You Belong In Rock n’ Roll

You Belong In Rock n’ Roll.
You Belong In Rock n’ Roll (single mix, video).
You Belong In Rock n’ Roll (Paramount City, 1991).
You Belong In Rock n’ Roll (Wogan, 1991).
You Belong In Rock n’ Roll (Top of the Pops, 1991).
You Belong In Rock n’ Roll (Sacrée Soirée, 1991).
You Belong In Rock n’ Roll (Eleva2ren, 1991).
You Belong In Rock n’ Roll (live, Oy Vey Baby, 1991).

Are there any new ideas left to be discovered in rock and roll?

Bowie: In rock and roll, no. But in what you can give rock and roll, yes. I think the whole idea of talking about the feelings that you have between your mid-30s and mid-40s…there are endless experiences there. The whole weight of having gone through the apocalyptic vision of the Seventies, the greed and vanity of the Eighties: these are things that none of the younger bands knew about or experienced. So they’re just a result of it. With a band like Guns ‘n’ Roses, lyrically there’s a kind of abandon there. But abandon from what?

Alan di Perna, “Ballad of the Tin Men,” Creem, 1991.

The lead-off single of Tin Machine II, “You Belong in Rock n’ Roll” was Bowie’s most overt attempt at pop since “Never Let Me Down,” and it tanked, charting only (and poorly) in the UK, ignored by the rest of the world. Possibly inspired by U2’s “With or Without You,” it shared with the latter a bass-driven, deep-crooned verse, a sudden dynamic shift in the chorus (triggered by the title phrase) and a simple, repeating chord progression—“Rock n’ Roll” just uses the first two chords, C and G, of “With or Without You”‘s cycling C-G-Am-F. But compared to U2’s brooding religious erotica, “Rock n’ Roll” is camp trash, with Reeves Gabrels playing his guitar solos with a vibrator.*

The title suggested some kind of reckoning with the past: after the bridge-burning of Tin Machine, it seemed to be Bowie trying to align himself for a fresh decade. An old friend once said that it was never a good sign when an aging band wrote a song with “rock and roll” in the title (he was thinking of Kiss, who had just put out “God Gave Rock and Roll to You”), as it usually was a cue for gross nostalgia or base pandering. Thankfully that’s not the case here—Bowie’s “Rock n’ Roll” is too slight, too moody, too crass, although he is chasing after ghosts in it.

The guiding spirit is Marc Bolan in his prime, comparing girls to cars and mountain kings: I love the velvet hat–you know the one that caused a revolution…you got the blues in your shoes and your stockings…I’ll call you Jaguar if I may be so bold. Bowie’s come-ons in “Rock n’ Roll” are shopworn and banal by comparison: the girl (or rock itself) reminds him of “cheap streets,” she says “cheap things,” she’s got a “bad look.” It’s third-rate seduction. Bolan had known he was the prize—the come-ons were just for show, he was just peacocking for his own delight, as he’d already closed the deal. Bowie in “Rock n’ Roll” has to really work the sale, and seems to vaguely despise himself for it.

The big hook, triggered to the song’s one chord change, is “you belong in rock n’ roll…well, so do I,” a weakly Bolanesque line. Bowie’s phrasing of the last words, a slight aspiring push upward, suggests that he knows it’s a dubious claim. But what was “rock n’ roll” here? In 1990 it meant Guns ‘n’ Roses and Warrant—it was no place for some crackpot dandy like Bolan, let alone Bowie entering his high Dorian Gray period. Bowie had never been reverent about rock music; he’d always questioned whatever transcendence it offered. In his Ziggy Stardust days, he referred to rock as an aging tart. Twenty years on, he felt the same, although now he was in a serious hard “rock n’ roll” band whose players sometimes acted as if they were the music’s last hope—it’s tempting to call “Rock n’ Roll” Bowie’s subconscious rejection of Tin Machine. In the video for “Rock n’ Roll,” Bowie preened into the mirror, wriggling out of his garish lime-green jacket while he sang “so do I”; on stage, he sometimes mimed slapping on foundation.

