David Bowie Music Innovators

David Bowie Music Innovators David Bowie British actor; musician; recording artist Born: January 8, 1947; Brixton, London, United Kingdom Died: January 10, 2016; Manhattan Primary Field: Rock and roll performer Group Affiliation: Ziggy Stardust Introduction There was one constant factor in the ever-shifting career of David Bowie, best known for his unsurpassed mastery of theatrical rock music and media manipu- lation: “I am an actor,” as Bowie himself put it. “My whole professional life is an act.” The British enter- tainer, whose basic training was in mime, began com- posing and performing ballads in the mid-1960s, when his “folk” style was suggestive of Anthony Newley to some and of Bob Dylan to others. After several years as a “straight,” guitar-strumming, saxophone-playing, singing leader of small pop bands, he shot to interna- tional stardom in 1972 in the persona of his androgynous alter ego, “Ziggy Stardust,” the king/queen of glitter rock. After several more transformations, Bowie shed his elaborate stage gimmickry and broadened his appeal, in conscious emulation of Frank Sinatra. The protean performer, who aspired to be a motion picture director, was the star of the 1976 science fiction film The Man Who Fell to Earth, his first screen credit, and had roles in other films and television shows. In music, A turning point in Bowie’s life came when he where he garnered nine platinum, eleven gold, and eight read Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. Influenced by Ker- silver recordings in the UK, along with five platinum ouac and other Beat Generation writers, Bowie was and seven gold ones in the United States, he was highly practicing meditation long before it became a fad, and successful in recording in a variety of styles. for a brief period he contemplated entering a Tibetan Mahayana monastery. His elementary school teachers Early Life tried, without success, to force the left-handed Bowie David Bowie, who was of Anglo-Catholic-Jewish heri- to become right-handed. By the time he entered high tage, was born David Jones on January 8, 1947 (accord- school, the gaunt boy was doing long-distance running, ing to most sources; at least one gives 1948) in Brixton, playing jazz saxophone, and coming to the conclusion “a very rough area,” as Bowie described it, in south that he would “have to invent” his “own world” in order London. “It was like Harlem,” he told Rex Reed in an “to be fulfilled”—to “become a superman” because he interview for an article in the New York Sunday News “felt puny.” (June 13, 1976). “I was very butch in those days. I was “I wanted my freedom quickly,” Bowie recounted, in street brawls and everything. [He emerged from one “and looked for a profession that would let me be ec- fracas with a permanently paralyzed left eye.] My father centric and express my idiocies.” At first interested in was a gambler and drinker and a layabout for most of painting as well as music, Bowie studied commercial his life. art at Bromley Technical High School and then, as he recalled, “tried advertising, and that was awful . the 178 Music Innovators David Bowie lowest” “But I was well into my little saxophone,” he devastatingly beautiful. With his loofah hair and blue stated in the Playboy interview, “so I left advertising eyes, he pads around like every schoolgirl’s wonder and thought, ‘Let’s give rock a try.’ You can have a good movie star. He smiles; you melt. He winks; you disin- time doing that and usually have enough money to live tegrate. He fumbles away on his twelve string acoustic on. Especially then. It was the Mod days: nice clothes guitar with ferocious gusto. He apologizes that his rep- were half the battle. I lived out of dustbins on the ertoire is mostly his own songs, which he admits sound back streets of Carnaby. The very best designers all very much the same.” were down there and . if any of the shirts had a button Bowie’s second album was The Man Who Sold the off or anything like that it would go into the dustbin. World (Mercury, 1970), containing, among other com- We’d go around and nick all the stuff out of the dust- positions of his, the bizarre sexual song “She Shook Me bins. Entire wardrobes for, well nothing.” Cold,” and the sci-fi tune “Savior Machine.” Review- Bowie the performer was always, in his own eyes, ing the LP in Rolling Stone (February 18, 1971), John primarily an actor. His basic theatrical training was a Mendelsohn wrote: “Bowie deals throughout . in two-and-a-half-year period as a mime artist with Lind- oblique and fragmented images that are almost impen- say Kemp. “That’s how I became fascinated with