the after parties that we on the footpath must rely on imagination to picture. Tracks on the album were assigned cities.
The infamous aspect of Watch that Man, though, is not the decadence on show but how hard it is to hear about it. Bowie's vocal is so well buried he sounds like he's coming through the amp mics. This was a mistake and it was sent back for correction but when the mix with the upfront vocal came back they went with the first one. If you're still thinking of the Stones this is not so off the track as a lot of the rockers on Exile have Jagger's vocals way down in the mix. The Stones even had a history of it going back to things like 19th Nervous Breakdown. Watch that Man does sound like a mistake though. When I first heard it (Christmas morning 1977) I thought the stereo had dropped a channel or maybe the record had a pressing error. But, nope, in that frustratingly lo-infomation world there was just no easy way of finding out until you got back to school and asked around.
But when you got used to it the levels started making sense. Little Ziggy/David/Aladdin lost in the Big Apple as the party just gets crazy.
After the big party we turn and face the strange with the title track. Aladdin Sane (1913, 1938, 197?) begins with a tolling piano chord against a featherlight jazzy bossa nova. Bowie's vocal is tinged with fatigue as though the party of the first track has left him wasted. He recalls images of high life with a sense of impending doom. The first two years in the title's brackets are just prior to world wars and the question mark left after the contemporary date hangs on eerily. "Who'll love Aladdin Sane? Battlecries and champagne just in time for sunrise," Bowie whoops over the chorus. And then the full power of the secret weapon of this album is unleashed in a long apocalyptic solo of violent dissonance and chiming open harmony. Mike Garson brought, at Bowie's insistence, his avant-jazz piano to the record and it hangs over or gathers the music together almost continuously. The two chord grind of the chorus is straight out of On Broadway which gets a reference in the fading vocal but the wandering solo builds storms of trouble before calming for the reminder, calming but never too far from the spooky aura of the song. And then ends on a self effacing doddly plop.
Moving to Seattle-Phoenix for Drive-In Saturday and we're in 50's doo-wop land and imagining a future of poured out phones and watching old movies on video (a term that existed at the time but not in common parlance) as they try to rekindle sexual behaviour that an unnamed cataclysm has reduced to memory. Bowie was scared of flying at the time (Aladdin Sane was written on a ship) so he was driven or took the train. At one point, he spied a clump of huge silvery domes and imagined them as post-nuclear attack living quarters and wondered what the life would be like in them. Not that he knew it then but the scenario in Drive-In Saturday was close to his character's bored reality in The Man Who Fell to Earth a few years on. The song ends with a growing tide of vocals slowly flooding down as the title repeats and covers everything.
Panic in Detroit breaks in with a Bo Diddley rhythm and a very un-Bo Diddley chord progression (similar to the A-F in Suffragette City). Bowie's vocal is ansiety-ridden as he recounts a story of street violence and its aftermath when all order is crumbling and the city itself seems to consume itself. This is a Motor City where the cars are sleep at traffic lights. The source of most of this was the figure from Detroit whom Bowie would be spending a lot of time and creativy energy: Iggy Pop (ok, he's from Ann Arbor but it's close). The lengthy fade has the compelling riff charging on while Mick Ronson teases, screams and whines from his Les Paul and Bowie's yelps grow distant and echoed.
The old side one ends with Cracked Actor who's all spent stardom and flat sleaze. The entirely appropriately Stonesy grind of heavy distortion and feedback introduces Bowie's harranguing vocal which tells in the first person of what the faded movie star does with his post glitz years. It's the closest thing musically to the Ziggy album but its tone is forbidding and grimacing. We're in Los Angeles in the 1970s, filled with old idols hiding behind the curtains with their tongues out, Goats Head Soup meets Sunset Boulevard.
Side two starts with Mike Garson playing a strident Jacques Brel figure before Bowie's theatrical voice comes in with a flourish about time's claim on all, great and small, angel or devil he doesn't care. And when the grand guignol creeping stops the whole band bashes in and the voice stretches into anguish. It might only be about waiting to go on stage as seconds elongate. The next verse gets us back to the stage with a few lines about screeeeaming with boredom before Ronson's inspired guitar scream warbles down the semitones like a theremin in an old horror movie. Another chorus and the wordless la las take us out but instead of fadnng we get the last word given, as it must here, to time itself, yelling its own name. We are in New Orleans.
