Wishful Beginnings

Wishful Beginnings.

One of the few Outside songs that Bowie never performed live, “Wishful Beginnings” was also dropped from the album on a few occasions: a late Nineties CD reissue and a vinyl edition. Unlike “Too Dizzy,” whose deletion was an act of self-criticism, the 5:09 “Beginnings” seems likely to have been cut for space reasons. Still, as it’s one of Bowie’s creepiest songs, hinting at the ritual murder of a young girl, it’s also possible that he had qualms about it (that said, it’s been restored to the most recent editions of the record).

Its lyric was allegedly the perspective of an “Artist/Minotaur” figure that Bowie made occasional gestures at explaining. It’s Bowie playing with one of his favorite interview subjects of the period: ritual sacrifice and murder as an art project. Tracing a line from Thomas De Quincey’s “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts” and Andre Breton’s Second Surrealist Manifesto (“The simplest Surrealist act consists of dashing down the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd. Anyone who, at least once in his life, has not dreamed of thus putting an end to the petty system of debasement and cretinization in effect has a well-defined place in that crowd, with his belly at barrel level“) to the scarring and blood-drips of Ron Athey, Marc Quinn (whose Self was a cast of his head filled with eight pints of his blood) and Kiki Smith‘s anatomical art, Bowie said all of it was of a piece, a tradition of modern paganism whose impetus goes “back to the Romans and their drinking the blood and eating the meat of the bull to enable us to go forward into the new era…a kind of appeasement to the gods to allow us to go into the next millennium.”

So the Minotaur figure, which Bowie had depicted in a few paintings for a 1994 theme exhibit in London (“Minotaur Myths and Legends”), was part of this movement, representing a piece of the artist that needed blood and appeasement before it had the strength to create again. A few lines hint that Bowie’s performing the blood ritual on himself (“I’m no longer your golden boy…flames burn my body“), and one reading of “Beginnings” is that it’s Bowie’s fear he was endangering his hard-won, carefully-constructed family man persona by indulging in base, violent fantasies for the sake of making better records.

As a track, “Beginnings” was one of Bowie’s most radical soundscapes, a sprechstimme vocal over a set of loops: a constant 4/4 drum, a two-note “chime,” and a thudding kick drum sample hitting on every other downbeat, bringing with it a satanic cackle and a rattling tambourine loop. At first, the only harmonic material is a synthesizer chord in sync with the kick drum sample, and Bowie’s voice hangs suspended for bars without any sense of grounding: it furthers the feeling that the singer has gone untethered, venturing into madness and estrangement from humanity. (It’s mainly a single-tracked vocal, with occasional echoes mixed right.)

As “Beginnings” goes on, the patterns loosen—the synthesizer plays an occasional melodic fragment, and begins sounding ahead of the downbeat, while the tambourine loop slightly lengthens and shortens. By the midpoint of the track, where Bowie is at his gentlest (“we FLEW on the wings…we will NEVER go DOWN”) and a keyboard offers a trio of tiny melodies, “Beginnings” feels like it could blossom into something human. Instead, the song freezes again. The kick drum sample and synthesizer chords vanish, leaving only a doleful Bowie and his percussion loops. The project has failed. We had such wishful beginnings, but we lived unbearable lives…I’m sorry little girl. And out comes the knife.

Scott Walker is an obvious presence here: “Beginnings” is one of the Outside tracks where Bowie was seemingly attempting to do a pre-cover of Walker’s Tilt, released during the last round of mixing. There are traces of Bowie’s past as well, like Lou Reed’s “Make Up” (cf. Reed’s “you’re a slick little girl” with Bowie’s “you’re a sorry little girl“). Where Reed had warmly detailed the stylish, precise makeup ritual of a transvestite, Bowie dehumanizes the ritual, making the girl simply a body, stripped of humanity, a piece of meat being prepared for the blade. And its key ancestor was Bowie’s own “Please Mr. Gravedigger,” with which “Beginnings” shares a structure (a spoken-sung melody that’s barely connected to any harmonic base) and a lurid, exploitative flavor.

Recorded ca. March-November 1994, Mountain Studios, Montreux, with possible overdubs at Brondesbury Villas Studios, London, and the Hit Factory, NYC, January-February 1995. Deleted from 1. Outside Version 2 (replaced by the Pet Shop Boys’ remix of “Hallo Spaceboy”), but restored to the 2003 and 2004 reissues (Europe and US, respectively).

Top: Andreas Freund, “New York,” 1995.

The Hearts Filthy Lesson

The Hearts Filthy Lesson.
The Hearts Filthy Lesson (video).
The Hearts Filthy Lesson (Trent Reznor “alt” remix).
The Hearts Filthy Lesson (Rubber Mix).
The Hearts Filthy Lesson (Simple Test Mix).
The Hearts Filthy Lesson (first live performance, 1995).
The Hearts Filthy Lesson (Late Show with David Letterman, 1995).
The Hearts Filthy Lesson (live, Loreley Festival, 1996).
The Hearts Filthy Lesson (live, 50th Birthday concert, 1997).
The Hearts Filthy Lesson (live, 1997).

Born during the Leon sessions in March 1994, “The Hearts (sic) Filthy Lesson” was systematically dirtied for more than a year before it emerged as Outside‘s debut single. It sold meagerly (UK #35, US #92) and some critics (including this one) have argued that Bowie would’ve had a better shot had he led off with “Strangers When We Meet” or “I Have Not Been to Oxford Town.”

But it’s obvious why Bowie chose “Hearts” as his opening salvo. The track packed a punch; it was cold and weird, his boldest shot at re-invention since Tin Machine. It signaled a new Bowie persona, or at least the return of an old one: obscurantist, distant, menacing, clinically obsessed with blood and guts. It was The Man Who Sold the World, minus the folkie trappings; a Wan White Duke.