Gen- etrable separately but which convey with effectiveness et—the androgynous, the neuter, the Everyman theme. an ironic and bitter sense of the world when considered I used all of that mime experience in rock music the together.” Mendelsohn noted that producer Tony Vis- way Buster Keaton did in films.” The first rock groups conti had used echo, phrasing, and other techniques on organized and led by Bowie were David Jones and the Bowie’s voice to achieve “a weird and supernatural tone Buzz, David Jones and the Lower Third, and a multime- reminiscent of a robot,” by which he did not mean to dia mime troupe called Feathers. Early in his career he imply that Bowie sings mechanically but that “his voice had some small stage roles, and he tried, unsuccessfully, is oddly metallic to begin with.” to start a local Arts Lab in Beckenham modeled on Jim The same reviewer, again writing in Rolling Stone Haynes’s defunct Drury Lane organization. (January 6, 1972), found that in his third album, Hunky The admittedly bisexual Bowie recalled how he Dory (his first on the RCA label), Bowie bore little re- met his wife, also professedly bisexual, and how she semblance to the “dangerous loony” of The Man Who was instrumental in getting him his first recording con- Sold the World. Mendelsohn wrote: “For the most part, tract: “Angela and I knew each other because we were Dave is back, after an affair with heavy high-energy both going out with the same man. Another one of her killer techniques, back into his 1966-ish, Tony Newley boyfriends, a talent scout for Mercury Records, took her / pop-rock thing, and happily so: Hunky is his most eas- to a show at The Roundhouse, where I happened to be ily accessible, and thus most readily enjoyable work playing. He hated me. She thought I was great. Ulti- since his Man of Words/Man of Music album of 1969.” mately, she threatened to leave him if he didn’t sign me. Among the songs on Hunky Dory were “Changes”— So he signed me.” a classic about childhood and aging—“Queen Bitch,” “Song for Bob Dylan,” and “Andy Warhol.” Life’s Work The “bisexual chic” which Bowie was credited with The first song recorded by Bowie was his composi- originating might be traced back to the cover of the Brit- tion “Space Oddity,” about an astronaut named Major ish version of The Man Who Sold the World album, with Tom who blasts off from Cape Canaveral and decides its picture of Bowie in long hair, makeup, and feminine never to return, bewildering ground control by bid- attire. The photo was a parody of Dante Gabriel Ro- ding his wife good-bye and then shutting off his com- setti, but Bowie told his publicists not to bother explain- munication circuits. That single, appealing to alienated ing, as he recalled: “I said, ‘Fine. I’ll play along. young people, surfaced in the charts in the late autumn Anything, absolutely anything to break me through,’ of 1969, and it was included in the album David Bow- Because of everybody’s thirst for scandal . they gave ie: Man of Words/Man of Music, issued by Mercury in me a big chance. All the papers wrote volumes about December 1969. how sick I was, how I was helping to kill off true art. Reviewing a concert given by Bowie in London’s . They wasted all that time and effort and paper on my Purcell Room, Tony Palmer wrote in the London Ob- clothes and my pose. Why? Because I was a dangerous server (December 7, 1969): “On stage, he is quite statement.” At first an underground “drag queen” cult 179 David Bowie Music Innovators formed behind him, but “bisexual chic,” with Bowie as band Kraftwerk. The stage was conspicuously empty of its leader, became a public phenomenon beginning in props, with Bowie alone, dressed in white shirt, black 1971, when Bowie, during an interview with an imper- vest, pumps, and pants, under intense white light, sing- tinent journalist he wanted to shock, went on record as ing a range of songs from Bertolt Brecht’s “Mahagon- the first bisexual rock star to come “out of the closet.” ny” to his own durable “Suffragette City,” “Panic in De- Partly inspired by the example of Vince Taylor, an troit,” and “The Jean Genie”— songs which, as Larry American rock ‘n’ roll musician of his acquaintance Rohter said in the Washington Post (March 15, 1976), whom he had seen go mad in the 1960’s, Bowie wrote Bowie would probably be singing “long after his latest, himself the role of Ziggy Stardust, the protagonist of Frank Sinatra-inspired persona has joined its predeces- his fourth LP, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and sors on the junk pile.” the Spiders from Mars (RCA).

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