Don’t Bring Me Down

Don’t Bring Me Down (The Pretty Things, 1964).
Don’t Bring Me Down (Bowie).

“Don’t Bring Me Down” began life as a benign pop song and was put to disreputable ends by the Pretty Things. The song, written by the now-obscure British singer Johnny Dee, was originally slow-paced and “tame,” Phil May recalled. “We hijacked it,” he told Richie Unterberger.

The Pretty Things’ version, their second Fontana single and their biggest UK hit (#10), is two minutes of caveman mating calls. It opens and closes with four descending chords, E-D-C-A, opening on guitar and ending with four thudding drum beats, and the four-step plummet continues throughout the song, occasionally countered by four-step upward pushes (“I said I think this rock is grand” is over A-C-D-E). May’s first verse has him as a rolling stone, not looking to settle down, but when he finds a girl he likes, our brute suddenly gets domestic. “I got this PAD/just like a CAVE,” he coos, following up with what sounds like “And then I laid her on the ground.” (It’s really “lead her,” which Bowie pronounces quite clearly; the line got the Pretty Things single banned by some U.S. radio stations).

As with “Rosalyn,” Bowie and Mick Ronson keep close to the original, though Ronson and Aynsley Dunbar provide more wattage (Dunbar in particular makes the original track sound like it was recorded on paper drums). The harmonica sawing away on the Bowie version seems like a throwback—replace it with another guitar and you’ve got a punk rock record. It’s a lesson future Sex Pistol Glen Matlock, who loved Pin Ups, would take to heart.

Recorded July-early August 1973.

Top: “Normko,” “Tower of London,” 1973.

I Wish You Would

I Wish You Would (Billy Boy Arnold, 1955).
I Wish You Would (The Yardbirds w/Eric Clapton, 1964).
I Wish You Would (The Yardbirds, w/Jeff Beck, 1965).
I Wish You Would (Bowie).

Billy Boy Arnold, born in Chicago during the Depression, was a journeyman in the city’s postwar electric blues scene, working mainly with Bo Diddley (he’s on Diddley’s “I’m a Man”). Tutored on harp by the original Sonny Boy Williamson, Arnold had good luck when he started out, as blues clubs in Chicago now favored amplified harmonica-guitars-drums set-ups over the traditional piano-guitar acts. While during the war every blues joint in town had an upright piano, by 1950 there was hardly a piano left in Chicago, Arnold recalled.

In 1955, tired of being a sideman and told that Chess Records owner Leonard Chess didn’t like him (Chess thought he was too cocky), Arnold cut “I Wish You Would” for Vee-Jay. This was an overnight rewrite of a song Arnold had written for Diddley, “Diddy Diddy Dum Dum,” with the Diddley beat sped up. Arnold’s guitar player on the track, Jody Williams, was tired of traditional blues playing, and his agitated riff fueled the track. Arnold worried that he was blatantly aping Diddley’s sound, but that’s what the label wanted, and the record sold. Arnold still considered himself more a straight blues man. “I didn’t want to be capitalizing on no Bo Diddley type of thing. But once you do something, you’re stuck,” he said later.

“I Wish You Would” is an early rock & roll record with a fatalistic blues heart. Arnold starts out with standards: his woman’s left him, going around town with another man, come back baby, pleading won’t do no good. Then he widens the lens—she left him because he was drinking every night, because he mistreated her, and he’s deserved what he’s gotten. There’s acceptance in Arnold’s voice, and a wryness, too, as if he knows the situation’s never going to straighten out. She might come back, she might go away again: it’s as cyclical and relentless as Williams’ guitar line that repeats, almost non-stop, throughout the track.

Nearly a decade later, The Yardbirds covered “I Wish You Would.” They had been playing the song since they began in ’63, and as it was one of the more commercial songs they had at the time (while still passing muster with their resident purist, Eric Clapton), it was picked as their debut single. While the Yardbirds’ cover was fairly respectful of the original, they trimmed the lyric, excising the man’s part in the mess, and played up the sex. Arnold’s song suggested there was no way out, while the Yardbirds version, which builds to a thrashing rave-up, argues otherwise. They sped up the song, replacing the shaky, thundering beat of the Arnold single with a straight 4/4 attack. “We just sounded young and white,” Clapton wrote in his autobiography.

While the Yardbirds’ “I Wish You Would” didn’t chart, it hit with other aspiring Brit R&B/rock bands, like Davie Jones and the King Bees. It helped that the song was easy to play—it’s basically one chord (A), with a move to G only during the solos, and the bassist and guitarist could play the same riff over and over. More than that, though, the song gave grandeur and mystery to adolescent stumblings; it suggested romance was serious.

Arnold told Richie Unterberger that when you worked a blues club in Chicago in the ’50s, you were among an exiled people. “When you on a job and a club, everybody was from the South. And they all had one thing in common–they was escaping oppression, the thing that gave them the blues in the first place,” he said. “The hard working people who supported the blues, which was all black, they wanted to hear the blues. It was a way of life for them—they lived the life, they go out and hear their music, their singers were singing, experience that the people in the audience had lived. The singers lived the same experience too. [Howling] Wolf and B.B. [King] and all, they lived the same. They worked on the plantations, they had the hardship, they lived under the oppression. They knew what the blues was.”