Bowie worked up some visual counterparts to the track, most notoriously its Samuel Bayer-directed video that implied some grotesque sacrificial ritual underway (minotaurs, decapitations, Pinhead piercings, baptisms, a goth-punk Last Supper).* More interesting was Bowie’s performance of “Hearts” on the Late Show With David Letterman, the day before Outside was released in September 1995. For those who had grown accustomed to the icily charming Bowie of the Eighties and Black Tie White Noise, this new incarnation, clad in black leather and wearing eyeliner, black nail polish and what looked like tinted contact lenses, gave off a hostile, jittery vibe. With an air of bemused contempt, getting lost in his mad pantomime, Bowie contorted himself, moving in exaggerated, jerky gestures; he acted as if the audience didn’t exist, that he was playing to a mirror, then he would suddenly acknowledge the crowd with leers and half-smiles. His band clashed behind him. Mike Garson played a solo like a Teppanyaki chef, while Gail Ann Dorsey (this was the first time most Bowie fans got to see her) was cool charisma.

“Hearts,” whose production had a flavor of Nine Inch Nails’ The Downward Spiral,* a favorite of Bowie and Reeves Gabrels’, was allegedly from the perspective of Nathan Adler. But its lyric was more a series of warnings that could be assembled in any order (something in our blood…falls upon deaf ears…her hundred miles to hell….I’m already in my grave). Two of the characters mentioned in the lyric, Adler and Ramona, hail from the character segues, while two others, Paddy and Miranda, are just names. The latter have as much dramatic import in the song, if not more. (“Paddy” could be a Beckett-esque nickname for God, a fellow Art Crime detective, or another version of the Minotaur/Artist character that Bowie was developing in other songs).

What was the heart’s filthy lesson? Bowie once said it was knowing the certainty of one’s impending death (the lesson is that the heart will stop one day). But the heart’s also filthy because it’s a blood-sponge. The center of our bodies is a grisly instrument, a ceaselessly throbbing muscle that we pretty up into a shiny red icon used to symbolize our soul, our ability to love, the best of our natures. So there’s a trace of Bowie’s Gnostic leanings in his song’s title phrase—the body’s a prison and we grant nobility to our jailer, making a happy god of our dirty waterworks.

The song itself…is made up of juxtapositions and fragments of information. [It] doesn’t have a straightforward coherent message to it. None of the album has any message; it’s really a compression of information, it’s just information: make of it what you will….The filthy lesson in question is the fact that life is finite. That realization, when it comes, usually later in life, can either be a really daunting prospect or it makes things a lot clearer.

Bowie, on “Hearts Filthy Lesson,” promotional film for Outside, 1995.

“Hearts” began as a group improvisation in the Leon sessions (Garson started things off by playing a hook on piano, while Eno’s contribution was to loop a French radio broadcast and blast it every four bars) and it shows in the song’s structure, as “Hearts” can seem like a welded-together collection of pieces. There’s a “verse” where Bowie sings a D-flat minor melody over a G-flat bass pedal point, a “bridge” that reconciles with the bass pedal by moving to G-flat Lydian (“Oh Ramona”), then to G-flat minor (“something in our skies”), and an F-flat Lydian “chorus,” while the song, after a few more permutations, ultimately closes back in G-flat.

Interweaving the various sections are a set of motifs—a Bo Diddley bass hook, a jabbing Garson piano fill that calls back to Iggy and the Stooges’ “Raw Power,” a guitar riff (Kevin Armstrong, or Reeves Gabrels on his Parker Fly, plays trills down the low E string, punctuating the motion with a quick run of descending notes on the D string.) For stitching between sections there’s an eight-bar antic Garson piano solo, some helpings of the guitar riff and a sudden sigh that triggers the song’s dramatic peak, a G major second bridge (“Paddy will you carry me”).

The devil’s in the details, which were likely Eno’s biggest contributions to the track: the consonant, sibilant backing vocals from the Edwards family**; the dog-whistle-pitched noise (a tuning fork?) that sounds on every other downbeat in the chorus; the mutterings underneath Bowie’s vocals; roiling waves of static; shaken chains; the plaints of a guitar so distorted that it sounds like synthesized strings (around 3:15).

Bowie’s singing is phenomenal and precise throughout the track, from the snarling ease of his opening verse, to the bridge sequence of “OHH Ra-MONa…if there was ON-ly” that Bowie disrupts with “be-TWEEN us,” keeping the stress rhythm but gleefully spoiling his internal rhyme scheme. Or the doomed-sounding “I’m already five years older…already in my grave,” where Bowie seems to intone a mournful organ line against Garson’s agitated piano. Gary Numan called it one of Bowie’s best vocals, saying to David Buckley, “Bowie oversings a lot of the time. He sings harder than he needs to…[“Hearts”] was right back into that not-so-full-on singing.”

That said, Gabrels may have salvaged the song. Bowie had second-guessed himself at some point during the overdubs, writing a completely different lyric based on English landscape painters. “David, that’s nice and all, but it’s kind of destroyed the essence of the song, don’t you think?” Gabrels recalled saying (as per Paul Trynka’s biography). An irritated Bowie told Gabrels to get lost, but he eventually relented and restored the original lyric.

Bowie’s change of costume on “Hearts” and Outside could come off as juvenile and desperate. Studied alienation, pretentious narration, gasped and muttered vocals, a video hinting at Se7en-esque ritualized torture: to some critics, it seemed like a man chasing a train while trying to catch his breath. But a YouTube comment on the “Hearts” video struck me. It was written by someone who was 15 when “Hearts” came out, who said that “Hearts” was the first Bowie song he ever heard, and it freaked him out.

It’s remarkable that a 48-year-old rock musician, who’d been making records since A Hard Day’s Night came out, could still manage to unnerve teenagers, making himself shabby and weird again. What’s more, there was a hard commitment to the present in Bowie’s latest revision, which he would make clear in his album’s title song: It’s happening Now. Not. Tomorrow. It happens Today.  On Letterman, a slight unease hung in the air after the Bowie performance, when Letterman was gassing on to Paul Shaffer and Doc Severinsen—it’s likely someone during the commercial break cracked, “what the hell was that all about?” But Bowie wasn’t singing for them; he just made them seem irredeemably old and square. Tell the others, as he’d murmured as the song careered to a close, tell the others.

