Karma Man (Revisited)

Karma Man (rejected Deram single, 1967).
Karma Man (Top Gear (BBC), 1968).
Karma Man (The Sunday Show (BBC), 1970).
Karma Man (Toy, 2000).

The much-discussed surrender of John, Paul, George and Ringo to the soothing influence of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi makes, in my view, depressing reading…The unfortunate Beatles, like many of us, it seems, are in grave danger of coming into contact with the Spirit of Universal Truth, an unhelpful tipple which has in the past turned the great mind of Aldous Huxley to mystical blotting paper.

John Mortimer, The New Statesman, 29 September 1967.

There’s high, and there’s high, and to get really high—I mean so high you can walk on water, that high—that’s where I’m going. The answer’s not pot, but yoga and meditation, and working and discipline, working out your karma.

George Harrison, quoted in Holiday, February 1968.

All at once, or so it seemed, the British pop aristocracy turned to “Eastern” religion. Pete Townshend found Meher Baba, Dave Davies was reading Vivekananda’s Rajah Yoga. Donovan and the Beatles became adherents of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s Spiritual Regeneration Movement, an offshoot of Hindu teachings centered on the practice of transcendental meditation.

The mystery of this burst of religiosity is somewhat dispelled if you consider that many of these people had taken LSD for some time—Tony Visconti and his wife Siegrid tripped once a week for a year, for instance, and John Lennon all but lived on acid in 1966. Eastern teachings resounded with young celebrities trying to make sense of a world in which “all limits had been magically removed,” as Bernice Martin wrote.

In Britain, where Christian observance was in great decline among the young (Lennon’s “we’re more popular than Jesus” comment was specifically about this generation), watery varietals of Buddhism and Hinduism became alluring. To Western youth, Buddhism had no edict-heavy god and its spiritual leaders were best known for protesting war and wearing colorful outfits. Seemingly devoted to the “now,” it was misinterpreted as a Pop religion. “I only live now and I don’t know why,” as David Bowie sang in “Karma Man.”

Bowie’s interest in Buddhism dated to his early teens, sparked in part by his half-brother Terry, Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums, and Penguin paperbacks on Zen Buddhism by the British convert Christmas Humphreys. But the essential book, Bowie later said, was Heinrich Harrer’s Seven Years in Tibet, the wellspring of Bowie’s first Buddhist-influenced song,“Silly Boy Blue.” Harrer was a German national who’d made his way into Tibet, a country few Westerners had ever visited. Much of his book concerned his stay in Lhasa, his meetings with the young Dalai Lama, and his thoughts on life in a Buddhist theocracy.

Bowie was a regular at the Tibetan Buddhist Society by late 1965, a time when he often stayed at his manager Ralph Horton’s apartment, a five-minute walk from the Society’s office in Eccleston Square. There he met and befriended a Tibetan lama in exile, Chime Rinpoche, who became Bowie’s spiritual mentor. He would ask Rinpoche and his fellow monks questions about Buddhism that the monks would answer with other questions, a circularity that delighted him.

The more frustrated Bowie became with his pop music career, the deeper his immersion in Mahayana Buddhism: late 1967 and much of 1968, when his debut album tanked and Deram kept rejecting his singles, marked the peak of his self-identification as a Buddhist. He said he was “going to chuck it all in” to become a monk, to the point of claiming to have visited a monastery in Scotland, allegedly sleeping upright in a box and keeping to a vow of silence. (It’s worth noting the latter practices have nothing do to with Mahayana Buddhism. This suggests a strong element of fiction in Bowie’s tale or that this Scottish Buddhist monastery was rather unorthodox.)

Chime Rinpoche, ca. 1960s

Buddhist-derived concepts, such as the ultimate emptiness of the self, intrigued Bowie. The line “his overself pays the bill” in “Silly Boy Blue” suggests that he’d read the Tathāgatagarbha Sutras, Mahayana sutras that claimed within everyone is an immortal, transcendental “overself” (a rough equivalent to the Christian concept of the soul, and sometimes referred to as Ātman, or the “Buddha nature”). Yet while anyone could be a Buddha, this potential was hidden within you, obscured by your own flaws of perception (“colored shades that blind your eyes”)— you wrongly perceived the world and, often, wrongly lived in the world.

So Bowie’s devotion was more dedicated than the average weekend Buddhist of his era, for whom “Tibet” was an Atlantis up in the mountains, a Shangri-La in which everyone was holy and wasn’t hung up on material things. The fevered political atmosphere of 1968 meant that identifying as a Tibetan Buddhist (and so by default protesting China’s occupation of Tibet) could get you flak from Maoist radicals. Even the apolitical Bowie reportedly was heckled by an American Maoist during his pro-Tibet mime Jetsun and the Eagle.

Spanish bootleg 45, ca. 1980

“Karma Man,” written in early-to-mid 1967, was slated as the B-side of Bowie’s proposed autumn single for Deram, a chaste counterpart to the lustful “Let Me Sleep Beside You.” Bowie’s tribute to monks in exile like Rinpoche, its title character prays in a carnival tent as one of the exhibits: a metaphor for the lama in the West, a “freak” living ascetically in the world of ice cream cones and sideshow stalls. There’s the concept of life as perpetual impermanence, which would turn up again in “After All” and “Changes,” and an obvious homage to Ray Bradbury’s tattooed Illustrated Man (“fairytale skin depicting scenes from human zoos”), with the lama as living storybook.

Down-and-out Strange (Strange Tales 115, Dec. 1963, Lee/Ditko)

Where “Silly Boy Blue” had the measured tone of a National Geographic article, “Karma Man” was more fantastical. Bowie had taken to describing Buddhist monks as superhuman figures, claiming to the Melody Maker that monks could go days without eating, spend months underground and could live for centuries (traces of this appear in “The Supermen”  and “Sons of the Silent Age”). This suggested that Bowie was up on one of the counterculture’s new heroes, Marvel Comics’ Doctor Strange, an arrogant ex-surgeon reborn as a chela to the Ancient One and who, as per Geoffrey O’Brien, “spends his days sitting lotus fashion within his tastefully decorated Greenwich Village pied-à-terre and tuning into the brainwaves reaching him from across the universe.” Steve Ditko’s Strange Tales was full of astral projections, trips to psychedelic bardos and battles with occult powers like the Dread Dormammu.