Still, “I Wish You Would” didn’t reflect this experience. It was new, flashy, a young man’s song. You get the sense that Arnold and Williams are picking apart the blues to find the shiny bits. The Yardbirds, an ocean and a lifetime removed from this (their drummer was a stockbroker in his spare time), took the game even further. “I Wish You Would” granted them access to something beyond their power, so they aped what they could, sped over the rest.

So why did Bowie cover “I Wish You Would,” another decade on? Nostalgia for the R&B circuit days, or Ronson wanting to outplay the young Clapton, or Bowie vaguely recalling his youthful ambitions to be a soul/jazz singer? Bowie’s version rolls along well enough, with Trevor Bolder and Aynsley Dunbar giving propulsion, while the harmonica, which for Arnold and The Yardbirds’ Keith Relf had served as a dueting vocal, is replaced by a Ronson guitar line. Still, something’s way off: Ronson sounds like an automaton while Bowie’s vocal comes off weedy and desperate. He’s less convincing than his teenage self was singing Bobby “Blue” Bland (see “I Pity The Fool”). It’s a harsh, streamlined version of the song, and as hollow as a drum.

Recorded July-early August 1973; on side 2 of Pin Ups. The backstory on Billy Boy Arnold came mainly from Unterberger’s extensive interview with Arnold, done in the ’90s.

Top: Ute Mahler, “Untitled,” from the series Living Together, 1973.

Everything’s Alright

Everything’s Alright (The Mojos, 1964).
Everything’s Alright (Bowie).
Everything’s Alright (Bowie, 1980 Floor Show, 1973).
Everything’s Alright (1980 Floor Show outtakes).

Pin Ups is the oft-forgotten runt of David Bowie’s Seventies albums. By the summer of 1973, Bowie, who had been touring since spring ’72, was exhausted and empty. He hadn’t written a song in half a year and RCA wanted a new record. So he made a covers album. RCA would have some fresh product for Christmas (and it would sell, too, hitting #1 in the UK) and Bowie would buy some time.

Bowie told an interviewer that Pin Ups‘ dozen covers were all “records I have back at home,” while on the LP sleeve he wrote that he had seen most of the bands at clubs like the Marquee or the Ricky-Tick. But these songs weren’t, for the most part, by Bowie’s primary musical influences. There’s no Jacques Brel, Lou Reed, John Lennon, Scott Walker, Anthony Newley, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, etc. Only Pete Townshend and Ray Davies perhaps qualified. On Pin Ups, Bowie mainly covered his jobbing contemporaries: the bands who had beat him out on the charts, who had outperformed him on stage, and who he had outlived.

Pin Ups was also crafted to serve two distinct audiences. For the British, it was a nostalgic tribute, with Bowie revisiting pop hits from nearly a decade before. So the record fit in well with the future-throwback ethos of the period, with the burgeoning “Fifties” revival (see “Drive In Saturday”), David Essex getting a hit song with a lyric composted from ’50s rock & roll choruses, or neo-Teddy Boy bands like Mud.

For Americans, though, Pin Ups might as well have been marketed as a new Bowie record. Only “Friday on My Mind,” “Here Comes the Night” and “Shapes of Things” had been US Top 40 hits. Bowie’s picks were generally obscurities, like a Kinks B-side, or tracks by bands unknown to Americans like The Mojos and the Merseys.

Most of these groups were young, decidedly unprofessional, seemingly more at home practicing for a teen dance than going out on national tour…they exemplified the berserk pleasure that comes with being on stage outrageous, the relentless middle-finger drive and determination offered only by rock & roll at its finest.

Lenny Kaye, Nuggets liner notes.

Most of all, Pin Ups‘ key counterpart was Lenny Kaye’s Nuggets 2-LP garage rock compilation, released in fall 1972*. The early ’70s, a time when the first generation who had grown up with rock & roll were having children, was unsurprisingly when the “official” history of rock & roll was being drafted. Call it the Whig (or Rolling Stone) theory of rock music, one which begins with, say, Bill Haley and culminates in Dark Side of the Moon: basically, it’s a steady climb from primitive teenage dance music up towards “relevance” and “complexity” with occasional refreshing dips back into “roots” music.

Nuggets/Pin Ups created a counter-narrative, which basically became the punk rebuttal: immediacy over history, the disposable trashy single over the concept LP, spontaneity over chops, with lyrics centered on dancing, alienation and sex. Yet Bowie didn’t commit to this line either, as on Pin Ups he often interpreted basic pop singles as campy affectations, sometimes seemingly at war with his more traditionalist band.

The oldest track Bowie covered on Pin Ups was The Mojos‘ “Everything’s Alright,” which had hit the Top 10 in Britain in March 1964. The Mojos were a Liverpool band who got better gigs and national singles by riding The Beatles’ coattails, along with other Mersey acts like The Big Three, Billy J. Kramer and Gerry and the Pacemakers. The Mojos followed their first single, the fantastic envy-ridden “They Say You Found a New Baby”, with “Everything’s Alright” (written as “Al’right” on the label), which seems inspired by the Beatles’ version of “Twist and Shout”: it’s a primal stomper crafted to get a club audience screaming.

