Chant of the Ever Circling Skeletal Family

Chant of the Ever Circling Skeletal Family.
Chant of the Ever Circling Skeletal Family (live, 1974).
Chant of the Ever Circling Skeletal Family (live, 1987).

Brutish and short, “Chant of the Ever Circling Skeletal Family” was the only way Bowie could have ended something like Diamond Dogs. Segueing from “Big Brother,” the track could be Winston Smith’s complete, joyous submission to power, or it could just as well be the return of the Diamond Dogs, dancing around a bonfire on some skyscraper roof in Hunger City.

“Chant,” almost purely a rhythm track, is something of a rhythmic puzzle. Nicholas Pegg wrote that “Chant” is in alternating measures of 6/4 and 5/4, which doesn’t seem right. Rather “Chant” seems to begin with alternating bars of 2/4 and 3/4 and then, in the six “choruses” (1 chorus = 1 set of “brother,” “ooh ooh,” “shake it up” x2, “move it up” x2), it moves completely to 5/4 [edit: no, it doesn’t.]. Further accents–three beats on a tambourine every three measures, a cowbell coming in on the second chorus (hit either two or three times), what sounds like a guiro on the third—seem intended to muddle the sense of time.

[An earlier version of this entry said the track’s end repeat was a lock groove, which isn’t accurate: thus the perils on relying on 25-year-old memories. Still, I’ve retained the info on lock grooves, if that sort of thing interests you.]

The track, and the LP, end in a pseudo-lock groove, the first syllable of Bowie singing “brother” repeated in a stabbing loop of sound. The idea of a repeating lock groove on a record was an avant-garde experiment, its main innovator Pierre Schaeffer, a co-founder of the Groupe de Recherche de Musique Concrète. By the mid-’60s lock grooves had begun to appear on pop/rock LPs like the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper and The Who Sell Out (the latter’s lock groove was an endlessly-repeating advertisement for Track Records). There the lock groove was often intended as a joke, meant to startle stoned people who were unwilling or unable to get up and change the record (Paul McCartney said the Beatles were inspired after many parties where everyone sat listening to the ticking of a record’s end groove for 20 minutes).

Recorded ca. January-February 1974. Performed during the Diamond Dogs tour of summer ’74 as well as the 1987 tour, in both cases as part of “Big Brother.” Essential cover: The Wedding Present, 1992.

Top: Try convincing your parents to let you go to this concert.

Sweet Thing—Candidate—Sweet Thing (Reprise)

Sweet Thing—Candidate—Sweet Thing (Reprise).
Sweet Thing—Candidate—Sweet Thing (Reprise) (live, 1974).

The rotten heart of Diamond Dogs; a triptych where prostitutes are the only lovers left, where street hustlers double as politicians.

***
Tony Newman, who drummed on most of the record, recalled Bowie switching off all the lights in the studio save those directly over his microphone. So Bowie sang “Sweet Thing” in a spotlight, the musicians around him mere shadows.

***
During the summer ’74 Diamond Dogs tour, Bowie sang the “Sweet Thing” suite from a catwalk above the stage. He preened, writhed as though being electrocuted; he looked like Baron Samedi gone Hollywood.

***
It’s Bowie on guitar (and sax), Mike Garson on piano, Herbie Flowers on bass, Tony Newman on drums. Bowie coached his players like actors. For the first 32 bars of “Candidate,” up until Bowie smells “the blood of les Tricoteuses,” he told Newman to play his snare rolls as if he was a French drummer boy watching his first guillotining during the Terror.

***
The suite opens with thirty seconds of a slowly-emerging wash of backwards tapes. It closes, after the “Zion” mellotron line and Garson playing a bar’s worth of “Changes”, with a minute of musical violence.

***
It’s safe in the city/to love in a doorway. “Sweet Thing/Candidate,” an urban debasement, is part of a long English tradition of city nightmares. So Thomas Hardy, describing an 1879 Lord Mayor’s Show: As the crowd grows denser, it loses its character of an aggregate of countless units, and becomes an organic whole, a molluscous black creature having nothing in common with humanity, that takes the shape of the streets along which it has lain itself, and throws out horrid excrescences and limbs into neighboring alleys.