But the track’s not mere parody, either. As with Bolan’s influence, you can hear Bowie trying to recall an old language, trying to ground himself again in a music that had once worked for him. There’s a trace of Buddy Holly in how Bowie toys with his phrases, hollowing out vowels, stretching a small word to fill the space of three: luh-uh-huh-hove, say-uh-hay-hay. (On the Paradise City performance, Bowie sings the second verse in a quasi-American accent). So it’s fitting that it ends back at the mirror. When Bowie builds up to the climax, he finally imitates “Bowie,” the imperious, archangel-voiced Bowie of pop memory: on fire! on FIRE! on FIRE! on FIIIHAH!

Though its rhythm track—a rumbling Tony Sales bassline, flourishes of acoustic guitar, a tight Hunt Sales playing a swinging kick drum pattern—was nailed down in the Sydney sessions, “Rock n’ Roll” was one of the tracks that Gabrels wouldn’t leave alone. He cut guitar overdub after overdub while Bowie was on his world tour in 1990. By the time Tin Machine II was mixed in spring 1991, “Rock n’ Roll” had ballooned to a 56-track recording, the majority of which was taken up with Gabrels’ bleats, buzzes and whines.

Gabrels had been obsessed with Nine Inch Nails’ Pretty Hate Machine, and as “Rock n’ Roll” was “basically a bass song, I wanted to lay in some industrial stuff against it,” he said. Gabrels started by vibrating an electric razor against his guitar strings but found he wanted something with variable speeds, so that he could better tune it. So Gabrels and his guitar tech went out to a few Sydney sex shops and came back with a selection of vibrators. Gabrels became a fan—“You can use [a vibrator] as a sound source and also as a string driver by laying it against the bridge,” he said—as did Bowie, who said he expected to soon go into a music store and find rows of vibrators with effects pedals and slides: an inspired vision of commerce that sadly never came to be.

That said, Gabrels’ main solo, the eight-bar fill between refrain and verse, is Gabrels at his most restrained, offering just a series of steadily-rising chords, while his various vibrator-guitar dubs work as mood colors in the mix rather than overwhelming the track. The final mix of “Rock n’ Roll” sounded good—Tony Sales’ backing vocals giving tension to Bowie’s murmurings, the handclaps, the low-mixed saxophone—but in the fall of 1991, no one wanted to hear it. Perhaps it was a minor cultural exhaustion with Bowie: it was the first single after the Sound + Vision tour/retrospective. The Bowie of the past was far too strong a presence, the Bowie of the present seemed compromised and empty. “Rock n’ Roll” was a pretender, soon sent packing.

Recorded ca. September-October 1989, Studios 301, Sydney, with overdubs in 1990 and March 1991. Released as a single in August 1991 (LONCD 305, c/w “Amlapura (Indonesian version), #33 UK). There was also a limited edition single in a metal box. To produce it, according to Pegg, the label had to purchase used tins from the US Navy. The band played or lip-synched “Rock n’ Roll” on Denmark’s Eleva2ren, France’s Sacree Soiree and the UK’s Wogan, TOTP and Paramount City, generating weak sales and minor controversy because of Gabrels’ vibrators. (Weirdly, the Machine apparently didn’t play “Rock n’ Roll” in their big US TV promotion, ABC In Concert.) Played throughout the 1991-92 tour, with a version from Chicago, 7 December 1991, used as the closing track on Oy Vey Baby.

* Gabrels told Musician that his touring vibrators were “a 4″ Ladyfinger and an 8″ variable speed, with a Panasonic electric razor as backup.”

Top: Michel Piccoli and Emmanuelle Béart, La Belle Noiseuse (Rivette, 1991).

It’s Tough

It’s Tough (early take/mix).
It’s Tough (“final” mix).

