CHAPTER
NINE:
IN THE
REALMS OF
THE UNREAL
(1994-1995)
Effect before everything.
— Philip Johnson
It’s all just paint, right?
— Nile Rodgers, on making recordings
There is a constant appeal to sense, but it remains unfulfilled, because the pieces keep moving and shifting and when “sense” appears it is transitory. Therefore, what is important is not to discover the truth at the end of the investigation, but the process itself.
— Alain Robbe-Grillet
Even his fakes were on a Titanic scale.
— Micheál Mac Liammóir, on Orson Welles
LEON
NOTHING TO BE DESIRED
LEON TAKES US OUTSIDE
SEGUE: NATHAN ADLER
SEGUE: RAMONA A. STONE/I AM WITH NAME
SEGUE: BABY GRACE (A HORRID CASSETTE)
SEGUE: ALGERIA TOUCHSHRIEK
(Bowie, Eno, Gabrels, Garson, Kızılçay, Campbell.) Recorded: ca. 1 March-summer 1994, Mountain Studios, Montreux; West Side Studios, London; (Eno “Segue” overdubs, treatments) late 1994, 4-6 January 1995, Brondesbury Villas, Kilburn; (last overdubs) January 1995, The Hit Factory, New York. David Bowie: lead and backing vocals, Korg, Ensoniq; Brian Eno: Yamaha DX7, Eventide H3000, Lexicon JamMan, E-Mu Procussion, Korg A3, transistor radio; Reeves Gabrels: guitar; Carlos Alomar: guitar (overdubs); Mike Garson: piano, keyboards; Erdal Kızılçay: bass; Yossi Fine: bass (overdubs); Sterling Campbell: drums, percussion; Joey Baron: drums (overdubs), Bryony, Josey, Ruby and Lola Edwards: backing vocals (overdubs). Produced: Bowie, Eno; engineered: David Richards.
First release: (“Nothing to Be Desired”) 11 September 1995, “The Hearts Filthy Lesson” (Virgin 7243 8 38518 2 9); (“Segue: Ramona,” “Segue: Adler,”“Segue: Baby Grace,” “Segue: Touchshriek,” “Leon Takes Us Outside”) 25 September 1995, 1. Outside (BMG/Arista 74321303392 /Virgin 7243 8 40711 2 7, UK #8, US #21.)
David Bowie’s wedding in Florence was the first time he’d seen Brian Eno in years. At the reception, they talked about work. Bowie commandeered the DJ’s system to play some current demos, pieces with “distressed instruments.” Eno was intrigued. Bowie seemed awoken from a long slumber. They agreed, tentatively, to collaborate. “We were suddenly on the same course again,” Bowie later said.
Eno had spent the Eighties making ambient instrumental albums, brewing perfumes, mulling ideas like “quiet clubs” and “research gardening,” doing a Tropical Rainforest Sound Installation for the World Financial Center, and being half of the production team that delivered U2’s The Unforgettable Fire and The Joshua Tree. In September 1989, he told an interviewer “I’m sure I could, if someone held a gun to my head, crank out a record of songs, but at this point in time I know it wouldn’t be any good, because there’s no conviction to carry it forward.” Nine months later, he was quarrelsomely working on a record of pop songs with John Cale, Wrong Way Up. Other “song” albums would follow.
And Bowie, in jigs and jags, had tried to experiment: with Tin Machine, on Black Tie White Noise and, particularly, The Buddha of Suburbia, which Eno considered strong work. Talking to Dylan Jones in 1994, Bowie said he wanted to “stop mucking about” and write for himself instead of an audience. (Axl Rose recalled Bowie saying “one side of me is experimental and the other side of me wants to make something that people can get into and I don’t know fucking why! Why am I like this?”) Pairing with Eno would strengthen his resolve. “I think my big contribution was in encouraging [Bowie] not to retreat from his extreme positions,” as Eno said of the Low period.