Strange Tales 133, June 1965 (Lee/Ditko)

“Karma Man” was a fragile beauty of a song, its syllable-stuffed D major verses calmed by harmonized B major refrains, whose melody had for an opening hook a grand descending phrase (“slooow down, sloooow down,” F#-D#-C#-B) that set up the spotlight moment, an Anthony Newley-style elongation of “do–oh–ow–ownnnnnn,” with Bowie really wringing out the concluding en sound. It would have a strange, frustrated life as a recording.

Its 1967 studio take was a rush-job, as Bowie and Visconti had to cut it on the same day they did “Let Me Sleep Beside You” (Deram soon rejected both tracks.) Bowie sounds tentative in his phrasings at times, putting hard emphases on filler words like “he’s” and “but,” sounding as if he’s stalling for time while changing lyric sheets. There’s a fundamental imbalance between Visconti’s cello scoring, which dominates much of the track, and the subdued rhythm section—John McLaughlin vanishing for much of the song after playing the opening riff, some professional busker guitar by “Big Jim” Sullivan, a bass mostly content to shadow the cello (a modest Visconti), Alan White’s drums trying to make peace with the track. Siegrid Visconti sang the high harmonies, blending well with Bowie’s voice and kicking off a tradition of Visconti spouses making cameo appearances on Bowie tracks or videos.

Far better was the “Karma Man” done for the BBC’s Top Gear in May 1968, which I still consider the song’s canonical version. Visconti’s strings are lusher, with a broader tonal range; the tempo has subtly but essentially increased, making the song move at last. Having a stronger rhythmic template to work with (see also, more dynamic drumming and livelier guitar strum patterns), Bowie sounds at ease in the song, better handling the tricky rhythms of his verse lines, luxuriating in his refrains.

He returned to “Karma Man” in early 1970, as it was being released at last, on a Deram compilation LP cashing in on Bowie’s “Space Oddity” success. Performing it alone for a John Peel session, Bowie alters the guitar pattern to the sort of chugging Bo Diddley-esque line he favored in the “Space Oddity” era, while he has a similar plaintive tone as on likes of “Columbine” and “God Knows I’m Good.” He’s more inventive as a singer by now—listen to how he subtly shifts emphases and holds his notes with more assurance in the refrains—and he makes “Karma Man” sound fresh. You can imagine it having further life on stage in the Hunky Dory/Ziggy years, but this was the end of it.

Thirty years later, Bowie remade many of his “lost” Sixties songs. “Silly Boy Blue” got a gravid, respectful reinvention; “Let Me Sleep Beside You” became an aging roue’s come-on. “Karma Man,” never bootlegged but said to have been cut in the Toy sessions, would remain a rumor until last Friday, when it appeared on streaming sites.

I wish that I could say its Toy version gave the song a new perspective. But so far I just hear a cluttered, fumbled cover, a reheated “oldie” with Bowie in a diminished voice—was he getting over a cold when he cut this vocal?—that feels more dated than its Sixties versions. The arrangement, with Mike Garson filigrees in the verses, a trumpet opening hook and radio ident bumper vocal tags, sounds at times like a band trying to replicate a Badly Drawn Boy track from memory. Sterling Campbell tries to pound some life into the thing, and there may well be some good guitar lines somewhere in the mix. The 1968 “Karma Man” had grace; the 1970 version held mystery—it left an opening. Its 2000 incarnation is airless.

There would be no going back, it turned out, and this wouldn’t be the way forward. The world that created “Karma Man” now seems ten lifetimes away. Bowie’s song was a butterfly, never meant to last more than a summer.

End credits

(Deram version) Recorded: 1 September 1967, Advision Studios, London. Bowie: lead vocal; John McLaughlin: lead guitar; Jim Sullivan: acoustic guitar; Tony Visconti: bass; Alan White: drums; Siegrid Visconti: harmony vocals; unknown player(s): cello. Produced: Visconti; engineered: Gerald Chevin. First release: 6 March 1970, The World of David Bowie (Decca SPA 58)

(Top Gear version) Recorded: 13 May 1968, Piccadilly 1 Studios, London. Bowie: lead vocal, acoustic guitar; McLaughlin: lead guitar; Alan Hawkshaw: keyboards; Herbie Flowers: bass; Barry Morgan: drums; Visconti, Steve “Peregrin” Took: harmony vocals; The Tony Visconti Orchestra (uncredited): violins, violas, celli. Produced: Bernie Andrews; engineered: Alan Harris. First release: 26 September 2000, Bowie at the Beeb (EMI/Virgin 7243 5 28629 2 4).

(Sunday Show version) Recorded: 5 February 1970, BBC Paris Studio, London. Bowie: vocal, 12-string acoustic guitar. First release: 28 May 2021, The Width of a Circle.

(Toy version). Recorded: (tracking) July 2000, Sear Sound, New York; (vocals, overdubs) October 2000, Looking Glass Studios, New York. Bowie: lead vocal; Earl Slick: lead guitar; Mark Plati: rhythm guitar, keyboards; Mike Garson: keyboards; Gail Ann Dorsey: bass; Sterling Campbell: drums; Cuong Vu: trumpet?; Holly Palmer, Emm Gryner: harmony vocals. Produced: Plati; engineered: Pete Keppler. First release: (streaming) 15 October 2021.

The Reverend Raymond Brown (Attends the Garden Fête on Thatchwick Green)

The Reverend Raymond Brown (Attends the Garden Fête on Thatchwick Green).

The release of the five-disc Conversation Piece hammers shut the year of “Sixties Bowie Redux.” The total, in terms of tracks unreleased until now: some 30 home demos, recorded between the autumns of 1967 and 1969.

