The Man Who Sold the World (27 page)

That diversion aside, “Big Brother” was as expansive as its subject's powers, opening with a vocal chorus produced by a machine, alongside a Mellotron trumpet motif
*
—an immediate sign that humanity was in the shadows. Bowie compensated with a soaring vocal, doubled by a voice an octave higher that might have been on the edge of insanity—or simply trying to connect with its emotions within the restraints of Big Brother's society.

 

[104] CHANT OF THE EVER-CIRCLING SKELETAL FAMILY

(Bowie)

Recorded February 1974;
Diamond Dogs
LP

From the cry for “Big Brother” [158], Bowie's electronic soundscape led inevitably into the ritualistic “chant of humanity”—his equivalent to the “Two Minutes Hate” in Orwell's novel, in which the citizens of Oceania were required to vent their anger and contempt for Big Brother's enemies. As the final track on
Diamond Dogs
, it was an uncompromisingly bleak portrait of mankind.

Orwell's Hate began with “a hideous, grinding screech, as of some monstrous machine without oil,” and climaxed in “a deep, slow, rhythmical chant . . . a heavy, murmurous sound, somehow curiously savage.” Bowie's musical equivalent was pitched somewhere between a robotic, futuristic dance track and an inhuman assault on the senses. Every iota of sound was under stress—reversed, synthesized, phased into a distortion of reality. Eventually the recognizable instruments (electric guitar, bass, Latin percussion) were suppressed beneath a reverberating rhythmic effect that was sound itself, the aural equivalent of a barrage of strobe lightning. To reinforce the banality and repetition of this mindless convulsion, Bowie added the most skeletal and meaningless dance lyrics, before the cacophony focused into the brutal metallic rasp of mutated syllables—“bro” and “riot” merged into an aural weapon.

That almost indecipherable sound was then repeated
al fin
in an eerie homage to the pioneering minimalist music of the American composer Steve Reich a decade earlier. Reich's “It's Gonna Rain” used tape loops and time delays to create a pulsing hammer of noise from the voice of a Pentecostal preacher. Kevin Ayers, whose musical path often crossed with that of Bowie in the early seventies, had already exploited Reich's example on “When Your Parents Go to Sleep” a few months earlier, but Bowie extended the technique to confrontational ends.

 

[105] ROCK 'N' ROLL WITH ME

(Bowie/MacCormack)

Recorded February 1974;
Diamond Dogs
LP

Only one song on
Diamond Dogs
could reliably be located as a contender for the lost
Ziggy Stardust
stage musical. Its subject was the ambiguous liaison between star and audience: the pull between the ecstatic lure of the stage and the pressurized capsule of fame. Bowie triumphantly located a door marked
OUT
, as if voicing Ziggy's intention to escape the spotlight. The gloriously commercial chorus,
*
which would have guaranteed substantial success had this song been issued as a single, signaled Bowie's (and Ziggy's) awareness of the gulf between the image and reality of fame. Later in 1974, Bowie summarized the song's message to his Messiah-hungry audience: “
You're
doing it to
me
, stop it!”

The prevailing mood was anything but exuberant. Though the refrain begged for a stadium of flag-waving fans, Bowie's voice was fired with desperation to be released, while the backup singers sounded distinctly resigned to their fate. Even Bowie's baritone sax seemed to be acting as a depressive, while the gospel-flavored piano emphasized that there was at least one soul at stake. Relief came only in the smallest of signs: the gorgeous texture of the acoustic guitar, for example, filling in the pauses between lines with delicious passing chords.

The credited co-writer, Geoff MacCormack, told David Buckley that his contribution to the song was minimal: “I started fiddling around with a chord sequence [on piano]. . . . David said, ‘Hang on a minute, play that again!' So it was very much accidental. . . . I wouldn't have dreamed of sitting down and saying, ‘Oh, let's write a song together.' ”

 

[106] FUTURE LEGEND

(Bowie; inc. “Bewitched” by Rodgers/Hart)

Recorded February 1974;
Diamond Dogs
LP

Alongside his cover of John Lennon's “Across the Universe” [168], this brief prelude to the
Diamond Dogs
album ranked as Bowie's greatest creative misstep of the decade. The transitory allure of its mutant iconography and sub–William Burroughs imagery quickly palled, becoming more laughable with every passing year. Equally silly was the climactic “genocide” line, which was presumably meant to match the impact of the Rolling Stones' self-congratulatory introduction to their
Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out
live album.