In the year after Bowie’s wedding, Eno was his usual beehive, releasing, producing and co-producing over a half-dozen albums, along with lectures, exhibits, and a daughter. He and Bowie would talk on the phone and mail or fax each other “mini-manifestos… so that at least when we went in [to the studio] we’d have a set of concepts that would enable us to avoid all the things we find boring and bland in popular music,” Bowie said. In late 1993, Reeves Gabrels became their translator. On tour with Paul Rodgers, Gabrels would return to his hotel after playing “Feel Like Makin’ Love” on stage to find faxes from Bowie and Eno asking, for example, how songs in 11/8 and 4/4 playing simultaneously could align on the same note.
They knew what they didn’t want to do: the fourth “Berlin” album. “We don’t want to make another record of a bunch of songs,” Eno said. “There’s got to be a bigger landscape in play than that.” They had a scatter of ideas — a musical; pieces for the La La La Human Steps dance troupe; a “heavy” CD-ROM. “Brian and I are developing something from which the user will genuinely feel he has had a full participation creatively,” Bowie said of the latter.
Each released a CD-ROM in 1994 — Bowie had Jump, where one could isolate tracks from Black Tie White Noise and watch blurry videos; Eno had Headcandy, advertised as a “mind-altering experience without the drugs,” in which users donned “prismatic glasses” to see 3-D images shifting to an Eno soundtrack. Eno soon wrote off CD-ROMs as “a typically disastrous new media adventure,” but he liked the idea of an overstuffed, incomplete album for which listeners controlled the narrative, “releasing something which says ‘here’s a whole lot of things. You sort it out’.” CDs had already killed LP listening habits — now you jumped around a disc or programmed it to play only your favorite songs. On his Nerve Net, Eno had two mixes of the same track, figuring listeners would skip the one they liked less.
“Make the medium fail. Do something that sounds like it’s bigger than something that can be fitted onto a CD,” Eno said. He expected musicians to release unfinished tracks, “something evolving on the cusp between ‘music,’ ‘game’ and ‘demonstration,’”; the musical equivalent to SimEarth. The artist would provide backdrops; the listener would be the player. Hence all the raw scenario ground up into Bowie and Eno’s 1. Outside, an album that seems like an interactive text videogame gone awry, leaving players stranded in its matrix. “I like things that tend to be endless puzzles,” Bowie said while promoting it in 1995.
Fodder
For their first recording session, “we would come in armed with fodder,” Bowie said. His inputs came from a recent immersion in the art establishment. He’d become an avid collector (favoring British painters like David Bomberg) and was on the board of Modern Painters, where he scored a coup by interviewing his Swiss neighbor Balthus. He was taking his own painting more seriously. Soon he’d collaborate with Damien Hirst and would have his first solo exhibition at The Gallery on Cork Street, London (“New Afro/ Pagan and Work, 1975-1995”). “I don’t think it’s enough anymore to make a record,” he said while making 1. Outside. “It’s a visual society now.” He’d taken to heart what Malcolm McLaren said in 1989: “Only the visual artists know what’s going on. Musicians always have to be catching up.”
From the art world, Bowie took a few shiny bits, “components that were bitten off from the periphery of the mainstream.” The work of Viennese Actionist Rudolf Schwarzkogler, wrongly believed to have castrated himself in performance (he did fall out of a window to his death), and to whose Aktions Bowie paid homage by being photographed similarly: swathed in bandages, with dead fish taped to his torso. Hermann Nitsch, who performed blood rituals using animal carcasses; Chris Burden, whose gallery works included being shot (see “Joe the Lion”); Ron Athey, for whose “scarifications” he and his collaborators had their skin penetrated, with the tissues that sopped up the blood hung like tiny flags. Bowie thought Athey’s work was becoming domesticated, given the popularity of piercing and tattooing, which suggested to him a growing paganism and tribalism among the young.
This flowed into a broader channel: Bowie’s idea that the West would binge and purge before the millennium. The peaceful, prosperous late-twentieth-century West liked blood and fear in its entertainments: serial killer movies and TV shows; paranoia soaked into everything from JFK to The X-Files; Hirst’s shark and sheep cadavers; the influence of the late fashion photographer Guy Bourdin, a developer of the heroin-chic waif look, who had posed his models like corpses. “Art murder,” one narrative concept of 1. Outside, was the natural next step, after “conceptual muggings” (“Murder may be art. If you get away with it,” Bowie said in 1995. “Like, perhaps, O.J. Simpson.”) A favorite novel of his at the time, Peter Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor, has an architect consecrating his churches with killings.