“Everything’s Alright” barely has a verse, just a couple of lines to fill spaces between choruses, where the beatific promise of “everything’s alright” is fulfilled with “let me hold your hand—be your lovin’ man” or “let me give you lovin’ like nobody can” repeated like mantras. The chorus is standard IV-I-V, with the dominant (G) coming on “let me hold your hand”: the band rides the chorus until it nearly breaks, then spurs the song further with a step-by-step move from C to F. It’s a record of pure pleasure, offering the wonderful lie that it, or the dance, or the teenage night, will somehow never end, and just keep building to greater and greater excitement. So the single’s sudden collapse ending, with the final “everything’s alright” delivered with exhaustion, seems tragic.

Bowie’s version has some tight playing by Mick Ronson, Mike Garson and Trevor Bolder, and it’s dominated by Bowie’s new drummer, Aynsley Dunbar. Dunbar not only gave Bowie some cred, as he had played on the original Mojos track (so possibly he suggested covering it) but he’s also a far more dynamic presence on record then the steady but unspectacular Woody Woodmansey, who’d been sacked before the Pin Ups sessions (on his wedding day!). Bowie sings the verses pretty straight, undermines his chorus with a set of goony backing vocals.

“Everything’s Alright” ultimately lacks the original’s punch, as is the case with most of the Pin Ups covers. The original tracks were mainly recorded live in the studio, direct to two- or four-track, and mixed in mono, while the Pin Ups covers were given clinical, dry production by Ken Scott, with a stereo mix that sometimes confines Ronson’s guitar to one channel and often buries Bowie’s backing vocals. Back-to-back comparison of the originals and Pin Ups often makes the Bowie versions sound dissipated.

Recorded ca. July 1973, and Bowie performed “Everything’s Alright” in his 1980 Floor Show on 19 October 1973. It’s a respectably manic version that comes close to parody thanks to the spastic dance moves of Bowie’s backing singers.

Top: Don McCullin, “East End, London, 1973.”

* I’ll get to other major counterpart to Pin Ups, Bryan Ferry’s These Foolish Things, when we hit “Sorrow” in a few weeks.

The Beatles Covers

This Boy (live, 1972).
Love Me Do (live, w/”Jean Genie,” 1973).
Love Me Do (live, w/”Jean Genie,” 1974).
Love Me Do (live, w/”Jean Genie,” 2000).

In the late summer of 1972, when David Bowie was becoming a pop star, he would throw The Beatles’ “This Boy” into the occasional Ziggy-Spiders From Mars set. One of The Beatles’ first B-sides (for “I Want to Hold Your Hand”), “This Boy” was their attempt at ’50s doo-wop (also inspired by early Miracles records, especially in its bridge), with its close three-part harmonies and rickety 12/8 time. Bowie mainly sang it solo, with Ronson coming in for occasional harmonies. Surfacing amidst the Ziggy Stardust numbers, “This Boy” seemed like a lullaby suddenly recalled from childhood, Bowie offering the crowd a memory.

The following summer, a gaunt, weary Bowie, with his blood-orange mullet and his Japanese lounging robes, made his final tour of Britain as Ziggy Stardust. He had sold the world and now he was resigning. In some of the last Ziggy shows, the Spiders extended “The Jean Genie” for over ten minutes, teasing it out, and, cued by Bowie’s harmonica, often segued into “Love Me Do.” It was an expedition to find the source. “Love Me Do,” the first Beatles single, was a raw, modern record upon its release: it was pure expectation and promise. At the final Ziggy show, Bowie sang “Love Me Do” simply, letting his audience finish the chorus, then crept back into his own song. The show ended, Bowie broke up the band and, looking for an escape route, burrowed into the past.

“This Boy” was played in a few ’72 shows, with the murky recording linked above from a 27 August concert in Bristol. “Love Me Do” appeared throughout the last Ziggy Stardust UK tour, including the last-ever Spiders show at the Hammersmith, on 3 July (it was cut from the concert film, either due to Jeff Beck’s resistance or copyright issues). Bowie also threw “Love Me Do” into “Jean Genie” performances during his 1974 tour and again in 2000.

Top: Paul McCartney, Band On The Run sessions, Lagos, Nigeria, ca. September 1973.

Lady Grinning Soul

Lady Grinning Soul.

The gorgeous “Lady Grinning Soul” seems written for an imaginary film. As James Perone notes, Bowie’s song is melodically similar to Quincy Jones’ “On Days Like These,” which opens The Italian Job, while his vocal’s initial upward leap and step-by-step descent echoes Max Steiner’s main theme for Gone With The Wind. Most of all, “Lady Grinning Soul” is Bowie’s lost James Bond movie theme song, seemingly paced to accompany a Maurice Binder title sequence. Even the last line, “your living end,” sounds like an Ian Fleming title (one far better than, say, “Quantum of Solace”).

The lyrical signifiers—Volkswagen Bugs, canasta, Americard (Visa’s original name)—don’t really connote glamour or mystery, though. If anything, they suggest my late grandmother, and possibly yours. Perhaps Bowie wanted a cultural mishmash, with French perfume, Uruguayan card games, German cars and American credit used as shorthand to indicate the Lady is pure cosmopolitan: stateless, rootless, all-conquering. Or maybe it was just Bowie taking delight in savoring the strange words, the tripping syllables of “canasta,” the melodious depths of “cologne.”