Slated for Tin Machine II until late in the day (it was replaced by a track cut in the March 1991 final sessions for the album, either by what proved to be the master take of “If There Is Something” or the newly-recorded “One Shot”), “It’s Tough” was then sunk into the memory hole, with no public trace of its existence until a few versions leaked in 2008. According to one source (recounted on the TW message board), Bowie played a rough mix of a provisional TMII to an Australian friend, who called “Tough” the weakest track, a verdict with which Reeves Gabrels allegedly concurred. So “Tough” was kicked off the album, knocked down to a proposed B-side and ultimately shelved.*

The Machine had spent time working “It’s Tough” into shape, hardening the “Lust for Life”-esque bassline, tweaking its intricate multi-guitar intro (while sounding like a synthesizer pattern, the intro’s base is more likely a rapidly-picked guitar, close to the opening of the Talking Heads’ “Burning Down the House”) and revising its structure: earlier versions had overused the “it’s tough! but! it’s okay!” refrain, while the apparent final take has an additional verse and a jabbing Bowie saxophone solo.

Bowie also scrapped some luridly violent lines (“someone driving a 4×4 threw acid on her face/she told the cops that she hacked him up/with the sharpened edge of his license plate“) in favor of a more obscure lyric that quotes Dean Martin at one point. While his earlier vocal had been more committed to malice, there was still a sharpness to Bowie’s observations, a spit in his delivery, that had been lacking in his work for over a decade: All the rats are winning…Squeezing out a generation/waiting for the next…So I lie! lie! lie! It’s the return of the Thin White Duke to a Los Angeles about to boil over in 1991. A repeated “I’m not ready for this” serves as a prayer and an excuse (& echoes a Mekons song from a few years before).

Listening the various bootleg versions of this track is an exercise in frustration, as any one of them have more kick and power than the lesser half of Tin Machine II. Cutting “It’s Tough” was a blunder, foreshadowing Bowie’s odd sequencing on Black Tie White Noise.

Recorded ca. September-October 1989, Studios 301, Sydney, with poss. overdubs 1990-March 1991. Unreleased.

* The “final” version of “Tough” likely comes from a promo CD of Tin Machine II that was assembled before its last recording sessions (recall that Bowie was shopping around the TMII tapes for a year, looking for a label).

Top: Ed Newman, “Dancing at Zydeco Fest, Plaisance, Louisiana, 1991.”

Hammerhead

Hammerhead (B-side edit).
Hammerhead (album edit).

There are two official versions of “Hammerhead,” a Bowie/Hunt Sales composition: a minute-long instrumental, in which Bowie’s saxophone is soon elbowed off stage by a Reeves Gabrels guitar meltdown, that appeared uncredited at the end of Tin Machine II, and a mush-mouthed rant-thrash piece in the line of “A Big Hurt” that was issued as a B-side. As it turned out, they were the same track—the instrumental is the lopped-off coda of the master take.

Seemingly free-associated at the mike, Bowie’s lyric is a rapid-fire slurred ode to a femme fatale, with the woman in question compared to a shark, a boxer (including, apparently, the turn-of-the-century champion George Dixon), Cher, Bruce Lee (Bowie seems to mumble “enter the dragon” at one point) and a Forties film star. Bowie sounds out of her league in any case, especially as his jaw seems to have been wired shut.

If one of the themes of Tin Machine II had been an attempt to lampoon ultra-masculinity (with mixed results),”Hammerhead” seems a natural end point—it’s a male POV made lunatic and ridiculous, a manic spew by a man trying to comprehend a woman by comparing her to a run of celebrities and wildlife. Still, it works better as an instrumental.

Recorded ca. September-October 1989, Studios 301, Sydney. The full version (3:15 in length, YouTube has no versions of it currently up) was released in August 1991 as the B-side of “You Belong in Rock n’ Roll” and, in Germany, “One Shot.”

Top: Nick Hider, “Saturday, March 31, 1990: London’s Poll Tax riot.”

A Big Hurt

A Big Hurt.
A Big Hurt (live, 1991).
A Big Hurt (Arsenio Hall Show, 1991).

The only sole Bowie composition on Tin Machine II was the misbegotten “A Big Hurt.” So don’t blame the band for this one: this was apparently Bowie’s long-stewed response to punk. Bowie had missed the height of the UK punk season, as he was living and working in France and Germany then, and he basically stayed clear of London until the Sex Pistols had broken up.* In the following decade, punk hardly informed Bowie’s music, if there’s arguably a trace of it on Scary Monsters. Like country & western, punk was a rare genre that Bowie seemed to have no interest in assimilating.