The Outside era, kicked off by “Hearts,” was a last throw of the dice for Bowie, where he tried to become a bothersome cult figure again. Sure, it was calculated: so was Young Americans, and Low, for that matter. And it worked, for some. There’s a little-acknowledged generational gap in Bowie fandom, between those who grew up with him in the “classic” Seventies and early Eighties, and those who first knew him with Outside. For the latter, this cadaverous aging creep, muttering about Ramona and blood and filthy things, was their Ziggy Stardust.

By decade’s end, after two albums and tours, Bowie would fall back, exhausted, into the sway of the past. But in the mid-Nineties, he willed himself to be shameless and there was something marvelously crackpot about it. He wouldn’t get hit singles anymore, but he also was a presence again; an irritant, an embarrassment. He became vaguely disreputable. As Greil Marcus once wrote of Randy Newman: he was back at the margin, scheming. It suited him.

Recorded ca. March 1994, Mountain Studios, Montreux, with overdubs at Mountain throughout late 1994, and the Hit Factory, NYC, ca. January-February 1995 (where Armstrong recorded his guitar overdubs). Released on 11 September 1995 (RCA/BMG 74321 30703 2), in a mind-numbing array of versions and mixes (see the Illustrated DB entry for details); the most interesting of the latter was the Reznor-affiliated “Alt Mix.” The US digipak single (Virgin 7432 8 38518 2 9), which did hit #20 on the Modern Rock charts, had “Nothing to Be Desired” as a bonus track, where the UK/Europe/Australia singles had “I Am With Name.” Of course, “Hearts” was used to ominously score the end credits of David Fincher’s Se7en.

Performed regularly from 1995 to 1997. A recording from the Phoenix Festival, 18 July 1996, was included on liveandwell.com, a CD issued exclusively for BowieNet members in 2000, as well as the French-only Limited Edition Track 3 Sampler, while a version from Bowie’s 50th birthday concert at Madison Square Garden was included on a CD that GQ magazine distributed in its November 1997 issue: Earthling in the City. The closing show of the “Earthling” tour, Buenos Aires on 7 November 1997, was the last time that Bowie ever played the song live.

* Mark Romanek’s video for “Closer,” with its bondage gear, Francis Bacon-inspired slabs of beef, crucified monkeys, decapitated pig’s head, nude human mannequins and general filthiness, was an obvious inspiration for Bayer and Bowie’s video for “Hearts.” (It was a tribute to a tribute, as the heart of “Closer” is a bass drum sample from Bowie and Iggy Pop’s “Nightclubbing.”)

** Bryony, Josey, Ruby and Lola Edwards, who also sang on “I Am With Name.” (I’m assuming they’re related, unless it was a Ramones-type of thing.) To my knowledge, Outside is the only record on which they’ve been credited.

Top: pride goeth before a fall, Se7en (Fincher, 1995); filthy lessons.

A Small Plot of Land

A Small Plot of Land.
A Small Plot of Land (alternate version, Basquiat soundtrack).
A Small Plot of Land (Bowie and Mike Garson, live, 1995).
A Small Plot of Land (live, 1995).
A Small Plot of Land (live, 1996).

After having spent so long in the hypothetical never-was (scrapped tapes, character segues, indecipherable prose), it’s a comfort, if a cold one, to finally reach the Outside songs. These were in two blocks: pieces that came out of the Montreux sessions in March 1994, mostly improvised by Bowie and Eno with Reeves Gabrels, Mike Garson, Erdal Kizilcay and Sterling Campbell, and the block recorded in early 1995 at the Hit Factory in New York. The latter featured Gabrels, Garson, old Bowie hands Carlos Alomar and Kevin Armstrong and a new rhythm section of Yossi Fine and Joey Baron.*

The latter songs were generally a catchier and punchier set: the Hit Factory is where “Strangers When We Meet,” “Outside,” “We Prick You,” “No Control” and “I Have Not Been to Oxford Town” came together. The songs that began in Switzerland (with some exceptions) tended towards the grim, theatrical and rambling. Many of them shared a common port of origin: Bowie’s old obsession Scott Walker (more in “The Motel”).

“A Small Plot of Land”** is certainly Walker-haunted, with its references to “Nite Flights” (“swings through the tunnels”) and Bowie’s condor-swoops on the reoccurring “POOR dunces” suggest Walker’s strangled tenor. (A live version from Utrecht in 1996 sounds like Bowie is trying to win a Walker impersonation contest). But “Small Plot,” a song built on running collisions among its players, is also an example of the sound that Bowie and Eno had wanted from the Leon sessions. The track opens with Garson on piano, doing his typically frenetic wire-dancing, but he’s soon fighting to be heard against Campbell, who keeps constant fours with his bass drum while seemingly trying to throw Garson off with a rocketing snare pattern. For over a minute nothing advances, no verse appears; the song remains trapped in its intro. Campbell’s insurrections harden into a pattern—he’s stuck in a loop while Garson still has a measure of freedom allotted to him. Gabrels keeps upstage, playing a nagging pair of notes, mixed right, that are the twine holding everything together. Erdal Kizilcay’s bass seems to abandon the song after a few bars, as if he walked into a room and didn’t care for the atmosphere.

Bowie said about seventy percent of his lyric was pure computer-generated cut-up, hence lines like “he pushed at the pigmen.” Using a moderated sprechstimme, he worked his set of random words into a group of mourners. From the first note, he established a funereal march pace: a two-note opening phrase (“poor soul,” “prayer can’t,” “poor dunce,” “brains talk”), where Bowie holds the first note while letting the second, lower in pitch, quickly expire; and two or three “spoken” closing phrases, with just a few notes emphasized or raised in pitch (“he never knew what HIT HIM,” “and it HIT HIM so”). This pattern builds to the two final “POOR dunces,” with the last repeat ballooning the structure: a three-bar endurance of “POOOOOOR,” followed by a muttered “dunce.”

On to Gabrels’ solo, which he said took Adrian Belew’s solo on “Red Sails” and Robert Fripp’s on “Teenage Wildlife” as launching points. Aided by Garson pounding the bass octaves of his piano, Gabrels bloodies and dominates the track so much that when Bowie returns to sing another round of “poor souls,” he’s been reduced to a supporting role.