Beyond the zombie chic and (Burroughs's)
Wild Boys
derivatives, however, “Future Legend” did offer some signposts, forward and back. Its surreal collage owed something to Frank Zappa's “Help I'm a Rock,” a Bowie favorite of 1966. Even more distant was the Rodgers & Hart tune “Bewitched,”
*
one of three guitar themes running simultaneously beneath his monologue. The title of “Future Legend” was suggestive in itself: the apocalypse was no longer “Five Years” [56] ahead, as on
Ziggy Stardust
, but any day now. (Looking forward to his reincarnation as a soul singer, Bowie briefly imitated the melody of the hit song of that name from 1962.) Most significant, in the context of what was to come, the sonic landscape of this track was severely distorted—a clamor of phasing, echo, synthesized sound, vari-speed vocals, and feedback, all contributing to a canvas that was rotting from within.

 

[107] DIAMOND DOGS

(Bowie)

Recorded February 1974;
Diamond Dogs
LP

The song existed before Guy Peellaert's cover artwork for the album, begging the question: who or what are the diamond dogs? They could be the canine equivalents of Burroughs's
Wild Boys
; or, as one rock journalist of the era suggested, a reinvention of the loyal beast from Harlan Ellison's apocalyptic science fiction tale “A Boy and His Dog.” Historians of science might remember Isaac Newton's dog Diamond, which unfortunately destroyed manuscripts detailing twenty years of his master's research. Those of a more metaphorical bent might recall that dogs are man's best friends, and diamonds are a girl's best friends: at least according to cliché and popular song.

Then again, who is Halloween Jack, aside from a character who lives atop a mansion that bears the name (reversed) of a major US bank, Chase Manhattan? Many Bowie aficionados credit Jack as a Bowie “identity,” following Ziggy and Aladdin, but there was little hint in this song that Jack occupied more than a cameo role. Could he have any ties to Robert Neville, hero of the 1971 movie
The Omega Man
, a futuristic man/dog/apocalypse film that was set in March 1975—“any day now,” indeed, in 1974? Or, as elsewhere on the
Diamond Dogs
album, was Bowie merely using cut-up chance and a little sleight of hand to create an appropriately fantastic but vague vision of what Alvin Toffler's 1970 best seller called “future shock”? The lyrics were certainly full of allusions, notably referencing Tod Browning's controversial
*
1932 movie
Freaks
, which had been a cult item in London's cinema clubs since finally being deemed fit for public exhibition in 1963. But why Tarzan? And why mutate Donovan's “Season of the Witch” into a bitch? Literal translation of the song did not bring you any closer to its heart, and Bowie's after-the-fact explanations were no more convincing than the spontaneous
Ziggy Stardust
myth that he related to William S. Burroughs during their meeting in late 1973.

For a real sense of civilization collapsing, the music was a more reliable guide. It began in applause, cheekily stolen from the Faces' recently completed
Overture and Beginners
live album, beneath which the scratchiest of rhythm guitars (one loud and confident, the other soft and erratic) embarked on a precarious series of slides between major chords. Eventually the track fell cacophonously into the key of A, over a drum pattern last heard on a late fifties Bo Diddley record. While Bowie happily spewed out his lyrical disconnections, he was accompanied by wildly distorted
*
backing vocals. That dislocation paled alongside what happened next: “will they come?” the strange voices asked, and in reply the drums began to play
between
the beats of the bar, as if time had come off its hinges. The track kept building from there: layer upon layer of keyboards, guitars, saxophones, dog imitations,
noise
, none of it centered around anything. So primal was its interpretation of rock'n'roll that it was easy to make comparisons—to the Velvet Underground's “Waiting for the Man” [A44], perhaps, or a loose rendition of the Rolling Stones' “Brown Sugar,” or, given that Bowie seems to have studied the work of Kevin Ayers with some care, the opening of “Stop This Train” from Ayers's
Joy of a Toy
album in 1969. Ultimately, though, “Diamond Dogs” created its own universe: ramshackle, amateurish, weirdly compelling, as jarring in its way as punk would become two years later.

DIAMOND DOGS
LP

W
hen
Diamond Dogs
was complete, MainMan promised that the record “conceptualises the vision of a future world with images of urban decadence and collapse.” That sounded like an all-purpose description, which might just as well have been applied to the
Nineteen Eighty-Four
project.
*
In fact, what was striking about
Diamond Dogs
was how consistently it avoided direct political and social relevance: the individual images that Bowie had assembled carried less cultural significance than their fragmentary state. So this was neither a soundtrack for a lost musical (although that didn't prevent Bowie from dreaming) or a work of social analysis, but an attempt by the artist to explore the impact that those themes had exerted on his psyche.
Diamond Dogs
also explored some of the fixations of the Pop Art school of the fifties—the nexus between science fiction, catastrophe, and consumerism, for example—but within an entirely personal landscape.