Now in Tin Machine, Bowie’s partners had been inspired or involved in punk, even if it was in far-diminished forms: Tony Sales had briefly played in a band, Chequered Past, with ex-Pistol Steve Jones, while Reeves Gabrels owed his style to the Mission of Burma and the Gang of Four. So Bowie had an arsenal if he wanted it. “Tin Machine,” a vague attempt at hardcore, had been a first foray, and now “A Big Hurt,” with its stub of a guitar riff, stop-start dynamics (Bowie again aping his beloved Pixies) and a screamed-mumbled vocal, went full-tilt.

The Machine carried it off fairly well—the guitar/kick drum sparring in the chorus, Hunt Sales’ Benzedrine-paced drumming (the tempo was even faster live), a suitably tasteless Gabrels solo. It’s Bowie who wound up with egg on his face, whether for his hoarsely shrieked verses, his crap lyric (inspirational couplet: “I’m a believer/you’re the sex receiver“) or his awful phrasing (the way Bowie belches out “big HURT”). As with “Stateside,” a modestly-interesting bridge serves as distraction or compensation—not enough in either case.

Recorded ca. September-October 1989, Studios 301, Sydney. A version recorded by the BBC was issued in October 1991 as a B-side of the 12″ “Baby Universal.” Played throughout the “It’s My Life” tour, 1991-92.

* Not so poor Mick Ronson, who in 1976 went out to Oxford Circus dressed in his glam gear, only to be ridiculed by the punk kids.

Top: Joey Harrison, “New Orleans buskers, 1990.”

You Can’t Talk

You Can’t Talk.
You Can’t Talk (live, 1991).

The Reeves Gabrels guitar squiggle that smirks midway through the intro of “You Can’t Talk” serves as fair warning: good taste is nowhere near. Ghastly sorta-rapped verses, their flow vaguely inspired by the Clash’s “Magnificent Seven” and their lyric pointlessly referencing “Beauty and the Beast,” give way to a chorus that at least has a melody, if a flat one. The lyric is as obscure as it’s witless: Bowie, in early takes, sang “I know you don’t blow me…away,” while in the final mix he cut out the last word, hobbling his weak bawdy joke.

Given these poor materials to work with, the band and the frenetic mix do what they can to distract the ear. The Sales brothers are fairly inspired, with Hunt turning in a hustling shuffle and Tony makes the song halfway danceable at times. Reeves is Reeves. There’s some fine rhythm guitar playing, reminiscent of early Talking Heads. To what end? It’s mildly catchy, it passes quickly enough. But a track like “You Can’t Talk” is an indictment of Tin Machine—there’s a hole in the center of this music. It’s pointless, uninspired, forgettable, forgotten.

Recorded ca. September-October 1989, Studios 301, Sydney. Four early takes circulate on bootleg. One, which goes at a slower tempo and in which Bowie’s still trying out paces and phrases, seems like a studio demo. The others are fairly close to the final track, with occasional tweaking (for example, the break after “call you over under out” (@ 2:25)  is followed by, in various takes, silence, a hi-hat, or a guitar panned left-to-right). Played throughout the 1991-92 tour, with the 24 October Hamburg show used for the Oy Vey Baby video.

Top: Flavijus, “Moscow, 1991.”

You Better Stop

You Better Stop.

An outtake from the Tin Machine II sessions in Sydney, “You Better Stop” (its bootleg title) is another Hunt Sales blues, here dominated by dueling cock-of-the-walk guitar licks. Reeves Gabrels apparently cut multiple overdubs, as the various guitars in the solo all seem to be his, which suggests “Stop” had evolved beyond a studio jam and was being considered for inclusion on the record. At first I had thought it was a version of Sonny Rhodes’ soul classic, but its lyric, a barely-audible string of blues cliches, is different and at one point Hunt cues the band with “bridge!” So evidently “Stop” is a half-completed original, and it has as much going for it as the two official Hunt-penned Tin Machine tracks.