“Small Plot” had an alternate life. Eno arranged another version of the track for the Basquiat soundtrack, where Bowie sang, echoed by a delayed second vocal track, over “long, drifting overlays” of synthesizers, some intended to sound like motors and machines humming. Here Bowie’s dramatic build to the final “POOR SOUL” was scrapped in favor of a humbly-sung, double-tracked set of closing phrases; it’s the churchyard in place of the cathedral. Julian Schnabel, Basquiat‘s director, told Eno he thought it was a better version than the Outside track, and he used it in the film to score the death of Bowie’s Andy Warhol.

“Small Plot” was meant to be long, punishing and hard, and Bowie sequenced it to be unavoidable. On the album, slotted after the one-two punch of the title track and “Hearts Filthy Lesson,” it stilled the momentum. On stage in 1995 and 1996, Bowie plopped “Small Plot” dead in the middle of his sets, often prefacing it with a shabby man’s monologue on the poor dunce (“he wasted all his life, he was dumb, he deserved to die and now he’s dead!”) During early performances, he followed a routine where he first sang with his back to the audience, then paced in a tight circle, and during Gabrels’ solo, he walked across the stage pulling on cords, tugging down long, rectangular banners. Some thought it was a mime sequence symbolizing Bowie’s separation and alienation from the audience. Gabrels, in 2000, said it was just something for Bowie to do with himself during the solo, and it helped set the stage for the following number. “[It was] functional theatricality,” he said.

That said, the finest live performance Bowie ever gave of “Small Plot” was more in the Basquiat version’s line. At a private charity performance in New York in September 1995, Bowie sang it accompanied only by Garson, and he loosened the severity of his phrasing, allowing the song to mourn more openly. The climactic “POOR dunce,” sung gorgeously, led into a tolling Garson piano solo that seemed at times to be churning up Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.” (“The last time we worked together before this year was in 1973, and as you can tell, we still haven’t found our way to finding a melody in those years,” Bowie cracked afterward.)

Recorded ca. May 1994, Mountain Studios, Montreux, with possible overdubs at the Hit Factory, NYC, ca. late January-March 1995. The Basquiat version may hail from the overdub sessions Eno and Bowie did at London’s Brondesbury Villas Studio in early January (there’s a reference to this version in Eno’s diary of the period). The version of “Small Plot” that Bowie sang accompanied only by Garson was for, in Nick Pegg’s words, “a private charity function at a New York hotel,” held on 18 September 1995. They also performed “My Death” there.

* One way to tell to which block a song belongs is its publishing: if it’s credited to Bowie/Eno/Gabrels/Kizilcay/Garson/Campbell, it’s definitely from the early Leon sessions. That said, most of the earlier songs were possibly reworked and recut and definitely overdubbed during the Hit Factory sessions.

** Bowie found the song’s title in the French philosophers Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus (recall that Duncan Jones was getting a philosophy doctorate at the time, although Deleuze and Guattari were catnip for Bowie, who likely got a kick from lines like: a rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo.) The paragraph Bowie took his title from could have been a manifesto for Outside: This is how it should be done: Lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with the opportunities it offers, find an advantageous place on it, find potential movements of deterritorialization, possible lines of flight, experience them, produce flow conjunctions here and there, try out continuums of intensities segment by segment, have a small plot of land at all times.

Top: Ted Barron, “Untitled,” 1994. (As I’ve written before, Ted is a friend and a fine photographer).

Segues: Nathan Adler

Segue: Nathan Adler (1).
Segue: Nathan Adler (2).

What does Nathan Adler want?

I think Nathan Adler would require the world to come back to…certain parameters that he understands. He looks back rather nostalgically to a time when there was a seeming order in things. He’s really rather despondent that things are broken into this fragmented chaotic kind of state. Which of course it always has been. But in his own Apollonian way he sort of created the parameters for his society and how he should be. That’s him. And he’s got to solve this crime…

Bowie, interview by Moon Zappa, Interview, 1995.

Edmund Wilson, in 1944, wondered about detective stories: why were they so popular? why were so many of his friends and “respected” literary figures obsessed with them? So being Wilson, he read a stack of books and pronounced a verdict. He read Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe (“a dim and distant copy of the original [Sherlock Holmes]“), Agatha Christie (“[her] writing is of a mawkishness and banality which seems to me literally impossible to read. You cannot read such a book, you run through it to see the problem worked out“), and Dashiell Hammett’s Maltese Falcon (“a cold underworld brutality…[but] not much above those newspaper picture-strips in which you follow from day to day the ups and downs of a strong-jawed hero and a hardboiled but beautiful adventuress.”)

Wilson sniffed that detective stories were popular because they suited their shabby times, the interwar and war years, when the world “was ridden by an all-pervasive feeling of guilt and by a fear of impending disaster which it seemed hopeless to avert because it never seemed conclusively possible to pin down the responsibility.” In a mystery novel, by contrast, “the murderer is spotted and, relief!, he is not, after all, a person like you and me…[and] the supercilious and omniscient detective…knows exactly where to fit the guilt.”

Bowie’s Nathan Adler comes fifty years later, during another time of vaguely-perceived impending disaster. Speaking in an Englishman’s memory of a hard-boiled gumshoe’s voice, clad in the private eye’s uniform of trench coat, necktie and cigarette pack, Adler is the alleged protagonist and narrator of Outside. In his three segues (two official and one that’s part of “I Am With Name”), you might expect to learn something: background, clues, details on suspects, even a resolution.

You don’t get that. What you get is a stream of unaligned information: names, jargon, settings, incomprehensible actions. As Phil Sandifer wrote about the hip “paranoid” TV shows of the Nineties, especially The X-Files, which devoted years to sifting through layers of conspiracies within conspiracies, “the conspiracy does not provide an answer so much as it provides an interminable narrative stretching towards an answer that never arrives.” So Adler is a private eye who’s a red herring; his presence is a confusion. He’s a lost soldier of order who’s an unwitting element of chaos, and he’s as clueless as you are, if not more so (he may not have heard Baby Grace’s tape, nor is he privy to Ramona and Touchshriek’s thoughts).