At last in one place (expect to see more Spying Through a Keyhole and Clareville Grove sets, over-optimistically priced, in used record stores), these demos make a decent pile and give a sharper picture of Bowie’s work life in the late Sixties. How sharp, though? Is it really worth one’s time to sit through these rough drafts, these murky tapes of old songs, many of which didn’t make the cut for Bowie at the time? (You can hear his laugh: “ah yes, a real treasure trove you’ve got for 80 quid.”)

Well, of course I’m interested. And the devoted fan—I’ll define this as someone who’s voluntarily listened to a Tin Machine bootleg—may find some of it fascinating. The “average” fan, whoever they may be? I’m not sure what they’ll make of it, if they’ll even hear it.

The collected demos* do a couple of things. They further document how the late Sixties were a proving ground for Bowie as a songwriter—his frustrations about lacking a record contract strengthened him as a composer; his songs develop in craft and form. “Space Oddity,” included here in what appears to be every demo ever made of it, no longer sounds like a sudden leap forward but more the culmination of years spent sitting at a reel-to-reel in his manager’s flat or in various bedsits and rented rooms.**

We also have a smoother transition between “psychedelic Mod” suburban Bowie and hippie Arts Lab Bowie of 1969. The Conversation Piece “demo” disc sequence opens with the set’s earliest recordings, in terms of composition: “April’s Tooth of Gold,” “Mother Grey,” “In the Heat of the Morning” and “When I’m Five” (the former two were copyrighted in December 1967; the latter two had studio versions cut in March 1968).

“The Reverend Raymond Brown (Attends the Garden Fête on Thatchwick Green)” (hereafter referred to, for sanity’s sake, as “Rev. Brown”) almost certainly hails from the same compositional period—late 1967 through the first months of 1968. Its earliest appearance is as a title in Kenneth Pitt’s 1985 memoir, where it appears in a list of prospective songs to be recorded for Bowie’s second (and never-recorded) Deram album.

It makes sense: “Rev. Brown” isn’t far removed from Bowie’s Deram debut, in terms of subject matter (another jaundiced look at suburban England) and song structure—there’s still a lot of Ray Davies being processed, along with a newer influence, Syd Barrett, while the outro is all but Bowie saying on tape “and then it ends like a Who track.”

Its lyric is a film sketch. Quick shots of various supporting characters (a nameless milkman and magistrate; Mrs. MacGoony and Grouse and “naughty Fitzwilliam”) build to (in the four-bar refrains) the introduction of the title character: Rev. Raymond Brown, shown leading the band at a village fete, “noting down sin” with a pencil, and guiltily lusting after the “beauty of Thatchwick.” Bowie’s word-choked bridges have similar phrasings as those in “When I’m Five”—here done to imitate the chatter of a “women’s guild” who compare their hats and gossip about a local girl getting pregnant (Sally, perhaps the future/former wife of Uncle Arthur).

Clever but shallow, “Rev. Brown” is apparently among Bowie’s last attempts to do an “Angry Young Man”-type short story in music, as he had done repeatedly on his 1967 album. It feels compromised in tone, as if he was already writing with Peter Noone in mind to sing it—it’s far less weird than the likes of “She’s Got Medals” or “Little Bombardier” or “Please Mr. Gravedigger.” That said, all we have is a rough sketch—perhaps “Rev. Brown” could’ve been transformed in the studio, getting brass or woodwind accompaniment for the refrains.

What I do find a hoot is that the verse phrasings, especially at 1:20 (the introduction of the Beauty of Thatchwick, who seems written for Julie Christie or Jane Asher to play), appear again in Bowie’s work—I hear them in “Little Wonder,” thirty years later. As Earthling is one of Bowie’s “return to Britain” records, so Rev. Raymond Brown, “musical priest” and would-be dirty old man, gets dug up as an ancestor to Blur’s Tracy Jacks and Ernold Same. Whether for “Little Wonder” Bowie went back to his Sixties demos or recalled some traces of a long-abandoned song is something we’ll never know.

Recorded: ca. late autumn 1967-March 1968, (most likely) Kenneth Pitt’s apartment at 39 Manchester Street, London. David Bowie: lead and backing vocal, guitars, bass, percussion. First release: 15 November 2019, Conversation Piece.

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* Collected but far from complete. Still unreleased are “Social Kind of Girl” and “Everything Is You,” “Silver Tree Top School for Boys,” “C’est la Vie,” etc. “Tiny Tim” remains a title. The absence of the 1968 demo of Bowie’s rock opera Ernie Johnson is no surprise—it’s possible the estate no longer owns the tape (one copy was auctioned in the Nineties) and EJ is my guess as to one of the things DB never wanted to become public.

** Despite the track on Conversation Piece sounding like a third-generation cassette dub, “Rev. Brown” appears to have been made on a sophisticated, costly set-up for a struggling musician in 1967. The “Rev. Brown” demo—done to copyright the song, distribute it for potential cover versions and, possibly, as a blueprint for Tony Visconti (who was supposed to produce Bowie Deram 2)—has a complete bassline, tambourine and “drum” track, lead and harmony vocals and possibly two guitar tracks. It’s surprisingly intricate for the period. Maybe Kenneth Pitt got the set-up for a short-term period by a vendor, and Bowie no longer had regular access to it once he moved in with Hermione Farthingale. Later DB Sixties demos sound more like “hit ‘record’ and hope the mike picks it all up.”

Top: Batman (Adam West) in Kennington, May 1967; “St John Vianney Garden Fete, 1967” (Hartlepool Museum Service).

Angel Angel Grubby Face

Angel Angel Grubby Face (earlier demo, 1968).
Angel Angel Grubby Face (later demo, presumably 1968).

Around February 1968, Bowie and his then-manager, Ken Pitt, “were still working on the assumption that all our problems at Decca would be solved and that David would continue to have his recordings released on the Deram label,” Pitt wrote in his memoir. Though his debut David Bowie had been a flop, Bowie was encouraged by Decca’s Hugh Mendl to start planning a second album, to be produced by Tony Visconti and cut in spring 1968. So Pitt and Bowie “sat down one night and compiled a list of possible titles…songs already recorded and rejected as singles…a number of old songs and some new ones that he had been writing at the flat.”

