The Man Who Sold the World (48 page)

 

[A45] EVERYTHING IS YOU

(Bowie)

Recorded April 1967; unreleased demo

Bowie intended “Everything Is You” as a gift for Manfred Mann, but could only persuade his friends the Beatstalkers to record it: in pop terms, the equivalent of aiming for an Aston-Martin and coming home with a Morris Minor. Like many of his compositions written for outsiders, it suffered from an extreme discordance between music and lyrics, with an ultracommercial (for 1967) melody linked to a lumberjack's lament that belonged alongside “Bars of the County Jail” [A10] rather than in the Top 40.

His skills as a pop confectionist were not in doubt, however, as “Everything Is You” opened with a radio-friendly wordless harmony line over three basic rock'n'roll chords in the tradition of Buddy Holly (whose “Heartbeat” bears close comparison). Though Bowie delivered the song with the jaded air of the John Lennon of “I Don't Want to Spoil the Party,” it had a natural effervescence that might have made it ideal for a group such as the Tremeloes. Bowie also indulged himself with a series of short, rhymed lines in the middle section that were heavily influenced by Bob Dylan.

Also written and demoed around the same time was another Bowie pop concoction, “A Summer Kind of Love” [see A54].

 

[A46] GOING DOWN

(Bowie)

Recorded circa May 1967; unreleased demo

It was not surprising that none of David Platz's Essex Music clients elected to record this bizarre exercise in avant-garde pop, which was as chaotic as some of the final recordings by one of Bowie's heroes from this period, Pink Floyd frontman Syd Barrett. The surviving performance of the song stopped and restarted almost at random, with the most basic of melody lines and lyrics (little more than a repetition of the title) interrupted by Bowie stamping his feet, hitting the microphone with his hand, or rattling any percussion within his reach. If completed and crafted, it wouldn't have sounded out of place alongside the more melodic elements of the Who's 1967 album,
Sell Out
, but in its existing form, it would probably have proved too unorthodox for even Frank Zappa to consider.

 

[A47] LET ME SLEEP BESIDE YOU

(Bowie)

Recorded September 1967;
The World of David Bowie
LP

Between the completion of Bowie's first album and this conscious attempt to create a single that would steer him in a fresh direction, a recognizable culture of British “rock” emerged from its uncomfortable gestation in the pop scene. It provided the soundtrack for the underground and counterculture, two terms for attempting to herd the era's multifarious retreats from “straight” society into a homogeneous whole. Musically, it was oriented toward the album rather than the single; it favored volume and aural assault over instantly appealing melody; it was unafraid to take its inspiration from blues, jazz, literature, folk, and beyond; and it was not concerned to limit itself into two-minute teenage melodramas. It self-consciously aimed at a slightly older, grubbier, perhaps better-educated audience: sixth-formers and students, in other words, rather than the pubescents and prepubescents who dominated the pop audience.

For the next decade, Bowie would attempt to span the divide, with varying degrees of success and acceptance. “Let Me Sleep Beside You” was a tentative step into the new world, and (not at all coincidentally) his first session with producer Tony Visconti, who exerted a major influence over Bowie's lifestyle for the next three years. It signaled its intentions with a guitar signature from jazz-rock pioneer John McLaughlin, and eschewed all the novelty elements heard on previous Deram releases. But the song still worked its way around familiar chord changes, with a dominant-tonic-subdominant progression supporting the understated chorus. Double-tracked for the middle section, Bowie held two notes (“void” and “hap-pen”) in a way that would become a trademark of his seventies records, while his strident call of “Would you?” anticipated the vocal persona that would stride out of the
Ziggy Stardust
era.

Ultimately, it was another “rock” characteristic, its willingness to step across bourgeois moral boundaries, that would keep this song from being released in 1967. Bowie later joked that his mother had told him it was indecent, but that anti-Oedipal explanation disguised the record company's misgivings.

