The Last Tour

some postcards from a very long trip:

Song 2 (Rotterdam, 15 October 2003).
It Can’t Happen Here (Vienna, 29 October 2003).
Do You Know the Way to San Jose? (San Jose, 27 January 2004).

“A Reality Tour”—nine months, 22 countries, 59 songs (+ more snippets*) performed, 112 shows—may be Bowie’s last. Even should he play live again, he won’t undertake the relentless global campaign that his 2003-04 tour was. The people of Australia and New Zealand, Singapore and Hong Kong may never see Bowie again and in North America, it’s fair to say Uncasville (CT), the Quad Cities, Manchester (New Hampshire), Winnipeg, Minneapolis and Hershey (PA) have seen their last Bowie concert.

Tour in capsule: The 57-year-old Bowie, playing markets that, in some cases, he’d last visited in the Eighties, embarked on a grueling schedule that, originally planned for seven months, soon grew to span nearly a year. Each night he played at least two hours and up to 35-song sets. There were a few signs of wear—a bout of flu caused Bowie to cancel a run of shows in December 2003, highly unusual for him (Lou Reed once said that “David never seems to exercise, but he never gets sick”) and his voice was frayed in some mid-winter shows. Upon finishing the last US tour leg, he moved directly to a run of European summer festivals in June 2004. In Prague, he appeared to have a heart attack and after getting through one more show in Germany, he had a heart operation and was forced to cancel the rest of the tour.

He’s never headlined a full concert again. His live appearances dwindled to a handful of guest spots and small sets; after 2007, he was no longer a public performer.

The future distorts the past. The “Reality” shows now seem hubristic in their energy, pacing and length—why was Bowie pushing himself so much? Take it easy, man! you want to yell at the computer screen when you see a concert clip. But this belies the evidence of the time. Fan reports, newspaper concert reviews, tour diaries of players like Gail Ann Dorsey, video footage of the shows—all document a man seemingly in robust health, in fine voice, eager to play each night.

He said he really was, at last. He’d been wary of singing live since the Sixties. “It was not something I looked forward to very much,” he told the Weekly Dig in late 2003. “I’ve always loved the putting together everything. I love the idea of making albums and writing albums and conceptualizing and all that side of the thing, you know? The actual going out on the road side of the thing—one, I never thought I was that good at it, and two, I just didn’t enjoy the process too much. I don’t know, maybe because I didn’t feel competent as an artist.”

But after Tin Machine and his road-heavy mid-Nineties, he’d developed a taste for the stage. “We did a lot of festivals throughout Europe. I mean, heavens, over a two-year period we did so many,” he told an interviewer. “We were working with really top-rate bands like The Prodigy, bands of that ilk, and we were going down really well. I hadn’t been amongst that many bands continually so it was like, ‘Phew, got to measure myself against this every night’. And it was like, ‘You know what, we’re going down really well considering all these bands are like half my age, some of them a third of my age.'”

 

Touring as “himself” to say goodbye, if unknowingly, to the world, Bowie quietly solved the problem of how to reconcile his hits (“singalong time,” he called it) with newer, lesser-known material by just putting the songs cheek-by-jowl in a set, sequencing them so that the crowd wouldn’t get restless and he wouldn’t get bored playing too many old chestnuts. “I can’t do a full evening’s worth of those songs [like “Starman”] because I’ll go barmy. You become a karaoke machine,” he said in 2003 (“look mum, I’m a jukebox!” he snarked after singing “Starman” one night). On stage he used the image of travel to describe his sets to crowds—you’ll go down an unfamiliar road for a while, so just enjoy the sights, and soon enough “you’ll recognize a street, then a house.” (“You’ll recognize this house,” he said, introducing “Ashes to Ashes.”)

He didn’t go easy on his audiences: “Heathen (The Rays)” was occasionally a set-closer or encore piece. “Sunday,” “The Motel” and “The Loneliest Guy” (the latter a bathroom break for some griping concertgoers) were regulars. Nor were the oldies only his top-charting hits. There was no “Space Oddity” or “Golden Years,” but plenty of “Fantastic Voyage” and “Be My Wife” and a somber “Loving the Alien.” Over the months, Bowie slowly reshaped his sets into being more retrospective—by spring 2004 he was playing only a handful of Reality songs while cycling in “Queen Bitch,” “Bewlay Brothers,” “Five Years,” “Quicksand,” “Panic In Detroit” and “Diamond Dogs,” mainly for encores.

“Judging by the audience reaction to this tour, I think I’ve done the right thing,” he told a reporter midway through the tour, in February 2004. “I think I’ve chosen quite accurately how far I can go with quite new and obscure things, and how much I should balance that with pieces everybody knows.” That said, fan recollections of the shows recounted a fairweather portion of audiences growing impatient at times. “Give us some hits, Davy!” one man loudly yelled in Toronto between songs.

An inspiration was Bob Dylan, who in 2003 was well over a decade into his “Never Ending Tour.” Learning that Dylan made his band keep 70 songs in their repertoire, so that if the mood struck him one night he could play “Lenny Bruce,” Bowie pushed his band to learn around 60 songs and he altered set lists regularly to bring in new pieces and shuffle out old ones. At first this churn was trying for the band—Dorsey wrote in her tour journal that after one show in Paris where Bowie swapped in a bunch of under-rehearsed songs, the band “all felt as if we had fumbled through a tough football match we knew we had lost from the beginning.”** But soon they had it tacked down, capable of playing any era that Bowie threw at them.

In the works since 2001, the tour’s impetus was in great part financial (which, of course, is the impetus behind every rock tour in history). Despite high chart placings in Britain and Europe, Bowie’s later albums had sold relatively modestly and he got scant airplay for his new singles. It didn’t help matters that the music industry was in free-fall, tottering thanks to Napster, plummeting once the iPod hit critical mass in 2004. Making a living by selling albums was for suckers, Bowie said. “I don’t see any hope for the industry at all. We’re watching it collapse—it’s definitely imploding—and it’s become a source of irrelevance.”

So touring was Bowie’s main source of new revenue (at the time, all earnings from much of his back catalog were going to Prudential Insurance, holder of the Bowie Bonds). And his Area 2 festival shows of 2002 had grossed $4.7 million, with attendance down from earlier “mini tours.” Bowie’s people surveyed fans and found them unhappy with the recent shows, which had been built around festivals and sharing the stage with other headliners. There was a hunger for an undiluted Bowie, by a global market. He hadn’t been to Singapore and Hong Kong since 1983, Australia and New Zealand since 1987, Japan since 1996, South America since 1997 (and he never would make it back to South America).

Using goliath Clear Channel Entertainment, Bowie and his advisers drafted a flexible tour schedule—he’d play the arenas he knew could sell out (like Wembley) but he’d also book 2,000-seat theaters in less predictable markets. And he often underestimated demand: he booked the 4,400-seat Rosemont Theatre for his Chicago stop, but sales were enough to justify playing the Rosemont two more nights. The tour wound up grossing $46 million, even with its premature end.

I know I’m a solo artist, but there are aspects of being a solo artist I don’t particularly enjoy, being separated from the others. I don’t like the feeling of being closeted somewhere on my own. I’ve always liked being part of a band—I did with the Spiders, I liked it with Tin Machine and that feeds back into the music. It starts to take on a coherence and a solidarity within the seven of us.

Bowie, Scotland on Sunday, June 2004 (his last newspaper interview to date).

His band was the “Hours” tour rhythm section (Dorsey and Sterling Campbell), old standby Mike Garson, guitarists Gerry Leonard (playing the “Fripp,” “Belew” and “Gabrels” roles) and Earl Slick (playing himself) and the most recent addition, from 2002: Catherine Russell, a utility player who sang, played keyboards, percussion and guitar. They were a no-nonsense crew who’d worked with Bowie, in some cases, over decades. If they lacked in improvisation, mainly keeping to established arrangements, they made up for it in power and precision, aided by a cracking sound mix in which “David’s voice sits on top, but this is not a Vegas-style show. The band is every bit as present as they need to be,” said front-of-the-house engineer Pete Keppler.

The aim was to make the band heard clearly throughout the room, even the largest stadium gigs. So Keppler and monitor engineer Michael Prowda used a JBL VerTec PA system, with 14 cabinets and subwoofers on each side of the stage and Prowda mixing each song live with a 14-track console (“Every song is a scene and I have some 50-odd scenes”). Bowie used a vocal effects system that included a Digitech Vocalist and a Moog moogerfooger to alter his voice on a whim. “David has two volume pedals onstage where he mixes his own distortion and doubling and sets his volume level. He’s hearing the balance in his head and wants it to sound similarly in the house,” Prowda said.

Wearing jeans, a t-shirt and scarf, leather boots or Chuck Taylors and a tattered jacket to be discarded after a few songs*** (“it’s a T-shirt and jeans type show, believe me that’s what it is”), Bowie became something of a traveling politician and emcee, pulling the same jokes each night, gurning, pantomiming (doing a runway strut for “Fashion,” Pierrot-isms for “Ashes to Ashes,” drag queen moves for “China Girl”), bantering with the crowd (“how DO you get your hair that color? What product do you use?” to a fan in Copenhagen; calling one guy in Atlanta “fancy pants”), having the crowd sing verses of “All the Young Dudes” and “China Girl.” “Constantly grinning,” Billboard noted of Bowie’s performance in New York. In Berkeley he “pranced theatrically, calling himself the Artful Dodger, imitated Americans and Americans imitating the British,” a reviewer wrote. In Denver, he did a bit of his old Elephant Man performance. He usually opened shows with “[YOUR CITY HERE] you bunch of crazy motherfuckers!”

It was all his “schtick,” as he described it to journalists. “I just want to have a laugh with the audience. I don’t want it any other way,” he said. “If there’s a sense of seriousness, that comes in the songs themselves….Performing isn’t a life-threatening situation in the scheme of things.” Or as the Kinks once sang, it’s only jukebox music.