The latter included songs whose demos Pitt was sending out at the time, some of which were recorded by the Beatstalkers and the Slender Plenty (“Everything Is You,” “Silver Tree Top School For Boys,” “When I’m Five,” “C’est La Vie“). Bowie split with Deram once their rejection of the “In the Heat of the Morning” single made it clear they’d written him off as a dud, and when he got his next record deal a year later, he had the likes of “Space Oddity” and “Letter to Hermione” to offer. Looking back on Bowie’s never-made 1968 album, Pitt mused that “I suppose that David has forgotten that he ever wrote some of those songs, but they live on in my box files where I keep his original manuscripts, typewritten by himself or written in his own hand.”

With the Spying Through a Keyhole set, we finally hear a few of these ghost songs in demo form:* “Angel Angel Grubby Face” even appears twice. Mark Adams’ liner notes argue for its second, presumably-later-recorded demo as having a guitarist other than Bowie, as it’s a finger-picked style he rarely used: DB was a born strummer. If it’s not Bowie playing, possible candidates are John Hutchinson (which could place the second demo as late as winter 1969) or Tony Hill, Bowie’s mayfly partner in the folk trio Turquoise in summer 1968.** [The more I’ve listened to it, the more I disagree with Adams—this sounds like Bowie, if playing more ambitiously than usual.]

Lyrically, “Angel Angel” falls in with David Bowie tracks like “Maid of Bond Street” and “There Is a Happy Land,” here contrasting hustling time-bound city life with a pastoral escape-land—a dozing bumblebee, “naked sky,” and an oak tree with generous shade, where lovers from Factory Street meet on stolen Sundays. There’s a briskness to Bowie’s “city” lines, which the alternate demo shows he shuffled around to try different phrasings: buses and smoke, disorder and vouchers (or buses and vouchers, smoke and disorder). Call it a sequel to his 1966 single “I Dig Everything” (which Bowie was reviving for a potential cabaret set at the time), with a “briefcase prince” shackled to the nine-to-five city world he’d once laughed at from his bedsit window.

Some of its melodies are also in “London Bye Ta-Ta,” which Bowie cut as a prospective B-side in March 1968—compare the “Angel” verse’s four-beat phrases (“Sun-day oak-tree,” “Mon-day mor-ning”) to “red-light green-light” in the latter, or the “Angel” refrain (“your briefcase prince is by your side”) to the bridge of “Ta-Ta” (“the poet in the clothes shop…”). As the two songs were contemporaneous, being pressed onto a two-sided acetate around this time, it suggests that Bowie was looking to see where some melodic ideas fit better, and “Ta Ta” apparently won. (The later demo sounds as if done in part to tweak the “Ta Ta” melody, especially in the refrain.)

Bowie sings the later demo quietly and somberly, aligned with the more intricate, bass-heavy guitar line. His refrain lyric now begins “‘Tom, Tom,’ she whispers low/ ‘don’t forget my name’,” a revision that darkens his song. What was once “citizens of town” slipping off to the country to be lovers could now be a seduction by a cad who’ll soon get on the train and leave the girl behind—the “she wants to feel older” line becomes more troubling. If he remembers her at all, it will be by the mocking nickname that he gave her under the oak tree.

Recorded: (early demo) ca. December 1967-early spring 1968. Possible locations (London): Kenneth Pitt’s apartment, 39 Manchester Street; Essex Music, 68 Oxford Street. David Bowie: lead and backing vocal, acoustic guitar; (later demo) summer?-winter? 1968. Along w/ previously-mentioned locations, 22 Clareville Grove. Acoustic guitar: Bowie? Hutchinson? Hill? First release: 5 April 2019, Spying Through a Keyhole.

Just FYI: Patreon contributors got this post some days ago, and also got an essay on Lodger at 40, so they’re having a truly wonderful month, I’ve been told.

* Of Pitt’s track list, only “Tiny Tim” and “The Reverend Raymond Brown (Attends the Garden Fete on Thatchwick Green)” remain unreleased or un-bootlegged. Perhaps their turn will come in the next expensive box set of 7″ singles this year!

** As Bowie found Hill via a personal ad DB had in the International Times of 14-27 June 1968, this would place the 2nd “Angel Face” demo (if it is Hill) between then and ca. October ’68, when Hill left Turquoise.

Top: London street scene, summer 1967, from “Swinging Britain,” a British Pathé newsreel.

Mother Grey

Mother Grey (demo).

What’s the point of an archive set of murky-sounding demos from fifty years ago? Spying Through a Keyhole, a box of four 7″ 45 RPM singles ($35.95 retail at Newbury Comics in Northampton, MA), seems meant to be faced-out on a shelf. “What’s that, then? David Bowie?” “Yes, nice, isn’t it? I should get around to listening to it one of these days…”

Format fetishism (soon to continue with the upcoming Clareville Grove Demos set) is inevitable at a time when vinyl packaging drives “physical media” buys. The justification here, as per Parlophone, is that having these demos on 7″ singles honors how they were sent to publishers and performers in the late Sixties (Why not go whole hog then?—put them on acetates that wear out after ten plays.) You, humble buyer, can imagine you’re an overworked staffer for Tom Jones’ management company.

For Keyhole, these are (mostly) songs which Bowie registered with the publisher Essex Music in the mid-to-late Sixties and over which his estate doesn’t have full control—Essex was reportedly why astronaut Chris Hadfield briefly had to pull his “Space Oddity” cover off YouTube. The specter of unissued Bowie songs entering EU public domain was one impetus for its release (the set notes that tracks were “previously available as an internet download only for a strictly limited period in December 2018,” a period so limited that I believe no one on the globe actually downloaded them).

Still, Keyhole offers something new. It clears, somewhat, a muddy picture—it documents Bowie’s steady improvement as a songwriter in 1968. This is considered his lost year, a year without a record deal, the year of Feathers and Hermione, of various failed advert, cabaret, and musical auditions. A holding-pattern year, one devoted to mime and Buddhism (“there were times when I felt I was the only person in the world who believed in his talent,” his then-manager Kenneth Pitt wrote about summer 1968.)*

As it turns out, Bowie was toiling away throughout 1968—even his apparent lassitude was for show. Keyhole is David Bowie as grubbing songwriter, blotting out lyrics, trying out hooks, recasting songs, sketching vocal arrangements. During his life, he wasn’t much interested in making these sort of drafting-room sketches public. Sure he’d rework and recycle lyrics, hooks, chord changes and voices throughout his career, but that was his purview. Make something fresh with it. Otherwise, let’s move on, as he’d sing. With Bowie gone, his past is his last undiscovered country. We’ll see soon enough how much of it will come to light.