Recorded ca. September-October 1989, Studios 301. Unreleased.

Top: “Doublejeopardy,” “Thailand, 1990.”

Shopping For Girls

Shopping for Girls.
Shopping for Girls (Oy Vey Baby, 1991).
Shopping for Girls (ChangesNowBowie, BBC, 1997).

Kham Suk is 13 years old. She is a small child with a delicate face. When she giggles, she sounds like any little girl at play. But Kham Suk doesn’t have much time for fun. Three months ago, her mother walked her across the border from Burma into Thailand and sold her to a brothel for $80. Kham Suk’s family desperately needed the money. Kham Suk still is paying the price: $4 a customer.

“Children in Darkness,” Sara Terry, Christian Science Monitor, 30 June 1987.

In 1987 Sara Terry, a reporter for the Christian Science Monitor, wrote a series of articles on exploited children in developing countries, centering on the Philippines and Thailand.* Her husband, Reeves Gabrels, accompanied her on research trips and helped his wife’s work by, for example, paying for child prostitutes so that Terry could interview them in privacy. Bowie had been to Thailand as well, during his 1983 tour, and had seen similar horrors. So when he and Gabrels began collaborating, they decided to pool their experiences into a song about the child sex trade.

It took Bowie years to write a lyric. The problem, he later said, was that the subject was so awful, so immune to irony or nuance, that it seemed impossible to make a rock song about it. Bowie scrapped draft after draft for being too sensationalist, for being too didactic. “The moment I got fingerwagging about it, or moralistic, the whole thing just went to pieces and became embarrassing,” he told Musician in 1991. The would-be prophet-of-rage voice he’d used on the likes of “Crack City” and “Under the God” would’ve been disastrous here. An inspiration possibly came from Lou Reed’s New York, in which Reed was more an amoral narrator of urban blight than a polemicist, letting the details pile up, letting their collective weight do the work for him.

So the final lyric for “Shopping for Girls” is a mix of narrators, starting with a cold, clipped third-person perspective for the first three verses and shifting to second person in the last, abbreviated verse. Annie McDuffie, when she wrote on this song, argued convincingly that the entire lyric could be in the first person, the removed perspective of a sociopath numbed to his actions. The shadowy perspective is paralleled by the song’s murky tonality—while the verses seem to shift between E minor and its parallel major, the B-flat chord that kicks off the chorus puts it in F major.

What’s striking here is Bowie’s phrasing, a type he had rarely used before. When a singer in his or her mid-forties alters their phrasing, it’s often to compensate for the strains of age—a move to a lower register, for example—but in Bowie’s case it was to attempt to create a new character, a shabby narrator on the margins, singing lines in a croaking, rapid patter which barely rises above the conversational—an unnerving recitative. (He would develop it further on Outside and Earthling). It was a voice that seemed to have wormed into the song, a disreputable person muttering things that you don’t want to hear.

So the first verse begins with Bowie dashing through lines without taking a breath, dispensing with rhyme or meter, as if he’s breaking into what was supposed to be part of Gabrels’ intro. It’s a consonant-heavy string of phrases that culminates with there are children riding naked on their tourist pals. Only then does Bowie allow the song proper to begin, sinking into the first eight-bar verse. He sings the first “shopping for girls” coldly, then gives the phrase more and more triumph as the song goes on. Details fill up the verses: a Michael Jackson song playing (Bowie spitting out Jackson’s name); a john emptily talking about how back home there’s winter; a brothel room that smells of the tropical flower frangipani, a favorite image of the Victorian decadents (it figures in Wilde’s Dorian Gray and Huysmans’ À rebours), made pathetic here.