This was a return to an old form: the fey, witty folk musician of “Bowie and Hutch,” who’d made his hippie audiences crack up between numbers. Or the would-be cabaret star of 1968, the “all-round entertainer” persona that his old manager Kenneth Pitt had believed was Bowie’s best bet for stardom. Reviving this glad-handing figure for the “A Reality Tour” (the indefinite article, mind) was a theatrical bit, a way for Bowie to serve as stage manager and frontman.

But he also seemed intent on de-mystifying “Bowie” at last. I’ll do songs I like, I’ll play songs you like, let’s have fun. The only stage props were catwalks, video screens and some tree branches suspended in mid-air. Each night of the tour found a magician walking on stage in shirt sleeves, showing you how he made his assistant disappear via a set of mirrors, recalling favorite sleights of hand. And then still making you fall for the trick.

Then his luck turned.

Early summer 2004 was dismal in northern Europe, with nearly every Bowie festival appearance that June plagued by rains and wind. At the Norwegian Wood Festival in Oslo, on 18 June, he was struck in the eye by a lollipop, causing him to understandably lose his shit for a moment. Gerry Leonard said a fan had somehow hit a bullseye (the thrower was a mortified thirtysomething who claimed she’d just been waving her hands when someone knocked into her and caused her to project the lollipop). The next festival, in Finland, passed uneventfully in rain. Then came Prague.

He opened with “Life on Mars?” for the first time on the tour, and eight songs in, while singing “Reality,” it was obvious to fans in the front rows that Bowie was in pain, struggling to finish the song. He left the stage, the band keeping going with “New Career In a New Town” and “Be My Wife” (sung by Cat Russell). “‘That’s not supposed to happen,” Leonard recalled thinking. “He was really feeling terrible. it happened right there on the stage: that’s showbiz.” Returning to apologize, Bowie blamed a trapped nerve in his shoulder. He sang “China Girl,” still in noticeable pain, and left the stage again after an aborted “Station to Station.”

It was as if the persona he’d developed for the tour, the music man who gave you a bang for the buck, wouldn’t let him end a set early. So he went back out again to finish “Station” and sing “Modern Love” and “The Man Who Sold the World” while sitting on a stool and clutching his arm. Finally he pulled the plug. Our Czech correspondent, longtime commenter Maj, was there: she told me that the crowd soon grew aware something was wrong: “There might have been a few boos because it got cut short, but I think mostly we were confused & a bit worried.”

While not confirmed, it seems apparent that Bowie had a heart attack that night, possibly while singing. It may not have been the first time, either. Gabrels told Marc Spitz, one of Bowie’s biographers, that “I knew for years that he was having some chest pains, but he swore me to secrecy, and I should have told Iman.”

If all this turned out badly and I didn’t enjoy it, I’d just have to create a character to get out of being me again, I suppose. Now there’s a story! There’s an album there (laughs).

Bowie, Weekly Dig.

There would be one more show.

The annual Hurricane Festival is held on a motorcycle racetrack in Scheeßel, a German village southwest of Hamburg. An unassuming place to close a story that began on Bloomsday, 16 June 1962, with 15-year-old David Jones’ first-ever public gig, playing Shadows covers at the Bromley Tech PTA Fete.

Fans noticed nothing amiss during the set, with Bowie moving around on stage and playing some guitar (he did seem to have a moment of pain during “Ashes to Ashes,” clutching his arm again). As evening drew in, it got colder, the North Sea winds coming across the Lower Saxony plains, and Bowie donned a simple grey sweatshirt. It’s poignant: Bowie finally reduced to the human, looking like a handsome, tired dad at a football game. Or a fishing boat captain weathering a storm (via Chris Barrus).

“Heroes” (Hurricane Festival).

He closed the set with “Heroes.” Leonard starts with an ascending, choppy figure on guitar, jabbing against a backdrop of Sterling Campbell’s snare and cymbals. Bowie holds back, knotting his fingers below his chin, as if he’s outside looking in, even slightly bemused by his old dramatics (he does a little dolphin dance). Dorsey’s pensive, working down the song. Slick comes in, cool and indifferent, chewing gum. At last, the wailing Fripp riff (courtesy of Leonard’s E-bow) appears and Bowie starts drawing power from somewhere in him, diving into the song, resurfacing, torching through its last verses. And the SHAME spread on the OTHER SIDE!, gesturing off towards a lost Berlin to the east. And NOTHING and NO ONE will HELP us! while Campbell plays hard enough to power a city.

Do they, does he, know it’s the end? But it is the end. An end, at least. The moment has chosen itself. This is the wake for David Bowie. We’ll never see his like again. Nor will he.

He encored with “Life On Mars?” (opening with it was bad mojo), “Suffragette City” and he closed the show, as he had for almost every other show on the tour, with “Ziggy Stardust.” The next day, at St. Georg Hospital in Hamburg, a surgeon performed an angioplasty to treat a blocked artery in Bowie’s heart, inserting a stent to open up a blood vessel narrowed by plaque.

Bowie was in hospital for over a week. One by one, his appearances at the remaining June festivals and the eleven July festival dates were cancelled. Scotland’s T in the Park, where Bowie had hoped to meet one of his new favorite bands, Franz Ferdinand. The Xacobeo Festival in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, where he would have shared a bill with Iggy Pop again.

He gave a public statement, said he was irked that the tour had to end this way but that he was feeling better and hoped to “get back to work” within a month. It would be a touch longer than that.

Following a rehearsal gig in August and a “satellite link-up” spectacle filmed at Riverside Studios in September, the tour ran from 7 October 2003 (Copenhagen) to 25 June 2004 (Hurricane). The 22-23 November 2003 shows at The Point in Dublin were filmed, with an edited selection of performances released as the A Reality Tour DVD on 19 October 2004 (a slightly-expanded version was released on CD in 2010).

Of immense help to this entry was the site Bowie Wonderworld, which provided a day-by-day account of the tour while it happened, compiling set lists and fan testimonies.

* No clips on YT, but Bowie also sang bits of songs like “Puppet On a String,” “My Funny Valentine” and “Here Comes the Sun” at other dates.

** Though he sound-checked and rehearsed “Win,” Bowie never played it, only humming it once at his penultimate US show on 4 June 2004.

*** In Adelaide on 23 February 2004, Bowie showed up in a grey zoot suit, sporting a trilby, braces and two fob chains, claiming he’d “found this pair of gardening trousers.” He was back to his usual “casual” costume by the following show, later saying he’d switched into gouster duds out of boredom.

Photos: a curtain call (unsure from which show); Melbourne, 26 February 2004 (Trevor Wilson); Pittsburgh, 17 May 2004 (Keith Sparbanie); Bowie and Debbie Harry backstage in Manchester, 17 November 2003 (Ian Hodgson); Houston, 24 April 2004 (Mark Jeremy); Kansas City, 10 May 2004 (Deryck Higgins); Indianapolis, 20 May 2004; Isle of Wight Festival, 13 June 2004 (Anthony Abbott); Hurricane Festival; Bowie at the Rainbow Theatre, London, 1972.

Isn’t It Evening (The Revolutionary)

Isn’t It Evening (The Revolutionary) (Earl Slick with David Bowie).

Whenever the “who’s the greatest Bowie guitarist” debate arises (typically by dudes), there are few contenders. Mick Ronson, architect of Bowie’s breakthrough. Carlos Alomar, ultimate right-hand man. Adrian Belew, Reeves Gabrels and Robert Fripp: instigators. That’s pretty much the lot.

It’s rare for someone to argue for Earl Slick, despite his pedigree—hot Young Turk on the Diamond Dogs tour, adding guts to the Lennon tracks on Young Americans, being the linchpin of Station to Station. Called back for the Serious Moonlight tour, and the mainstay of the last Bowie tours and albums. Slick is one of the last remaining ties to Bowie’s past: of the players on The Next Day, only he and Tony Visconti had worked with Bowie in the Seventies.

So why doesn’t he get his due? Maybe he never shed the “hired gun” label (he had to fill Ronson’s shoes in 1974 and was drafted as a last-minute replacement for Stevie Ray Vaughan on the 1983 tour). Or that he’s not considered a bandleader in the way that Ronson, Alomar and Gabrels were. Some critics and fans have argued he lacks a signature sound. You can hear a few notes of Ronson and Alomar and likely place them, but what defines Earl Slick?

This gives him too little credit. Slick’s playing has a distinctive tone, a bluesy, swaggering sensibility: there’s an attitude in his string bends (only Ronson could wring more out of his bends) and pick attacks; he seems hell-bent on making his amplifiers smoke. John Lennon got Slick for the Double Fantasy sessions because “he wanted one street guy in there” among the studio aces, and Bowie regarded Slick in much the same way, as a fearless “blue-collar” guitarist who wasn’t plagued by good taste. Slick’s peak was “Station to Station,” where his regiments of overdubbed guitars created a sound that even Belew struggled to reproduce on stage.

Slick grew up in Red Hook, Brooklyn, and Staten Island. Kicking around in a few NYC bands in the early Seventies, Slick met the composer/arranger Michael Kamen, who hired him as a roadie and then as a guitarist. Kamen, chosen as bandleader for the Diamond Dogs tour, suggested Bowie consider Slick as a lead player. “I went down to RCA Studios to meet him, they stuck a set of headphones on me, turned on some Diamond Dogs mixes and told me to play along,” Slick recalled in 2003. “They didn’t even tell me what fuckin’ key they were in.” He got the gig.

