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The Bowie Hunt Begins

A lot of good and/or interesting people have left this mortal coil recently, and, for the most part, other than wanting to raise an Ace of Spades at the recent loss of Lemmy, I didn’t feel the need to comment. Plenty of other people are willing to do that.

But waking up to hear on a wintery Monday morning that David Bowie had died was different. It was the very first thing I heard when I switched on NPR that morning, the announcer reporting that Bowie had died after a long bout with cancer, told to the trippy strains of “Space Oddity” – “I’m floating in a most peculiar way, and the stars look very different today.”

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No, I thought, not David Bowie!

My immediate reaction was to turn the radio off and go to my one Bowie album, his first greatest hits record, CHANGESONEBOWIE. I don’t even have a cover for the record. It’s in a cover generically titled “Disco.”

Does that tell you I was not a true Bowie fan?

Not really. What it tells you is that people don’t get rid of Bowie records. This coverless greatest hits record is the only thing I’ve ever seen of Bowie in a thrift store. But, then I’ve never sought his records out in the great online vinyl thrift store, either, while I have done that for many other artists.

Why not Bowie? I guess I had the feeling that I had plenty of time, that the Thin White Duke would always be with us. There is something timeless about much of his music.

I played the record I own, both sides twice, before heading to work, where, I remembered, my boss keeps his vinyl collection in the office bar (what? your office doesn’t have a bar?), and that it contained a number of Bowie records.

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I brought all of them home and kicked off the listening experience with the earliest one in Mr. Eliot’s eclectic collection – the brilliant and innovative Aladdin Sane, from 1973. It sounded as fresh, urgent and alive as it first did almost a half century ago, with Bowie and company singing brilliantly and he and Mick Ronson delivering guitar sounds that defined the 1970s. I hear the sound of other, later innovators in his music and in his execution of said music (Prince and Paul Weller, I’m talking about you two in particular). If the title tune alone doesn’t convince you of Bowie’s musical genius, you can stop reading here.

Alas, only one song from this record is on my greatest hits, the powerful blues stomp “The Jean Genie.” They should have included “Aladdin Insane” as well.

In 1974 Bowie released Diamond Dogs. Two of its songs made it onto my greatest hits – the raucous title tune and the rousing “Rebel Rebel.” Bowie plays all the guitars, except for on the boldly bombastic “1984,” with wah-wahhy guitar provided by Alan Parsons (apparently before he found his Project). This is also the album when Bowie started blowing his own horns – saxophones, to be precise.

Perhaps the greatest thing on this record is Bowie’s ceaselessly tough guitar. He makes it sound like barely controlled electricity that could explode in your face if he wasn’t directing it into a benevolent purpose. He makes the guitar sound like it could be a weapon of mass destruction in a dumber person’s hands…“This ain’t Rock ‘n Roll – this is Genocide.”

Fabulous record, but it is time to move on to 1975 and the disco-era Young Americans, the record that marked a musical departure for Bowie. The music is less dense, simplified. Soulful. Funky. The masses catch on and catch up to Mr. Bowie. They forget about his former weirdness and androgynous-ness (although he’ll still slip into falsetto now and again). The music is still tough and relentless in its drive. I was actually surprised that the title tune has been around for 41 years. Seems like yesterday.

John Lennon sings backup on “Fame” and plays guitar on his own “Across the Universe,” which gets a strange Nilsson-like makeover from Bowie.

Luther Vandross assists Bowie with the fantastic vocal arrangements on this record. “Right” ends side one on a righteous note, only to be picked up with the vocal magic of “Somebody Up There Likes Me” on side two. Bowie gives up sax duties to David Sanborn, who seems to have only one sound, what I like to call the Saturday Night Live squeal. Doesn’t matter. It’s all about the voices here – Bowie and the great backup singers. Turn this one way up! The record-ending “Fame” is funk at its finest. Move over Average White Band!

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Then on to 1976 and Bowie’s Station to Station, featuring on the cover a still from the Nicolas Roeg film The Man Who Fell to Earth, which starred Bowie as an alien who liked to jump on the bed with his junk hanging out.

Station to Station is Bowie’s minimalist record. Not a lot of info on the record cover or insert. What is there is in red Helvetica, all caps. Less than 30 words, total (considering that song titles, names, etc. are all written as one word). The music is that way, too. It opens with the long approach of what must be a train, followed by an insistent rhythm introducing the return of the Thin White Duke. At times the music sounds brittle, as though all the clanking and crashing will result in total breakdown. Surely it can’t keep up that pace? But it somehow does gallop to the end without collapsing under its own weight.

That is followed by the hit single “Golden Years,” another Bowie funk excursion. Wow, this is really 40 years old?

Many musicians are of their time. It might be fun to try to recapture those moments by listening to their songs again, but these Bowie tunes are different. Yes, they are from the past, but many of them could have been done yesterday, or tomorrow. That, to me, is the mark of genius.

My serious hunt for Bowie records begins.

Farewell David Robert Jones. You made the stars look very different.

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