Singing in the Silver Kitchen

“Mother Grey,” registered with Essex in December 1967, is a storied “unreleased” Bowie song, as its title was known as early as 1973, when Essex sued Bowie for its copyright.** Released at last in 2019, it’s striking even in bleary demo form—for me, the highlight of the set.

Presumably a candidate (the timing fits) for Bowie’s never-made second album on Deram, slated to be cut in spring 1968, “Mother Grey” is Bowie keeping the thematic framework of his 1967 album—it’s another third-person lyric about a slightly-surreal domestic situation—while toying with structure. So while all 14 David Bowie songs have a (usually) instrumental intro, “Mother Grey” opens with its chorus! (something Bowie rarely did again until “Let’s Dance,” and then he’d credit Nile Rodgers for pushing him).

In two verses, Bowie moves against a bass figure (on guitar here) while varying phrasings to make a ladder of hooks. A five-beat line with a slight weight on the last syllable (“sil-ver kit-chen full of pots and pans“), followed by a goofy aside, often harmonized (“mee-eee oh-myy-ay-ay!”) that in turn trims the closing phrase to four beats (“that’s a way for Mother Grey”). He’s smoothing out and breaking up the lengthy, twisting verse phrasings of late 1967’s “Karma Man“—it’s tighter, hookier writing, with Bowie keeping to a short span of notes.

You assume the awkward “join” linking verse to chorus (esp. at 1:08, which sounds like a clunk-fingered tape edit) would have been improved had “Mother Grey” gotten a full-band recording. Instead you’re left to imagine the ghost arrangement—scored low strings for the refrains? Harmonica replaced by lead guitar? The outro seems to be readying itself for the sort of rambling jam heard on Space Oddity tracks.

It’s a day-to-night portrait—Mother Grey makes beds, cleans the kitchen, cooks tea for her husband (he “tries to kiss but she ain’t in the mood”), scrubs floors, polishes a picture frame of her son, who’s moved out and left her alone in an empty house. She goes to sleep “so alone,” as harmonized Bowies sing in the closing refrain.

Some Ray Davies is in it—see Priscilla’s domestic drudgery in “Two Sisters” (and there’s a Kinks-esque little skip between opening refrain and first verse)—and the liner notes argue for “Mother’s Little Helper” as an influence. But there’s a vicious, joyful contempt in the Stones track, where getting old is a failure and domestic life is a hell of your own making. Take your pep pills for the tennis court, some Valiums to knock yourself out: if you never wake up, who’ll miss you? Jagger soon enough played the devil, but he sounds like an Old Testament-style scourge here, his voice tuned to a sharp, pitiless scale. He’s cursing all he sees, all this horrific prosperity.

There’s nothing like this in “Mother Grey,” who’s confined to her house, like a zoo animal that can’t survive in the wild; she’s trapped in cyclical existence and even seems vaguely aware of it at times—see Bowie’s line about her, for a moment, being suddenly on “the outside” and seeing the starry sky, which looks down on “her hands”; she’s nothing but labor, a hollow tool. His sympathies are with his character here, if coldly. Bowie’s perspective, from early in his work, was of someone trying to puzzle out why “normal” people behave as they do. Everyday life as seen at a remove, as if from the deck of a ship.

It’s most aligned with another 1968 Bowie song, “When I’m Five.” Mother Grey could be that kid’s mother: a towering yet pitiful figure whose life makes no sense (note the child’s-eye name for her, like the soon-to-come President Joe and Major Tom). Bowie’s strained relationship with his mother (who at times would call journalists to complain about him neglecting her) is an unavoidable aspect of the song, as is his long-developed theme of suburbia as a frozen landscape he was lucky to have escaped. It’s frustrating to hear it forever trapped in sketch form. Still, the greatest compliment you can give “Mother Grey” is to mourn the track that it never became.

Recorded: ca. December 1967?-early spring 1968. Possible locations (London): Kenneth Pitt’s apartment at 39 Manchester Street; Essex Music, 68 Oxford Street. David Bowie: lead and backing vocal, acoustic guitars, harmonica, percussion. First release: 5 April 2019, Spying Through a Keyhole.

[If you’d like, print this out and put it between the “London Bye Ta-Ta” and “When I’m Five” entries in Rebel Rebel.]

*In his memoir, Pitt (per usual) exactingly detailed Bowie’s total income for 1968: £905.19.10. Given that, inflation-adjusted, this is something like £16,000 at a much higher pound-to-dollar exchange rate, this is a not-horrible? income for someone who didn’t put out a record and barely performed that year.

**In May 1973, Essex entered a writ in the High Court of Justice in London, claiming that “Mother Grey,” “April’s Tooth of Gold,” and “Ching-a-Ling” should have been assigned to them as part of a 1967 agreement, and alleged Bowie had broken his contract with them when he signed with Chrysalis Music—this would be one of the many legal headaches of the MainMan era).

News, etc.

I want to say thanks again to everyone who came out to the readings and conversations in New York, London, and Manchester in the past months—it was a delight to meet all of you. I hope you’ve enjoyed Ashes to Ashes. If you haven’t gotten it, well, you still can.

I’ll put up more new entries here in a while (the rest of the ‘new’ ’68 demos and probably the last Blackstar songs at some point). And I’m fairly close to finishing the first piece of an “interim” project, a sort of ‘variety show’ thing, you could say. More soon.

Top: Britt-Marie Sohlström, “Mors dag (Mother’s Day), Sweden, 1968.”

 

April’s Tooth of Gold

April’s Tooth of Gold (demo, unreleased).

Long known only as a song title, “April’s Tooth of Gold” was finally bootlegged in 2010, revealing itself as a piece of mild psychedelia melodically similar to “Silver Tree Top School for Boys.”