Within months, though, he was on the outs. Bowie reconfigured the tour in September 1974 to reflect his new “soul” music and Slick now had to share the stage with a rival guitarist, Alomar, and a new vocal chorus, and tackle songs that Bowie hadn’t even released yet. “I thought I was important to the thing but I’m starting to feel like a fuckin’ throwaway,” he told Bowie biographers the Gilmans in the mid-Eighties. “David had gone completely in a direction I didn’t like.” Slick realized he’d only hung onto his job “because they needed me for the rock material.”

So Station to Station became Slick and Alomar battling for control, each overdubbing the other, each trying to outplay the other. Alomar, who’d assembled a rhythm section he was in sync with, had pole position; Slick, who’d made the strategic blunder of signing with Bowie’s soon-to-be-estranged new manager, was outside, trying to knife his way in. The title track, “TVC 15,” “Golden Years” and “Stay” are the records of their battles—Alomar sparring with one of his endless catchy riffs, Slick retaliating with massive chords and feedback concertos.

Slick was gone before the 1976 tour. In the Eighties he was a session man and leader of his own sub-super group, Phantom, Rocker & Slick. In the Nineties, he cleaned up and burned out. “Every time I got called to do anything, or when anybody was going to get involved with me, it was for that—more of the same,” he told Billboard in 2003. “And I remember going onstage doing another, yet one more blues rock solo, and just thinking, ‘Man, this is not fun.’ And at the time, I don’t think I was conscious of whether I was bored with what I was doing, with that kind of guitar playing, or if I just started hating music. I didn’t know where I was at.”

So he quit. Moved to Lake Tahoe with his Newfoundlands, stayed off the grid for years. When he put up his own website, around 1999, he got back on Bowie’s radar. The story was that Bowie, who was spending hours on the Internet at the time, did the usual thing: he wondered “hey, whatever became of Slick?” and typed his name into AltaVista. And so Bowie (or a staffer) discovered Slick was living in the High Sierras. Around New Year 2000, an email invitation was sent to Slick’s webmaster, and Slick went to New York to, yet again, step in for a departing lead guitarist: in this case, Reeves Gabrels. Slick played on Bowie’s 2000 mini-tour, and has been on every Bowie album and tour since.

It helped that Bowie was reviving many of his Seventies rockers on stage and that the new songs from Heathen and Reality suited Slick’s style—Bowie wasn’t asking him to do many drum ‘n’ bass numbers. Slick also had cooled down. “I don’t like using my chops anymore. It bores me,” he told Vintage Guitar. “I approached David Bowie’s stuff a lot differently way back than I do now. I’m playing less, but I think my playing is a lot more intense and I’m playing more to the sound of things. I’m playing simpler and a little more thematic, and a lot less jammy and bluesy than I used to. Because I write so much now, I’m approaching the songs more like a songwriter.”

Invigorated by working on Bowie’s albums and tours, Slick in 2001 began planning his first solo album in over a decade. Originally he was going to make an instrumental record, using fellow Bowie sideman Mark Plati as producer, but he didn’t have the stomach to cut a “noodling” album, as lead guitarists usually produce. (“I’ve never been that much of a heavy noodler anyway,” he said.) Instead, Zig Zag started as Slick’s attempts at writing incidental music for films, keeping his tracks concise and melodic. “The album was almost like making a demo to get scoring jobs.”

But Slick had racked up admirers over the years, so he soon had Robert Smith singing on one track, and Joe Elliott, Royston Langdon (Spacehog) and Martha Davis (the Motels) were also on board. Bowie not-quite-subtly invited himself. “He overheard a conversation I was having with [Plati]… and said, ‘I guess you’re not interested in me maybe doing a little something on the record,‘” Slick recalled.

Each guest singer had provided their top melodies and lyrics, and Bowie did the same. His contribution, “Isn’t It Evening (The Revolutionary),” which Slick described as “pensive,” came after Slick sent Bowie “seven really rough pieces” and he picked one. Once the track was properly recorded, Bowie came to Looking Glass Studios (during the recording of Reality in early 2003) to cut his typically quick-take vocal. “He asked what I thought about the ending and I said, “Well, what if you tried this on the harmony…,” Slick recalled. “It was fucking weird giving him direction! I was stepping back from myself the whole time, like there was one of me at the console and one of me just watching everything in the room.”

The result was a track that, unlike some other Bowie side-project contributions, was worthy of his own albums. Bowie’s lyrics and melodies are in line with the somber theatricals of Heathen and Reality, with some striking lines (“one dies on the lawn/his face turned away from it all“). The track’s final-curtain mood makes “Isn’t It Evening” another end point for a professional life that, unknown to all concerned, was about to go on hiatus for a decade.

So here’s to the perennially-underrated Earl Slick: say what you’d like, but he outlasted ’em all.

Recorded: (Bowie vocal) Looking Glass Studios, ca. February 2003; (guitars, backing tracks) ca. late 2002, early 2003, Looking Glass. Released 9 December 2003 on Zig Zag (Sanctuary 06076-84671).

Top: Camilio Vergara, “‘Satan, you are not longer my Lord,’ Outdoor service of the New Creation Ministry, Sutter Ave., Brooklyn, 2003.”

Love Missile F1-11

Love Missile F1-11 (Sigue Sigue Sputnik).
Love Missile F1-11 (Sigue Sigue Sputnik, video).
Love Missile F1-11 (Bowie).

I want to be successful and yet never out of touch with things. I don’t want to be someone who’s made into a pop icon and then doesn’t know how to save himself. I don’t want to become David Bowie or Mick Jagger.

What do you think is wrong with them?

I think they’ve cheated an awful lot of people. They’ve manipulated an awful lot of people and they’ve become cliches of themselves.

Martin Degville (Sigue Sigue Sputnik), “Starry Eyed and Laughing,” Paul Morley, NME, 8 March 1986.

Bowie’s cover of Sigue Sigue Sputnik‘s “Love Missile F1-11,” cut during the Reality sessions, was likely never in serious consideration to make the album, but it proved ideal for a B-side (issued on the European/Canadian “New Killer Star” singles). His cover’s cheekiness surpassed that of his take on “Pablo Picasso,” but Bowie wisely didn’t try to match the Sputnik track in excess. Instead his take seemed more an attempt to replicate “the anarchic dub sound of the [track’s] Portastudio demos,” as Sputnik head Tony James described them.

Sputnik began in 1982 when Generation X bassist James, seeing how much fun his old singer was having selling out, put together a band dedicated to scavenging pop junk from the past three decades and stringing bits of it together like Christmas lights. Elvis Costello, with some admiration, summarized the plan in 1986: It’s like Tony James was saying (assumes thick-ear drawl), “we thought we’d get some designer violence, mix it up with some BMX bikes and computer games, models with big tits, fast cars.”.. It’s funny. As long as you don’t have to listen to the record.”

EMI soon signed them, according to legend for £4 million* (Costello: “this daft record company EMI—how can they fall for it twice in ten years?”). For its investment, EMI got a #3 single (“Love Missile”), a Top 10 LP and a brief tour that was sporadically marked by performative violence**. Sputnik took too long to make a follow-up and were over by 1988. Yet the band (or, perhaps more correctly, the project) was well ahead of its time, whether in its use of “found” film dialogue or in its crass commercialism, with Sputnik offering corporations the opportunity to buy ad space between tracks on its LP (L’Oreal and i-D Magazine did). Its sense of pop music as a game that one can win by following a corrupt rulebook, of pop consuming itself and spitting itself back out, was a rough draft of what the KLF would soon pull off.

Sputnik’s epitaph was “Love Missile,” with its Cold War sex and drugs lyric (nuclear missiles as both erect penises and heroin needles), its shameless recycling of Bo Diddley rhythms and Eddie Cochran guitar riffs, its Giorgio Moroder mix littered with chunks of repurposed dialogue from the likes of Scarface and A Clockwork Orange. Bowie recognized the song for what it was—the Ziggy Stardust of 1986, and a sleeker and flashier beast than his old plastic rocker ever had been. He sang it straight, digging into the song (“there goes MY love ROCKET RED!” he boasts in admiration), and you wish he’d sandwiched the track into Reality as a nose-tweak for yet another American war getting underway. One of his fizziest, loopiest, most committed and most enjoyable covers.

Recorded January-February 2003, March-May 2003, Looking Glass Studios, NYC. Released 29 September 2003 on the “New Killer Star” CD single (ISO-Columbia COL 674275 9/ ISO-Columbia 38K 3445).

* The £4 million figure was a complete fabrication, James later said: “Journalist Chris Salewitz had randomly plucked that figure out of the air for a piece he was writing about us in the Sunday Times and four million pounds translated into six million dollars, so we became the “six million dollar band” which appealed to me because I loved the “Six Million Dollar Man.”

** From an NME review of a Sputnik gig in Reading, 1986: “It was a fairly normal pop concert. Apart, that is, from the purple-faced Nazi on my left who screamed obscenities at a girl he barged past on his way to the front, or the rotund drunk who clutched his real ale and hollered “Bastards! Wankers! Violence!” while flailing towards the stage, and the Fleet Street photographers who eagerly raced around the building after a young man with a bloody head.”

Costello quotes from an interview in Sounds, 1 March 1986.

Top: “Torbakhopper,” “what’s in your window : ishootwindows, new york city (2003).”

Waterloo Sunset

Waterloo Sunset (The Kinks, 1967).
Waterloo Sunset (The Kinks, live, 1973).
Waterloo Sunset (Bowie and Ray Davies, live, 2003).
Waterloo Sunset (Bowie).

At his final (to date) Tibet House benefit concert in February 2003, Bowie duetted with Ray Davies on the latter’s “Waterloo Sunset.” Soon afterward Bowie recorded a cover of the song, at first slotted for Reality and ultimately issued as a bonus track. Apart from his cover of “Where Have All the Good Times Gone?” on Pin Ups, it’s Bowie’s only overt Kinks homage,* but Davies was far greater an influence than this suggests. He was a fundamental element for Bowie; he’s in the bedrock of Bowie’s songwriting.