Eno regarded Bowie’s obsessions with blood and ritual with bemused tolerance. He was more interested in game strategies, creating scenarios to keep artists fresh (“role playing is essential in Brian’s life, it seems,” Bowie said. “I don’t know how much he takes it into his private life.”) For Bowie’s recording session, Eno scripted characters for musicians and engineers to play, with his usual caveat for no one to reveal their instructions. These were in the vein of science-fiction pieces he’d recently written for the Whole Earth Review. Bowie was a griot, a town crier figure (“it was my job to pass on all the events of the day… in a society where the informational networks have broken down”); Gabrels was in the house band on the third moon of Jupiter (his recollection) or in an underground club “in the Afro-Chinese ghetto in Osaka” (Eno’s); drummer Sterling Campbell was, variously, a disgruntled member of a South African rock band or playing on a moon satellite; Mike Garson was a morale booster for a “small ragtag terrorist operation” (or “just be Mike Garson”); bassist Erdal Kızılçay had to play Arabic funk to win over the father of a woman he wanted to marry (“I don’t need a letter to play Oriental stuff,” Kızılçay later sniped to Paul Trynka).
Kızılçay more played the role of Carlos Alomar on Lodger — a longtime Bowie collaborator frustrated by the art school hijinks of Eno, of whom Kızılçay once said “cannot even play four bars...cannot play two harmonies together.” It was the last time Kızılçay played with Bowie. He later wondered why Bowie, after a decade, turned cold and stopped using him. Bowie said he’d hand-picked musicians he thought “wouldn’t find themselves in an inhibiting or embarrassing position when asked to do things which musicians maybe aren’t generally comfortable with… I needed adventurers, seamen, fellow pirates.” Gabrels, Garson, and Campbell were game; Kızılçay apparently not so much, though his dismissal was more part of an overall Bowie purge of his Switzerland period — he would also never again work with David Richards, nor record again at Mountain Studios.
Annunciation
Recording began at the start of March 1994 at Mountain. Gabrels came a week earlier to reconnect with Bowie, whom he hadn’t seen since the Black Tie sessions. While they did some composing and tracking (“Thru’ These Architects Eyes” and “The Voyeur of Utter Destruction (As Beauty)” were begun at this time), Bowie more wanted to talk. He’d wade into his album. On the first day, an overall-clad Bowie greeted everyone with tools — paintbrushes, wallpaper hangers, canvases. Before playing, they would redecorate the studio. Each musician got a corner of their own. Bowie made an atelier, painting and sketching for days before he sang a note.
It was a variation on what Eno had done the previous summer with the Mancunian band James. During the day, they made a “structured” pop album, Laid. At night, in a second studio with dim lighting, they made what Eno called a “shadow album,” Wah Wah, going through lengthy improvisations. At Mountain, Eno and Bowie would create another shadow album, one without a counterpart. While Kızılçay recalled hearing demos (“really terrible… the demos just didn’t work because they weren’t any good”), the impetus was on unstructured jamming, the musicians punching in around 10am, breaking for lunch, jamming through the afternoon; five days a week, for weeks. As with Wah Wah, hour-long tape reels captured everything. Eno used “strategies designed to stop the thing from becoming over-coherent” or, worse, becoming blues jams. His “fodder” included an “archive of strange sounds,” Bowie recalled. Eno employed it whenever he heard a conventional jam, piping into everyone’s headphones loops of clock chimes, French radio broadcasts, samples from Motown tapes. So Sterling Campbell could lock into a French weather report loop, alter his drum pattern and shift the direction of the improvisation. Eno’s directions were often George Lucas-esque: “continue, continue.”
In a 3 March 1994 journal entry, Bowie wrote how happy he was that the music the band was playing had no connection to his past works, though he planned to introduce “Dead Against It” the following day to see if it could be “transformed.” The peak moment came a week later, on 12 March 1994 (or, as Bowie recalled in another interview, 20 March 1994). Standing before a table covered with pages he’d ripped from books and magazines, and sheets of computer-generated “cut-up” lines, Bowie started riffing. During this “blindingly orgiastic” session, he made a setting — Oxford Town, New Jersey, a suburban take on his Hunger City via Twin Peaks. “Placing the eerie environment of the Diamond Dogs city now in the Nineties gives it an entirely different spin,” he said. Then he sketched people who lived there: “a guy called [Nathan] Adler and this other guy called Leon and this very scary woman named Ramona [A. Stone] and there was some kind of murder thing that happened, and it had to do with the art world.”
