The Man Who Sold the World (44 page)

The popular taste for western-themed story songs in 1959–60, such as Johnny Horton's “Battle of New Orleans” and Marty Robbins's “El Paso,” coincided with Hollywood's epic ventures into similar areas—not least
The Alamo
, the indirect source for Bowie's choice of pseudonym. “Bars of the County Jail” was (appropriately enough for a narrative that ended in a hanging) a doomed attempt at reviving that country-folk tradition. For a rank failure, though, it was not without interest: the rowdy Cockney vocal chorus was a tentative step toward the multidubbed chorales of songs such as “The Bewlay Brothers” [51]; the schoolroom-clever rhyme of “gold/stoled” evidenced an early playfulness with language; and the midsection switch from the dominant G# to an unexpected F#6 (“wherever I
can
”) presaged the more sophisticated melodic progressions of his debut album.

 

[A11] I'LL FOLLOW YOU

(Bowie)

Recorded ca. October 1965;
Early On
CD

Built around an attractive slide down the minor scale, with a brief excursion into the major, “I'll Follow You” lent an air of poignancy to a scenario that—like the Police's “Every Breath You Take” many years later—came closer to stalking than romance. Each verse ended with a wordless harmony motif reminiscent of the Searchers' 1964 hit “Some Day We're Gonna Love Again.” But the formulaic middle section, always Bowie's weakness in his early composing career, was merely filler, while the guitar solo—one flourish, then incoherence—confirmed that this demo was designed to sell the song, not the group.

 

[A12] GLAD I'VE GOT NOBODY

(Bowie)

Recorded ca. October 1965;
Early On
CD

Bowie's continuing difficulty in turning melodic fragments into a coherent structure was acutely obvious on this generic pastiche of the British beat sound that had dominated UK pop in 1963 and 1964 but was now beginning to sound anachronistic. It opened like a maudlin retread of one of the Kinks' more lackluster early singles, “Everybody's Gonna Be Happy,” and moved through a series of sections that bore no apparent lyrical or musical connection.

 

[A13] BABY THAT'S A PROMISE

(Bowie)

Recorded ca. October 1965; unreleased

The most promising of these early demos sadly escaped Shel Talmy's archive excavations in the late eighties, and therefore wasn't included on the
Early On
CD. “Baby That's a Promise” was clearly indebted to the Small Faces (friends of Bowie's on the London Mod scene), and beyond them to the Motown sound. If this song—built around a similar two-chord transition to “You've Got a Habit of Leaving” [A6]—might have fitted into the repertoire of the Small Faces, Bowie's vocal performance was altogether less focused, flitting between the almost parodic excess of P. J. Proby and the smooth swagger of Marvin Gaye. This combination would find a more suitable home a decade later on Bowie's
Station to Station
album.

The Lower Third performed “Baby That's a Promise” at an audition for the BBC in late 1965, alongside covers of James Brown's “Out of Sight” and—reflecting Bowie's bravado, if nothing else—the novelty song “Chim-Chim-Cheree” from the Julie Andrews musical
Mary Poppins
. The BBC's Talent Selection Group delivered a brutal verdict on Bowie's potential: “A singer devoid of personality. Sings wrong notes and out of tune.” It would have been little compensation for Bowie to know that they had been equally damning about Paul McCartney three years earlier.

 

[A14] CAN'T HELP THINKING ABOUT ME

(Bowie)

Recorded by David Bowie & the Lower Third, December 1965; single A-side

I'M NOT VERY SURE OF MYSELF WHEN IT COMES TO THINKING ABOUT ME. I TRY AND LEAVE “ME” ALONE. . . . IT'S MUCH MORE OF A REALISM FOR ME TO THINK THAT THIS [POINTS AROUND ROOM] IS ALL ME, THAT THERE'S NOTHING ELSE IN HERE. IT'S ALL OUTSIDE. I PREFER THAT WAY OF EXISTENCE.