Bowie had met Davies in 1964, when the former’s King Bees were on the same bill as the Kinks for a brief tour of southern Britain, and for a time Bowie and Davies shared a producer in Shel Talmy. But Davies existed more as a guide on records for Bowie, teaching him how to structure songs, write top melodies, set up riffs, spin lyrical scenarios. You see it anywhere you look in Bowie’s Sixties work, from how the lovelorn “Baby Loves That Way” answers the Kinks’ “Nothing In This World” to how “See My Friends” haunts “The London Boys,” from the Davies-esque third-person character pieces of Bowie’s debut LP to the melodic and harmonic flavors from Kinks songs that turn up in later Bowie pieces (e.g., Iggy Pop’s “Baby,” which Bowie co-wrote, has bits of “Dead End Street” and “Sunny Afternoon” in it).

Yet covering “Waterloo Sunset” was still rather ambitious for Bowie: it would be like attempting to finally crack “A Day In the Life” in late middle age. “Waterloo Sunset” was a Kinks masterpiece, a capstone for an era. “I started writing a song about Liverpool that implied that the era of Merseybeat was coming to an end, but I changed it to ‘Waterloo Sunset’ not only because that gave me a bigger canvas to work on but because it was about London, the place where I had actually grown up,” Davies wrote in his “autobiography” X-Ray.

He’d felt possessive of the song as he wrote it, refusing to let his bandmates hear his lyric until backing tracks and backing vocals were cut.** “Even when the record was finished, it felt like a secret,” Davies wrote. “It was like an extract of a diary nobody was allowed to read.” When asked by a critic what the next Kinks single was, Davies pretended to have forgotten the song’s title.

It came from a teenage memory: Davies standing on Waterloo Bridge, watching the brown Thames flow beneath him, having a vision of the river cresting its banks and submerging the Houses of Parliament.*** Many of his great Sixties songs share the sense that an older, homelier England is getting washed away by a fresh tide, leaving the “common” British man or woman stranded and wondering how to get home (if home’s even still there). While often using his large, ructious family as characters (Rosy, or his brother Dave as his swinging sister), Davies used for his lead actors in “Waterloo Sunset” the actors Terence Stamp and Julie Christie, beautiful gods of Swinging London (if there was a Wicked + Divine set in Sixties London, they’d be in the pantheon for sure). He cast himself as narrator, a shut-in who spends his days in his flat, watching life go by, turning the nameless people he sees into stories.

So “Waterloo Sunset” is a songwriter’s workbook. The composer sits at home alone, watching the young go about the business of life as he scratches out ideas in his notebook. There’s too much relentless life out there: the dirty river, flowing ever eastward to the sea (counterpoint to the lazy old sun, ever ballooning westward). The millions of people entering Waterloo Station, pooling from all across London and streaming in veins outward to the suburbs. Waterloo Bridge itself (the opening and closing scene of Alfie), its name Britain’s fading glory, now a commuter’s walkway and a meeting place for lovers, a still point for old dreamers.

Davies was often depressed in the Sixties, worn down by band and managerial politics, struggling with financial problems (he was writing #1 hits yet was often broke). He said he felt he was supposed to have given up years before. The Kinks were just meant to get a few top hits and break up, letting the record company move on to brighter things. But he kept at it. In 1967 he was still writing songs in the shadow of the favored likes of the Beatles. The Beatles promised the world could be new; Davies stayed home to keep a record of what was being decommissioned: steam trains, china shops, Victoriana, palais halls, dance bands. Must you keep flowing? As long as you have one corner of London to claim, you’re not dead yet. Sunset’s the end of the day, but it lingers for a while in the summer.

The Kinks’ recording of “Waterloo Sunset” was marked by happenstance and their typically erratic studio habits. After puzzling how to process Dave Davies’ lead guitar, they wound up piping it through tape delay (“almost like a Fifties-type ‘triplet’ delay,” Dave recalled) while Ray’s rhythm guitar was a scrappy undercurrent in the mix, barely audible at times. The song’s beautiful melancholia was in the backing vocals–the Davies brothers and the essential Rasa Davies, the grace of many Sixties’ Kinks tracks—which soar upward while the chromatic bassline trudges downward.

Having sung “Waterloo Sunset” as a joyous full-band piece at the Tibetan concert, with Bowie serving as the high end of the harmonies, Bowie crafted a bright, even peppy version of the song in the studio. Why he felt the need to chase away the blues of the song, to make essentially a “Waterloo Sunrise,” is another question. There was something of a precedent: a Kinks TV version from 1973 with horns and a host of singers, where the refrains were a carnival retort to Davies’ humble verses.

But Bowie mainly just scrubbed away the soot, his embellishments including a nagging two-note synthesizer riff, a handclap-fattened Sterling Campbell hitting on every beat in the intro, and a “theremin” squiggle to transition back to verses. The song hustled, sparkled; it pushed you along. Bowie discarded most of the Kinks’ harmonies, only doubling himself at the octave in refrains (one of his voices was almost conversational). He wrote a new set of backing vocals for the last verse, some “ooh-LA-las” in slight debt to the Beatles’ “You Won’t See Me.” Only in the coda did he finally bring in the echoing, plangent harmonies of the original. He sounded as if he was in competition with himself.

The Kinks’ “Waterloo Sunset” offered that in a world consumed with movement, often going nowhere, sometimes you could find an escape hole, like Terry and Julie do (were they catching a train out of town?) Bowie’s version has no need for hideaways. It’s the sound of a winner’s Sixties, a flattened Sixties; it seems intended as cheery in-flight music for Virgin Airlines.

Bowie and Davies’ performance was at Carnegie Hall, 28 February 2003. Bowie’s version was recorded ca. January-April 2003, Looking Glass Studios, NYC. Released 10 November 2003 as a “cyber-single” download in the UK (some BowieNet members got the track earlier on a promo CD), and also included on the “tour” edition of Reality, which included a DVD with the entire album sequence played live at Riverside Studios in Sept. 2003.

* Bowie also played Kinks hits on stage with the likes of the Manish Boys and the Lower Third in the mid-Sixties, and he’s thrown in bits of “All Day and All of the Night” in a few live performances over the years.

** Likely some poetic license here on Davies’ part (X-Ray is far from an “official” autobiography), as his brother recalled Ray playing the developing “Waterloo Sunset” to him and “we started ad-libbing vocal parts around the chorus.”

*** Davies described the Thames as “bright brown, almost red…like blood flowing through a great vein,” which does suggest another lament for a “lost” England, Enoch Powell’s “rivers of blood” speech from 1968.

Top: “Gadget (Ben),” “London, Mayday 2003;” “Waterloo Station, 1967“; Waterloo Sta., still from John Schlesinger’s Terminus (1961); dirty old river, still flowing under Waterloo Bridge, 2003 (Bruno Girin).

People Have the Power/ Get Up Stand Up

People Have the Power (Tibet House Benefit 2001: Patti Smith with Bowie, Tony Visconti, et al).
Get Up Stand Up (Tibet House Benefit 2003: Ziggy Marley with Bowie, Lou Reed, Ray Davies et al).

Among the most sublime live performances Bowie gave in the early 2000s were at a trio of concerts for the Tibet House Benefit. Held annually at the end of the long New York winter at Carnegie Hall, the benefit shows have had the likes of Lou Reed, Philip Glass, Iggy Pop, Patti Smith and Bowie as performers and arrangers.

Bowie’s three consecutive appearances (2001-2003) produced the most striking arrangements of his later performing years. “Silly Boy Blue,” sung with the Tibetan monk chorus that he’d always envisioned for the song, was a marvel, one of the song’s finest performances, while the Scorchio Quartet-dominated version of “Heroes” is one of that warhorse’s more haunting interpretations.

In 2002, Bowie sang the as-yet-unreleased “I Would Be Your Slave” with the Scorchios and Tony Visconti on bass, then offered a colossal “Space Oddity” driven by the combined Scorchio and Kronos quartets, Philip Glass on piano and the late Adam Yauch on bass (if one’s to make any criticism, it’s that Sterling Campbell’s drums are a bit leaden).

And for his last (to date) performance at the Tibet House benefit, Bowie played “Loving the Alien” for the first time since the Glass Spider tour, with just Gerry Leonard for accompaniment, and Bowie wending back into the song as if trying to catch sight of its first inspiration. “Heathen” was the now-standard gorgeous interpretation with the Scorchio Quartet. He also sang a duet with Ray Davies (see next entry).

At the end of each show, Bowie showed up at the close for the group sing-a-long. These tended to be somewhat ragged affairs, with a happy touch of Christmas pantomime to them. Twice Patti Smith took the lead with her “People Have the Power,” while in the 2003 show, the finale was a group-sung version of Bob Marley and Peter Tosh’s “Get Up Stand Up,” the great third-world anthem whose righteous anger seems more justified with every passing year.

If Bowie ever does return to live performance, I wouldn’t be shocked if it starts at Carnegie Hall one winter.

Performed (“People”) 26 February 2001, 22 February 2002; (“Get Up”) 28 February 2003, Carnegie Hall.

Top: Andreas Neumann, “Tibetans Playing Dice on the Street,” Lhasa, 2001.

I Feel So Bad/ One Night (2002 Tour)

Part 1: Taxidermy

Near-complete Low and Heathen (live, Roseland Ballroom, NYC, 11 June 2002).
Near-complete Low and Heathen (live, Meltdown, London, 29 June 2002).
Half-complete Low (live, E-Werk Festival, Cologne, 12 July 2002).
Near-complete Low (live, Montreux Festival, 18 July 2002).

The closest Bowie has come to being the curator of himself was the 2002 tour to promote Heathen. This was first intended as a minor tour of the European summer festival circuit, with a few TV dates between gigs, but soon Bowie’s theatrical instincts kicked in and he devised the most fannish set-list of his life.