Gestation/Abduction
Anywhere from twenty-five to thirty-five hours of material came from the sessions: what remained after Bowie and Eno sliced up the daily reel-to-reels and kept what they liked. What followed was a nearly year-long revision. Gabrels went to Switzerland several times in 1994, working on new songs, developing pieces pulled from the improvisations. Eno was doing the same at his studio in Kilburn, and in late spring-early summer 1994 there were further sessions and initial mixing at West Side Studios in London (drummer Neil Conti was called in, but apparently not for any released take).
The rough edits were of an “improvised opera” provisionally called Leon. What we can hear of this piece today are three bootlegged “suites,” each between twenty-two and twenty-seven minutes long, that were pared from a three-hour work. Gabrels said this bootleg comes from someone nabbing initial mixes from West Side in summer 1994 and later chopping them up into “suites.” So the Leon bootlegs are not unreleased edits by anyone involved in the recording, but the work of a bootlegger imposing their aesthetic ideas upon those of Bowie and Eno. This bootlegging also lessened Bowie’s interest in developing Leon further.
So now we have another, unknown author imposing themselves into an already-confusing story. It’s a bit fitting, given the nature of the project. Let’s start with the section of Leon that the bootlegger titled “I Am with Name.” What exists of it on 1. Outside is its intro, some of which was reworked as “Segue: Ramona A. Stone/I Am with Name” (with a new mix — the drums are jacked up on 1. Outside), and the first “Segue: Nathan Adler,” the latter having a different vocal and backing tracks possibly recorded as late as the sessions in New York in January 1995. The soundscape of Leon often has Kızılçay and Campbell as support poles (sounding looped at times) while Gabrels and Garson swirl around them — Gabrels ripping chords, Garson with fills and reaction shots. Bursts of applause and crowd noises are heard throughout — loops triggered in the studio when someone liked where a jam was going.
Keeping to instructions of being a reciting storyteller, Bowie cycles through words, shuffling them: laugh hotel, fishy, good-time drone, slug-male (slug-mail), an OK riot, I wanna be chrome, small friends, Oxford Town, heart-skin, anxiety descending. He has a taste for jargon from computer magazines. “She was a router and a swapper,” Adler says of Ramona A. Stone. “A fuckin’ update demon” (Demon was one of Britain’s first internet service providers). Algeria Touchshriek is “a domain name server.” Later come “packet sniffers” (a term for tools to diagnose network bottlenecks).
More voices appear than on 1. Outside. There’s a character who, four minutes into the suite, sounds as if rats are climbing over his body: I won’t eat me it will hide me he should take them I won’t tell it she can’t take them it won’t do this he said tell it he said strongest he should do this he should be there!! After Adler and Ramona A. Stone’s sections (see below), a more melodic piece marks the suite’s halfway point: “We’ll Creep Together,” sung languidly over Garson’s piano and gunshot noises. Later, a parody of the Doors’ “The End” (“this is the Chrome, my friends”) and the march of the “Leek Soldiers,” with Bowie flogging a new dance: “twist fly boy! Back front heaven erect! Twist hardware, fleece the ziplock twist hardware!” Things disintegrate: more chanting; Bowie does a ventriloquist act; Garson sounds like he’s following a possessed metronome.
Editorial Apparatus
What the bootlegger packaged as Leon’s “The Enemy Is Fragile” suite has for its centerpiece a tremendous title section — a stretch of art funk with a slamming bassline and drum pattern, whirring percussion, and a corral of Bowie voices. The suite opens with a character who didn’t make the cut for 1. Outside — a “dramatic” narrator enunciating each word as if going for an elocution prize. Backdrops include murmuring goblin voices, train noises, accordion, spasms on Garson’s piano, and Gabrels’ “Spanish” guitar soloing. After appearances by Nathan Adler, reminiscing about “a dame called Ivy, who drove around in a hearse,” and Ramona A. Stone (“I think we’re stuck in a web… a sort of nerve-net… we might be here for a long time”), the narrator returns to tout a CD-ROM, floridly rolling his “r”s. For this compilation of Wolof music, “the editors have done an excellent job… the editorial apparatus of this CD-ROM leaves nothing to be desired.”