***
In the two verses of “Sweet Thing,” Bowie’s voice rises from the depths (the basso profundo of the opening verse), settling first on a conversational tone (“isn’t it me”) then vaulting to high, long-held notes, starting with “will you see.” There’s the cartoon New Yorkese voice he uses in the first bridge (“if you wannit, boys”) and he nearly laughs when he sings the cut-up-produced nonsense of “turn to the crossroads and hamburgers.” (Or is it “of Hamburg”?) This isn’t the step-by-step graded elation of something like Carol Douglas’ “Doctor’s Orders,” where the song seems to be willing its singer to keep moving higher. It’s more a menagerie of voices that Bowie barely can keep under control.

***
George Gissing, on Farringdon Road, in The Nether World: Pass by in the night, and strain imagination to picture the weltering mass of human weariness, of bestiality, of unmerited dolour, of hopeless hope, of crushed surrender, tumbled together within those forbidding walls.

***
There’s a funereal tone to the suite, fitting for its year of creation. Nick Drake, after recording his “four last songs” in February, died in November. Duke Ellington died in May. Archigram closed. Candy Darling died, age 25. Gene Ammons recorded Goodbye and departed. It was the year of Shostakovitch’s last quartet, Syd Barrett’s last-ever studio session. All that came out of the latter were a few brief guitar pieces. One, known as “If You Go #2,” (3:00 in the preceding link) is a jaunty hint of a song, incidental music for an impossible life.

***
Bowie’s guitar keeps to the margins until “Candidate,” when begins to cut into the vocal, like an increasingly belligerent drunken party guest. Crude and insistent, possessed by an appalling truth. At first confined to the right speaker, the guitar starts bleeding through. Bowie’s vocal starts matching the guitar’s tone, his phrasing mimicking the riffing.

***
Making bullet-proof faces, Charlie Manson, Cassius Clay. 1974 was the wake for the Sixties. Everyone came wearing tatters or suits: they dressed as the person they pretended they once were. Bob Dylan and the Band, touring North America early in ’74, played songs that had earned boos and jeers in ’66, but the songs had become, blessed by time, victory anthems. Dylan sang in a bellow: he might as well have used a bullhorn. He played “All Along the Watchtower” in Boston as if he meant to roust Hendrix from the grave.

***
Bowie tugs and tears at words, particularly in “Sweet Thing”‘s first verse (“see that I’m scared and I’m lonely“), while he tumbles out other phrases in a bushel (“where the knowing one says” is muttered over three beats). In “Candidate,” the hustler starts out all business, with Bowie sounding confident, even wry, but as the verses keep coming, and he’s not closing the sale, he grows more desperate. He sounds as though he’s suppressing screams: his vocal becomes a run of slurs, colliding syllables, forced marriages of words not meant to rhyme (he mates “shop on” with “papier”). The “Sweet Thing” chorus returns, now only four bars long and taken at a hurried, less alluring pace—time’s running out. When it’s good, it’s really good, and when it’s bad I go to pieces. The merchant at the mercy of his customer.

***
Margaret Thatcher, in 1982, was Lent to the past Carnival: We are reaping what was sown in the sixties…fashionable theories and permissive claptrap set the scene for a society in which old values of discipline and restraint were denigrated.

***
Holly Woodlawn to the dying Candy Darling: “It’s okay, hon…you don’t have to talk. I know you’re tired.”

Candy: “Yeah. Putting on lipstick…it really takes it out of me.”

***
Mike Garson’s piano gives the second verse of “Sweet Thing” a few moments of grace and levity. The little winking run of notes after “you’re older than me,” the shards of melodies he plays in the spaces Bowie takes to breathe.

***
Do you think that your face looks the same? There’s pity in Bowie’s voice here.

On the whole there’s only room for two views in this country.

Education Secretary Thatcher’s election-night commentary, 28 February 1974.

***
“Candidate” is utterly essential to the suite, its centerpiece, and it also could be excised completely and you would never know it had existed. Play “Sweet Thing” and the Reprise back-to-back and it’s a near-seamless transition. “Candidate” is an outgrowth of “Sweet Thing”‘s chorus, as it’s built on the same chords (D minor, A minor, G); it’s also the inverse of the earlier song—mainly two long verses (24 bars), two brief 4-bar choruses.