He would perform all of Low in sequential order, wearing a (slightly) looser version of his Thin White Duke outfit. Then, after a change to Burberry tweed, he would perform all of Heathen in sequential order. The albums “feel like cousins to each other,” he said. “They’ve got a certain sonic similarity.” His recent work with Lou Reed (see “Hop Frog“) may have been an influence, as Reed had performed full-album live sets for New York and Magic & Loss.

But Bowie was also doing a bit of trend-chasing. Around 1998, it became increasingly common for bands (especially older bands) to play their “classic” LPs in sequential order live. The trend ballooned in the 2000s once live performance became a primary way for musicians to make a living. (“You’d better be prepared for doing a lot of touring because that’s really the only unique situation that’s going to be left. It’s terribly exciting. But on the other hand it doesn’t matter if you think it’s exciting or not; it’s what’s going to happen,” Bowie told the New York Times in June 2002). You could see why the “play your whole LP” shtick worked: get the old fans who’d stopped buying CD reissues out of the house to hear It Takes a Nation of Millions or Fun House or Entertainment! on stage.

Was choosing Low a cynical touch? The album had little to do with Heathen besides some superficial resemblances (it’s as if Bowie recalled Low being eleven variations on “Warszawa” and had forgotten the little fractured funk tracks on its first side). But 2002 was the apex of Low‘s critical reputation: it was now considered, in the Pitchfork age, to be his masterpiece and most influential release. So there was some ad man’s hustle (“Heathen is the new Low“) and keyed-in nostalgia in the mix.

The full performances of Low were tailored to what fans wanted (on the Montreux tape, you can hear some guy lose his marbles when “Breaking Glass” kicks in)—the performances were sung well and played well, with Earl Slick tracing over his old nemesis Carlos Alomar’s guitar lines, Gail Ann Dorsey singing “Warszawa” like a muezzin and Sterling Campbell as a dynamic foundation (he’s a monster on stuff like “Speed of Life”). The guitar-heavy arrangements (Slick on lead, Mark Plati on rhythm and acoustic, Gerry Leonard on what Bowie termed “atmos”) and the supplemental vocals of Catherine Russell and Dorsey gave a density to the sound.

But there’s a constriction in some of the performances: there’s a sense that Bowie’s working with a common audience memory of each song and feels unwilling to challenge it. This was most noticeable in the instrumentals, which cried out for some sort of revision, some fresh improvisation or just an instrument swap. Instead Bowie kept reverent, a tour guide pacing his audience through an old cathedral of his making.

The track-by-track album live homage also suggested a sad endgame for Bowie: to be doomed, ever so often, to trot out another classic to showcase to fans. The Second Year of the Diamond Dogs. Major Tom’s 40th Birthday Party. Hunkier Dorier 2011.

Boredom (the most constant of Bowie’s muses) soon put an end to it. After playing Low and Heathen in their entirety at a BowieNet-only show at the Roseland in NYC, he began monkeying with the song order, first jumbling the Low songs to break up the run of instrumentals. By his 1 July 2002 performance in Paris, he’d made a salad of the set-list, also throwing in oldies like “Ashes to Ashes” and “Fame.”

On he went, through Horsens and Oostende, from Manchester to Cologne to Lucca, earning the sort of reviews that had become de rigueur by now. “The hits were pitch perfect” (Daily Star). “An incredible rebirth as a performer” (Daily Telegraph), “More relaxed than he’s been for years” (Manchester Evening News), “His voice: that indispensable sound which ricocheted against the square’s walls like some operatic singer” (Sunday Times of Malta). Having done enough, he sailed home to New York on the QE2.

Part 2: Theology

I Feel So Bad (Chuck Willis, 1954).
I Feel So Bad (Elvis Presley, 1961).
One Night (Smiley Lewis, 1955).
One Night (Elvis, 1958).
One Night (Elvis, 1968).
I Feel So Bad/ One Night (Bowie, live, 2002).

[Elvis was] a kid who was monstrously acquisitive, but also fundamentally passive, looking to be counselled and led. In his own wholly pragmatic way, Col. Parker foresaw several future directions that showbiz would take. He saw how Elvis, the real Elvis, with all his moods and problems, could be left to sit at home and do whatever he did, while the spangly, malleable Elvis image could be sent out into the world to work…

Ian Penman, “Shapeshifter,” London Review of Books, 25 September 2014.

The next leg was an alternating-headline slot Moby’s Area 2 Festival, a three-week cross-country North American tour that also included Busta Rhymes (sometimes a no-show) and the Blue Man Group. (“What’s most striking about this collection of acts is the lack of novelty,” Kelefa Sanneh wrote in his review of a Holmdel, NJ, stop.) Bowie said he didn’t mind playing second fiddle to Moby on some nights, as it let him cut out early and (if he was in the Northeast) get home to say goodnight to his daughter.

The set-lists were essentially the same as the latter European shows: a mingle of Low and Heathen tracks, with some popular oldies for seasoning (“Fashion,” “Life on Mars?” “Space Oddity,” “Let’s Dance”). Bowie was drawing the sort of crowd for whom the appearance of “Stay” in the set-list “generated a bit of puzzlement,” according to a review of a Toronto gig. “Bowie devoted two-thirds of his set to songs that were 20 or even 30 years old. But the move didn’t seem like a surrender to the commercial reality that fans want to hear the familiar,” wrote Robert Hilburn, reviewing the LA stop. On and on it went, in the pages of American and Canadian papers: Timeless perfection. A still-commanding voice. He’s still beautiful. As steely as sinuous as ever. A nearly flawless musical time capsule.

On the last night of the Area 2 tour, at the Gorge Amphitheatre east of Seattle, Bowie did something different at last for the encore. He noted that it was the 25th anniversary of Elvis Presley’s death (which he’d learned about while on safari in Kenya in 1977). He mock-griped that Presley’s birthday had always eclipsed his own. “He gets all the birthday shit and nobody knows that I ever got born…Jimmy Page was born on the 9th: you can make something out of that. But the 8th of January? You lose out, innit.” And he sang two Presley songs in commemoration.

Like any British rocker born in the Forties, Bowie was fascinated by Elvis, who’d seemed like an extraterrestrial to him at age 10. Elvis was a swiveling mass of American bad intentions. There’s even a touch of Elvis in Bowie’s singing at times, in the swagger of “Janine” and, oddly enough, in some of his “Song For Bob Dylan.”

At first Bowie seemed to be paying tribute to the pantomime Elvis, the dead Elvis of common tabloid memory. Fat, pilled-up Elvis, the sweaty kung-fu-chopping “thankyouverramuch” Elvis: rock and roll in its buffoonish red giant phase. But the songs that he chose were a fan’s picks.

“I Feel So Bad,” which Presley cut in Nashville in March 1961, was Presley’s take on a Chuck Willis R&B number. It was fitting for Elvis at the time, about to vanish into a morass of cheap, endless movies and soulless soundtrack LPs (“sometimes I wanna stay here/then again, I wanna leave“): its moroseness chased away by an alliance of Floyd Cramer’s piano and Hank Garland’s guitar, and capped with a Boots Randolph saxophone solo that Presley walked over to cheer during the take, as if he’d bet on Randolph in a horse race.

“One Night” was a dirty Smiley Lewis song, an open account of a man caught in an orgy (“the things I did and I saw/would make the earth stand still“), that Elvis cleaned up (slightly) in his 1958 take, a minor hit. Elvis went back to “One Night” in his 1968 TV special, where he tore into the song, retrieving the original Lewis lyric. You can see in the clip what made him maddeningly, exotically Elvis. He’s joking around, mugging for the camera and his friends, parodying himself, not seeming to give a shit about the song and then suddenly in a breath he’s there, committed like a zealot, screaming BEEN TOO LONELY TOO LONG! like he’s confessing to a killing. He lurches up, forcing one of his buddies to rig up a mike for him, and he stands there, balancing his weight with his foot, slashing at his guitar as if he wants the strings to snap off in a pack.

Bowie’s versions of the songs (respectful, even modest) couldn’t compare. Elvis was too high a cliff to climb, to even consider climbing. He paid his respects and called it a tour.

Part 3: Cartography

The New York Marathon:
Music Hall at Snug Harbor, Staten Island, 11 October 2002.
St. Ann’s Warehouse, Brooklyn, 12 October 2002.
Colden Center at Queens College, Queens (queen borough of the 5), 16 October 2002.
Jimmy’s Bronx Cafe, Bronx, 17 October 2002.
Beacon Theater, Manhattan, 20 October 2002.

Well, not yet. Bowie seemed unwilling to stop playing. He went back to Europe in September for more TV and radio spots, some record store signings. At a Radio 2 concert he filmed some of the audience with a handheld camera (“to show my daughter exactly what sort of person I associate with”). He offered more prizes for lucky winners, like the first-ever live performance of “Bewlay Brothers.”

On 22 September he played Max-Schmelling-Halle, his first concert in Berlin since 1995. The hall, built in 1996, was at the edge of the Mauerpark, near where the Wall once had cut through Prenzlauer Berg. “Half the audience [that night] had been in East Berlin that time way before [in 1987],” Bowie told Performing Songwriter in 2003. “So now I was face to face with the people I had been singing to all those years ago. And we were all singing it together.”

It was as if his tour had become a leyline of his past lives. A stop in Munich, where he’d recorded some of The Idiot. A return to the once-Hammersmith Odeon (in 2002 it was “the Carling Apollo”; it later became the “HMV Hammersmith Apollo” and is currently the “Eventim Apollo”), with Eno, Bowie’s old schoolfriend George Underwood and his once-drummer John Cambridge in attendance. This gig, finally, was supposed to be the finale.

