I’ll Take You There

I’ll Take You There.

The other Bowie/Gerry Leonard co-composition, “I’ll Take You There” had bigger and better hooks than their “Boss of Me” but wound up slotted as a frenetic bonus track. Set in a B minor key that it’s desperate to escape whenever possible, “I’ll Take You There” is Bowie reconciling with his Eighties, to the point where his instructions in the studio were apparently to play “Beat of Your Drum” for the band a few times.

It’s mixed to grab at you, bluntly and often: the stereo-panned drums (fattened with percussion overdubs in the mixing sessions); Leonard, David Torn and Tony Visconti punching in as many guitar tracks as the console can take (Bowie played some acoustic, not that it’s found anywhere in the mix’s heavy traffic); Leonard doing his best Earl Slick imitation for a lead riff; a pneumatic drill of an intro/outro guitar line; the usual loop-de-loops with the backing vocals.

The lyric is well-sung bunk (the refrains start “what will be my name in the USA?”— it helps to forget the English language while listening) and the dippy bridge builds to a “look up…at…staaaaars!” climax that leaves Bowie stranded like a cat in a tree—the band has to ladder-walk him down before the next refrain kicks off.

It’s heartening that Bowie’s gaudy pantomime/ desperate “rocker” side hasn’t gone entirely lost, that he hasn’t grown too respectable. A tacked-on track on the “deluxe” edition of The Next Day, “I’ll Take You There” gives an amphetamine shot to an album bowing under the weight of its accumulated histories, miseries and deaths.

Recorded: (backing tracks) ca. mid-September 2011, The Magic Shop, NYC; (overdubs) spring-fall 2012, Magic Shop; Human Worldwide, NYC. Released on 8 March 2013 on The Next Day: Deluxe Edition.

Top:  Xiaojun Deng, “Mombasa,” March 2011.

“DBMSG77”

Ian McDuffie is a Chicago-based artist who’s been following this blog since…2010? A long time. In terms of blog commenters, he’s one of the village elders.

Ian’s taken my doom-filled, never-was 1977 Bowie Madison Square Garden concert from the “Bring Me the Disco King” post and has turned it into a short comic book. It’s been a tough month, so when I came home to find a copy of this in the mail, and to see my writing had inspired this—well, it really was something. So thanks, Ian, and thanks to all of you for sticking with this blog over the years (only 16ish more entries to go).

Please consider picking it up.

Rebel Rebel Promo News

Also: if you’re in the NYC area, mark your calendars: Sat. October 17, 2015.

It’s a big Bowie night at Q.E.D. in Astoria, Queens. I’ll be reading from Rebel Rebel and helping run a Bowie trivia contest, among other things. There will be music, and I’ll sign any books that you bring (and will have some copies to sell, too.) More details to come soon.

Boss of Me

Boss of Me.

After the first Next Day sessions of May 2011, Bowie had a good set of backing tracks (“Heat” and “Love Is Lost,” which will come later in this survey, also had their rhythm tracks cut then) but he was far from ready to move to the vocal/overdub phase. Having gone through ideas stockpiled from his “off duty” years, he wanted to freshen the pot with some new compositions.

So that summer he visited his guitarist/bandleader Gerry Leonard in Woodstock (Leonard had a house there; Bowie, a nearby mountain). “He said, ‘okay, I’ll come over for coffee and maybe we’ll do a little more writing,'” Leonard recalled to Rolling Stone. Borrowing a Roland TR-808 from a friend (he couldn’t say why—“we were still in this official secrets act [period], y’know?“], Leonard set up a makeshift studio in a back room, with a keyboard, the Roland and some guitars and amps. “It was ready to pick up instruments and bash around,” as he told the writer Jamie Franklin.

Bowie and Leonard scratched out two songs, both of which they’d record in the next round of studio sessions in mid-September 2011. “‘I’d just establish the tempo and we’d program up a very simple beat and play along,” Leonard said. “When we worked out all the sections, then we would do a very simple little recording of that.”

One song, a mid-tempo C minor piece, took its title (no one’s confirmed this but it has to be true) from one of Leonard’s effects processors, the Boss ME-80. You can just imagine how it went: “ha! Boss ME! You’re not the Boss of ME!” Using this cliche as a lyrical rallying point, Bowie wrote lines which he rhymed “cool…again” with “cool…again,” gave character insights like “life has your mind and soul” and built to peak inanity with “and under these wings of steel, the small town diiiiiies,” which he sang like a dying Valkyrie.

Sure, “Boss of Me” is a possibly a joke about his Somalian-born wife being a “small town girl,” and yes, he’s aware you’re thinking that, and so having some fun with your groundless suppositions about his marriage, and you know he knows this, and so on and on into infinity. He told Rick Moody that key words for the song were “displaced,” “flight” and “resettlement,” so maybe there’s a refugee narrative in there somewhere that Bowie’s privy to at least.

There are a few things of interest—Tony Levin’s Chapman stick, Zachary Alford’s cymbal work, the grumpy baritone saxophone retorts by Steve Elson, sounding like a bear waking up from hibernation, the tippling recorder lines by Visconti in the bridge, and the clever structural shift, as the C minor verse chords (Cm-Am-Bb-F) subtly become the refrain chords: it’s a passively hostile takeover. It has good stereo placement; there’s depth in the mix. But there are always a few things of interest, even in the most dire recording. Which this is—by far the worst thing on its album. There is no reason for it to exist. Bowie had a decade to create The Next Day: including something so third-rate on it seems an act of genial perversity.

Recorded: (backing tracks) ca. mid-September 2011, The Magic Shop, NYC; (overdubs) spring-fall 2012, Magic Shop; Human Worldwide, NYC. Released on 8 March 2013 on The Next Day.

Top: Trevor H., “Laputan Robot,” 2012.