***
James Thomson, in The Doom of a City (1857), came to the City of the Dead: The mighty City in vast silence slept,/dreaming away its tumult toil and strife…Within a buried City’s maze of stone; Whose peopling corpses, while they ever dream/Of birth and death—of complicated life/Whose days and months and years/Are wild with laughter, groans and tears/As with themselves and Doom…

***
My set is amazing, it even smells like a street. Bowie spent some time obsessively but fruitlessly working on test footage for a Diamond Dogs movie as a daytime distraction from his drinking and drugging social circle at the time (Bowie claims that some of the footage features an impatient John Lennon in the background, berating him with the words “What the bloody hell are you doing, Bowie, all this mutant crap?”, as Bowie tinkers with a clay model of Hunger City, the album’s post-apocalyptic setting). John Tatlock, on “Cracked Actor.”

***
Live, “Candidate” was introduced by Earl Slick’s guitar and David Sanborn’s saxophone, two peacock performances. On record, Bowie’s guitar solo that closes out “Sweet Thing” is far cruder yet more compelling: a hustler with grand ambitions.

***
To Thomas Hardy, London was a Wheel and a Beast. (George Whitter Sherman.)

***
The chorus of “Sweet Thing” is sung by a set of typical Bowie grotesques. The somber bass voices overtopped by tenors. The croaking flat voice that seems most prominent when you’re half-listening. A set of gargoyles, arranged as though on the parapet of a cathedral.

***
Later in the night Thomson returned home to his own city. Its awfulness of life oppressed my soul; the very air appeared no longer free/but dense and sultry in the close control/of such a mighty cloud of human breath.

***
“Sweet Thing (Reprise)” offers just one verse: it’s one of the loveliest things Bowie ever recorded, and it pays homage to cocaine, submits to the cruelties of the street. The hustler’s closed the deal at last, and the city takes another victim. It’s got claws, it’s got me, it’s got you. The soaring final notes are reminiscent of “Life on Mars,” whose empathy, grace and beauty “Sweet Thing” suggests were all just vicious lies.

***
We’ll buy some drugs and watch a band/then jump in the river holding hands.

Recorded January-February 1974. The entire suite was performed during the “Diamond Dogs” tour of summer ’74, and never again. A new edit of “Candidate” was made for Patrice Chéreau’s 2001 film Intimacy.

Top and bottom: “Bruce,” “Maggie Sollars, Brixton, 1974”; Middle: Ted Heath faces the public, 28 February 1974.

Candidate 1 (Alternative Candidate)

Candidate 1 (Alternative Candidate).

Having only one line and a title in common with the “Candidate” that eventually appeared on Diamond Dogs, the earlier “Candidate” was a studio demo Bowie recorded on New Year’s Day 1974. It apparently was part of Bowie’s stillborn Nineteen Eighty-Four adaptation, though little of its lyric would suggest that (there’s a reference to “the correction room”—that’s about it). It’s in F-sharp minor (was the entire Orwell musical going to be in a minor key?), and is centered around Mike Garson’s piano runs and smears of Bowie’s guitar.

“Candidate 1,” or “Alternative Candidate,” is somewhat akin to “Zion” in that it’s an inchoate track that serves as a storehouse of obsessions Bowie would tag for future development. So there’s identity and sex games, hallucinogenic TV pornography (see “TVC 15”) and hints of fascism and black magic (see Station to Station). Bowie sings blankly and distantly, and ends the last verse with “Do I have to give your money back when I’m the Führerling?”

Recorded 1 January 1974; not released until the Ryko reissue of Diamond Dogs (& later included on the 30th anniversary reissue).

Top: Vanessa Redgrave, campaigning as a MP candidate for the Workers Revolutionary Party, February 1974.

Diamond Dogs

Diamond Dogs.
Diamond Dogs (live, 1974).
Diamond Dogs (live, 1976).
Diamond Dogs (live, 1996).
Diamond Dogs (live, 2004).

They’d taken over this barren city, this city that was falling apart. They’d been able to break into windows of jewelers and things, so they’d dressed themselves up in furs and diamonds. But they had snaggle-teeth, really filthy, kind of like vicious Oliver Twists. It was a take on, what if those guys had gone malicious, if Fagin’s gang had gone absolutely ape-shit? They were living on the tops of buildings…they were all little Johnny Rottens and Sid Viciouses, really.

David Bowie, on “Diamond Dogs,” 1993.

Where I lived was with my dadda and mum in the flats of municipal flatblock 18A, between Kingsley Avenue and Wilsonway. I got to the big main door with no trouble, though I did pass one malchick sprawling and creeching and moaning in the gutter, all cut about lovely, and saw in the lamplight also streaks of blood here and there like signatures, my brothers, of the night’s fillying.

Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange.

“Diamond Dogs” has never sounded quite right: a sordid, overlong Rolling Stones imitation, someone else’s nightmare inflicted with malice upon you. As darkly comical as it is menacing, it’s a “classic rock” song overrun by grotesques (amputees in priest’s robes, Tod Browning rejects, various ultraviolences).

Audiences didn’t know what to make of it. “Diamond Dogs” was Bowie’s least-successful single since the Hunky Dory days, reaching only #21 in the UK, and going nowhere in the States. On the radio, it never seems to segue well: it burlesques whatever song it follows or precedes. Leading off the second side of Bowie’s hits compilation, ChangesOneBowie, it was a wide moat of a groove, taking up the space of two less disturbing songs (I often skipped it, dropping the needle on “Rebel Rebel” instead). The track sounds used, repurposed, as though Bowie found an old master tape and overdubbed slurs and noises onto it.

The germ of “Diamond Dogs” came from Bowie’s father, Haywood Jones, who had worked at Dr. Barnardo’s Homes, a British children’s charity. Jones had recounted to his son stories of the Homes’ founder, Dr. Barnardo, and his patron, Lord Shaftesbury, who had gone around Victorian London finding bands of homeless children living on the roofs of buildings. Bowie transposed that image into his now-standard future dystopia, turning the Victorian “ragged boys” into”diamond dogs”: a pack of feral kids living on high-rise roofs, going around on roller skates, robbing and mugging, terrorizing the corpse-strewn streets they live above.

A Clockwork Orange was again central (see “Suffragette City”), not only in Bowie’s droogs-like “Dogs” and their Alex-like leader, Halloween Jack, but in the song’s setting—a ruined, post-apocalyptic modernist building. It could be set in a more decayed Thamesmead South estate where Stanley Kubrick shot Clockwork Orange (or Alton West, which Truffaut used for Fahrenheit 451, or La Défense, playing a future city in Godard’s Alphaville, etc.).

Each day the towers of central London seemed slightly more distant, the landscape of an abandoned planet receding slowly from his mind.

JG Ballard, High-Rise.

Watching films from the early ’70s, you can’t avoid the general sense of shabbiness, regardless of where the films were shot. Take one contemporary example, Hal Ashby’s The Last Detail, which is a guided tour of blighted Atlantic Coast America, from Philadelphia slums to New York whorehouses to empty Boston parks. It’s decay worsened by the knowledge that the run-down train stations, corner stores and row houses were once clean, stylish, even modern places. Enduring the Seventies meant living in the ruins of the postwar dream of general prosperity, particularly in the cities, which were more and more depicted in films and in the press as asylums, graveyards and prisons.

But “Diamond Dogs,” set in appalling urban ruins, isn’t a despairing song in the slightest. It’s full of vitality, cheap loud tricks, carnival horns, vulgarities, hammering beats (take the way someone keeps thwacking on a cowbell for the nearly the entire track). It makes do with style, it makes playtime out of collapse. The elevator’s shot, so Halloween Jack swings by a rope, Tarzan-style, to reach the street.

The song seems to predict JG Ballard’s High Rise, published the following year, in which residents of a high-rise apartment complex fall into tribalism and warfare. But the high-rise dwellers come to love their new condition: they stop going to work, devoting all their energies to feral pleasures, devolving into hunter-gatherers. It ends with one survivor watching the lights go out in a neighboring high-rise, which makes him happy. He’s “ready to welcome them to their new world.” Bowie was already there.

In the year of the scavenger: “Diamond Dogs” is made partly out of stolen goods. It opens with applause lifted from the Faces’ live album Coast to Coast (you can hear Rod Stewart yell “hey” just as the guitar riffs kick in), and towards the end there’s a blatant rip of Bobby Keyes’ saxophone line on the Stones’ “Brown Sugar.” Bowie’s main guitar line might well be a rewrite of the Stones’ “It’s Only Rock ‘n Roll (But I Like It),” which was born out of a jam session that Bowie took part in. The track ends with Bowie furiously chording on a Bo Diddley riff.

Like “Rebel Rebel” it’s structurally simple, a standard I-IV-V rock song (it’s in A major, and the verses mainly go from the tonic, A, to the dominant, E, while the choruses are basically repetitions of D-A-B, ending back in A) with, as in “Rebel,” two verses, a bridge (6 bars here, starting with “I’ll keep a friend serene”) and ending with an extended chorus.