This was a revision of Adler’s role. On Leon, Adler is far more present, speaking in each of the three suites. He’s still cryptic but his reoccurring presence acts as an adhesive that binds the bizarre suites together. On Outside, Bowie reduced Adler to cameo appearances. He was playing with the established role of the private eye: the loner who manages to break into a closed circle. Marlowe in The Big Sleep, Jake Gittes in Chinatown, Rick Deckard in Blade Runner. The private eye is a walking means to advance a story: he doesn’t know anything, so he asks questions; he pokes around and stumbles upon bodies and secrets; he eventually shades in the plot.

Adler* talks like his predecessors but no one talks to him, no one tells him anything. He’s not even trying to solve a killing but only to determine whether the murder qualified as art (he also works for an overseas employer: he’s a telecommuter). The screen detective he most resembles is Lemmy Caution in Godard’s Alphaville: an unflappable fragment of some lost narrative, blankly wandering through a world he can’t understand, still serving as a grounding point for viewers (and listeners, in this case). (Of course, a direct ancestor of Adler was Bowie’s cameo role as the lost FBI agent “Philip Jefferies” in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me.)

The two Adler segues hail from different stages of the recording of Outside. The first is an edit of two segues from the “I Am With Name” suite and given a new backing track dominated by a jittery Reeves Gabrels guitar line (it’s possible it’s Carlos Alomar). The second, which is barely half a minute long, was recorded during a round of overdubs with Eno in early 1995 (it’s credited only to Bowie and Eno, unlike the other segues), and has Bowie muttering and moaning over a middleweight drum ‘n’ bass loop, an early sign of where Bowie would go next.

However, Adler also left a diary behind…

Recorded ca. May-November 1994, Mountain Studios, Montreux, and Westside Studios, London, with overdubs (and in the second segue’s case, the complete recording) at Brondesbury Villas Studio, London, January 1995.

* There’s plenty of speculation where Bowie took the name from. Candidates include the psychologist Alfred Adler, the 19th Century British rabbi Nathan Marcus Adler, the 18th Century Kabbalist Nathan Hakohen Adler (all dignified agents of order), and, Maj’s astute suggestion, Irene Adler. The name could also just be a joke about being “addled.”

Top: Gumshoe Jones.

Segue: Algeria Touchshriek

Segue: Algeria Touchshriek.

Do I detect a character from ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ lurking on your new album?
Bowie: Not intentionally….
The guy who rents the room–
Bowie: Aha! Catshriek! Yes, the guy who owns the store in ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four.’
There’s a little bit of him, I thought.
Bowie: It is very much. A very English character, he’s almost the stereotypical shop owner.

Interview with Seconds, 1995.

Bowie meant “Charrington,” but he was so tickled that the interviewer had unearthed a piece of his subconscious that he blended Orwell’s character with his own. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Charrington is the junk shop owner who rents a room to Winston Smith for his liaisons with Julia. “The old man seemed seldom or never to go out of doors, and on the other hand to have almost no customers. He led a ghostlike existence. Wandering about among his worthless stock, with his long nose and thick spectacles and his bowed shoulders in the velvet jacket, he had always vaguely the air of being a collector rather than a tradesman. He had dragged out from the corners of his memory some fragments of forgotten rhymes.”

Charrington turns out to be a Party member who helps bait the trap that lands Winston in Room 101. (Some scholars have argued that Charrington is a veiled T.S. Eliot, who Orwell had defended from attacks by leftist critics and who later “betrayed” Orwell by declining to publish Animal Farm.) The loyalties of Bowie’s character on Outside are more vague. Touchshriek is a 78-year-old shopkeeper who, according to Nathan Adler, “deals in art drugs and DNA prints [and] fences for all apparitions of any medium.” His personality is described as “harmless, lonely.”

Lonely, yes. Is he harmless? Touchshriek has one of the more opaque roles in the Outside “narrative.” He seems to have seen something (Grace’s murder, Leon or Ramona’s arrangement of the body), as in a deleted Leon segue, he mentions having been walking near the Museum of Modern Parts, where Grace’s body was displayed. He’s considering renting a room above his shop to a fugitive (perhaps Grace was once kept there), and it’s possible Touchshriek was involved with the killing in some manner. In another deleted Leon segue, he mentions that he “knew Leon once.”

But Touchshriek’s far more interesting than his cloudy role in Bowie’s admittedly plotless mystery. His Outside segue, an edited/re-recorded version of a segue on the “Enemy Is Fragile” Leon suite, is a clever, touching, sharply compressed piece of writing. Bowie opens with some Edward Lear- and James Joyce-inspired wordplay and, showing a fine touch for detail, he builds up Touchshriek’s enclosed world in a handful of lines.

The backing track suits the flow of the segue, with Reeves Gabrels guitar and Mike Garson piano lines cycling beneath Touchshriek’s monologue, as if they’re interrogating him. (In the original segue, Bowie spoke over a gradual crescendo of Garson piano glissandi and Gabrels arpeggios). Some Eno “jungle” sounds accompany Touchshriek’s last words, and he walks off stage to a quiet flow of synthesizer chords.

If the various Outside characters are refracted pieces of Bowie’s personality, Touchshriek is the withered end of one unlived life, a David Jones who had stayed in Beckenham, had kept up marginal ties to the local art scene (imagine him still running an Arts Lab at the Three Tuns in 1995) and who had grown old and alone there. In this vein, Touchshriek also ties back to Bowie’s Sixties character studies, his songs of shabby bachelors, elderly shoplifters and Gurney Slade-esque suburban dreamers: he’s the heir to Uncle Arthur, the Little Bombardier, and the lonely scholar in “Conversation Piece.”

Recorded ca. May-November 1994, Mountain Studios, Montreux, and Westside Studios, London, with overdubs at Brondesbury Villas Studio, London, January 1995.

Top: Bowie, older than he is today.

Neuköln

Neuköln.
Neuköln (Philip Glass, “Heroes” Symphony, 1997).

I found I didn’t have a very good relationship with the sax and that lasted right the way through. We’re sort of pretty embittered with each other. It lies there waiting for me to touch it. It defies me to (laughs). I really have to go through traumas to get anything out of it that has anything to do with what I want it to say. So it’s not a steady relationship; it’s not a good one.

David Bowie, 1983 (“Bowie’s Saxophone Struggle,” Steve Weitzman, Musician).