But back in New York, Bowie realized he still had some TV appearances booked for October, so why not keep the band together a bit longer (“before they drifted off to family and friends for the winter“)? Bowie credited a friend “Bill” (likely his financial adviser, Bill Zysblat) with the idea of doing a set of shows that roughly followed the route of the New York marathon. It would be a tribute to his still-recovering adopted city, with Bowie playing clubs.

First Snug Harbor, a park two miles west of the Ferry terminal on Staten Island (“Earl Slick country,” Bowie wrote. “Earl was freaked and excited at the same time. ‘Oh God, I’m gonna see some really old faces. We’re gonna get Joey Bag-a-Doughnuts…And then there’s family. I’m never gonna survive this.”). Then up to the rapidly-gentrifying DUMBO (one sign of gentrification: getting an acronym like “DUMBO”) neighborhood of Brooklyn, at St. Ann’s Warehouse. I’d seen Joe Strummer play there earlier that year: he’d been late, complaining his cab didn’t know where to go, then ripped into “Bank Robber,” singing it like Elvis.

Colden Center at Queens College, which the band likened to a high school hall. Jimmy’s Bronx Cafe, visited by everyone from Fidel Castro to Bill Cosby (and which would close its doors in 2004). Finally the Beacon Theater on the Upper West Side. Bowie closed with “Ziggy Stardust.”

“When Gail Ann and I slow-danced through ‘Absolute Beginners’ that night…it didn’t seem like the end of a long and grueling year, but a new time with a horizon that went on forever,” Bowie wrote in 2003, when he was making a new album and planning a global tour. Was this hyperbole? Of course not. It would go on forever. Wouldn’t it?

“One Night” and “Feel So Bad” were performed 16 August 2002, The Gorge, WA.

Photos: “Elvis Bombay” and “Vigil One: Elvis Death March, Memphis,” Ted Barron, 2002; Giacomo Pepe, “Bowie in Lucca,” 15 July 2002; Adam Bielawski, “Bowie in Chicago,” 8 August 2002. The other shots of Bowie in NYC, mid-October 2002, are from David Bowie: Live in New York, a fine photo collection by Myriam Santos-Kayda.

Saviour

Saviour (Kristeen Young with Bowie).

At the end of 2001, Bowie broke with his current label, Virgin (it helped that Virgin hadn’t picked up its option on a new Bowie album—they were all but daring him to leave) and formed his own record company. This was the culmination of over a decade’s worth of frustration with the music industry and in particular with Virgin, who’d rejected both a live Bowie album (liveandwell) and a studio one (Toy). “Many times I’ve not been in agreement with how things are done and as a writer of some proliferation, frustrated at how slow and lumbering it all is,” he told Billboard.

So at age 55, Bowie was finally an indie recording artist. His new label, ISO, had one client, himself: there were reports ISO had signed a band and another solo act, but nothing apparently came of this. He signed a distribution deal with Columbia for Heathen, a structure that remains at the present day (Columbia’s issuing Nothing Has Changed in a few months).

One sign of Bowie’s contractual freedom was a growing penchant for guest-starring on others’ albums: these would be his only moments on record in the late 2000s. It helped that he was able to use Tony Visconti for his field research. Visconti had already gotten Bowie on a Rustic Overtones album and now he introduced Bowie to a St. Louis songwriter and pianist named Kristeen Young.

A half-Apache, half-German child adopted by fundamentalist Christians, Young endured adolescence as a series of pitched battles (her mother would smash her Prince records; Young later described herself as “an imprisoned child”). She took refuge in punk and indie music, becoming pen pals with Jello Biafra (who once taught her to parallel park); in the Nineties, she formed and discarded bands, worked as a waitress and began recording solo records with a drummer, “Baby” Jeff White (the set-up was a reversed image of the White Stripes). She was an acquired taste: the CMJ, reviewing her debut in 1997, began with “What is it about playing the piano that encourages young women to become crazy, screaming banshees?”

She sent Visconti a copy of her second album, Enemy, in November 1999 (she’d reportedly found his name in a music industry directory). Taken by what he described as her “part rock, part Bartok” music, her cover photo and her four-octave “gutsy voice…with its high soprano register,” Visconti agreed to produce Young’s next album. As she had no record deal, Young and Visconti worked up a collection of demos in New York in 2001-2002, around the same time Bowie was recording Heathen. She wound up singing and playing piano on a few tracks, Bowie in turn offering to sing on one of hers.

This was “Saviour,” which Young later said was in part a tribute to her friendship/mentorship with Visconti. Bowie took the second verse, savoring the line “American landfill…LAAND-fill,” and kept pace with Young for the rest of it, mostly content to let Young out-sing him. It’s a piece of bizarre, affected, fairly catchy art-rock. Should Lady Gaga and Bowie get together at some point, “Saviour” could even be something of a template.

Young went on to have a contentious, sibling-like relationship with Morrissey, who sacked her from a 2007 tour for “salacious language” but soon mended fences. Earlier this year, the Morrissey camp accused Young of giving Moz a “horrendous cold” that resulted in yet another tour cancellation. If Bowie ever tours again, Young should perhaps consider switching allegiances.

Recorded: Looking Glass Studios, ca. late 2001/mid-2002: (Bowie vocal retake) February 2003. Released 13 June 2003 (November 2003 in the US) on Breasticles (N Records ZM 00103). (Reflecting the chaos/implosion of the music industry in 2003, this record was released as a CD only in Portugal, and later as a web-only release in the US/UK). The promo version of Breasticles, which Young self-distributed in 2002, featured an earlier Bowie vocal.

Top: “The king stay the king“: D’Angelo lectures Wallace and Bodie on chess strategy, “The Buys,” The Wire, June 2002; Young, ca. 2002.

Hop Frog

Hop Frog (Edgar Allan Poe, read by Nick Gisburne).
Hop Frog (Lou Reed with Bowie).

You write in the liner notes [to The Raven] that Poe is more attuned to our century than he was to his own.

I think that we can relate more to him now than then. Recent world events seem to have a real Poe turn to them.

Lou Reed, to Larry Katz, January 2003.

Sometime in December 1966, David Bowie heard the voice of Lou Reed for the first time. Bowie put on an album that his manager had brought back from New York. First came a sweet, haunting “Sunday Morning,” then, out of nowhere, another voice breaks in: flat, unimpressed, working up the details. Up to LEX-ing-TUN: ONE-TWO-FIVE. Hey WHITE BOY. Here he cooomes..he’s all dressed-in-BLACK. Everybody’s pinned you but NOBODY caaaares.

Entranced, Bowie decided to devote the rest of his life to the song.

In August 1972, Bowie produced a record for Reed. At the brink of exhaustion (he was rehearsing with the Spiders From Mars in his downtime), Bowie had to contend with an icy Reed, barely talking and taking in the whole enterprise as if he was a critic silently watching a faltering stage act. Reed had offered some skeletal songs on acoustic guitar. Mick Ronson dressed them up, Bowie did vocal arrangements. There was a delicacy to Bowie’s work that belied the strain he was under: the little dancing motifs in “Satellite of Love,” the girl-group “spoke spoke” in “Wagon Wheel,” the acidic queen harmony in “New York Telephone Conversation.”

At last, despite the occasional public dust-up, the two settled into being friends, living within walking distance of each other’s NYC homes. In the months after 9/11, Reed was working on an album based on Edgar Allan Poe stories and poems, and he asked Bowie if he wanted to sing on a track. Bowie chose “Hop Frog,” a little rant under two minutes long.

“That’s him, not me,” Reed told Venice magazine in 2003. “He chose that part. I was pretty astonished myself, because I thought he would have picked one of the other parts. I thought he would go for one of the power ballads, but it turns out that he was a perfect Hop Frog. I realized that David wanted to have some fun, and have some fun just being Bowie. He did the kind of background vocals on this that I really like, all the way back to my Transformer record when he did those kind of things. I liked it then and I still love it now.”

It would be their last collaboration.

Reed had been asked to write some Poe-related songs by the stage director Robert Wilson for a show, “POEtry,” which played in Hamburg and Brooklyn. “Bob thought this is something that could occur easily, without any weird rubbings going on,” Reed told the New York Times. “I saw it as a can’t-win situation. I knew people would say, ‘How dare he rewrite Poe?’ But I thought, here’s the opportunity of a lifetime for real fun…It’s accessible, among other things. And I felt I was in league with the master. In that kind of psychology, that interest in the drives and the meaning of obsession and compulsion in that realm Poe reigns supreme. Particularly now, with the anxiety and everything else that’s permeating our lives right now.”

He turned the project into an album, realizing it would also serve as a grand Viking funeral for his recording career. One last enormous folly: a 2-CD, 36-track album of rewritten Poe and reconfigured Reed, guest-starring Ornette Coleman, Willem Dafoe, Steve Buscemi, Laurie Anderson, Antony Hegarty, Kate and Anna McGarrigle, The Blind Boys of Alabama and Bowie.

“Can you imagine what it took to do that?” Reed asked Uncut. “I mean, I’m serious. Imagine! Even now I can’t believe that we’ve done it. This might be a nice way to say ‘Goodbye’, a good way to go out…it’s like ‘Pheww!’ Really. Anyway, I don’t think you’ll get a chance to make records like this with people downloading their music… unless you take the viewpoint that there’s only one good track on it.”

The Raven was also a farewell and tribute to the late 20th Century “pop” bohemian New York, the NYC of The Performance Group and The Knitting Factory, the Kitchen and St. Ann’s Warehouse. Reed cut “Fire Music,” a piece of extended feedback, a few days after the WTC attacks. On the album, it’s preceded by Amanda Plummer screaming “Burn, monkeys! Burn!” (why? see below).