Bowie sings with exuberance, sometimes ranging widely (“Tod Browning’s freak you was” falls an octave in a single bar), sometimes digging in place (“crawling down the alley on your/hands and knee” is all one note). His guitar work is primitive and brutal, and mixed to be inescapable—as ace commenter Snoball wrote in the “Rebel Rebel” entry, Diamond Dogs tracks like “Rebel” (and “Dogs”) are filled with Bowie’s sledgehammer riffing, lacking the tension-and-release precision of Mick Ronson’s work.

“Diamond Dogs” swims in ugliness (it’s grotesquely funny, too: take how Bowie, having introduced his first character, a genderless amputee dressed in a priest’s costume, has her/him “crawling down the alley on your hands and knee“) and it makes no concessions. If there was ever an irony in dancing to a Stones song like “Brown Sugar,”  a party song celebrating slavery,”Diamond Dogs” raises the ante—on its face, it’s completely unredeemable, a honky-tonk celebration of death, decay and violence. Over the years, it’s become one of Bowie’s beloved standards.

Recorded (initially as “Diamond Dawgs”) from 15 January to mid-February 1974. Released as a single (RCA APBO 0293, c/w “Holy Holy”) in June. Performed, no surprise, throughout the “Diamond Dogs” and “Philly Dogs” tours of 1974, and also in 1976. Retired for two decades, then played in some of Bowie’s recent tours.

For SEP, as this is her favorite Bowie song.

Recommended reading: Ballard’s High-Rise, 1975; Thomas M. Disch’s 334, 1972; Owen Hatherley’s excellent Militant Modernism.

Future Legend

Future Legend.

It works ’cause we said it worked.

John Lennon, 1980.

The one-minute “Future Legend” is almost the entirety of the Diamond Dogs LP “concept.” Not for Bowie the libretto and motifs of Pete Townshend’s Quadrophenia, or the painstaking dreamscape theater of The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway. As a narrative, Diamond Dogs barely exists. Its story is told only in abstracts: the back cover and inner sleeve of the LP, and the record’s first two songs.

Bowie neither had the time for nor the interest in making his songs a narrative, even a loose one. As he told William Burroughs, he got distracted easily, and while he seemed to like the idea of making odd concept records, he managed to avoid the grim business of actually having to write one. And time was pressing: Bowie was going on tour again in the spring of ’74, needed a new record, and didn’t have the material for an LP on the Diamond Dogs idea alone (hence the scrapped 1984 songs were used to fill a side).

Bowie could argue he had a fine precedent: the king of all concept records, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. As John Lennon later said, Sgt. Pepper’s‘  “story arc” consists of the LP cover, the title song, maybe “With a Little Help From My Friends,” and then the “so-called reprise,” as Lennon described it, late on the second side. The rest of it was a set of random Beatles compositions: if they fit together, it was only because the listener wanted them to.

So “Future Legend” is stage setting for an absent play, with the SF juvenilia of the lyric (“fleas the size of rats sucked on rats the size of cats,” etc.) set against a rolling scrim of ominous music—air raid sirens; dog howls; synthesizer washes; “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered” on electric guitar; what sounds like an impersonation of Scott Walker singing “Any Day Now”; lost children wailing in the streets. The obvious influence is the aural montage opening minutes of Lou Reed’s Berlin. “Future Legend” ends with canned applause and genocide.

Recorded ca. mid-January 1974.

Rebel Rebel

Rebel Rebel (original UK single).
Rebel Rebel (LP mix)
Rebel Rebel (US single, 1974).
Rebel Rebel (live, 1974).
Rebel Rebel (live, 1976).
Rebel Rebel (Musikladen, 1978).
Rebel Rebel (live, 1983).
Rebel Rebel (Live Aid, 1985).
Rebel Rebel (live, 1987).
Rebel Rebel (live, 1990).
Rebel Rebel (TFI Friday, 1999).
Rebel Rebel (Later With Jools Holland, 2002).
Rebel Rebel (VH1 Fashion Awards, 2002).
Rebel Rebel (remake, 2003).
Rebel Rebel (Sessions @AOL, 2003).
Rebel Rebel (live, 2003).
Rebel Rebel (live, 2004).
Rebel Rebel (last live performance, 25 June 2004).