David Bowie began as a saxophone player: it was his only role in his first band, The Konrads, and he plays sax on his debut single, “Liza Jane.” Bowie as saxophonist is a minor theme of his professional life, but it’s a consistent one—Bowie plays the brief, melancholy solo in the coda of “Changes” as well as some of the sax on Let’s Dance. Yet Bowie also knew his limitations on the instrument, which he had never mastered and which he would abandon for years (especially in the late ’60s). He sometimes brought in a pro when a song called for prominent saxophone, like David Sanborn (“Young Americans”) and Ken Fordham (much of Aladdin Sane).

“Neuköln” features one of Bowie’s most ambitious saxophone performances, and the determination of Bowie’s playing here comes as a surprise (Bowie later called it his favorite sax performance on record). After Bowie’s two warm-up runs on sax, it seems as though the pattern of the track is settled, with Bowie’s sax serving as an occasional counterpoint to Eno’s synthesizer patterns (which at the start suggest his “Big Ship” and his work with Cluster), some of which are echoed by a three-note guitar line.

Then (@ 2:45) Bowie begins an extended solo that continues for the remainder of the track. While at first submerged in the mix, the sax builds up steam until (around 3:50) Bowie erupts into a series of shrieking runs inspired by Ornette Coleman or late John Coltrane. Bowie’s sax closes out the track alone, with two wailing falling lines that call back to the faintly mournful synthesizer heard at the start of the track.

During the Ziggy Stardust era, Bowie’s sax playing had been bent on imitating the sound of early rock & roll players (Bowie aiming for the massed-horn sound of Little Richard’s band on tracks like “Watch that Man”) or of R&B/jump bluesmen, with the fat-toned Earl Bostic a primary influence. On “Neuköln,” though, Bowie wanted to go avant-garde, but the limits of his technique and of his allotted time compromise the power of his playing—it’s startling but has no real depth. As with its sisters “Sense of Doubt” and “Moss Garden,” “Neuköln” is built around oppositions: here Bowie’s squawking against a static wash of synthesizers. And as with the other instrumental tracks, there’s also a feeling of dilettantism to it.

Bowie titled “Neuköln” after the southeastern Berlin neighborhood mainly populated  by Turkish gastarbeiters (Bowie dropping an “l” from the name*). This created a persistent myth that Bowie had lived in the neighborhood—he lived in Schöneberg, though to be fair, it’s not that far from Neukölln. And Bowie later claimed he had used a “Turkish modal scale” for his performance,** which makes its sequencing into “Secret Life of Arabia” both fitting and slightly ridiculous.

So several critics have found “Neuköln” to depict the isolation of Turkish immigrants in a harsh city that used them solely for labor, or a musing on Islam in the West (Bowie’s sax does appear to imitate a muezzin call at times), or the fate of a faceless, nameless individual living in the cradle of the Cold War. All of these theories could well be true, and the image of a stateless traveler would be central to Bowie’s next record. But the speculations are also a testament to the brute power of naming. Had Bowie instead called the track “Tiergarten,” would it now be considered a rumination on Nazi persecutions, some veiled depiction of Rosa Luxemberg’s murder? A single word creates worlds.

Recorded July-August 1977, Hansa, Berlin. Used as the fifth movement of Glass’ “Heroes Symphony.”

* The misspelling led to speculation that Bowie was actually referring to the band Neu! and the city of Köln, but it appears to have been just a spelling error on Bowie’s part.

** The only clue Bowie gave as to what this scale was came in a 1983 interview, where he mentioned that the scale had “whole notes where one could take a half note,” suggesting it’s likely the Phrygian dominant scale or some variant.

Top: Don McCullin, “Mother and Son, Bradford,” 1978.

Moss Garden

Moss Garden.

Another product of Bowie and Eno playing “Oblique Strategies” and not revealing what their cards were (see “Sense of Doubt”), “Moss Garden” came about through a similar clash of intentions, with Bowie playing chaos (having drawn a card that read “destroy everything”), Eno, order (“change nothing and continue with immaculate consistency”).

The Oblique instructions were a minor ingredient of the mix, as Bowie mainly had intended to create a sonic depiction of Saiho-ji, the “moss temple” of Kyoto, which he had visited while on tour in Japan. He acquired a koto, a six-feet-long, 13-string traditional Japanese instrument, to serve as the main instrumental voice, and played it on the track with an amateur’s inspiration and sense of restraint, mainly keeping to a few repeating scale patterns (compare “Garden”‘s relatively spare lines to “Go Dan Ginuta,” a work by a master of the instrument, Michio Miyagi).

“Moss Garden” hangs between F-sharp and G-sharp, and so hints at being in the key of C#, but as it never falls back to the tonic, it exists in a shadow key. Much of the piece has a similar fluid nature. While “Garden” suggests a clash of West and East, with synthesized airplane drones disrupting the “traditional” musings of the koto, it’s far from that simple—Japan is as much a modernist country as it’s a traditional one (and the sound of an airplane over Japan calls back to the bombers heard in “V-2 Schneider,” though with an even deadlier cargo). The koto itself spans worlds, as it’s able to be tuned to both Japanese and Western “classical” tunings. The piece’s livelier ancestor is Eno’s “Burning Airlines Give You So Much More,” with its Kyoto-bound jet liners disturbing the wispy beard of a meditating sage miles below, likely sitting in some silent moss garden.

Gorgeous and static, the eye at the center of “Heroes” (and, arguably, the whole “Berlin” project), it’s one of the most successful ambient pieces Eno (and Bowie) created before the start of Eno’s Ambient series in 1978. That said, “Moss Garden” eventually builds to a small climax with a surge of synthesizers in the final minute, capped off with the appearance (4:40) of a synthetic dog barking, its timbre accurate enough to prick my dog’s ears.

Recorded: July-August 1977, Hansa, Berlin.

Top: Philip Guston, Ladder, 1978.

V-2 Schneider

V-2 Schneider.
V-2 Schneider (live, 1997).
V-2 Schneider (live, 1997).
V-2 Schneider (Philip Glass, “Heroes” Symphony, 1997).

