The performance launched Bowie to stardom. Thursday 6th July, 1972, is said to be ‘the day that invented the 80’s’ as so many musicians who went on to be household names saw the performance and it changed their lives. Those watching that night included U2’s Bono, The Cure’s Robert Smith, Boy George, Adam Ant, Mick Jones of the Clash, Gary Kemp of Spandau Ballet, Morrissey and Johnny Marr of the Smiths, Siouxsie Sioux, Toyah Willcox, John Taylor and Nick Rhodes of Duran Duran, Dave Gahan of Depeche Mode and many more.
“It’s deceptively easy to forget that in the summer of 1972 David Bowie was still yesterday’s news to the average Top of the Pops viewer, a one-hit wonder who’d had a novelty single about an astronaut at the end of the previous decade,” writes Nicholas Pegg in The Complete David Bowie. But his taking the stage of that BBC pop-musical institution “in a rainbow jumpsuit and shocking red hair put paid to that forever. Having made no commercial impact in the two months since its release, ‘Starman’ stormed up the chart.” As with “Space Oddity,” “the subtext is all: this is less a science-fiction story than a self-aggrandizing announcement that there’s a new star in town.”
Under Pressure, the classic tune from David Bowie and Queen, seems like one of those songs you don’t want to mess with — we’re looking at you here, Vanilla Ice. But if someone is going to cover it, it might as well be Karen O from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Willie Nelson.
In this video from Fender, the legendary producer/composer/guitarist Nile Rodgers sits down with his iconic Stratocaster and talks about how he took a folky tune that David Bowie came up with and turned it into the jazzy backbone of the pop song Let’s Dance, arguably Bowie’s biggest hit. Listening to where the song started off before Rodgers started tweaking, it’s hard for this musical simpleton to recognize that it’s even the same tune.
Update: Rodgers told a variation of this story in 2015.
A group called Choir! Choir! Choir! recently put on a show in NYC where they taught the audience to accompany them on a song, in this case, David Bowie’s Heroes sung by David Byrne. Byrne wrote up the experience in his online journal:
What happens when one sings together with a lot of other people?
A couple of things I immediately noticed. There is a transcendent feeling in being subsumed and surrendering to a group. This applies to sports, military drills, dancing… and group singing. One becomes a part of something larger than oneself, and something in our makeup rewards us when that happens. We cling to our individuality, but we experience true ecstasy when we give it up.
The second thing that happens involves the physical act of singing. I suspect the regulated breathing involved in singing, the act of producing sound and opening one’s mouth wide calls many many neural areas into play. The physical act, I suspect, releases endorphins as well. In singing, we get rewarded by both mind and body.
No one has to think about any of the above-we “know” these things instinctively. Anyone who has attended a gospel church service, for example, does not need to be told what this feels like.
In a recording session in 1985, David Bowie casually did a number of impressions of other singers in-between takes. Among others, he sang as Lou Reed, Bruce Springsteen, Neil Young, and Iggy Pop. These impersonations were recorded by producer Mark Saunders and were only released after Bowie’s death last year. Sanders recalls that the song Bowie sings appears to have been written quickly that day:
I think that Bowie probably wrote these lyrics quickly for the Springsteen impersonation which is first. I have no memory of us sitting around waiting for him to rewrite so it was probably done very quickly. If so, that’s pretty impressive! The imagery is definitely very Bruce.
The accompanying piece by Saunders is worth a read as well. During one of several sessions with Bowie, Mick Jagger showed up to record their Dancing in the Street cover for Live Aid; they did the whole thing, start to finish, in three hours.
The band was still working on different sections of the song, so there was a lot of stopping and starting, and it was as if Mick was wired to the sound because he could be in the middle of a serious conversation and when the band started playing he’d immediately start dancing and when the band stopped, he would, too. Not a full-blown Mick Jagger-on-stage kinda dance, but an on-the-spot dance that would enable him to continue his serious conversation. I thought this was awesome — like, he’s the real deal; music is in his blood and he just can’t even help himself!