“Shopping for Girls” bricks itself up in older songs, as if trying to distance itself from the coarse transactions at its heart, and calling into question all of the swagger and promises of love and bliss that pop music offers, which are lies when the songs play on the radio in some Phuket child brothel (yet the songs could be the only thing keeping the child sane). It could be a David Bowie song playing there, after all—“Let’s Dance” or “Golden Years” tinnily chirping away during some routine $4 sale. So the song’s title references the Coasters’ “Shoppin’ for Clothes.” The distorted guitar riff that follows the second chorus, and which crops up throughout the rest of the track (including all of the last verse), parodies the hook of “Raspberry Beret” (the joy of discovering sex in Prince’s song curdled into disease here). A striking line in the last verse, “her eyes for a million miles,” is a near word-for-word Captain Beefheart quote.

Should Bowie have dispensed with the word games** and references? Should Gabrels have used a less zippy guitar hook, which he even kicks up an octave at the close, as though the song’s ending with a blast? Yet what would have a more serious song accomplished but be unbearable to hear? (The Specials’ “The Boiler” comes to mind: one of the most harrowing protest-realist songs ever recorded, and all but unplayable.) The Christian Science Monitor series on child exploitation disturbed its readers, embarrassed governments, won prizes, but the child sex trade thrives, a quarter century on. What could a song buried on a forgotten Tin Machine record have done?

“Shopping For Girls” confesses its impotence. It offers no means of revolt, no incentives to rally, no heartfelt cries of support, no communal singalongs: it’s not “Biko,” it’s not “Free Nelson Mandela.” “Shopping for Girls” is just distanced reportage, a stew of unstable narrators, a collective disgust, a curse. Because in the end, Bowie and Gabrels couldn’t come up with a song worthy of the awfulness of its subject. All they could do was levy a guilty verdict on everyone—the song’s subjects, its narrator(s), its writers, its performers, its listeners, its compilers, its critics.

Recorded ca. September-October 1989, 301 Studios, Sydney, and with overdubs in 1990-1991. Performed on the 1991-1992 tour, and revived as an acoustic track for Bowie’s 50th birthday radio broadcast, ChangesNowBowie, which aired on 8 January 1997.

* Terry developed the series with fellow reporter Kristin Helmore and photographer Melanie Stetson Freeman.

** Bowie’s bizarre line that opens the second verse (“a small black someone jumps over the crazy white guard“) seems an apparent spoof of the English pangram.

Consider supporting: ECPAT International.

Top: David Alan Harvey, “Child Prostitute,” Bangkok, 1989.

Exodus

Exodus.

Unknown before surfacing on bootleg in 2008, “Exodus”* is another of the “surf” instrumentals that Tin Machine was playing around with (see “Needles on the Beach”). While no lost masterwork, the track’s general jauntiness, Reeves Gabrels channeling Robert Fripp on Eno’s “St. Elmo’s Fire,” Tony Sales’ exuberant bassline and Bowie (or Kevin Armstrong) subbing for Hunt Sales’ cymbals via a rapid-strummed acoustic guitar, gives “Exodus” a life and a bright spirit that’s missing from a few tracks that made the cut for Tin Machine II.

Recorded ca. September-October 1989, Studios 301, Sydney. Unreleased.

* The title is possibly a bootlegger’s. It’s unclear what was intended for the track—another instrumental like “Needles”, or as a rhythm track for a scrapped or redesigned song.

Top: Corinne Day, “Kate Moss in a telephone booth,” Borneo, August 1991.

Needles on the Beach

Needles on the Beach.

Though Tin Machine II wound up a stitched-together, incoherent record, it began with Bowie and Reeves Gabrels working in a general theme: life in the rotten South Pacific. Drawing from Bowie’s recent vacation in Java and an earlier trip to Borneo with Iggy Pop (see “Tumble and Twirl”), Sara Terry’s (Gabrels’ wife) work covering child prostitution in Thailand and the Machine’s stay in Sydney while recording, a recurring image was a spoiled tropical paradise, whether corrupted by the West or by the eternal human verities of greed and lust. A few of these songs—“Shopping for Girls” and “Amlapura”—made it onto the final record, but another variation on the theme, the Machine’s attempt at a jaundiced surf music, was ultimately shelved.