It’s said to be about the singer Claudia Lennear, and it’s more tasteful than her other alleged tribute, “Brown Sugar.” But there’s a vagueness to the Lady’s character, with the cinematic feel of the music and the lyric’s oddities lessening the sense the song’s about a specific person. “Lady Grinning Soul” is more the glory of a perfect symbol, one through which someone trapped in life can find release, false or no. The key line is “how can life become her point of view?,” liberation from the self by submission to another, possibly ending in death. (For Bowie, this is a love song.)

Everyone on the track seems dressed to the nines. It’s the closing number, after all. Mike Garson’s piano intro gives a taste of the verse vocal melody and adds a Spanish tinge. His piano cascades through much of the track: in the verses, he spins out repeated arpeggios with his right hand while Bowie sings, as though he’s trying to upset Bowie’s timing. “French, with a little Franz Liszt thrown in,” Garson described his playing to David Buckley, adding that he also took cues from Liberace. So the avant-garde piano of “Aladdin Sane” is replaced by something that comes close, at times, to vintage European schlock—Garson’s performance is the biggest clue that “Lady Grinning Soul” could actually be something of a parody.

Mick Ronson plays a Spanish-style acoustic guitar solo against Garson’s arpeggios (with Garson eventually echoing Ronson’s playing), and finishes off the track without artifice, his electric guitar playing soaring, vibrato-saturated notes as the lights dim. Bowie’s saxophone arrangement and his vocal are the finest on the record, with Bowie sounding like a man who swallowed a dream. “Lady Grinning Soul” ends a sordid, urban and often-cynical record with pure delusive romance.

Recorded ca. 20-24 January 1973. “Lady Grinning Soul” was the last song written for, recorded for, and sequenced on Aladdin Sane (Bowie scrapped a remake of “John I’m Only Dancing,” which was intended to be the album closer, possibly because it spoiled the LP’s closing mood). Bowie has never performed it live.

Top: Francis Bacon, Triptych, May-June 1973.

Let’s Spend The Night Together

Let’s Spend the Night Together.
Let’s Spend the Night Together (live, 1973).

The Rolling Stones’ “Let’s Spend the Night Together” is stranger and more complex than its reputation as one of the Stones’ most primal dance and sex songs. It’s a product of the Stones’ psychedelic era (the band was stuck in London, unable to perform live, and so spent their days throwing parties, taking drugs, getting busted and making Between the Buttons and Their Satanic Majesties Request); so while written to be a single, it’s a murky and even experimental record. Keith Richards wrote most of it on piano (considering it a remake of “Have You Seen Your Mother Baby”), and his repeated piano line and a droning organ dominate the track, nearly swallowing up the guitars. As Richards pointed out years later, the backing singers are basically vocalizing piano chords. Charlie Watts seems to be slipping behind the beat, while the monotony of the track only breaks with its odd middle section, when there’s a swirl of vocals and, underneath, clattering sticks (allegedly by bobbies visiting the studio for a drug raid).

And Mick Jagger’s vocal isn’t as much a lecherous come-on as it is a desperate teenage boy’s plea, someone whose ambition far outweighs his experience. Take the way Jagger hems and haws in the opening verses, filling in spaces with “my my my my”s and other nervous tics, getting caught up on vowel sounds (“fooling around, and ’round and ’round…”), even admitting “this doesn’t happen to me everyday!!” As the song builds, the kid tries to psych himself up to ask the question, and when Jagger finally hits his mark after the final moment of doubt (the ominous bridge), he sings his last lines with delight, the backing singers cheering for him.

All this nuance went out the window when Bowie covered “Let’s Spend the Night Together” six years later. Bowie unfurled it as a show-opener for his return to Britain in late December 1972, then quickly cut a version for the Aladdin Sane LP. There’s a sense that the band is just tarting the song up—it’s moved up in key (from the original G (I believe) to A), sped up in pace, and filled with Mick Ronson and Mike Garson at their most indulgent: guitar sneers, spiky piano, synthesizer washes.

And where Jagger’s vocal can be hesitant and wry, with Jagger singing the title phrase by emphasizing “night” then falling off, slightly, on “together,” Bowie is manic and confident, as though he’s so sure of this conquest he’s already got his eye on another one. He delivers the chorus like a royal edict, keeping on the same note for most of it, and sprints through the verses as if someone’s got a stopwatch in the vocal booth. His breathy, spoken “our love comes from above…let’s make….lurve” bit is just irritating. Some have interpreted Bowie’s version as a gay liberation of the Stones’ heterosexual original, but if so, it was done at the expense of the original’s humanity—a bit of a cruel bargain.

As a cover song in a Ziggy Stardust show, “Let’s Spend the Night Together” worked well enough; as a filler track on an LP that’s already a bit padded (the second side of Aladdin Sane also has a remake of “The Prettiest Star”), it’s loud, tacky and pointless. Still, Bowie won the game at the end, as subsequent Rolling Stones performances of the song (they didn’t play it live again until the late ’70s) seemed to take his version as inspiration, with Jagger becoming a parody of a glam spoof of himself.

First performed by Bowie on 23 December 1972, opening his grand return to the Rainbow Theatre, and recorded around the same time. Performed throughout the last Ziggy Stardust tour in 1973, and issued as a single in the US and Europe (RCA 41125 c/w “Lady Grinning Soul”).

Top: Bobby Douglass in the field, Chicago, 1972.

