Space Oddity
The fade in is slow but intriguing. A soft acoustic guitar strum with atmospherics emerging from the silence like vibraphone, drums and guitar harmonics. It's like the murk of inner orbit. Also, I thought this when I first heard the song on proper LP vinyl instead of David H's tape of it. E minor swings to C major. They are both in each other's scale but seldom heard so close together. There is a sense of doom to it. Bowie plays the roles of Ground Control and Major Tom as Bowie's own whisper counts down to lift off.
The big spooky drama of this song and its recording, especially in headphones, with its careful spatiality and muted colours really drew me in and, hearing it almost freshly in this way, I listened to it three times in a row. From Major Tom's harmonised statements, both jubilant and anxious to the futile one-way cry from ground control ("can you hear me mighty Tom?") brought home the desperate loneliness of space, better than the best sci-fi movie from the time. And there was something else.
That slow fade in had a purpose beyond the drama of the song. Those were the days when loud, honking DJs would talk over the intros to songs. It crammed the time in for as much advertising as they could manage and it discouraged home taping. I should have said it supposedly discouraged it but no kid who waited by the tape deck for their favourite song or a new one ever cared about it. Actually, it was almost a battle scar for the song as it existed on the cassette. In a way, it brought a star like Bowie closer to his fans. He knew what radio was like, too.
And there we had to leave him, in his tin can, drifting far into space as the electronics and ingeniously reassigned convetional instruments wove a mujsical tapestry of the huge expansive star field against which Major Tom was an invisible speck.
John I'm Only Dancing
I hated and hate this one. I hate it for its bait and switch, starting with the boogying acoustic guitar and then dribbling into an echoey mess before an ok chorus made me look over my shoulder in case anyone came in and witnessed me listening. I was fourteen and while I knew there was a kind of urbanity to claim by being supportive of the gay community it was still something that left me scared and baffled. And I was still fourteen. There is no amgibuity about this song's theme of a guy taunting his other with the protest that he's just dancing, not wooing. But the music doesn't cut it and it sounds like a cast off from Ziggy. Bowie liked it so much he reminagined it from scratch around the time of Young Americans as a cold funk number. Doesn't work that way, either.
Changes
A friend at school wondered at the inclusion of this one, as did I. We both thought it was more recent. I was soon to discover it was part of Hunky Dory in which, when listened to, it sits very easily. It opens as a kind of cocktail jazz routine about youth both bored and running wild. The famous chorus with its shutter on the title word appears in muscial ambush and surprises with its brightness. Ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-changes (turn and face the strange). It is appropriately a pendulating position between a warning about the singer's coming influence and his own self-doubt. Bowie, persistently self-promoting (he really did try until it worked and it took years) and confident of his choices, had just come through a number of bold failures among the early hits. Man Who Sold the World is not represented on this compilation (and the covers album Pin Ups is similarly untapped) and its bleak borderline metal tracks might have caused upset (then, there is the inclusion of Only Dancing which wasn't an album track). Here, in this context as a kind of record of career steps, Changes makes great sense and on a side over served by guitar anthems, it's a refreshing inclusion with its subverted boogie piano figures and lazy sax smoke rings.
Ziggy Stardust
A year and a bit into bedroom guitar playing and I coudl work the riff out before I touched the instrument. It's a fanfare honed by the great Mick Ronson from chords to a progression of parts from stiff and crunchy to trilling to a loose swinging and then back again. Bowie comes in as though falling from a height with an extended, "oh yeah." It's the story of the rock star from the stars, the one who made it so big that the fans tore him to pieces. There are references to a few figures but the most recognisable is Hendrix who played it left hand with screwed up eyes and screwed down hairdo. A story of rock music made of some of the most arresting rock music.
Suffragette City
Then it's the sudden big engine rev of Suffragette City just like on the original album where the stresses and fun of touring, phone calls and groupies with a call and response verse before the big chorus blows everything out to panavision and races off. The sax-ish solo and then horn section are synthesised and the tone is of a quality that forbids fatigue during the endless A to G chord riffing wall that Mick Ronson builds. A big yelling anthem for the big shows.
Jean Genie
Aladdin Sane is soley represented by its side one closer, Jean Genie. Bowie and his band settle into a perfect '60s influenced R&B stomper, including blues harp licks and an unshakeable rhythm section. Bowie singpiels through verses about the title character. A rock and roll animal who moves through crowds high and low, forging his legend. The name is intentionally suggestive of tough guy poet Jean Genet but it's also based on Iggy Pop, who Bowie knew and supported through some abjection to raise to prominence with a pair of recording projects that turned into classic albums. A Pete Townshend-inspired tremolo monotone guitar solo (inventively doubled on harmonica) builds to a final barnstorming chorus to close yet another side one. We're almost free of the mullet years.