The instrumental “Needles on the Beach,” which finally appeared on a “surfbilly” compilation on a Boston indie label in 1994 (arguably the most obscure official release in the Bowie catalog), got its title from Gabrels noticing that the tide on Bondi Beach would often bring in used syringes. There’s a musical joke baked into the song as well, as some of its chord changes are from Jimi Hendrix’s psychedelic surf track “Third Stone from the Sun”—specifically the progression when Hendrix, in the original recording, murmurs “to you I shall put an end, then you’ll never hear surf music again.”*

A set of alternating eight-bar runs, “Needles” has a once-repeated structure of variation 1 (Gabrels’ guitar riff (similar to the opening of Hendrix’s “Third Stone”) & drum shuffle), variation 1, variation 2 (slightly altered guitar riff and straight-on drums), variation 1, and variation 3 (three-chord descending phrase by Gabrels). On the released version, “Needles” is faded before the final repeat of variation 3, which ends with a full close and a Gabrels pick slide, à la Dick Dale. Either Bowie or Kevin Armstrong plays a dreamy rhythm guitar that’s barely audible in the released mix.

Recorded ca. September-October 1989, 301 Studios, Sydney. Released in October 1994 on Beyond the Beach. Thanks: Ian McDuffie.

* Allegedly a buck-up message intended for Dick Dale, who had colon cancer at the time.

Top: Ross Giblin, “Jerry Nepia and Rajee Patel surfing at Titahi Bay [New Zealand], 15 January 1991.” From the Alexander Turnbull Library.

Betty Wrong

Betty Wrong (original mix, The Crossing OST, 1990).
Betty Wrong (TMII).
Betty Wrong (Oy Vey Baby, 1991).

The first track to publicly emerge from the Tin Machine II sessions, “Betty Wrong” turned up on the soundtrack of the 1990 Australian film The Crossing, starring a young Russell Crowe. Given further overdubs for TMII (mainly two Bowie saxophone cameos and some woodblocks in the verses), the track was mooted as a possible single but instead wound up buried midway through the album.

“Betty Wrong,” like a few other TMII tracks, is evidence that Bowie was trying, if indifferently, to write more commercial material again—its hooky chorus could have been incidental music for a Coke commercial, and as such was well suited for the sub-Rebel Without a Cause scenario of The Crossing. Its intro, which seems slightly in hock to Midnight Oil’s “Beds Are Burning,” suggests a more energetic track than its rather sickly verses delivered, though the chorus comes around quickly enough to keep the wheels rolling. Bowie’s lyric is in the vein of “Amazing,” a fallen man transported by love and pledging his faith in a broken time, though its decent lines (“nurtured on grime, good will and screams“) are overpowered by its duff ones (“the kiss of the comb/tears my face“).

During the last Tin Machine tour, Bowie and Reeves Gabrels put their composition on the rack, extending “Betty Wrong” over ten minutes with introductory and climactic guitar* and, especially, saxophone solos. The latter are some of Bowie’s most extravagant recorded performances on the sax, in which Bowie fulfills a teenage dream and tries to pretend he’s Eric Dolphy for a few minutes, though Bowie was far better at the R&B stylings of the big-toned tenor men of the Fifties, like Earl Bostic. At its best, Bowie’s sax added a swagger to “Betty,” particularly its intro, where the Machine now sounded like a bar band ripping into the Peter Gunn theme.

Recorded ca. September-October 1989, Studios 301, Sydney, and first appeared in October 1990 on The Crossing OST (Regular Records TVD 93336). Two other versions of “Betty” are circulating on bootleg: one’s just a slightly different mix of the released track, the other is an early instrumental take at a slower pace, with Gabrels still working out his solo ideas.

* Gabrels, in Musician, said of his closing blues solo “the chords are C#min7 to Amaj to G7 to G#min—I wondered what it would sound like if you had Otis Rush playing over something other than I-IV-V. The difference is to move one note in the right direction. The strongest statement that you can make is often the shortest distance: just a half-step away from the note that’s ringing. That’s hardest to hear.”

Top: “Visit to Moscow by Secretary General Manfred Wörner,” 14 July 1990 (NATO archives—who knew NATO was on Flickr?).