The images include Bowie in concert on the Ziggy Stardust tour of 1973; the famous zigzag lightning bolt across his face on the “Aladdin Sane” cover; and the covers of his “Heroes” (1977), “Let’s Dance” (1983) and “Earthling” (1997) albums. An image from Bowie’s final LP, “Blackstar,” released days before his death, is also part of the set…
The Royal Mail said that this will be the first time it has dedicated a full set of stamps to a single musician. Philip Parker, the stamp strategy manager at the Royal Mail, said in a statement that the stamp issue honored Bowie’s “many celebrated personas.”
He said: “For five decades David Bowie was at the forefront of contemporary culture, and has influenced successive generations of musicians, artists, designers and writers.”
I would love for the USPS to do something similar for Prince. I don’t know if we have any other stamps that honor royalty. (Besides maybe Wonder Woman.)
The album collects together a selection of Bowie’s most popular tracks and singles, from 1969’s ‘Space Oddity’, through to the final singles ‘Lazarus’ and ‘I Can’t Give Everything Away’, issued earlier this year.
BOWIE - LEGACY will be available as a 1 CD and a Deluxe 2 CD from November 11th. These will be followed by a double vinyl album version on January 6th, 2017.
The album is available in a shorter 1-disc length and as a double album (embedded above). 2016 took Bowie from us, but maybe a little Bowie can help us through the rest of the year.
David Bowie died Sunday from cancer. Dave Pell at Nextdraft has a nice roundup of links, writing:
In the NYT obituary, Jon Pareles writes: “Mr. Bowie wrote songs, above all, about being an outsider: an alien, a misfit, a sexual adventurer, a faraway astronaut.” Maybe that’s why there is such an outpouring of emotion at the news of David Bowie’s death at the age of 69. Everyone feels like an outsider and Bowie made being an outsider feel more like being ahead of the curve. Today, there are people who are famous for nothing. David Bowie was famous for everything.
Bowie was also quite keen on the Internet:
Quartz calls him a tech visionary, and there’s this from a 1999 Rolling Stone article: “David Bowie has pulled another cyber-coup by becoming the first major-label artist to sell a complete album online in download form.”
He didn’t get the future exactly right, but authorship and intellectual property has been “in for such a bashing” lately and music sales are down down down:
“Music itself is going to become like running water or electricity,” he added. “So it’s like, just take advantage of these last few years because none of this is ever going to happen again. You’d better be prepared for doing a lot of touring because that’s really the only unique situation that’s going to be left. It’s terribly exciting. But on the other hand it doesn’t matter if you think it’s exciting or not; it’s what’s going to happen.”
James Murphy (LCD Soundsystem) remixed David Bowie’s Love is Lost in the style of minimal music composer Steve Reich. Here’s the video for it by Barnaby Roper:
The video is NSFW, although most of the NS-ness is of the watching scrambled Cinemax on your uncle’s cable in 1985 variety (aka datamoshing).
The song “Space Oddity” is under copyright protection in most countries, and the rights to it belong to Mr Bowie. But compulsory-licensing rights in many nations mean that any composition that has been released to the public (free or commercially) as an audio recording may be recorded again and sold by others for a statutorily defined fee, although it must be substantively the same music and lyrics as the original. But with the ISS circling the globe, which jurisdiction was Commander Hadfield in when he recorded the song and video? Moreover, compulsory-licensing rights for covers of existing songs do not include permission for broadcast or video distribution. Commander Hadfield’s song was loaded onto YouTube, which delivers video on demand to users in many countries around the world. The first time the video was streamed in each country constituted publication in that country, and with it the potential for copyright infringement under local laws. Commander Hadfield could have made matters even more complicated by broadcasting live as he sang to an assembled audience of fellow astronauts for an onboard public performance while floating from segment to segment of the ISS.
We live in a world where sending a guitar into space is trivial while ironing out rights agreements is the tough part. (via waxy)
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