 

[A48] KARMA MAN

(Bowie)

Recorded September 1967;
The World of David Bowie
LP

Tony Visconti's primary contribution to this charming piece of science fiction was to follow the example of producer George Martin, whose arrangements for the Beatles' “Eleanor Rigby” had shown the potential of a string section as an active, almost aggressive vehicle, rather than (as was customary on pop records) lush decoration. Lyrically indebted to Ray Bradbury's story sequence
The Illustrated Man
, in which cinematic tattoos spell out the characters' fates, “Karma Man” worked its way elegantly through an ambiguous series of changes,
*
with only the leap back to the opening D at the end of the chorus sounding abrupt. It was one of Bowie's most creative marriages of words and music to date, the anxious staccato of the verses giving way to the melancholy acceptance of the chorus, reflecting the narrator's isolation from his unseeing companions. The song might have fitted perfectly in an alternative world in which the self-conscious “progression” of rock could still have been focused on the pop charts.

 

[A49] IN THE HEAT OF THE MORNING

(Bowie)

Recorded December 1967; BBC radio session. Re-recorded March–April 1968;
The World of David Bowie
LP

“In the Heat of the Morning” represented a valiant attempt by Bowie to merge the epic ballad style of “When I Live My Dream” [A40] with the more restrained approach of “Let Me Sleep Beside You” [A47]. In its Decca rendition, which required markedly more studio time than anything he'd recorded to date, it incorporated elements of pop (the string accompaniment, and a passionate hook line, which sadly wasn't the title), progressive rock (Mick Wayne's guitar motif, and some prominent Hammond organ), and even soul (the repeated wordless vocal riff, like a late-night response to the R&B standard “Land of 1000 Dances”). If the words spilled into over-romanticism,
*
there was a passionate engagement in his vocal that cut through his verbosity. His range was stretched further than before, to a high A, and the force with which he declaimed the phrase “like a little soldier” anticipated the central sound of the
Station to Station
album eight years hence.

Deram's refusal to accept either this song or “London Bye Ta-Ta” [A52] as a potential single betrayed the fact that their interest in Bowie as an artist was exhausted, regardless of what he offered them. Despite that, Kenneth Pitt recalled that he and Bowie were still assembling material for a second Deram album. Songs such as “Angel Angel Grubby Face,” “Threepenny Joe,” and “The Reverend Raymond Brown” survive only on a tape loyally retained by Pitt. Their titles suggest that Bowie was continuing to stockpile “character” songs in the mistaken belief that they held his commercial future.

 

[A50] EVEN A FOOL LEARNS TO LOVE

(François/Thibault/Revaux/Bowie)

Recorded ca. February 1968; unreleased demo

Bowie's publisher, Essex Music, offered him several opportunities in 1967–68 to widen his portfolio by providing English-language translations of songs in foreign tongues. There were Israeli folk tunes, Belgian pop,
*
and a proven hit in the form of Claude François's melancholy French ballad about romantic separation, “Comme d'Habitude.” Although François's passionate rendition was released in Britain, Essex boss David Platz rightly considered that the haunting melody required a libretto with international potential. Bowie supplied him with “Even a Fool Learns to Love”—a phrase that fitted the space left by “Comme d'Habitude” very inexpertly. The same lack of feeling for poetic scansion was apparent throughout Bowie's lyric, which he recorded at home to the accompaniment of the François original. It was left to American singer-songwriter Paul Anka to supply a more evocative lyric, hinged around the simple theme of doing things his way. Bowie took his revenge with “Life on Mars?” [52].

 

[A51]
ERNIE JOHNSON

(Bowie)

Song cycle comprising Tiny Tim, Where's the Loo, Season Folk, Just One Moment Sir, Various Times of Day (Early Morning, Noon Lunch-Time, Evening), Ernie Boy, A Song of the Morning, Untitled Track (“If your Oxford bags are oh so thin”). Recorded spring 1968; unreleased demo

The
Ernie Johnson
suite—thirty-five minutes of comic songs and dialogue, interleaved with moments of extreme poignancy—demonstrated the extent of Bowie's ambitions during his career hiatus of 1968. It also highlighted the difficulties he found in translating his most extravagant concepts into a format appropriate for a mass audience. It was one of the most intriguing and at the same time frustrating projects that he ever conceived, full of imagination but totally lacking in coherence and structure. Only the surviving lyric sheets, which reveal Bowie's belief that the song cycle was complete (“Voilà, fini,” he wrote at the end), suggest that this wasn't a venture that he abandoned midway through its creation.