Glam died swiftly, with great theater. By summer 1974, the top British glam acts had been deposed on their home soil by cartoon pop acts (Mud, the Bay City Rollers) and opera buffa rock groups (Sparks, 10cc, Queen). Slade went to the hills to live in exile, Marc Bolan kept pleading with an audience who’d tired of him (“whatever happened to the Teenage Dream?” he asked—it stalled outside the Top 10, and would be among the last tracks he made with Tony Visconti). Mott the Hoople, self-chroniclers to the end, issued as a final single the retrospective “Saturday Gigs,” with Mick Ronson in tow. Roxy Music closed each side of Stranded with resignation letters, ecclesiastical (“Psalm”)* and existential (“Sunset,” which finds Bryan Ferry sitting in his sports car contemplating the void). By the end of the year, even the shameless likes of Gary Glitter were on their way down.

The end was inevitable (“the really great scenes die,” the producer Tom Ayres once noted) and long in coming. Self-parodying from the start, glam died when it lost its wit, descending into farce—see KISS outlasting the New York Dolls—or knees-up shtick. Bowie found he was being crowded out by imitators, with Ziggy Stardust’s mantle waved about by the likes of Jobraith and Steve Harley.

So “Rebel Rebel” is Bowie blessing a movement that he abandoned as it fell. The first wave of punk kids in Britain were former Bowie and Roxy Music fans, and “Rebel Rebel” is Bowie’s goodbye and tribute to them (he often sings it like “rabble, rabble!”). He divides the kingdom, distributes inheritances. The promo video he made for “Rebel Rebel” in Holland taught the future punks style and attitude. Wearing an eye-patch and dressed in thrift-shop motley, Bowie held an unplugged red Hagström Kent with disdain, hardly pretending to play it.

It’s a primer of a rock & roll record: easy to play, easy to remember (each of its verses repeat), its arrangement simple as nails, its top melody cut to fit anyone’s voice. Bowie keeps to a comfortable four-note span for much of it, his phrasing loose and conversational. There’s some David Johansen attitude: “where’dya wanna GO?” A sparring two-chord (D major and E major) verse progression spills over into the refrains, an A major chord finally showing up in the four-bar bridge to referee between them.

Its front-loaded mix, a loop of beats and guitar riffs, was owned by Alan Parker’s lead guitar riff, Herbie Flowers’ bass (playing constant, subtle variations throughout, with walking lines and scalar passing tones—Flowers makes you able to dance) and a Tony Newman crush-on-every-beat manifesto that’s relieved by an occasional modest fill. There are a few lesser players, like Bowie’s strummed acoustic guitar parked in the right channel and Mike Garson’s piano, buried so deep in the mix that it sounds like another cowbell.

The lead riff’s in three parts—a descending fanfare, a centerpiece (two barked-out E chords) and a last hook that starts with a near-two octave jump and ends on a fat D root note to launch another repetition. There were rumors it was Mick Ronson’s work, but its tripartite structure was close to the Bowie-penned “Ziggy Stardust” riff, and Bowie singing the notes in the intro suggests it began, as many of his riffs did, as a scatted melody. He had three-fourths of the riff down when he played it on acoustic guitar to Alan Parker, telling him “I want it to sound like the Stones.” Parker thought it needed “honing,” so he transferred the riff to a Les Paul standard, using a Fender reverb amp with a single Wharfedale speaker, and added a few bends to barb its last piece. Ronson’s absence was noticeable in how the riff got run into the ground. In the four-plus minutes of “Rebel Rebel,” it’s only absent in the two bridges and the “hot tramp” tags.

Bowie’s voice is of someone a bit older—someone edging out of the scene, a bit jaded, and who’s bemused at first by some tacky cross-dressing kid’s antics. “You put them on!”: donning a new set of glam gear while tweaking the noses of her parents. (An original line was “your hair’s on fire,” a call back to Arthur Brown—he also changed “we like dancin’ and we like to ball” to “look divine”.) The kid’s young enough not to know better, Bowie’s old enough to care (he whispers “donch’a?” after bellowing his love). As the song piles into a 20-bar coda, Bowie loses whatever reserve’s bottled in him. His words keep coming, keep piling up. “Rebel Rebel” slams shut as Bowie watches the kid walk off into her youth, his juvenile successor. It was played every half-hour at Rodney’s English Disco in LA, where future Runaways Cherie Currie and Joan Jett were regulars. Their “Cherry Bomb” would be its answer song.