 

—David Bowie, 1973

Part autobiography, part emblematic snapshot of the narcissistic Mod psyche, “Can't Help Thinking About Me” launched Bowie's enduring pseudonym with a wry reflection that he'd “blackened the family name.” Whatever the crime—his effeminate appearance, sexual misdemeanors, or simply abandoning his identity as a Jones—his exile set up an intriguing scenario that flitted back and forth between insecurity and swaggering self-confidence. The uncertainty captured by the sustained fourth adaptation of the opening A major chord gave way to a sense of freedom emphasized by Bowie's joyous romp through the key of E,
*
only for the song to enter a cul-de-sac with the frustrating circularity of the chorus (the banality of which probably damned its commercial chances). Its brief appearance in the
Melody Maker
singles chart was, according to his co-manager Kenneth Pitt, achieved by bribery, belying the fact that its sales were meager at best.

That was scant reward for a record that, despite its structural flaws, was infused with energy and personality. Its lyrical ambiguities caught all the indecision of adolescence, with Bowie pining nostalgically for his childhood while remembering how he had hated school. His vanished Eden was a fantasy, as conceded, perhaps, by the punning reference to “Never-Never Land,” where Peter Pan and the Lost Boys were presumably repaying their hire-purchase bills. The narrative was assembled with some literary skill, launching the listener headfirst into the heart of the drama in the opening line, and spotlighting Bowie's vulnerable humanity with his girlfriend's disarmingly casual greeting, “Hi, Dave.”

This was also his first great vocal performance, rich in passion, his soaring delivery of the simple line “I'm guilty” proclaiming his pride in having escaped from the conventions of his upbringing. Like “The London Boys” [A21], written around the same time, “Can't Help Thinking About Me” leaves one regretting that Bowie wasn't commissioned to compose a concept album about teenage London life in 1965.

 

[A15] AND I SAY TO MYSELF

(Bowie)

Recorded by David Bowie & the Lower Third, December 1965; single B-side

In less convincing style than “Baby Loves That Way” [A7], “And I Say to Myself” signaled Bowie's debt to the Motown stable, while retaining the outdated British beat influence of “Glad I've Got Nobody” [A12]. The opening flourish of an octave-spanning a cappella vocal, swiftly undercut by its accompaniment,
*
was startling, but the song swiftly subsided into banality and predictability—the latter never more evident than when the chorus revisited the I-vi-IV-V chord progression of many 1950s vocal group records, while the Lower Third chanted the title with all the enthusiasm of schoolboys enduring detention after school. By contrast, Bowie's vocal oozed self-confidence worthy of Motown star Marvin Gaye.

Anyone searching for biographical resonance might be intrigued by the reference to a “playgirl,” repeating the theme from “Bars of the County Jail” [A10] of a poor boy's doomed infatuation with a rich girl, and raising the possibility that Bowie's relationship with the aristocratic teenager Dana Gillespie
*
might have sparked a class-conscious sense of inferiority.

 

[A16] DO ANYTHING YOU SAY

(Bowie)

Recorded March 1966; single A-side

Commercial failure once more encouraged Bowie to jettison his band, and within two weeks of leaving the Lower Third, he was performing with yet another outfit, the Buzz. True to form, their name was absent from his next single.

Stepping back from the self-disclosure of “Can't Help Thinking About Me” [A14], Bowie merged two Mod influences on this soul pastiche, reprising the two-chord vamp of the Kinks' “Tired of Waiting for You” against a snappy, Motown-styled track. Not that the Detroit label would ever have countenanced the recurrent dissonance in the almost laughably lethargic backing vocals, or sapped the strength of a major chord (the G, as each verse neared its end) by withdrawing its root. All Bowie's vocal bravado (plus a bubbling piano motif after the chorus) was required to keep the frail structure afloat, his boast of returning in a thousand years striking an eerie note in the light of his later obsession with the Third Reich.