Aladdin Sane

Aladdin Sane (1913-1938-197?).
Aladdin Sane (live, 1973).
Aladdin Sane (live, 1974).
Aladdin Sane (live, 1996).
Aladdin Sane (Bridge Benefit Concert, 1996).
Aladdin Sane (ChangesNowBowie, 1997).

Masked parties, Savage parties, Victorian parties, Greek parties, Wild West parties, Russian parties, Circus parties, parties where one had to dress as somebody else, almost naked parties in St John’s Wood, parties in flats and studios and houses and ships and hotels and night clubs, in windmills and swimming-baths, tea parties at school where one ate muffins and meringues and tinned crab, parties at Oxford where one drank brown sherry and smoked Turkish cigarettes, dull dances in London and comic dances in Scotland and disgusting dances in Paris—all that succession and repetition of massed humanity.

Evelyn Waugh, Vile Bodies.

Bowie was scared of airplanes so he took a ship, the R.H.M.S. Ellinis, home to Britain in mid-December 1972. During the trip he read Waugh’s Vile Bodies and found, he thought, similarities between the novel (completed months before the 1929 crash, and whose narrative ends in a near-future with WWII already underway) and his own times. He soon got a song out of it.

At a London press conference in the summer of 1972, just as Ziggy Stardust broke, Bowie seemed unnerved by his success, though he had been trying to be a pop star for nearly a decade. Something disturbed him about his rise, he said, along with Lou Reed’s new prominence (“Walk on the Wild Side” would hit the Top 10) and the Glam boom. Once there had been well-groomed boys in matching suits on Top of the Pops. Now there was Roxy Music, who looked like extraterrestrials in a witness relocation program, or Slade and Roy Wood, hill trolls in Halloween costumes, or The Sweet, a bubblegum group who leered at their audience and seemed to be sharing a private joke. It was a sign that modern civilization had reached the point of absurdity—its entertainments had become bizarre and sordid, even menacing.

It is hardly surprising that they were Bolshevik at eighteen and bored by twenty…There was nothing left for the younger generation to rebel against except the widest conceptions of mere decency. Accordingly, it was against these that they turned.

Waugh, “The War and the Younger Generation,” 1929.

People like Lou [Reed] and I are probably predicting the end of an era. Any society that allows people like Lou and me to become rampant is pretty well lost. We’re both pretty mixed-up, paranoid people—absolute walking messes. If we’re the spearhead of anything, we’re not necessarily the spearhead of anything good.

Bowie, 1972.

In Waugh’s novel, ridiculous young people dress up in costumes, sleep with each other, have treasure hunts on city streets at midnight, drink and drug themselves to oblivion; it ends on a battlefield. “Aladdin Sane” was Bowie’s parallel sequel: a premature epitaph for his own lost generation. Though this time the party would end with a nuclear holocaust (hence the song’s (1913-1938-197?) subhead—Bowie seemed to really think that the world would end before 1980).

There’s a sadness and frailty to “Aladdin Sane,” set in B minor, with its lyric a meager collection of fragmented images—glissando strings, bouquets of faded roses. It’s as though Bowie realized the decadence of Waugh’s era had a panache his own time lacked. Bowie had just come off a months-long rock tour of America in 1972, and had endured/enjoyed the debauchery, the loud fashions, the noise, the bad food. It was a flyblown existence and Bowie wanted a nobler victim: in “Aladdin Sane” he invented a more glittering world to snuff out.

Bowie built “Aladdin Sane” out of sets of nine—there’s a nine-bar intro, two nine-bar verses, a nine-bar chorus, then another nine-bar verse and chorus, leading to the centerpiece of the track, and the album: Mike Garson’s 45-bar piano solo (or five nine-bar choruses).

The verse is an intricate little thing, sewn through with a three-note motif (F-E-D) that Ronson plays in alternating bars: the motif’s first only a guitar line, then in subsequent repeats Bowie sings the same three notes (“you’ll make it,” “I’m waiting”). The verse vocal is a call-and-response, with Bowie’s six-beat opening phrases, mainly staying on one note (“watch-ing him dance a-way“), answered by three-beat phrases (“dead ro-ses,” “don’t fake it”). The seventh bar of the verse is the variable, as it’s changed chords from the intro (from E to E minor*) while the rest of the verse is exactly the same as the intro. The seventh bar is first given dummy lyrics until, in the last verse, Bowie sings the title over it.** The chorus is simpler, moving to major chords, with its machine-like rhythms driven by Mick Ronson’s guitar, bolstered by piano and bass.

All of this is prologue for Garson’s solo. Garson has already undermined the verses, playing spiky lines that crash against Bowie’s vocal and Mick Ronson’s rhythm. Now he performs a magic trick.

Garson, in Trident Studios with Bowie, Ronson and producer Ken Scott, was asked to play a solo for “Aladdin Sane” over a simple set of chords (A to G to A, repeat indefinitely). Bowie gave Garson no guidelines, just told him to play what he liked. Garson did, and Bowie shot down his first two tries (a blues and a Latin-tinged solo). Bowie told Garson to go further out. On tour, Garson had told Bowie stories of the ’60s New York avant-garde jazz scene—of watching free jazz hierophants like Cecil Taylor. That’s what I want, Bowie said. So Garson sat down and played, off the top of his head and in one take, what is likely the finest rock piano solo recorded that decade, if ever.