Four-and-a-half minutes on LP, the track’s harmonic stasis and its Möbius strip of a guitar riff made it feel longer. As with “Diamond Dogs,” the song spread out, as if Bowie couldn’t be bothered to rein it in: there was a punishing sense to it.

We have a remedy, as Pete Townshend once said. Upon arriving in New York in April 1974, Bowie reworked “Rebel Rebel” to pop on US radio, with Geoff MacCormack adding congas, guiro and castanets to give the track a “Latin” tinge. Bowie trimmed “Rebel Rebel” by nearly two minutes, gutting a set of verses and the second bridge, pushing up the hooks. He led off the track with the “hot tramp” chorus tag, salted in new phased chorus vocals and lowered the lead riff in the mix to give more prominence to Flowers’ bass, Garson’s piano and his own acoustic guitar. The US edit was the essential “Rebel Rebel,” Bowie’s single of singles; most of his live versions took off from it.

He played “Rebel Rebel” on every tour until 1990. By then he’d tired of it, telling a reporter that the song meant nothing to him anymore, that it was a relic of a lost time. So when he went back to the song, in a revision that he debuted on stage in 2002 and cut in a studio take for the soundtrack of a Charlie’s Angels sequel, he started at a distance, singing the opening verse coldly over a four-note guitar line. It’s a man wondering what youth has gotten up to over the years; it’ s as if his sympathies lie with their mothers now. He’s self-effacing on the “they say I’m wrong” line (maybe he’s been wrong all along), seems wary that the refrain’s coming up. Then the old metal beast of a riff kicks in, and in come the drums, and the ghost of Herbie Flowers’ bassline walks, and every lie he’d once believed in his youth is true again.

Recorded ca. late December 1973, 14-16 January, late January 1974. Released as RCA LPBO 5009 on 15 February 1974 (UK #5), two months before Diamond Dogs came out. The American single (RCA APBO 0287) was cut in New York in mid-April ’74. It only hit #64 in the US, and the mix was never compiled until the 30th anniversary reissue of Diamond Dogs. Performed in every Bowie tour until 1990, revived around century’s end and played until the last full show that he ever did. The new arrangement, debuted on stage in 2002, was recorded in 2003 during the Reality sessions, and wound up on the Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle soundtrack. Later merged with “Never Get Old” to make the 2004 mash-up record “Rebel Never Gets Old.”

Top: Daniel Meadows, “Portsmouth: John Payne, aged 12, with two friends and his pigeon, Chequer, 26 April 1974.

*Watch this video, not only for the great performance, but to see Ferry make a flawless tambourine catch at 6:20.

Rock ‘n’ Roll With Me

Rock ‘n’ Roll With Me.
Rock ‘n’ Roll With Me (live, 1974).

“Rock ‘n’ Roll With Me” is an island of melody and reassurance on an otherwise diseased-sounding record. It seems to be playing the role reserved for cover songs on Bowie’s earlier albums (see “Fill Your Heart,” “It Ain’t Easy,” “Let’s Spend The Night Together”): a spot of familiarity in a strange landscape. “Rock ‘n’ Roll With Me” even sounds like a cover. Bowie chose it to lead off Diamond Dogs‘ second side, thus making whatever LP concept remained even more incomprehensible*; its relative prominence was likely a commercial move, as the song seems like a possible single (& a live version of it would be).

Co-composed by Bowie’s close friend Geoff MacCormack, who wrote some of the verse melody and chord sequences, “Rock ‘n’ Roll With Me” was originally slated for the vaguest of Bowie’s mid-’70s projects, a stage (and/or TV) musical version of Ziggy Stardust. In Bowie’s interview with William S. Burroughs in November ’73, Bowie said he intended to create a “cut-up” musical performance of Ziggy. He would write some 40 scenes, which he would then “shuffle around in a hat the afternoon of the performance and just perform it as the scenes come out. I got this all from you Bill… so it would change every night…”

Like some Ziggy tracks (“Star,” for example), “Rock ‘n’ Roll With Me” refers to rock & roll as something occurring elsewhere—it’s more a stage direction than a description of the actual record. But the song’s also a fairly artless (for Bowie) rumination on the transactions of stardom. A rock star flatters his audience, thanking them for his fame, giving them in recompense a singalong chorus that puts them on stage with him for a moment. Performing the song in Boston in November ’74 (link above), Bowie broke off halfway through and tried to spell out his intentions: “This one is very much for you, this song…are you people? I’m people.” (“It’s about me, and singing,” he said during another performance of “Rock ‘n’ Roll With Me” that year.)