 

[A17] GOOD MORNING GIRL

(Bowie)

Recorded March 1966; single B-side

“Take My Tip” [A5] had already signaled Bowie's willingness to flirt with jazz changes, and “Good Morning Girl,” dominated by the switchback ride between first and fourth chords in a Dorian G minor scale, was exquisitely tailored toward the cooler end of the Mod club scene. Besides a contemporary nod to Georgie Fame and his jazz organ, Bowie offered homage to Sammy Davis Jr. in the ease with which he scatted his way alongside the guitar solo and through the climactic rush toward the final seventh chord. Alongside such zestful exhibitionism, the dismissive playfulness of the lyric was almost irrelevant.

 

[A18] I DIG EVERYTHING

(Bowie)

Recorded July 1966; single A-side

For the first time, one of Bowie's flirtations with the jazz/soul hybrid was promoted as an A-side, though from its dominant Hammond organ to its hip drug references (there was even a “connection,” six months before the Rolling Stones devoted a song to this archetypal sixties figure) it was aimed at an elite audience of knowing Mods rather than the pop mainstream. The title (with the inevitable suffix, “man”) might have been uttered by any character in Kerouac's
On the Road
, and Bowie's imagery was unashamedly American. On “Good Morning Girl” he'd already slipped across the Atlantic with a dime, and now he met a time-check girl and a garbageman while claiming to have the Village (New York's Greenwich of that ilk, presumably) at his feet. Yet the song also visited London's Trafalgar Square, suggesting that location was less important than peer group identification. The Latin-flavored percussion was redolent of New York's Cuban community, whose music briefly became a Bowie obsession when he moved to the city in 1974. Most impressive of all was his impeccably assured vocal, whether he was lazily laying out for the organ or squeezing extra syllables into a line in the Bob Dylan tradition. None of this came close to approximating a 1966 hit single, however.

 

[A19] I'M NOT LOSING SLEEP

(Bowie)

Recorded July 1966; single B-side

In the unconvincingly carefree tradition of the country standard “She Thinks I Still Care,” Bowie devoted an entire song to declaring how little the adventures of his socially climbing ex were preying on his mind. The recurrent shift between the tonic and the minor second chords symbolized surging ambition, assuming defiant proportions amid the strident major chords of the chorus. The structure was a tribute to Motown's growing sophistication, while Bowie's vocal expressed the barely suppressed anger of contemporary American “garage-punk”
*
songs by the likes of the Standells and the Shadows of Knight. Only one element jarred: each verse closed with a theatrical swagger worthy of Anthony Newley, who might also have suggested the abrupt key changes of the “middle eight” had he ever experimented with mid-sixties rock.

 

[A20] RUBBER BAND

(Bowie)

Recorded October 1966; single A-side. Re-recorded February 1967;
David Bowie
LP

Little more than three months separated “I Dig Everything” [A18] from “Rubber Band,” yet there was virtually nothing to connect the two songs except Bowie's name. Rarely can any recording artist have conceived such a complete demolition of his existing image. Gone were the Mod sensibility, the grounding in club soul and cool jazz, the casual lapses into American slang, the frenetic attempts to cater for the sections of London's youth culture with whom Bowie felt most comfortable. They were succeeded by an Englishness located firmly within earshot of Bow Bells, a fashionable nostalgia for national culture before it was infiltrated by American influences,
*
and a concentration on fictional characters rather than episodes of real or fantasized autobiography.

Kenneth Pitt and Anthony Newley are often credited—or blamed—for this abrupt change of technique and image; Pitt for his knowledge of musical theatre, Newley as the musical Cockney with a heart on his sleeve and a smile on his lips. Pitt was merely responding to Bowie's own affection for the stage, however, in seeking to enlarge his potential audience; and Newley's distinctive tone, so often assumed to be Bowie's primary influence during this period, is audible on only a handful of songs, most notoriously “The Laughing Gnome” [A37].

More relevant to Bowie's creativity was perhaps his brief collaboration with orchestrator and composer Carl Davis, with whom Bowie was encouraged to pen songs for a musical film. Davis wasn't credited for his contribution to any of the material Bowie wrote during those weeks, but it's difficult not to believe that he was formative in teaching the singer how to construct theatrical songs and edit his own work with rigorous discipline.