Garson’s solo, at first listen seemingly random and chaotic, has a structure—it moves from dissonance and disturbance to the reassurance of memory, then breaks apart again, churning and spinning, until it’s finally yoked back to serve the song. The first chorus (2:04 to 2:21) opens with Garson playing a jarring four-note pattern that disintegrates, splintering into pieces; the second (2:22 to 2:40) is mainly his long, manic runs along the keyboard. The third (2:41 to 2:57) is a list of quotations—“Rhapsody In Blue” and “Tequila,” likely others (maybe a hint of “On Broadway,” which Bowie sings a part of in the outro). The fourth (2:58 to 3:15) kills that indulgence with three bars of furiously pounded chords and ends with the saxophone wending its way back; the fifth (3:16 to 3:33) is the return to earth, as Garson, bowing to time, plays the bassline midway through.

The outro is a maelstrom of saxophone squalls, Bowie singing “On Broadway” and Garson’s piano—the music closes in on itself, slowly fading off, finally leaving Garson playing alone and humbled, reduced to a rationed set of notes. Garson’s last stand sounds like one of Schoenberg’s Six Little Piano Pieces. Bowie may have sung about a fallen world, but Garson’s solo is what a weary, bloated civilization sounds like when it dies.

Recorded ca. 15-24 January 1973. Performed a few times during the last Ziggy tour, regularly during the Diamond Dogs tour (it’s on David Live) and revived in the mid-’90s after Bowie and Garson had reunited.

*Guitar footnote: It’s officially a change (acc. to the sheet music) from Esus2 to Em11.

**I’ve seen “Paris or maybe hell” sometimes written as “Paris, or maybe Hull,”, which might be a better line.

Top: Art Spiegelman, opening page of “Maus,” Funny Animals, 1972. (Collected in Breakdowns.)

Time

Time.
Time (live, 1973).
Time (The 1980 Floor Show, 1973).
Time (live, 1974).
Time (live, 1987).

During his first US tour, Bowie had written sharp, vicious rockers (“Jean Genie,” “Cracked Actor,” “Watch That Man”). Yet by the time he returned to the UK in December 1972, something had changed. The final songs he wrote for the Aladdin Sane LP were sprawling, piano-centered mood pieces: the title track, “Lady Grinning Soul” and “Time.”

Some biographers claim Bowie found life as a newly-minted rock star maddening and constricting, so he began writing “art” songs to break out of rock & roll’s confines. That’s possible, though a more likely influence was Bowie’s new pianist, Mike Garson, who could play in any style and who had an intuitive sense for accompaniment. Unlike Bowie’s other major pianist to date, Rick Wakeman, whose relationship with Bowie was entirely in the studio, Garson first played with Bowie on the road. So Bowie became fluent in Garson’s style (the two would sometimes play in hotel bars after shows, on standards like “My Funny Valentine”) and he soon began writing for Garson as he did for Mick Ronson. (One could argue Bowie was already thinking about how to replace Ronson.)

Garson grew up in Brooklyn in the ’50s and, until his mid-teens, had intended to become a rabbi. Instead, he became a touring musician—first in the Catskills with the likes of Jackie Mason, then in New York, where he played in jazz clubs and backed Martha and the Vandellas. Bowie arrived in New York in September ’72 and put out the word that he needed a touring pianist, and one of Garson’s friends recommended he audition. Garson went into a room he later described as being full of men with rainbow hair wearing circus clothes, and got the gig after playing eight bars of “Changes.”

“Time,” which Bowie allegedly wrote in New Orleans during a stop there in mid-November 1972, opens with an 8-bar intro in which Garson plays what he later described as a stride piano line “a little left field, with an angle.” Stride had developed in the early ’20s —it generally meant playing a set of beats with the left hand while the right hand improvised on melody. Garson’s version of stride is overly stylized, aided by Ken Scott’s production, which pushes Garson to the front of the mix (mainly in one speaker) and emphasizes his tone’s treble qualities, so much that Garson sometimes sounds like a player piano (Scott is also responsible for mixing in two bars of heavy Bowie breathing after a verse).

The final track is an elaborate duet between Ronson and Garson. Each generally comps while the other solos, though they also strike against each other (take the way Garson’s rainfall of piano notes (after “I had so many dreams”) is followed by a Ronson waltzing guitar line). Or how, in the intro repeat midway through the track, Garson’s fractured stride piano line is answered by Ronson making three whinnying runs on his guitar. It’s a masterful dual performance. Ronson winds up quoting from Beethoven’s Ninth and Garson plays a free-time solo buried in the mix during the repeated ‘LA-la-la-la-LA-la-LA-la” outro.

“Time” is an odd composition: its chorus (if it even has one) is wordless; its bridge converts into a chorus/outro; and it has three verse variations, each of which repeat after the Ronson/Garson solo. The first set goes from “Time, he’s waiting in the wings” to “his trick is you and me, boy” and is mainly Bowie’s vocal over Garson’s stride piano and Trevor Bolder’s bass. The second variant, a more harmonically complex version of the first (it still goes from E minor to F to end in C, but there are more chords along the way), features the entrance of the full band. The third is harmonically different (going from C up to G, down to C again), and Bowie sings it at full drama (beginning with “the sniper in the brain”, or, later, “breaking up is hard”).