Ray Davies was central to the development of Bowie’s songwriting and “April’s Tooth of Gold” discloses the debt as openly as Bowie ever allowed. Driven by a harshly-strummed acoustic guitar reminiscent of the Kinks’ “Autumn Almanac,*” Bowie’s song concerned strange young people with blue hair and gold teeth, and the older generation bewildered by them—it was a first draft of “Oh! You Pretty Things,” with the old-timey affectations of “Rubber Band” not quite discarded yet. A minor but appealing piece that could’ve won a place on the never-recorded second Bowie Deram album.

* If it was inspired by “Almanac,” it would push the date of composition for “April’s Tooth” to post-October 1967, when the Kinks track was issued. There’s also a bit of The Lovin’ Spoonful in it.

Top: “Arbyreed,” “Hippies near Trafalgar Square, ca. 1968.”

Various business: I did a recent podcast for Zachary Stockill’s Travels in Music. You can hear me utterly blank on naming Eno’s Oblique Strategies (hey, it was early in the day).

C’est La Vie

This entry, on a minor but sweet song from ca. late 1967, is in the book but never was on the blog. This was due to the fact that the recording didn’t leak until well after I’d covered the Sixties on the blog (2009, basically–I think “C’est” only popped up around 2012).

I am curious whether other demos from the messy “second (and never recorded) Bowie Deram LP” era of late 1967 to early 1968 will eventually surface. I wouldn’t be surprised if so. Looking forward to hearing “Angel Angel Grubby Face” and the Ernie Johnson tape someday.

C’est la Vie.

Bowie wrote “C’est la Vie” in summer 1967 and his manager Kenneth Pitt sent demos that October to song publishers and the American singer Chris Montez, to no response. The elaborate tape, which had eight instrumental and vocal versions of the song, with multiple vocal overdubs and prominent clunky bass (apparently Bowie), suggested Pitt thought “C’est la Vie” one of Bowie’s more commercially promising efforts.

Considered for Bowie’s second Deram album but never taken beyond the demo stage, “C’est la Vie” had a warm melody to suit its lyric’s homebody sentiments. Bowie’s content to watch the world pass by his window, hoping that time will pass him by in turn. It’s a lassitude found in a contemporary interview he gave to Chelsea News (“David is contented with contentment: he is a happy loving person with a gentle nature”). He later reworked one line for “An Occasional Dream” (“burns my wall with time”) and recycled some of its top melody for “Shadow Man.” You could also argue that “Conversation Piece” starts here.

Recorded: (demo, still unreleased) ca. September 1967, Essex Music. Bowie: lead and harmony vocals, acoustic guitar, tambourine, bass?

Top: John Atherton, “London, 1967” (“September 13, 1967 at St. James’s park. She was from Germany.”)

Reissues: The Laughing Gnome

Fitting for April Fool’s Day, it’s the one of the most knocked-about and belittled songs in the Bowie canon. But I stand by what I wrote in 2009, and the book version has even more love for the song. Below is a mingle of the two versions:

The Laughing Gnome!

Let’s come straight to it: yes, “The Laughing Gnome” is about a man meeting a gnome and, a bit later, the gnome’s brother. It has sped-up gnome voices (à la Alvin and the Chipmunks) by Bowie and engineer Gus Dudgeon. For the refrains, Bowie and the gnomes duet. There are gnome puns, many of them.

During a state visit to Washington, DC in 1994, Boris Yeltsin was found dead drunk late one night, standing on Pennsylvania Avenue wearing only his underwear, trying to hail a cab because he wanted to get a pizza. Many consider “The Laughing Gnome” to be something of an equivalent in Bowie’s life. “Undoubtedly the most embarrassing example of Bowie juvenilia,” wrote Charles Shaar Murray. “WORST SONG EVER LOL, know SERIOUSLY WORST,” wrote Techtester45 on YouTube.

At the apex of Bowie’s global fame in 1984, Mick Farren (who’d known Bowie in the Sixties) wrote that “whenever [Bowie] comes under discussion and the folks around the bar start to get rapturous, a still, small voice pipes up in the back of my mind to remind me: This is the man who recorded ‘The Laughing Gnome.’” When Bowie asked fans to vote for which songs he’d perform on his “greatest hits” tour of 1990, the NME launched a write-in campaign to humiliate him by making him sing “Laughing Gnome” on stage.

Stuff and nonsense, I say. After “Space Oddity,” it was Bowie’s best single of the Sixties.

Why “The Laughing Gnome” is brilliant

1. It rocks. It was Bowie’s best Mod soul single: its propulsive 4/4 slammed home by drums, bass, harpsichord and guitar all locked in, the guitar shifting from topping the bassline to biting down hard on each beat. (It was the first of many Bowie attempts to match the drone of the Velvet Underground’s “I’m Waiting for the Man.”) Even the gnome voices were basically drum fills. His melody, reminiscent of “The Tennessee Waltz,” was a rhythm guitar line in a vocal. Bowie started each verse with short upward moves (“I was walk-ing, down the high street”), took a long stride down an octave (“heard-foot-steps-be-hind-me”) echoed by a closing set of short, descending lines (“scarlet and grey, chuckling a-way”). The refrains were a four-part harmony: soaring oboe, playing whole or half notes; huffing bassoon happy to act the clown; Bowie’s lead vocal; the gnome chorus.

2. The puns. Come on, they’re not bad. Some are even inspired.

“Haven’t you got an ‘ome to go to?”
‘No, we’re gnomads!’
“Didn’t they need you to get your hair cut at school, you look like a Rolling Gnome!”
‘No, not at the London School of EcoGnomics!

It’s a quadruple gnome pun score! Eighteen points, plus a bonus for making an LSE joke about Mick Jagger.