[A note, from 2016: as several have said over the years, this entry builds much of its arguments on a basic error—that Bowie was referencing the V-2 rocket and not, as seems far more likely, just referencing Florian Schneider’s nickname. This will be rectified in the book, and this entry will be improved—take it as a very flawed first draft. I likely will replace this text with the revised version whenever I’m done with the latter.]

“V-2 Schneider” is Bowie’s poisoned tribute to Florian Schneider, one of Kraftwerk’s founders, with Bowie prefixing Schneider’s name with one of Hitler’s last gambles, the Nazi rockets that fell on London in 1944-45. Though Tony Visconti said the title came together randomly, there seems more to it, at least on some subconscious level, as Bowie’s relations with Kraftwerk were a mingle of admiration and darker projections.

“I think there are two bands who now come close to a neo-Nazi kind of thing: Roxy Music and Kraftwerk,” Bowie told Ben Edmonds in 1976. “It’s not Nazism so much as nationalism. I think it may be too cliched to use the Nazi thing; it’s more nationalistic.” Of course this interview came at the height of Bowie’s Thin White Duke, fascist-sympathizing, cocaine-addled public incarnation, whose public excesses Bowie would later recant. Still, Bowie’s words gave some of the British press free reign to call Kraftwerk fascists, and it seems clear that, at least at the time, Bowie was willfully misreading Kraftwerk for his own ends.

In interviews Bowie would contrast Kraftwerk to his own work. Kraftwerk was emotionless, rigid, pristine, a sealed box, he said, where Bowie was making music that still had a human element in it, particularly the sound of his African-American rhythm section. Something about the Kraftwerk sensibility seemed to jar Bowie as much as it attracted him—not just the crystalline structures of their synthesizer and electronic percussion arrangements, but their utter lack of irony, or an irony so deep that it relegated much of Bowie’s work to the surfaces.

With their dress suits and investment bankers’ haircuts, their deadpan expressions and their absurdly literal lyrics, Kraftwerk seemed to court being called automatons, fascist droners. Coming out of the same milieu, postwar Düsseldorf, that had produced the painter Anselm Kiefer (born two years before Schneider), Schneider and his partner Ralf Hütter were of the generation that, as Werner Herzog said, “had no fathers, only grandfathers,”* coming of age in a country whose recent past had been erased by general consent. By the late ’60s, when Kiefer and Kraftwerk started working, they began picking at the scabs. Kiefer first got attention by photographing and painting himself giving the Nazi salute against various backdrops, while Kraftwerk took ideas from one of the Nazis’ favored composers, Carl Orff, while fetishizing what Richard Witts called “the shiny, new everyday objects of the Nazi period—its cars, its motorways, its short-range radios…and like Kiefer, present[ing] them in a utopian glow…the provocation is that of a society projected as though it is not yet defeated.”

As Witts wrote, Kraftwerk was combining the pre-Nazi utopianism of Bauhaus Germany (which was permissible, as it was now considered the “real” modern Germany), the now-verboten spiritual and technological obsessions of the Nazis (culminating in the Nazis’ desperate efforts to build an atom bomb and affix one to long-range rockets like the V-2, which seemed like a modernist adaptation of Das Rheingold) and, finally, the “miracle” transformation of West Germany into capitalism’s favorite child. These aspirations bled together: the gleaming Trans-Europe Express, celebrated by Kraftwerk, could easily have been a Nazi innovation, crossing a Europe without borders because it was all one cleansed Reich.

Bowie appears to have discovered Kraftwerk while in Los Angeles in 1975, constantly listening to Autobahn while being ferried in his limo. He had wanted them to open his 1976 tour, and when that didn’t work out, Bowie baffled his audiences by playing Kraftwerk as pre-show music.** “Station to Station,” opening with a slow assemblage of train sound effects, was directly inspired by the car-ignition opening of “Autobahn,” yet Bowie was already drawing distinctions, using an “analog” device (a sound effects LP) where Kraftwerk had used synthesizers. And where in “Autobahn” Kraftwerk had depicted a West Germany existing in a present tense of fast cars, superhighways and sunlit valleys, Bowie had brought back the sound of the train, the transport of wartime Europe, carrying troops going West and prisoners going East.

Kraftwerk’s masterpiece Trans-Europe Express (recorded around the time Bowie cut Low, released in March 1977) seems like their answer record to “Station.” In the title track Kraftwerk reclaims the train: it’s now another figure removed from history, cleaned up, modernized, humming along contentedly, rolling across the borders that had been fought over (and rewritten) for centuries. To top it off, they name-checked Bowie and Iggy Pop in the lyric.

So is “V-2 Schneider” Bowie’s retaliation, a little barb reminding Schneider that he was the heir of Nazis? The track opens with what sounds like an incoming wave of airplanes, and “Schneider” isn’t as much a Kraftwerk imitation (Low‘s “Speed of Life” is far more in their debt) as it’s a defacing or questioning of their sound, with its distorted, off-beat saxophone hooks and the track’s centering on a tensed, quivering muscle of a bassline by George Murray. There are two obvious call-backs: Dennis Davis’ snare fills, which seem like analog equivalents to the synth percussion fills on “Trans Europe Express,” and the vocoder-sounded title phrase, which coheres near the fadeout after being a murk of vowel sounds for much of the track.

(Keeping with the make-do improvisations of the “Heroes” sessions, the vocal wasn’t actually done by a vocoder. Visconti said that Bowie had been “too impatient” to track down a vocoder, so “we had a cheap little synthesizer in the studio and found sounds that had a vowel shape that resembled: Vee-Too-Schnei-Der. The idea was to use those four separate patches for each note and David would supply just the consonants with his voice filtered electronically (all the ‘body’ taken out), i.e.: V-T-Sch_D…and it kind of worked…”)

Bowie’s saxophone work, starting off-beat and mainly keeping there, was an error, Bowie missing his cue while doing overdubs. However, recalling one of Eno’s Oblique Strategies cards about honoring your mistakes, he didn’t recut the saxophone track. Compared with the rest of the “Heroes” instrumentals, “V-2 Schneider” is more conventional in structure (after the intro, the track is basically a series of 4-bar horn or guitar passages and 8-bar vocal “choruses”) and is far more of a band track. A fresh challenge to Kraftwerk or yet another misreading of them, it’s one of Bowie’s most compelling instrumentals in any case.