Then there’s Bowie’s lyric, which is terrible. You could read the most notorious lines (“time, he flexes like a whore/falls wanking to the floor”) as Bowie personifying positions on a clock’s face, but they were likely conceived more as grotesque mime imagery (one shudders to imagine Bowie performing it—his backing dancers threaten to in the 1980 Floor Show performance). The lyric is all pathetic adolescent cod-profundity—masturbation as a kind of philosophy (“I looked at my watch, it said 9:25/and I think, ‘oh God I’m still alive!’ oh, shut up).

Still, buried underneath Bowie’s dreadful language is a real sense of mourning. Bowie wrote “Time” after hearing about the death of the New York Dolls’ drummer Billy Murcia, who he had met a few months earlier. Murcia had a messy, stupid rock & roll death, asphyxiating after being force-fed coffee (his friends were trying to prevent him from sleeping after Murcia took too many barbiturates). Bowie references “Billy Dolls” being taken by “time” and in later verses seems to return to him (“perhaps you’re smiling now, smiling through this darkness” etc).

“Time” worked best on stage, where it served as recitative between the hard rock songs—a moment for Bowie to take a breath, smoke a cigarette, play the weary roué. So it’s no surprise the song was central to Bowie’s two most theatrical tours—the 1974 Diamond Dogs show, where Bowie sang “Time” sitting cross-legged behind an enormous black hand (a performance which veers close to Lily Von Schtupp territory), and the 1987 Glass Spider tour, where Bowie was borne aloft to the top of the infamous spider wearing fiberglass angel wings.

Recorded ca. 15-24 January 1973. It led off Aladdin Sane‘s second side and RCA issued an edit as a single in the US (radio stations bleeped “Quaaludes” but let “wanking” go through), where it failed to chart.

Top: New Orleans, 1972.

Drive-In Saturday

Drive-In Saturday (first performance, live 1972).
Drive-In Saturday.
Drive-In Saturday (Russell Harty Plus Pop, 1973).
Drive-In Saturday (live, 1974).
Drive-In Saturday (VH1 Storytellers, 1999).
Drive-In Saturday (live, 1999).

The 1950s of 1970s pop wasn’t quite right and had a strange ambivalence…The style and content [of Glam] was rooted in an idea of pop musicians being mutants from the future who were trying to blend in with us by assembling “authentic” versions of period clothing and getting it wrong. They had ’50s shoulder pads and Elvis-like lamé suits, but also eyeliner and lipstick…the lyrics touched on clichés of ’30s gangster movies and Humphrey Bogart alongside spaceships, motorbikes, aliens and jukeboxes.

Tat Wood, About Time 3.

“The Fifties” were invented around 1972-1973. American Graffiti (which gave life to Happy Days) and its UK counterpart That’ll Be the Day were on screen; Elvis, Chuck Berry and Ricky Nelson topped the charts; The Rocky Horror Show opened on the West End and Grease on Broadway. The actual 1950s, in all their shadow, were converted into an Eden: a sparkling, innocent contrast to the weariness, grime and open sexuality of the early ’70s.

So “Drive-In Saturday” is Bowie’s ’50s pop pastiche, though as typical with Bowie there’s a twist: “Drive-In Saturday” is a ’50s song celebrating the freedoms of the subsequent decade, with Mick Jagger and Twiggy serving as erotic household gods. The premise is that a post-apocalyptic civilization, through fear or reactions from fallout, has forgotten how to have sex, so the kids watch Rolling Stones promos and old films to see how it was done.

It’s the first Bowie song to reflect the challenge of Roxy Music, whose first LP (and hit single “Virginia Plain”) had come out in the summer of ’72. The phased synthesizer lines owe something to Brian Eno’s squiggles and groans, while Bowie’s approach to the material—parodic, subversive, yet done entirely straight-faced—is similar to Bryan Ferry’s fractured takes on country-western (“If There Is Something”) and torch ballads (“Chance Meeting”).

Bowie wrote “Drive-In Saturday” during a train ride from Seattle to Phoenix in early November 1972. He was unable to sleep and, looking out the window at night while the train was somewhere in the desert, he saw a row of nearly 20 enormous silver domes off in the distance, moonlight dancing on their roofs. It intrigued him: what were they? Government post-nuclear-war prep facilities? Secret laboratories? (Most likely feed silos.)

As with “Oh! You Pretty Things,” Bowie’s SF narrative is a cover for a more basic human predicament—how kids, who typically have no idea about sex, have to improvise and fake their way through it, often using film stars and pop music as cues and instruction guides. The idea of groups of teenagers in cars, watching erotic films at a drive-in as though attending a church, is one of his sadder, more haunting images. Bowie also predicted that the Sixties would be enshrined, in the following decades, as the unsurpassed height of glamor and sexual freedom, and so used to belittle the kids who would grow up in the Sixties’ shadow. As much as the past can be warped to serve the present’s needs, the past is also toxic.

“Drive-In Saturday” opens with a pure period reconstruction: there’s a saxophone, swooning backing vocals, a basic chord structure in which the home key A steadily rises to the dominant (E), and it’s in 12/8 time (the standard meter for doo-wop, and used in other ’50s pastiches like The Beatles’ “Oh! Darling” and Madonna’s “True Blue”). The opening lines are a feint, too, offering timeless, banal romantic sentiments (“don’t forget to turn on the light/don’t laugh babe, it’ll be alright”).