That dream of Bowie's, the notion (shared by Pete Townshend of the Who and Ray Davies of the Kinks) that an album needed stage or screen to assume its full, three-dimensional power, led him to boast almost immediately that there would soon be a
Diamond Dogs
musical or movie. To facilitate the latter idea, he constructed a miniature landscape and models of his intended characters in his New York hotel room, and then filmed them, all the time narrating the key elements of his screenplay. “I wanted to make a film of
Diamond Dogs
so passionately,” he revealed in 1980, when he was still hoping to issue his trailer as a videocassette. “I had the whole roller-skating thing in there. We had no more cars, because of the fuel crisis. . . . Also, I had groups of these cyborg people wandering around looking so punky.” But the narrative needed to fuel a movie was more difficult to grasp.

With three decades' hindsight, Bowie dismissed
Diamond Dogs
as “my usual basket of apocalyptic visions, isolation, being terribly miserable.” Participants in the 1974 sessions at Olympic Studios, where Bowie shared his time with Brian Eno, who was mixing
Here Come the Warm Jets
down the corridor, remember an altogether more positive artist—energized, restlessly creative, bouncing back and forth between his white Perspex guitar, his Mellotron, and his synthesizer.
Rolling Stone
magazine may have complained that the finished record was “simplistic and murky . . . muddy and tuneless,” but that was the way Bowie wanted it. To that extent,
Diamond Dogs
anticipated the sonic audacity of
Low
and “
Heroes
,” at the same time as it capsized the vessel of classic rock.

None of this was apparent at the time, and in Britain, at least, the album was widely regarded as a severe disappointment, ameliorated only by the rowdy genius of the “Rebel Rebel” [101] single. There was much talk, too, about Guy Peellaert's cover design, on which Bowie metamorphosed into a mutant canine, just as the inner gatefold of
Aladdin Sane
had seen his body morph into a creature without sexual organs. Peellaert, however, had painted the Bowie dog with a penis and balls, which had to be airbrushed into decency before the record was released. Censored or otherwise, the
Diamond Dogs
sleeve marked the end of a year of semi-affectionate sparring with Mick Jagger, who had made the mistake of boasting to Bowie that the next Rolling Stones album would feature a Peellaert design. “Mick was silly,” Bowie conceded. “I mean, he should never have shown me anything new.” And with a swagger in his step, he set off for America, his three-year experiment with the rock template fashioned by the Stones and the Beatles at an end.

 

[108] CAN YOU HEAR ME

(Bowie)

Recorded August, November–December 1974;
Young Americans
LP

Bowie's journey from rock to soul began with this sensuous and elegant ballad, written to prove his conviction that his friend Lulu was “a real soul singer.” In April 1974, he boarded the SS
France
for New York, to begin preparations for an extravagant American tour. When he checked into the Sherry-Netherland hotel, Lulu was already in residence, and the following day he produced her still unreleased version of the song, commissioning a string arrangement from Mick Ronson (their last musical collaboration of the decade). “Lulu's got this terrific voice,” he said excitedly after the session, “and it's been misdirected all these years. People laugh now, but they won't in two years' time, you see!” The session, which also allowed him to revamp “Rebel Rebel” [101] for its US single release, marked his first encounter with guitarist Carlos Alomar, who would soon join Bowie's band and remain a vital collaborator for the rest of the decade.

“Can You Hear Me” reemerged during Bowie's Philadelphia sessions in August, its intense “take it in right” vocal interplay inspiring the creation of another song [119]. Ostensibly a romantic ballad, for someone whom Bowie refused to name, it also awoke some internalized demons. As on “It's Gonna Be Me” [116], he expressed his boredom with the parade of sexual partners available on tour. More urgently, the song's title expressed a more existential fear: Could his perception of reality be trusted? Did he really exist at all? “I set out on a very successful crusade to re-establish my own identity,” he said later of this period. “I stripped myself down, and took myself down, and took myself apart, layer by layer. I used to sit in bed and pick on one thing a week that I either didn't like or couldn't understand. And during the course of the week, I'd try to kill it off.” All of which may explain the apparent—with Bowie, reality and artifice were always difficult to separate—emotional openness of his performance.

Like “It's Gonna Be Me,” “Can You Hear Me” captured the mood of southern rather than Philly soul, as if it had been cut during Elvis Presley's 1969 sessions at American Studios in Memphis. Indeed, Bowie had envisaged producing an entire album for Lulu in exactly that location. The signifiers of “southern” identity were the gospel-tinged piano, the tight and terse guitar figures, and the sense of space in the arrangement. Where Philadelphia reasserted itself was in the strings (added by Tony Visconti in London, ironically enough) and in the intimacy of the relationship between Bowie and his background singers, especially during the play-out, as the band vamped modestly over a C major chord. His lead vocal, slightly compressed and rigidly controlled in the opening verse, slowly began to betray the depth of his commitment, the edges almost cracking with emotion as he stretched out all the possible implications of the gorgeous melody.