By Bowie’s standards of the time, “Rock ‘n’ Roll With Me” is a fairly basic composition and performance, from its “Lean On Me” inspired piano intro, to Bowie’s familiar vocal strategy (low and rich in the first verse, high and dramatic in the second, and in the chorus repeats), to the chord sequence of the chorus (C/E minor/F/C), which is the same as a host of pop standards, like “Kiss the Boys Goodbye” (it’s also a simplified version of “Over the Rainbow”‘s chorus).

Still, it’s not as warm a song as it first seems—Bowie’s lyric is ultimately ambivalent about his audience, despite his flattery (“they sold us for the likes of you”), and some surviving cut-up-inspired lines like “lizards lay crying in the heat” further confuse things, while Bowie’s brutal lead guitar playing eats away at the melody’s sweetness.

* A far more coherent Side 2 of Diamond Dogs would have been: 1984/Dodo/We Are the Dead/Big Brother/Chant.

Recorded 15 January 1974. The David Live version, recorded in July ’74, was released as a North American single (PB 10105) in September; it was a rush-job meant to compete with Donovan’s cover, though neither single charted.

Top: Elton John breaks in the piano in his new Surrey mansion, June 1974.

Big Brother

Big Brother.
Big Brother (live, 1974).
Big Brother (live, 1987.)

A love song to abasement, a fascist hymn, a cocaine song: “Big Brother” apparently was, in the scheme of Bowie’s Nineteen Eighty-Four adaptation, meant as an end piece to accompany the broken Winston Smith’s submission at last to Big Brother. It may well have been intended as the show’s closing song.

“Big Brother” is built like a flowchart, designed to move the listener from doubt (the verses open in B minor, move slowly up to A at the end of the first two lines, a structure repeated in the chorus, though Bowie sings the latter in a much higher register) to desire (the first bridge, “please savior, savior show us”) to, in the choruses, an ecstatic submission to power. Once you move past a certain point, there’s no way back: take how the verse never reoccurs after Bowie sings the chorus. There’s only the four-bar second bridge (Bowie singing alone on acoustic guitar, “I know you think you’re awful square”…) that serves as a final breath before the song completely gives itself over.

Still, submitting to a higher power—a dictator, a president (the chorus promises that the divine ruler will be “someone to fool us, someone like you”), even a line of coke—can be beautiful, “Big Brother” argues. Its final chorus repeats are glorious, soaring with melody (Bowie’s upward leaps at the start of each bar), with each chorus offering something to further the excitement—a new counter-melody emerging on guitar or a great rolling drum fill by Aynsley Dunbar in the final repeat. It’s a stunning resolution to a game that’s been rigged to lead you there all along, from the one-bar gaps between the bridges and chorus that give an illusion of space and freedom, to how the saxophones are present throughout the song, prodding the listener along like warders.

Are there signs of resistance? The scrappy acoustic guitar playing, barely discernible, under most of the track? Bowie’s octave-doubled lead vocal, with his more resonant voice shadowed by a thinner, lower one, like a bad conscience? Or the realization that the “trumpet” whose fanfare opens the track and which gets the solo, is a fraud, a synthesizer in disguise? And is there a sly sense of humor under it all? Nicholas Pegg makes the excellent call that one of “Big Brother”‘s ancestors is The Bonzo Dog Band’s 1969 parody of Charles Atlas ads, “Mr. Apollo,” a track Dunbar drummed on. (“He’s the strongest man/the world has ever seen…follow Mr. Apollo/everybody knows he’s the greatest man!)

If so, they’re wiped out by the efficiency, beauty and power of Bowie’s song, whose three and a half minutes culminate in its final line, a simply-sung “we want you Big Brother,” which immediately segues into the tribal celebration of “Chant of the Ever Circling Skeletal Family.” Broken and emptied, the once-human being is brought to his feet and made to dance.

Recorded 14-15 January 1974, a regular during the ’74 tour, revived for the Glass Spider tour of 1987.

Top: Augusto Pinochet and friends, Santiago, Chile, ca. September 1973.