The Prettiest Star plays like all those cod Victorian music hall takes from the late '60s by the likes of The Kinks, The Beatles and The Zombies but done as a Mick Ronson rocker. It's 2/4 flapper rhythm sways along as we hear of a love whose absence drives ruefulness. The song's own prettiness is undercut by Bowie's vocal which sounds spent.
The cover of Let's Spend the Night Together is one I didn't skip this time only because I needed to report on the whole album. From the crashing ugliness of Garsons discords that distort the Stones riff to Bowie's strangling vocal that throws most of the original melody out the window. There's a breakdown section where he speaks of a kind of teen rebel sexuality that ends in prehistoric grunts from Mick Ronson's guitar before everything dives back into the pill popping energy. All of this is intentional, clearly, but it just doesn't convince me. It comes across more as a kind of dare to listeners to revile his ravaging of a classic. It's like the worst of the tracks on the Pin Ups covers album where, instead of working with what was there to begin with, he has taken the conscious route to piss off the old guard. I guess that's it, for me: it's juvenile.
Back in New York we get to the most iconic track on the record, the one that people who have never heard the album will know, The Jean Genie. Against a hard blues riff Bowie variously croons and Jaggerishly hectors about a figure part human part reptile. Instead of Iggy's stories, it's Iggy himself or a world-built version of him, slinking or rampaging through the city from subway to skyscraper. The strutting talking blues is utterly infectious in the verse and breaks out excitingly for the chorus. The guitar/harmonica tremolo one note solo recalls the nastier moments of the '60s Who or Yardbrids and here just doubles up the intensity. A hard rock masterpiece.
We might have ended there but there's one more thing to say and its in the wider European context that yet does not feel like home. Garson's introduction is all flash and show but when Bowie's yearning croon starts the piano holds it aloft with a gorgeous constant glittering arpeggio. Ronson's layered guitars come in for the chorus which concludes with a John Barry semitone switch for that extra moment of danger. It's a love affair which is all silky sex and expensive fragrance, champagne and bottomless credit cards. But she will be your living end, the yearn of aftermath will haunt your days just as the James Bond figure in the guitars and piano do. A moment of purest musical seduction.
Seduction is the undeclared theme of the whole album which is a kind of expressionistic recall of the Ziggy Stardust the year before. It doesn't end with Rock and Roll Suicide because it's based on lived rather than imagined experience. Most of it is about the America Bowie saw opening up to him, its highest and shiniest and its darkest and most violent. It gave him nights of constant compelling pleasure and moments of cold terror and that's what we have here. It's less coherent than Ziggy as a musical song cycle but that's a symptom of its true life source. As Conrad said of Heart of Darkness, it's experience pushed a little, very little.
I don't often mention the cover art of these records I write about but this one rates a paragraph at least. The iconic strength of this cover is such that all you have to do to evoke the spirit of David Bowie in anything you present is to put it in a copper mullet and draw a lighting flash across its face. It's could be a cartoon character or an office coffee mug but it will say Bowie even to people who know nothing else of the artist. People who have never heard this album or know its title, recognise the imagery and its meaning of flamboyant stardom. The cover was a gatefold and the middle image was a full body photo from the same session in which Bowie is looking beyond the camera's gaze into the lights, two stylised flashes behind him and his body transforming from skin tone to a silver spray on coat that removes his genital package and fades before we see his feet. The back cover is a pen and ink outline of the front with the song titles and credits. The inner sleeve has the lyrics and more multi coloured flashes. If the cover of Ziggy described a rising rock star in the back streets of a rainy London, this conveyed him into the infinite white of the starship he expected would take him to the cosmos.
It's strange how I and quite a few fellow Bowie fans can forget this album when listing their favourites, despite its imagery offering the most popular depiction of him. Is it the annoying buried vocal of the opening track, the difficult jazz soloing of the title track, the obnoxious Stones cover version? IT's hard to say why this gets less love than the harsher Heroes (that title track is not like the rest of the record) or the largely resistant Scary Monsters. I've frequently heard it described as bitsy or mixed but, really, there's a lot of adherence between these tracks and what they are telling us. Bowie found fame and found it was still a struggle and that clashed with the meteoric rise promised in Ziggy Stardust. If the fans wanted Suffragette City they got Panic in Detroit, if they expected Starman, they got Cracked Actor. Really, though, what was being offered was an outstretched hand to pull them up and fans don't always want to go where their idols lead.
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