Reed’s “Hop Frog” has little to do with Poe’s story, a lurid revenge piece in the line of “Cask of Amontillado.” (The following tracks, “Every Frog Has Its Day,” “The Courtly Orangutans” and “Tripitena’s Speech,” are the narrative). Hop-Frog, a dwarf who walks with a limp, is the slave of a cruel king, for whom he’s the long-suffering court jester (you get the idea George R.R. Martin may have read this story). Offended by the king throwing a drink in the face of fellow dwarf Tripetta (renamed “Tripitena” here), Hop-Frog devises a scheme in which he has the king and his ministers dress up as escaped orangutans for a masked ball. Their costumes are made of pitch and flax, the “orangutans” are chained together to further the illusion. Hop-Frog sets them ablaze, leaving the king and his party as torched ape-men corpses. He escapes after announcing “I am simply Hop-Frog, the jester—and this is my last jest.”

Reed’s “Hop Frog” essentially plays off that last line. It’s a strut, a boast, savoring the clash of “ahp” and “ahg” sounds in the title. Its backdrop is a vein of feedback, a vicious, cycling Reed rhythm guitar and Tony Smith’s heavy-mixed drums. Bowie holds back a bit in the first verse, creeping in to echo, then top Reed’s voice. Then he sets about taking over the song.

Now dominating over Reed’s voice, Bowie devised a set of background harmonies, a funfair ride of rising and falling phrases (“I love David’s background parts that he does, when he goes up really high: I love his voice,” Reed told Australian DJ John Faine) and outfitting an army of Bowies for the final verse. Bowie’s having a whale of a time. You can see me in the ballroom! You can see me in the BED-room! You can see me in the WOODS! Hap!-HOP FROG! He closes with a last, plummeting trademark “wail” note. Reed pays him homage with a fanfare on guitar. Exeunt omnes.

Everything ends. Reed and Bowie went out with a noisy nose-tweak of a track starring a vengeful, murderous Poe dwarf. Sounds about right. See you, Lou.

Recorded October-early November 2001, New York. Released 28 January 2003 on The Raven (released in single and double-CD versions. If you have Spotify, unabridged version’s here.)

Top: Julian Schnabel, “Lou Reed,” 2002; Bowie and Lou, approaching the end of the game, 2007; Arthur Rackham, “Hop-Frog, Trippetta, the king and his councilors,” 1935.

America

America (Simon and Garfunkel, 1968).
America (1-2-3, live, the Marquee Club, 1967).
America (Bowie, the Concert for New York City, 2001).
America (Bowie, Robin Hood Benefit, 2002).

Those towers were almost human for me. I was in love with them, and that’s why I married them with a tightrope.

Philippe Petit, 2014.

When the first tower was hit, there was a long rumbling. Take an oil drum, turn it on its side and play a tattoo on it with mallets, amplify this, give it heavy bass. Something like that. It was an extended sound—it went on for three, four seconds.

I was working in 195 Broadway, a block east from the Trade Center (it was an older, far more distinguished building; it likely considered the Towers parvenus). I went to the window to see if a truck had overturned on the Brooklyn Bridge, my first guess as to what had happened, but there was nothing but traffic.

Kevin came in. He was the sort of loud, overgrown boy who makes a good reporter on Wall Street. He wore blue nearly every day, great bright blues. “Plane hit the Trade Center,” he said.

“What kind of plane?” I said. “Some kind of Cessna?”

“Probably out of Teterboro or something.”

“How do you hit the Trade Center? How bad a pilot must you be?”

“Like JFK Jr. bad.”

He went back down to the street. I looked out at the Bridge again (still traffic), then crossed to the other side of the office, where a small window, a foot wide and two feet high, offered our only rear-facing view: a little rectangular frame of Church Street and the base of Trade Center 2. There was a grey and black plume of smoke in the air, with bits of paper raining down. “How big was the plane?” a woman behind me asked. “It was a real plane?”

A man came on the intercom and said that everything was under control. No need to leave. Kevin came back, his bluster drained out of him. People were starting to jump, he said. “It’s worse than you think.”

I sat at my desk, sipping coffee, constantly refreshing a news website that said nothing. It felt like I was sitting in a room with a corpse. I kept walking to the small window, watching the dark cloud grow darker, the papers whirl and scudder in the air. I could see they were memos, photocopies, manila envelopes, pieces of folders. I looked at the desk next to the window and saw the same, only neatly stacked.

When the second plane hit, there was a long, loop of fire and what looked like embers flung high into the air. The building shook; there were screams, murderous screams coming from the street. The man on the intercom, sounding unshaken, said that we should leave.

In 1996, I’d worked in 2 World Trade, on the 18th floor. The towers were often empty-feeling buildings, as if they’d been built for some municipal folly (say, if NYC had hosted in the Olympics in 1968) and had been left to fend for themselves. The guards wore maroon jackets. There was so little light. Our office rationed it out to the bosses and editors, each of whom had an office with a tiny window view, leaving the rest of us clustered in semi-darkness. It could feel like working in a mineshaft.

On the ground floor there were a set of halls and small lobbies that linked the two towers with the lesser buildings of the Trade Center complex. At Christmas, they set up a shabby-looking electric train set. There were statues—Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck as stockbrokers, their feet up on their desks—in one shop window (I recall seeing Bugs covered in grey dust in a newscast post 9/11). A dyspeptic man ran a narrow, almost vertical newsstand. There was a bagel stand whose manager would catch your eye and yell “Yes! what are you having today!” He was the brightest soul in the whole place. There was a Duane Reade outpost whose aisles, especially in the winter, were full of lunchtime coughers and snifflers. I still try to recall faces sometimes, of anyone whom I saw then. If I can, I wonder if they made it out.

Tourists came to the Towers but they just took the elevator up to the observation decks, snapped photos and left. No one who didn’t work there hung around the neighborhood, which was full of winding, scaffold-filled streets whose main businesses were small-time importers, rug dealers and people who seemed to cadge a living out of repairing toasters and radios. You could walk around at lunchtime and know that someone in 1924 saw much the same view as you. Except for the Towers.

So when the men playing “God Bless America” on boomboxes began selling souvenir atrocity postcards, and the busloads of people wearing American flag T-shirts began to show up to gawk at the ruins, it was hard not to be resentful, as petty as that may sound. This gritty little old neighborhood, visited by few, loved by fewer, had been burned and gouged, had been turned into a mass grave and now it was a theme park. What was once a real, and happily anonymous, place was bought by history.

On Broadway that morning, there was broken glass everywhere—the windows of Au Bon Pain were shattered, as were those of a Mrs. Fields cookie shop (its owner hurriedly pulling down the grating). People were standing in the street and sidewalk, staring up at the towers. I stood with them for a few minutes. There was a sudden fluttering down along the length of Trade Center One: someone had just fallen. I couldn’t stand there and watch any more.

I decided to walk to my girlfriend’s office in Chelsea, declining to take my chances with the subway. I took Church Street up. I tried to process what had happened—had there been a second plane? Had the first tower caused the other to catch fire? When I first had moved to New York, to help myself get the lay of neighborhoods, I’d come up with little mnemonics. The one for Church’s cross-streets came back into my head for some reason: Judge Murray Warren will see you in his Chambers. Thomas doubts the Worth of Leonard Franklin. A van pulled up sharply and out spilled six or seven FBI agents. I knew this as they were in windbreakers marked “FBI” in great yellow letters. One of them, a woman younger than me, seemed excited. She sported an FBI hat as well. Perhaps she had a desk job and suddenly here she was, pulling an X-Files. I couldn’t blame her for looking a bit eager.

In a parking lot at Canal and Greene St., I stopped to watch the towers again. They were now heavily aflame. Each had a large black wound spewing filthy clouds which the light wind was sending on to Brooklyn. These were the only clouds. Otherwise the sky was so clear and fine that you could see the sleeping moon.

I was in a small knot of people. “It’s going to burn for a long, long time,” an old man said, with shaky, if unquestioned authority. Two NYU kids were filming with handheld video cameras. “Check it out, dude,” one said to the other. He offered a view from his camera monitor as if he was sharing a flask.

Walking up Greene through Soho, I kept turning back to the towers. Felt like Lot’s wife. Two men in suits, roughly my age, fell into step with me. We heard something and turned to watch 2 World Trade fall into a pile of smoke. It made a low, bustling sound, like a train crossing somewhere in the distance. Now there was only one tower, ruling over a cloud. I looked at the shorter of the guys, said something like “can you believe this” and he gave me a why-are-you-fucking-talking-to-me face. “We have got to get out of here, it’s not safe here,” he told his friend. I crossed Houston, cut through the NYU dorms, past the Picasso sculpture no tourist has ever visited. There a woman was talking to a buildings-and-grounds man, explaining in detail what was happening, although he could see the burning tower directly over her head. In Washington Square Park, some 200 people were standing in rows near the arch, looking like they were at an outdoor concert.

Everywhere I walked, I saw people carrying children and dogs.

I went into the First Presbyterian Church on Fifth Avenue and sat in a back pew for a time. As I was coming out, the crowd in the street gasped as one. The other tower was crumbling now, again into a grey, atomic cloud, again with a soft rumble. What was there wasn’t now. How many deaths was I going to witness today? For all I knew 195 Broadway was gone as well, for all I knew I wouldn’t make it out of Manhattan. “Oh God, all of those people,” a woman said, not screaming, just giving each word a long, piercing note of sadness. The air went out of me and I sat on the street.

At my girlfriend’s office on Seventh Avenue, I found she wasn’t there (she’d never made it in to Manhattan from Queens). I drank some water, took in whatever speculations were circling (Camp David was bombed, Congress was bombed, the President was missing). I figured I’d have to walk home to Queens at some point, so why not start.

Walking towards Third Avenue, trying to avoid the larger streets, I saw people in lines everywhere: public phones, bars, pizza shops, ATM machines. Was there a bank run, too? Like 20th Century Miseries, Greatest Hits this morning, I thought. A grocery store had set up an easel with draft paper, on which you could write the name of anyone for whom you wanted a prayer said. A handful of names, including “Everyone.” A man was jogging down Third, headphones on, shirtless, a blank expression. I wanted him to collide with a telephone pole.