3. Credible dark interpretations. Momus, in the early 2000s, offered the intriguing theory that “Laughing Gnome” may be about a man losing his mind, a schizophrenic’s conversation with himself. The storyline fits. The man’s walking down the street, hears a strange voice, sees a vision. Then he starts having visions at home. He tries to rally, puts the gnome “on a train to Eastbourne.” No luck. The visions return and multiply: there are two gnomes now! Finally, descent into madness. The man’s at home, believing his gnomes have made him wealthy and famous, but is actually curled in a ball on the floor. If you come close you can hear him whisper “HA HA HA…hee hee hee…”

4. Gnomic synchronicity. The son of a half-century’s worth of British novelty records, from Charles Penrose’s “laughing” discs in the Twenties to Anthony Newley’s “Pop Goes the Weasel” and “That Noise,” “Laughing Gnome” suited the frothy mood of its time, preceding Pink Floyd’s “The Gnome” by a few months. Syd Barrett’s gnome is named Grimble Gromble and is more of a stay-at-home than Bowie’s. Both gnomes like their booze, though. They’re color-coordinated, too: Grimble wears a “scarlet tunic [and] a blue green hood” while the Laughing Gnome sports “scarlet and grey.” Barrett offers a general benediction, honoring the other meaning of the word gnome, that is, “a brief reflection or maxim; a wise pithy saying”:

Look at the sky, look at the river,
Isn’t it good?

5. The Gnome saved Bowie from a life of cabaret. “Bowie included the song in his ill-fated cabaret audition, with the assistance of a glove-puppet gnome.” (Nicholas Pegg; my emphasis.)

6. A bassoon is a lead instrument. The chromatic three-octave-descending oboe/bassoon riff would be a through-line in Bowie’s songs, heard in everything from “Fame,” “Speed of Life” and “Fall in Love With Me” to “Scream Like a Baby” and “Real Cool World.” And the varisped gnome voices returned as ghouls in “After All,” “The Bewlay Brothers” and Bowie’s cover of “See Emily Play,” among others.

7. It’s a testament to a lost friendship. Gus Dudgeon, architect of “Gnome,” became close to Bowie over the course of making Bowie’s first LP. He recalled Bowie walking into his flat at Christmas and shaking a branch of Dudgeon’s tree in greeting. (“All the bloody pine needles came off.”) For “Laughing Gnome” Bowie and Dudgeon spent weeks coming up with puns and experimenting with tape speeds, cutting multiple versions of the track (the musician Mike Scott said he once slowed down the track enough to hear that Dudgeon’s doing most of the gnome voices). Bowie and Dudgeon even were proud of the single until the world told them it was a mistake. “For a brief period I enjoyed it, but then when the record came out and everyone said how awful it was I realized it was pretty terrible,” Bowie recalled in 1993.

The single’s failure to chart and some critical pasting pushed Bowie towards a darker path: soon enough came Space Oddity and The Man Who Sold the World. This would become his regular maneuver. Whenever he did something too silly (say, Labyrinth or the Glass Spider Tour) he’d make amends by dressing as a “serious” artiste for a time. While the cracked, gleeful spirit of the “Gnome” went missing for much of the Seventies, Bowie kept quietly drawing from its stores.

Dudgeon and Bowie eventually had a falling out. But when Dudgeon was killed in a car crash in 2002, Bowie sent flowers to his funeral with the note “Farewell to the Laughing Gnome.” Because Bowie, deep down, knew the track was one of the finest things he ever did.

Recorded 26 January, 7 & 10 February and 8 March 1967 and released on 14 April 1967 as Deram DM 123. It flopped upon first release, but reached #6 in the UK when Deram reissued it at the height of Ziggydom in 1973. The Gnome will rise again, one day.

See also: “Requiem For a Laughing Gnome.“

Ching-a-Ling

Ching-a-Ling.
Ching-a-Ling (edited version, promo film).
Ching-a-Ling (demo, 1969).

He had avoided it as long as possible, but by the summer of 1968 David Bowie had become a hippie. He grew his hair down to his shoulders, sat around his manager’s house naked, cooked macrobiotic meals, joined a communal arts lab and, saddest of all, formed a folk music trio.

This was Turquoise, soon to be rechristened Feathers. Turquoise was founded by Bowie, his first serious girlfriend Hermione Farthingale, ballet dancer and amateur singer, and London folkie (and former guitarist for The Misunderstood) Tony Hill, who soon was replaced by John “Hutch” Hutchinson, former lead guitarist of Bowie’s old band The Buzz. Hutchinson had recently returned to the UK from Canada, his head full of the new Canadian folk music (Gordon Lightfoot, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen), and he found that Bowie now “was into softer things…he didn’t need a band to pump it out anymore.”

Following in the path of grubby hippie groups before them and the countless numbers after them, Feathers played a meager circuit of university halls and folk clubs. It was a bit of passive rebellion on Bowie’s part—his manager Ken Pitt, desperate to get Bowie some paying gigs, had pushed him to develop a cabaret act, which went nowhere, and landed him a brief spot in a Lyons Maid “Luv” ice cream commercial (directed by Ridley Scott!). Bowie later described Turquoise/Feathers as being in part just a device to spend more time with his girlfriend, but the group also reflected Bowie’s belief that since he wasn’t getting paid anyhow, why not form a “non-commercial” band that performed just for the joy of it?

So Feathers played sets consisting of recited poetry, a few recent Bowie compositions (like “When I’m Five”) and some Jacques Brel covers, interspersed with mime routines. “Ghastly,” the mime Lindsay Kemp recalls in Marc Spitz’s new Bowie biography. The band’s enforced democratic vibe (everyone sang, everyone played guitar) resulted in, as it typically does, a determined sense of mediocrity.

The only Feathers record was “Ching-a-ling,” which Tony Visconti recorded on the sly—booking a session at Trident Studios without managerial approval and hoping the track would get picked up by a label. The b-side was meant to be Tony Hill’s “Back to Where You’ve Never Been,” but as Hill was suddenly replaced by Hutchinson, that idea naturally fell through. “Ching-a-Ling” is not bad and not memorable: it simply floats along like a soap bubble. It may be the most depressing thing that Bowie recorded in the entire decade.

Recorded on 24 October 1968 (Bowie’s sung verse is cut on most versions of the track; it’s no loss); on Deram Anthology (the full version finally appeared on the David Bowie reissue). Bowie and Hutchinson recorded a demo version in mid-April 1969.