Diamond Dogs
Side two opens with the next major album's title and opening track. A crowd at a gig and an announcer. I always thought he yelled, "This ain't rock and roll, this is David Bowie," where the surname was pronounced like taking a bow. But it's, "this is genocide!" The metallic riff cranks in with a Stonesy groove and we're off with the tales of post apocalyptic decadence. Halloween Jack goes from oxygen tent to the latest party and on from there. In the scope of this album, this song is like a ressurected Suffragette City but bruised and slow from high-strength painkillers making a slow progress through smoky streets and down into dens where you might as well stay if they're just going to keep you buoyant. The cluster of final chorsuses (stretching out in a groove so Stones-like that it includes the sax riff from the fade of Brown Sugar) might be warning about mutant or robotic pursuit creatures or slang for something to reverse the damage.
Rebel Rebel
It's followed seamlessly buy a bent string note and one of the greatest riffs in rock history. That is like how it happens on the album but from a different song, the grimy epic of Sweet Thing/Candidate/Sweet Thing but it works fine until you know that. It's the apex of the glamour that an unnamed character from Sweet Thing emerges with after the pleasures and ordeals therein. They shine in the spotlight, however ephemerally, a vision as compelling as that tangy, beautiful guitar tone. It goes on but you just want more.
Young Americans
The Young Americans album was fresh enough when this comp came out that it got two entries. The first was teh title track. I found the plastic soul of it difficult to listen to. Bowie's vocal is fine and the stories from Manhattan in the lyric are engaging enough but this is a case where I cannot get past the music that I dislike. It took me finally hearing it as part of the whole thing to get it. By then the music's beauty was also shining. through. I've still not allowed it past the gate but I'll listen more happily than I once did.
Fame
This was more like it. A slinky, creepy funk groove with a nervewracked call and response vocal of complaint and anxiety. A clean electric guitar rings out constantly like a telephone in the background. Someone always wants something. The second voice is the new York John Lennon, approaching the end of the special interest taken in him by the U.S. government. Bowie sings through a grimace. Then the two come together for the big screaming middle eight before things just return to the paranoia groove. A masterpiece.
Golden Years
More funk but with a cool modal harmony added and some futuristic tribalism. More imagery of limousines and manipulation at the stardom end of the spectrum. It's like Fame after the guy learned how to ride it. It appears here, preceeding Station to Station and farewelling the tupperware disco of Young Americans. There's video of Bowie in an other than quite fit state, miming this on Soul Train. It's worth your trouble finding it online. The album ends on a clean stop instead of a fade. Buy more Bowie.
A photo from around that occasion shows him with slicked back hair, malnourished and smoking. It was on one side of the inner sleeve. The reverse of this is a gallery of cover art from the redubbed Space Oddity through to Young Americans, identifying all the LPs I needed to get to really touch the air around the star. The rear main sleeve had the tracks listed the same way that Station to Station would, thick red font with no spaces against a stark white background. The front announced the coming thin white duke look, hair as neat and sculpted as a '30s movie star, eyes gazing off in thought, one hand supporting his chin with the fingers fanned decoratively. This was not the sweaty live photo of a stadium rocker nor the abstract collage of a Hipgnosis cover but something that was drawn away from time.
Everything about the presentation was both sincerely commercial but also aloof from the motivation, the choice of singles and album cuts and a clear line of creative development in order of appearance. Not too many songs, nor just the big bangers, just eleven of the best to party with. It was the first Bowie album we all had and our few years' difference between this and the mullet years, the glam years, were filled with this side one. Want more, wanna get closer to the cool of the artist? Buy the records, they look like this.
The cover art on the inner sleeve and on the releases of Space Oddity and Man Who Sold the World were revisions that conformed more to the Ziggy look from after their release. This allowed RCA to impose the damage control of the curly hair hippy of the first and the androgynous lounger in a "man's dress" of the latter. Everything looked as though it had gone from Ziggy to Duke so that we second gen fans could get it all without feeling too strange (and our parents wouldn't scream, "queer!")
These weren't the songs of our generation, we just wanted to touch them. By the end of the year we were either trying to remember how Anarchy in the UK went because it was only on TV a few times and never on the radio. Well, not all of us but this record taught us that the green apple shampoo and sport shoe world could do what it liked as long we didn't have to know about it. We're going to Suffragette City and Jean Genie's at the wheel. God, it was worth numberless Eagles or Steely Dan records. It felt like home. And once we were done with it we were ready to leave.
Listening Notes: My RCA Japan CD found in an op shop is exemplary. You can also get it from an online shop as a paid download in higher res. The artwork is good enough if you found an LP for it just for display. Apart from the excerable John, I'm Only Dancing you can get all these tracks on the various hi-res releases of the original albums where each song sits better in context. If you have never had it, though, find it.
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