A bassline has been snaking beneath him. Now he gives over to it, his last four words becoming a mantra. Nothing to be desired. He’s joined by a chorus whose ranks include “Laughing Gnome” voices, and they shift to another chant — mind changing change your mind changing mind changing. Ad copy as religious invocation. The chants build, driven by pounded piano chords, Bowie bracing himself (“stand by! stand by!”) until the tension breaks with a drum fill.
This segment (6:35-7:35 of the “Enemy Is Fragile” suite) was the only officially-released music from Leon, apart from the intro and character segues on 1. Outside. Titled “Nothing to Be Desired,” it was a bonus track on the “Hearts Filthy Lesson” CD single. For its release, the Leon extract was prefaced by a minute of heavily-mixed drums, a new bassline and guitar dubs that persisted through the vocal section. Barely remembered in the twenty-five years since, “Nothing to Be Desired” is a strange orphan, dressed up and cast out into the world with no letters of introduction.
The Art Murderer: Leon
The final bootlegged Leon suite was named “Leon Takes Us Outside.” All that’s been released from it are its intro, which became 1. Outside’s opening track, and a tantalizing glimpse of Bowie and Eno recording “We’ll Creep Together,” a middle section, in the album’s electronic press kit. The full piece is a series of jumps through questionable links, broken dialogues, perhaps all the dream of Leon Blank: artist, outsider, suspect, possible killer or martyr.
Bowie described Leon, the mysterious central character of the “opera” improvisation, as a twenty-two-year old of mixed race, with a rap sheet (“plagiarism without a license”). A Nathan Adler segue has Leon jumping on stage at midnight and cutting “zeroes” in objects with a machete, ripping a hole in “the fabric of time itself.” Visually (Bowie used the image of a young black man (with his own features) to represent Leon in the 1. Outside CD booklet: it was obviously based on a photo of the musician Tricky), Leon was his homage to two contemporary artists — Tricky, and the late painter Jean-Michel Basquiat. Some Tricky effects appear on Leon — ambient noise, particularly the sound of rain, and in the intro Bowie even attempted Tricky’s murmuring flow. In 1995, Q magazine asked Bowie to interview Tricky, hoping for a “Paul Weller Meets Noel Gallagher” type feature. Bowie instead turned in a batshit fictional piece in which he cast Tricky as Leon Blank and himself as Adler. They climb a building, chatting about “the War” and the “haunting Nineties,” until Tricky, out of malice or mercy, kicks him and Bowie falls to his death.
The “Leon Takes Us Outside” suite begins as 1. Outside does — Bowie murmurs dates and holidays over surf guitar and twinkling piano. A melody develops on synthesizer; guitar and piano form ranks, jabbing against it. It’s a stream of data, both American and British (Michaelmas and Martin Luther King Day; July 6th and “5th March”), as though reciting a sequence of information that will wake up a program. (Its similarity to the buzz-and-murmur opening of U2’s (Eno co-produced) Zooropa is likely no coincidence.) The suite moves outward: a section where Bowie chirps “choir! choir!” over loops of congas; a cut to Bowie singing, in plaintive voice, “the first time… that I saw the boil… put it on the neck”; a babbling Nathan Adler monologue (“as sure as you can see the nose on my face or the greys on my arm… or the foot on my ankle or the car in my garage”); an arrival in Oxford Town (“moving on the sidewalk, faces on the ground”).
A lengthy central sequence has Bowie in his Adler voice. Over an “on the four” drum pattern, Gabrels plays arpeggios, Garson adds a few asides. After some ranting, Adler settles into his story. “It was the night of an OK riot,” he recalls. Ramona Stone was there, “with her wavy hair, and her research grants.” It builds in intensity, Adler consumed with Ramona, howling her down. “I’d rather be chrome! Beauty is A. Stone!”