I reached the Queensboro Bridge around noon. “We’re representin’ Queens,” a man yelled on the gangway. “This is the real Million Man March!” Cheers. It was a carnival atmosphere by now, everyone sent home early from work. The sun had gone brutal. There were no police on the bridge, as far as I could see, and the mood was edgy: it felt as if it could turn dark in a moment. A few men drinking Budweiser were ogling women, calling for them to strip. They were jumping on and off the rear bumpers of barely-moving trucks.

It was as if we were in a retreating, quickly deteriorating army. Midway across the bridge I felt, no I knew, that a plane would come and shear straight through it, and thought about how it would feel to hang in the air for a moment before falling into the East River. Death seemed so present by now, so familiar.

In Queens Plaza the crowd broke in two, the greater half heading straight onto Queens Boulevard, the lesser up towards Astoria. I followed the latter stream for a time, forked off to Sunnyside, home to Locust St. My girlfriend had believed, for an hour or two before I managed to call her, that I’d possibly been killed. A few days later, during a minor argument about the dishes, she slapped me in the face and started crying. We got married a year later; it didn’t last.

I sat for an hour with my feet in a bucket of warm water. I had no idea how I would get through the rest of the day.

Leonard Cohen:...the terrorist position is so seductive that everybody has embraced it. The governments have embraced it, the lovers have embraced it. The same politics of the bedroom and the living room and the legislative assemblies of the world…it is the terrorist position. Reduce everything to confrontation, to revenge.

Vin Scelsa: Do you think the media plays a big part in all that?

Cohen: It’s way beyond that. It’s all lost… Our culture, our civilization, all this beautiful stuff from Mozart to Bukowski, as exalted or as funky as it gets, it’s just nail polish on the claws and the nail polish has begun to crack and flake and the claws are showing through. And that’s what we’re living with—a world in which the claws have been exposed. And it’s only been a tiny brief moment when they were covered with nail polish, and now the nail polish is coming off.

Scelsa: The future looks pretty grim.

Cohen: It is grim. It always has been grim.

“Vin Scelsa’s Idiot’s Delight,” NYC, 13 June 1993.

Bowie and Tony Visconti were upstate that morning. Visconti’s son and a friend were living down by the towers; they got out. Bowie and Iman’s place in Soho was close enough that she saw the second plane hit.

A month later, Bowie took part in the Concert for New York at Madison Square Garden. It’s hard to watch this concert now, with its exhausted, nervy sense of mourning, the open anger and blood lust, the boorish antics by the comedians. The Anglo-American theme of the night, emphasized by the Union Jack and Old Glory set against each other above the stage and with Paul McCartney writing an official theme song, was reassuring then; it just seems a sad premonition of a shared disaster now.

Bowie’s performance of “Heroes” was everything the audience needed to hear that night. Many of them had lost friends, and some of them likely would contract cancer and emphysema because of their work during those weeks. Bowie cast the song up in the air for everyone to grab onto it. It seems churlish to begrudge him, or the audience, for doing the expected; doing the expected felt like a luxury then.

But he had opened the show by himself. He sat at the edge of the stage, his legs tucked under him, looking as though he’d been recruited from the Beckenham Arts Lab and asked to warm up the crowd before the real acts started. He had a Omnichord keyboard, on which he set up a waltz pattern. It was another toy instrument, like the Stylophone and the Rosedale Electric Organ, that he’d elevated.

Bowie messes up. He misses his cue with the Omnichord and he spends the whole first verse off-kilter, the keyboard racing ahead of him, which makes him rush his phrasings and he can’t quite settle into the melody. He doesn’t show a lick of concern. With the second verse he catches up with the song, falls into a lilting pattern.

The lyric, like the Trade Center, was a relic from a lost Sixties. Even as a child, I’d thought Simon and Garfunkel’s “America” was about another, much older country, like the Hardy Boys novels with their jalopies and automats. Mrs. Wagner’s Pies; men wearing gabardine suits and bowties on the bus; young people hitch-hiking without fear of being kidnapped and killed (the latter was drummed into you as a kid in the Seventies). “America” was an exile’s song. Paul Simon had written some of it in England, using his English girlfriend Kathy Chitty as a supporting character; he was missing his home enough that he turned people stuck on the New Jersey Turnpike into pilgrims.

Why sing “America”? Well, the title was a good applause line. And he “was looking for something which really evoked feelings of bewilderment and uncertainty, because for me that’s how that particular period really felt. And I really thought that Paul Simon’s song in this new context really captured that,” Bowie said in a November 2001 web-chat.

It was also an old memory of his, as he’d been a fan of the Scottish band 1-2-3 (later Clouds), who had a residency at the Marquee Club in 1967. One of the songs in the 1-2-3’s set was by a composer that no one in Britain had heard of, some New York folkie who’d crashed in London in the mid-Sixties. Somehow 1-2-3 had gotten hold of one of Simon’s then-unreleased songs and turned “America” into a nearly ten-minute progressive track, full of time and key changes (Yes would all but steal the 1-2-3’s template for their cover a few years later).

The song felt as if it could be opened: each of its verses is a self-contained little world, each line could fork off somewhere else. Bowie takes his time with it, he gives each line enough room, he stresses the preposition “for” over the crowd-pleasing “America.” There’s a sense that he’s trying to recall a world that’s fading just as he’s singing. Michigan seems like a dream to me now. Saginaw’s in another country. A bus full of sleepers drives East, and the night inks in the fields and towns that it passes. What was it like, he asks on behalf of all the lost kids at the Marquee, to have lived in such a place? And what will be there when it’s gone?

The Chrysler Building was talking to the Empire State.
The Twin Towers were talking to each other,
Saying, “All is forgiven, I love you still”

Luna, “Going Home,” 1994.

There’s a story about Nabokov and his family, sailing to America in May 1940. They had fled the Soviets and Nazi Berlin and now they were leaving Nazi Paris. Here they were, Vladimir and Vera and Dmitri, washed up on a pier in mid-Manhattan. A small porter and two large customs men opened their traveling trunk; on top were two pairs of boxing gloves. The customs men slipped on the gloves and began sparring, whirling in a dance around Nabokov; another inspector examined Nabokov’s butterfly collection and offered, gratis, his newly-coined name for a species.

“Where would that happen?” Nabokov would say when recounting that morning, delighted by the strange young country he’d come to live in. “Where would that happen?”

Performed 20 October 2001, Madison Square Garden. Released (edited) 27 November 2001 on The Concert For New York City (Columbia C2K 86270). Bowie performed “America” again on 30 May 2002 for a charity show at the Javits Center.

Top to bottom: Jamie Squire, “New York City,” 5 September 2001; Julien Menichini, “NYC,” 5 September 2001; Monika Bravo, “View From the 92nd Floor, WTC 1, During a Storm,” 10 September 2001; David Officer, “View of NY Skyline from the Empire State Building,” 10 September 2001; Evan Kuz, “World Trade Center,” 10 September 2001; Mike Horan, “9-10-2001”; “Oberon Watchman,” 8:22 AM, 9/11/01.

When the Boys Come Marching Home

When the Boys Come Marching Home.

While Bowie claimed he’d written the lyrics for Heathen before the 9/11 attacks, it’s easy to imagine the B-side “When the Boys Come Marching Home” coming out of the dark autumn of 2001, with the Afghanistan invasion, a nation afraid to open its mail thanks to the anthrax scare, routine color-coded terror freak-out alerts, the Department of Homeland Security established and plans for the Iraq war underway.

It’s not as if the song would have been out of place anytime in the past century, though. The somber refrains, Matt Chamberlain’s snare pattern and the song’s title suggest the endless military cycles of history (“There’s nothing to learn from history. As we’ve repeatedly shown,,” Bowie told the Daily Mirror in 2002. “We’re not willing to learn. We’ve slipped straight back into what we usually do—we’ve fallen for a religious war.“): an obvious reference was the U.S. civil war song “When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again” and its British counterpart “Johnny I Hardly Knew Ye.”

But the lyric, one of Bowie’s most gnomic works since Hunky Dory, offered more than antiwar sentiments: there are “outsider” artists as bellwethers and court jesters (“I love him in his craziness, his tatters and his courage“), wanderings through some lost battle-numbed Europe of the imagination (“I love the little cars at dawn“). Cities and countries as prostitutes; collectives of mean townies; Aldous Huxley nods. Bowie casts himself as the moon (“my cloudy face will be gone, high-tailing it out of here” and there’s a lovely bit in the second verse where the moon in turn becomes a fisherman, using the tides to “pull[] up its net of souls“) and Don Quixote (“I and the cobbled nag I ride/stumble down another weary mile“).

A descending synthesizer line, following the footsteps of the Laughing Gnome, appears in the first verses and then gets packed off; florid margin commentaries of violins and viola, courtesy of the Scorchio Quartet, color the refrains; Jordan Rudess plays a nimble piano line towards the close that seems about to break into stride or boogie-woogie. The vocal melody in the bridge is one of Bowie’s loveliest, seemingly building to a dramatic payoff that never comes (that we don’t deserve?): the refrains sound beaten into submission. One of his more indecipherable songs, it’s been all but forgotten today.

Recorded: (basic tracks, vocals) August-September 2001, Allaire Studios, Shokan, New York; (overdubs) October 2001-January 2002, Looking Glass Studios, NYC. Released 5 June 2002 as a bonus track on the “Slow Burn” EC single (ISO/Columbia COL 672744 2) and later in the UK on the “Everyone Says ‘Hi’” single.

Top: Sgt. Joseph R. Chenelly, “A U.S. Marine with the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit leads others to a security position after seizing a Taliban forward-operating base, Afghanistan, 25 November 2001.”