The scenario—one hesitates to call it a narrative—runs like this. For reasons unexplained, Ernie Johnson is staging a suicide party in his Bayswater flat (this West London location signifying a certain level of poverty in 1968). We meet one of the first arrivals, Tiny Tim; more guests turn up, fire questions at their host, and demand to know where they can spend a penny; Ernie remembers the women he's loved over the previous year; then he's mysteriously transported to a park, where he has a conversation with a tramp while pretending to be a TV interviewer; time passes; he wakes up in the morning, ready for the day of his suicide; and finally he visits a Carnaby Street boutique to buy a suitable tie for the occasion, being casually insulted by the oh-so-trendy staff in the process. And there the sequence ends, leaving this drama about a suicide party without a suicide or even much of a party.

Taken individually, however, the constituent parts of
Ernie Johnson
were striking. “Tiny Tim” (subsequently considered by Kenneth Pitt as a contender for a second Deram album) was an arch, colloquial
*
portrait of a gay young man, voiced by a cynical admirer. Set to the rhythm and riff of the Drifters/Searchers hit “Sweets for My Sweet,” it mixed acoustic guitar and foot-stomping percussion, with Bowie adopting the campest of vocal personae.

“Where's the Loo” mingled two and sometimes three Bowie voices over acoustic guitar, playing a motif vaguely reminiscent of the one that powered “Queen Bitch” three years later. The narrators were a series of fresh arrivals at the party, who bombarded their host with staccato questions—the overall impression being similar to Peter Cook and Dudley Moore chatting over a Syd Barrett track.

“Season Folk” marked an abrupt change of mood, as an ultraromantic solo ballad portraying Ernie's regretful memories of “Ann” (all household chores and comfortable familiarity), “Nearly Jane” (who like so many Bowie heroines of the sixties left him feeling socially and intellectually inferior), and “Jill” (a London dolly-bird with a handbag full of mind-changing pills).

Ernie met the tramp in “Just One Moment Sir,” a dialogue sequence that found the two Cockney characters bonding over some racist chat about “nig-nogs,” while the tramp repeated a charming refrain about scratching his itches. In his role as television reporter, Ernie ended the conversation by insulting his subject, after which Bowie envisaged the tramp retreating with a barrage of insults and V-signs.

Next, Bowie evoked “Various Times of Day.” “Early Morning” featured two long lines of poetry, delivered to the accompaniment of eerie, alien, heavily echoed voices. “Noon, Lunch-Time” was a snapshot of London in midsummer, with office workers filling the parks while traffic wardens searched for victims. Finally, “Evening” unfolded as if the Beach Boys had been attempting a merger of their stoned 1967 sound with Bowie's
Low
, an unearthly vision of anticipation and expectancy being built out of sonic distortion and mock doo-wop vocals.

“Ernie Boy” occupied more familiar territory as a character song, which was introduced by some poignant lines of dialogue from the star of the show: “Suicide isn't something I've always wanted to do. . . . I know who I am.” Backing vocals spelled out his name in each refrain, while Bowie delineated the grim details of Ernie's life: poverty, emotional dislocation, alienation from the world of Swinging London. Perhaps Ernie and Bowie weren't so different after all.

“A Song of the Morning” (alias “This Is My Day”) boasted the eerie cheerfulness of the Who at their most macabre, as Ernie welcomed the dawn of his final day on the planet. Reminding himself that he must wear his most flamboyant tie at the evening's party, Ernie was transported back to the fashionable boutique where he had found it, for the untitled finale—delivered by the salesman in what Bowie specified as “a trendy, gear, freak-out type feel. Cool dad.” This was the moment when several of his themes and infatuations collided: the ruthlessness of advertising, the Kinks' brand of social satire, Syd Barrett's whimsicality, the cacophony of Zappa and the Velvet Underground, the barrenness of psychedelia, and a recognition of the fine details of contemporary fashion. The song, and the suite, ended with a melee of voices and noise, before a repeated tape loop—a throwback to the end of the Beatles'
Sgt. Pepper
album, and also a preview of the finale of his own
Diamond Dogs
LP [104]—left the listener, and Ernie, marooned in limbo.