Top: (l to r) Hermione Farthingale, David Bowie (cropped hair due to his role as an extra in The Virgin Soldiers), Tony Visconti, John Hutchinson. Ca. October 1968.

When I’m Five

When I’m Five (demo, 1968).
When I’m Five (BBC Top Gear 1968 recording; promo film).
When I’m Five (1969 demo).

Als das Kind Kind war,
erwachte es einmal in einem fremden Bett
und jetzt immer wieder,
erschienen ihm viele Menschen schön
und jetzt nur noch im Glücksfall.

(When the child was a child,
it awoke once in a strange bed,
and now does so again and again,
many people seemed beautiful,
and now only a few do, by chance.)

Peter Handke, “Lied vom Kindsein.”

Thereafter all his dreams and plays were inspired by the magic words, “When I’m five an’ can see.” The sentence served as a mental spring-board to jump his imagination off into a world of wonder where he could see “dest—dest as good as big folks.”

Margaret Prescott Montague, “What Mr. Grey Said.”

“When I’m Five” is a sung by a child who wants to be a child. Or to be more precise, a true child, a child of five or seven, one who seemingly has the business of childhood sorted out. Age is the most salient of childhood’s hierarchies; age truly matters, each year has its own weight and presence, in a way it never quite does again. To a four-year-old, a seven-year-old (the first climacteric year, the year of permanent teeth) is an aspiration, a 10-year-old is a high master, while those over 13 belong to the Great Otherwhere, a sullen land full of dark, awful mystery.

Bowie’s “When I’m Five” is a thematic sequel to “There Is a Happy Land” (not just thematic—Bowie reuses “Happy Land”‘s bridge). Where the latter was sung by an all-seeing narrator who occasionally took the voice of the children he observed, “When I’m Five” is entirely first-person. It’s both endearing and embarrassing—Bowie sings in a pinched, awkward voice (matched visually by his mime-like performance in the promo film Love You Till Tuesday) and performs without a trace of self-consciousness. It feels quite personal for a Bowie lyric, which up until now have rarely been autobiographical: there’s a reference to “my Grandfather Jones,” as well as a crying father and a mother who keeps secrets tucked away in a drawer.

While “When I’m Five” is embedded deep in the mind of childhood, there’s also a flavor of departure in it—the child wants to grow up, if at first just to be a greater child, but escape and adulthood are his final aims. The adult world, with all its worries, pettiness and wonders (spitting tobacco, marching in army parades, marriage), has come flooding in. After a period in which British pop music had been besotted with childhood, a change appears to be coming, darkness and strife on the horizon.

Bowie cut a demo of the song in early 1968, while the only proper recording he made of it was at a BBC session on 13 May 1968—the BBC version was the soundtrack to the “When I’m Five” sequence in Love You Till Tuesday. The Beatstalkers were convinced to cover the song, and released their bewildered version on their last single, c/w, appropriately, “Little Boy” (CBS 3936). It marked the end, both of the band’s connection to Bowie’s music and of the band itself.

London Bye Ta-Ta

London Bye Ta-Ta.

In Victoria Station Bowie overheard a West Indian family calling “London bye ta-ta!” to relatives boarding a train out of town. And the song Bowie wrote with that title is, in part, about immigrant London: a city that, by the end of the ’60s, had a rising population of West Indians, various Africans, Pakistanis, Indians and other nationalities. Many of the newcomers had been members of the British Commonwealth or of its former colonies—the result was a new complexion for the UK (the BBC: in 1945, Britain’s non-white residents were in the low thousands, by 1970 they were approximately 1.4 million). Reaction was swift: Enoch Powell‘s notoriety (or infamy) began a month after Bowie first recorded “London Bye Ta-Ta,” one of several songs of the period to touch on immigration (not only was The Beatles’ “Get Back” originally a satire on Powell, the “get back to where you once belonged” addressed to Pakistanis, but “Ob-la-di, Ob-la-da”‘s title was coined by the Nigerian conga player Jimmy Scott, a friend of McCartney’s.)

One of Bowie’s prettiest ’60s songs, “London Bye Ta-Ta” is also the latest variation on Bowie’s provincials-come-to London theme, in the line of “Can’t Help Thinking About Me,” and “The London Boys.” What’s fine here is a broadening of perspective—two young bohemians meet and flirt, but the singer also realizes they’re part of a greater exodus, mere ripples in a sea of population change. Everyone flooding into town is looking for some form of renewal: a new name, a new face, a better job. “The poet in the clothes shop sold me curry for a pound,” the singer recalls in passing. London has become, seemingly overnight, a strange young town.

It’s a rewrite of “Threepenny Pierrot,” though Bowie greatly improves the song in revision. “Threepenny” is just a catchy chorus and a tinkly little verse; “London Bye Ta-Ta” keeps the chorus but the verse is now in three stages—first just four descending notes (“gi-gi-gi-gi,” “red light green light”) countered by four rising ones (“take me away,” “make up your mind”) punctuated by a clang, then four bars of developing melody (with a third chord, G, finally introduced—it’s only been D and C up to now). It leads to the verse’s final and loveliest four-bar section, in which a neat guitar riff anchors an upward sweep of Tony Visconti’s strings arrangement and, even higher, Bowie’s vocal.

“London Bye Ta-Ta,” as much as it captures the beauty and sweep of a city in the flush of reinventing itself, winds up a tragedy. The two kids don’t make it:

She loves to love all beauty,
And she says the norm is funny
But she whimpers in the morning
When she finds she has no money

“I loved her! I loved her!” the singer pleads with us. But he’s out the door all the same.

Recorded on 12 March 1968 (it was proposed as the B-side to the rejected “In the Heat of the Morning” single); also cut a day later for the BBC (the version linked to above, which is on Bowie at the Beeb). Bowie still thought it had potential and considered it as a follow-up single to “Space Oddity,” cutting a revised version (with Marc Bolan on guitar) between 8-15 January 1970. But it was ultimately scrapped, and the Bolan version wasn’t released until the 1989 Sound and Vision compilation.

Top: London, May Day 1968.