Then things unsettle—a synthesizer splash in the verse’s seventh bar becomes a high, wailing note like an air-raid siren, while Bowie sings about “strange ones in the dome” and video-films. The second verse is entirely bizarre SF, with “Jung the foreman” gazing at the dried-up sea, worrying about fallout and guarding “the Bureau Supply for aging men” (Viagra?), The chorus, which changes key to G, is harmonically complex and time-shifting (so the two-bar “drive-in Sa-tur-day” alone is C/G-B/Am7/C-G/D-F#/D-E, with a move to 6/8 on “tur-day”).

The arrangement is typically intricate: take how the backing vocals often mirror Trevor Bolder’s bass (singing/playing three-note fills at the end of some verse bars, and making parallel downward steps in the long outro) or how Bowie’s vocal riffs off the saxophone, singing the same two-note pattern near the fadeout. The saxophone plays a sweet counter-melody to the vocal in the 4-bar bridges, while Mick Ronson’s guitar mainly serves as color: after his metronomic opening, he only rouses himself at the start of each chorus. It’s one of Bowie’s better vocals on Aladdin Sane, with Bowie first singing the title line softly, mainly keeping on one note, and then opening up in subsequent repeats, hitting a high G on “drive.”

Bowie introduced “Drive-In Saturday” days after he wrote it, playing it in several of his last ’72 American concerts. There are claims he debuted it in Phoenix, on 4 November, though the first surviving concert recording is from Bowie’s 17 November show at Pirate’s World, near Ft. Lauderdale, Fla. (Another recording, from Cleveland on 25 November, is on the 30th anniversary reissue of Aladdin Sane). He sang it alone on acoustic guitar, introducing it as “a song from the year 2033.” There are conflicting stories about whether he offered “Drive-In Saturday” to Mott the Hoople, with some claiming that Bowie soon rescinded the offer, others that Ian Hunter rejected it.

Recorded in New York on 9 December 1972, and issued as Aladdin Sane‘s second single (RCA 2352, c/w “Round and Round’). While it was one of Bowie’s highest-charting UK hits (#3), “Drive-In Saturday” was rejected as a single by RCA’s US division (which weirdly chose to issue “Time” instead). So “Drive-In Saturday” became something of a lost single for Bowie,  not included on any greatest-hits compilation until the ’90s. A shame, as it’s one of the finer songs he wrote in the period.

Top: Elvis Presley takes Mary Kathleen Selph for a ride, Memphis, 30 June 1972. (She was killed in an auto accident 18 days later.)

Cracked Actor

Cracked Actor.
Cracked Actor (live, 1973).
Cracked Actor (live, 1974).
Cracked Actor (live, 1983).
Cracked Actor (Later With Jools Holland, 1999).
Cracked Actor (Live at the Beeb, 2000).

Bowie spent two weeks in Los Angeles in late October 1972. His manager Tony Defries said you had to spend like a star to become one, so the Bowie entourage, roadies and all, stayed at the 5-star Beverly Hills Hotel. Everything was charged to RCA. No one had enough cash to take a cab, so they charged limousines to room service. Afternoons by the pool, nights at Rodney’s English Disco on the Sunset Strip. To complete the LA experience, some of the Spiders took a course at the Scientology Celebrity Center (pianist Mike Garson was a Scientologist; he converted Woody Woodmansey by proselytizing on the tour bus). By the time they left LA, Bowie and company had burned through $100,000.

Sometime during his stay (allegedly after touring Hollywood Boulevard), Bowie wrote a song about an aging, debauched film star. The actor was once Hollywood’s golden boy, or so he claims, and now lives a twilight existence in Hollywood’s mortuary era, reveling in his fall. Life’s been clarified down to a series of coarse transactions, with the actor leveraging his fading fame, and depleting what’s left of his fortune, to poach young boys (and girls). These could be desperate, aspiring actors, or kids he’s hired off the street—it hardly matters so long as they’re on their knees. It’s one of the most brutal lines Bowie ever wrote: “Forget that I’m fifty, ’cause you just got paid.”

“Cracked Actor” is crude and louche, its lyric a collection of barely-double-entendre lines (“stiff on my legend,” “give me your head”). The chorus is hammered through with harsh, plosive sounds (“crack,” “smack,” “suck”—mirrored by Mick Ronson slamming on each beat), while Ronson smears guitar over every corner. The track’s centered on Ronson’s power chording and Bowie’s harmonica, the latter played through a cranked-up guitar amp and pushed high in the mix. While the song basically ends at 1:40, the guitar and harmonica extend the track for four more 12-bar choruses, starting a fifth as the track fades out, suggesting the Hollywood nightmare will keep repeating itself.

Recorded ca. 20-24 January 1973. For the 1974 Diamond Dogs tour, Bowie removed “Cracked Actor” from its back-room origins and staged it entirely within an actor’s fevered mind: he wore a cape and sunglasses and sang to a skull in his hand, a la Hamlet, then French-kissed the skull. He did the same, with even more artifice, during his 1983 tour. A curse on Los Angeles, “Cracked Actor” would rebound on Bowie: it became the title of a 1974 documentary chronicling Bowie living in LA at his lowest state, reduced to a jittery husk of a human being.

Top: Anthony Friedkin, “Vice police interrogating two men, Hollywood, 1972.”