Recorded July-mid-August 1977, Hansa, Berlin. Used as the closing movement of Glass’ “Heroes” Symphony. Performed live in 1997—a recording from the Paradiso, Amsterdam, on 6 October 1997 was issued as a b-side of “Pallas Athena” (it’s the latter of the two live links above).

Of great help with this entry was Richard Witts’ “Vorsprung durch technik – Kraftwerk and the the British fixation with Germany,” reprinted as Chapter 8 of Kraftwerk: Music Non-Stop, ed. Albiez & Pattie; Continuum, 2011.

*Florian Schneider’s father, the architect Paul Schneider-Esleben, had served in the German army during the war, though not a Nazi party member. His ’50s work, including the Manesmann Hochhaus, was associated with the “Year Zero” movement of rejecting the Nazi obsession with neo-classicism and championing the “lost” modernism of the Bauhaus school.

**Edmonds, attending an early show in Vancouver in ’76, watched as Bowie’s audience at first were intrigued by Kraftwerk, then grew restive and finally angry, mocking the vocals, clapping to drown the music out.

Top: Kraftwerk, promotional photo for Trans-Europe Express, 1977. Schneider is first from left.

Blackout

Blackout.
Blackout (live, 1978).

In one story, a man is thrown off his motorcycle after colliding with a car. As he’s sliding across the road, perhaps to his death, he hears his helmet bouncing against the asphalt. The sound has a catchy rhythm, he thinks, and he finds himself composing a little ditty to it in his head…

…”The question is: do drummers have different brains from the rest of us?” Eno said. “Everyone who has ever worked in a band is sure to say they do.”

Burkhard Bilger, “The Possibilian,” The New Yorker, 25 April 2011.

Time again to praise Dennis Davis. Davis’ drums, distorted by Tony Visconti’s Harmonizer (see “Breaking Glass”), are the sonic trademark of much of Low. By contrast, Visconti used the Harmonizer sparingly on “Heroes,” and only at the mixing stage, so Davis’ drums were mainly cut live, with few overdubs. “Heroes” is the sound of Davis playing to the room.

It helped that it was a colossal room, Hansa Tonstudio 2, which had been built to house a 150-person orchestra. Rather than using a drum booth, Davis set up his kit on a riser that, in a past life, had been used for choirs. At one end of the room, sitting about five feet off the floor, Davis could see George Murray down to his right (whenever Davis used his kick drum, Murray felt like he was being hit in the face), Carlos Alomar to his left, and Bowie, on piano, directly in front of him. Everyone but Davis used “gobos” (isolation panels); Davis’ drums instead were meant to fill the room. At the far end of the room was another microphone, intended to pick up the aftershock of Davis’ drumming. It’s easy to see what happened: Davis soon became the bandleader, conducting with his wrists and his feet.

Davis also had expanded his kit. He found a set of congas in the corner of the studio, hauled some timpani up on the riser. There are times on “Heroes” when Davis sounds like a percussive orchestra, or his fills seem a painstaking series of drum overdubs. But it’s just him, most of his drumming cut live, like the series of crazy fills Davis does twice on “Blackout” (cued by Bowie’s “get me to the doctor!” at 1:01 and 2:02), where he spins like the second hand of a clock, moving from toms to congas back to toms. There’s the little fills Davis throws in throughout, as if providing regular infusions of oxygen, or his move to what sounds like cowbell on the “get me off the streets” verse. And during it all Davis keeps perfect time. A human jazz metronome, Visconti later called him: playing flawlessly, yet never the same way twice.

“Blackout” is as abrasive as “Heroes” gets—the track seems to have been battled over by waves of armies. The verses are a series of assaults, with something resembling a chorus appearing only a minute-half in. Robert Fripp’s guitar, which early on calls back to his solo on Eno’s “St. Elmo’s Fire,” later approaches dog whistle frequencies; it seems bent on undermining Bowie’s vocal. Eno’s synthesizer burbles in the right channel. The backing vocals are conscripted to keep the lead from disintegrating (Bowie seems to falter while singing “kiss me in the rain,” as if he’s so drained he can barely form the words—the backing singers (Bowie and Visconti) keep at him, but he stumbles, finally inching out “in…the…rain.”) Pieces of old Bowie songs are churned up—Alomar’s guitar (kept to the left channel, he sounds like the only sane man left in the room) offers a riff that seems a marriage of “Suffragette City” and “Boney Maronie,” while the “chorus” section reworks “Stay.”

Bowie sings long, meandering lines that he severs with shouts and mutters. It’s an even more bizarre and mannered performance than “Joe the Lion”—there’s the ranted-out “I’m under Japanese influence and my honor’s at STAKE!” or, even crazier, the lines where Bowie seems to be attempting a New York accent: “I’m getting some SKIN EXPOSHUH to the BLACK-OUT!”

“Blackout”‘s lyric was another live-at-the mic production, though the lines are so deliberately random that it’s likely Bowie did some cut-up experiments to get a few of them. The lyric is said to be inspired by all sorts of disasters, like Bowie, agitated after the appearance of his wife Angie, passing out from drink and being hospitalized in late 1976. Bowie, perhaps mischievously, later said the song was a reaction to the New York City power outage of July ’77. And “Blackout” feels like an urban song, all crowds and paranoia, with the streets of Berlin subbing for the purgatorial Los Angeles of Station to Station or “Always Crashing in the Same Car.”

Still, delving too much into the ways and means of the lyric seems beside the point. In the final mix, Bowie’s vocal, often harried by Fripp’s guitar, is just another contributor of incidental noise, the equivalent of one of Eno’s synthesizer lines; it’s one more signal in an overloaded frequency.

Recorded July-mid-August 1977, Hansa, Berlin. The version from Philadelphia, May 1978, collected on Stage, is arguably the definitive version of the song: Bowie’s vocal is tremendous and Davis sounds like a monster.

Note: most of the information on the recording of “Heroes” is from various interviews Tony Visconti has given over the years (particularly one with Sound on Sound in 2004) as well as his autobiography.

Top: The Burger Bistro adapts to the New York City power outage, 13 July 1977.