I’m a Hog for You Baby

I’m a Hog For You Baby (live, 1996).
Complete Bowie Bridge Benefit Concert.

A month after wrapping up his summer festivals tour of 1996, Bowie took part in Neil Young’s annual benefit concert for the Bridge School. Playing two nights at the Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View, California, Bowie joined the likes of Pete Townshend, Patti Smith, Pearl Jam and fellow Bromleyite Billy Idol.

Playing acoustic guitar and supported only by Reeves Gabrels and Gail Ann Dorsey (both plugged in), Bowie’s set lists were among his most retrospective since the Sound + Vision tour. Opening the first night with a quiet, gorgeous “Aladdin Sane,” in which Dorsey took much of the vocal and Gabrels somehow managed to play Mike Garson’s piano solo on guitar, Bowie then played “Jean Genie” for the first time in six years. Dorsey tapped out Trevor Bolder’s bassline like a code-breaker; Gabrels aimed for the heights of Mick Ronson and missed. Bowie dug into the song. Its old power seemed to surprise him; here it suddenly was, bloody with life again, making him marvel he’d ever written it.

Then some light relief. After reminding Gabrels of how to play the lead riff, Bowie sang a chorus and a bridge of “I’m a Hog For You Baby,” a 1959 Coasters single. In the spring of ’59, the Coasters had hit with their Saturday-morning-serial single “Along Came Jones,” so their producers/songwriters Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller wanted to push them back into a “more funky” direction for the follow-up, Leiber recalled. It was a balancing act that Leiber and Stoller were adept at: rock ‘n’ roll songs broad and jokey enough to make the pop charts but that still had a sharp R&B edge.

So on “I’m a Hog For You Baby,” Leiber and Stoller went as dirty as 1959 would tolerate (they were good at threading the needle: these were the guys who wrote a song about VD that your grandmother could sing). Playing with the idea of a teenage boy as a root hog (not much of a stretch), “Hog for You” is single-minded in its dedication to lust (“this little piggy’s comin’ over your house/he’s gonna nibble on YOUR SWEET LIPS!“), with its poor teenage narrator lying tortured in his bed at night, his frustrations and releases given voice by a grunting saxophone and a single-note guitar solo.

It might’ve been too much on the nail: “Hog For You” was the first Coasters single to not make the Top 10 in two years, and it marked the start of the group’s commercial decline. Still, the following generation of rock ‘n’ rollers treasured it, with covers by Dr. Feelgood, Clifton Chenier the Grateful Dead and, most of all, a 1966 single by the Groupies that sounds as if it was cut by Cro-Magnons. Bowie’s “Hog for You” is a lark and throwaway but he gets into the proper spirit, even tweaking Leiber’s lyric to spell things flat-out, much to the delight of the audience.

The glee of Bowie’s “Hog for You” was in keeping with the rest of the sets: he seemed renewed during these shows. He played his revised “I Can’t Read,” turned “Let’s Dance” into a blues and “China Girl” into a mood piece that called back to the Iggy Pop original; he closed the second show with his favorite slab of rock ‘n’ roll: “White Light/White Heat.”* He would spend much of 1997 on the road (as we’ll see), working out the new Earthling material. But the Bridge Benefit was a hint of the hardened, jubilant retrospective Reality tour six years later.

Performed 19 October 1996 at the Shoreline Amphitheatre, Mountain View, CA. The only performance officially released from Bowie’s sets was “Heroes,” which appeared on The Bridge School Concerts Vol. 1.

* In the second show, Bowie played “You and I and George” in place of “Hog For You.”

Top: “Gijon,” “London, 1996.”

Dead Men Don’t Talk (Studio Improv)

“Dead Men Don’t Talk” (improvisatory sequence).
Complete Bowie interview segments from Inspirations (Apted, 1997).

Before Bowie began his summer 1996 tour, he took part in a documentary directed by Michael Apted. Called Inspirations, the film attempted to plumb the creative process and trace, as its title suggested, the development of an artist’s style and how he/she absorbed influences. Apted interviewed seven artists in various mediums: Bowie and his former collaborators, the dancers/choreographers Louise LeCavalier and Édouard Lock, of La La Human Steps; Nora Naranjo-Morse (a potter and poet); the painter Roy Lichtenstein; Dale Chihuly (a glass sculptor) and the architect Tadao Ando.

Bowie’s interviews found him open and wry. He spoke with intelligence and appreciation about the commercial art world (where he had briefly worked in the mid-Sixties) rather than using it as a joke, as he had in the past, when he’d regarded advertising as a square fate he’d escaped by going into rock music. He had come far enough to appreciate the craft of commercial art, and considered his current music (he’s shown rehearsing “A Small Plot of Land”) as, in its way, following a similar exacting standard.

A main sequence of Bowie’s section of Inspirations is a rehearsal with the Earthling band—Mike Garson, Zachary Alford, Gail Ann Dorsey and Reeves Gabrels, with Mark Plati likely behind the desk–in which Bowie attempts to write a new song in the studio. He begins by taking a front-page article from the New York Times about a disgraced admiral who killed himself, runs a few sentences from the piece through his word-mixing Verbasizer program, and soon comes up with the raw material for a lyric—you can see in the clump of text that the program generates the intriguing phrases “the top kills himself” and “dead men don’t talk.”

The choices that I now make from this form I can then reimbue with an emotive quality, if I want to. Or take it as it writes itself.

Bowie turned “dead men don’t talk” into a chorus hook (directly or perhaps subconsciously referencing Eno’s “Dead Finks Don’t Talk”) and set the lyric to an off-kilter pattern dominated by a Gabrels guitar feedback loop and a jittery Garson piano that echoes the vocal line. What’s interesting is that as late as May 1996, Bowie was still working in the Outside vein—“Dead Men Don’t Talk” is far more in line with the songs that came from the Leon sessions of 1994 than it is with the songs that Bowie and this band would record in just three months’ time.

He apparently didn’t try to revive or finish “Dead Men” for Earthling (it’s unclear from the film how far along its construction went), and the track’s far more interesting as a glimpse of the mechanics of Bowie’s songwriting than it is as a song.

Bowie’s entire segment of Inspirations is worth watching: the segment with Tony Oursler’s “egg” projections, which turn up on “Where Are We Now?,” shows just how ruthless a recycler of ideas Bowie is. The “Dead Men” fragment has often been misidentified as being from the main Earthling sessions in August 1996 or even from the December 1996 rehearsals for Bowie’s 50th birthday concert (audio versions have even turned up on Outside bootlegs, mixed in with Leon fragments). But the copy of the New York Times that Bowie uses here (from “Friday last,” he says in the clip) is the 17 May 1996 edition (“His Medals Questioned, Top Admiral Kills Himself,” by Philip Shenon), which conclusively places this recording during the week of 20-24 May 1996.

Top: Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke, Before Sunrise (Linklater, 1995).