Scene change. Bowie now in patrician English voice, close to a Margaret Thatcher impression. A man on a balcony, watching the Leek Soldiers marching before him; a British Quisling or Pétain. He’s a remnant of some fallen order (like Adler’s, it’s another dead twentieth-century voice, a decayed hauteur associated with Merchant-Ivory films and Noël Coward records). “Friends of the trust!” (applause loop) “You’ve been a breath-filled crowd tonight… you’ve been positively… fly boys.” (applause) “As far as I’m concerned, you are all number one packet sniffers!” He begins a lullaby. “We’ll creep together… you and I. Under a bloodless chrome sky.” From there, it’s a slow retreat until the fade. Adler bows out, saying “it would end in chrome… but wait, I’m getting ahead of myself.” Gabrels plays a three-note figure that he alternates with descending scales; a synthesizer melody sounds like bottled Vivaldi. The suite closes with feedback and a judicial drum fill.
The Diary
Leon began its reinvention as 1. Outside towards the end of 1994, when Q asked Bowie to contribute to their one-hundredth issue by keeping a diary for ten days. Recording at Mountain at the time, he figured a true day-today account would be “incredibly boring.” He wondered what his private detective character would write instead. This became the “Diary of Nathan Addler, Or the Art-Ritual Murder of Baby Grace Belew” which, with slight revisions (such as Adler and Baby Grace’s last names), would be the CD booklet of 1. Outside.
After the Leon improvisations, “David...after becoming aware of what the lyric content implied, looked into it further and revised and rewrote,” Gabrels said in 2000. “The order and plot were imposed/invented by David after the fact.” Q’s deadline got things into a semblance of order. On Leon, characters are voices, moving in and out of focus. Now, like a game of Clue (or Cluedo, depending on your country), five were given distinct looks and possible motives. “They’re all based on me,” Bowie said. The Nathan Adler Diary “was a great skeleton to put the texture on… the story is the skeleton and flesh and blood on the feeling of what it’s like to be around in 1995.”
Pay the Private Eye: Nathan Adler
Speaking in an Englishman’s attempt at a hard-boiled gumshoe’s voice, Nathan Adler is the alleged protagonist of 1. Outside. His direct ancestors were Phillip Jeffries, the FBI agent Bowie played in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, and Jack Grimaldi, played by Gary Oldman in the 1993 film Romeo is Bleeding — a corrupt cop in a sexually obsessive relationship with a psychotic Russian mob assassin.
A private eye is the walking means to advance a detective story. He doesn’t know anything, so he asks questions, pokes around, stumbles upon bodies and secrets; he shades in the plot. Nothing like this happens with Adler. The more he talks, the more confusion there is. (His name was originally “Addler,” after all.) He’s not even trying to solve a murder, only determine if it qualifies as art, perhaps for tax purposes. He’s also a commercial artist — based out of Mark Rothko’s old apartment, with some previous investigation reports displayed at the Tate. A citizen of narrative in a postmodern world, Adler “looks back rather nostalgically to a time when there was a seeming order in things,” Bowie said. “He’s really rather despondent that things are broken into this fragmented chaotic kind of state.”
On Leon, Adler is more of a presence — he’s heard in all three suites, a rambling, opaque narrator whose voice is often mixed under guitar and piano tracks. The “official” Adler, as heard in his 1. Outside suites and as read in the Diary, is more terse. He even swings a bit: for his first 1. Outside segue, he talks over a minute-long funk piece that’s hooked to what sounds like Carlos Alomar’s rhythm guitar.
Wavy Hair and Research Grants: Ramona A. Stone
Ramona A. Stone is the apparent villain of the piece. She first appears in Adler’s diary in “Kreutzburg (sic), Berlin,” June 1977, running a Caucasian Suicide Temple, “vomiting out her doctrine of death-as-eternal-party into the empty vessels of Berlin youth.” She’s a punk rock “no-future priestess” (the Sex Pistols were in West Berlin a few months earlier in 1977) who helps a score of Berliners kill themselves. At century’s end she’s in London, Canada, running a “string of body-parts jewelry stores.” She’s a cyborg, a “good time drone” who says, “in the future, everything was up to itself.”
She’s also every accusation levied against Bowie in one cyborg body — vampire artist, control freak (see Angela Bowie’s typically barbed comment to Peter R-Koenig: “David wants to be a dictator, not God. His fixation is with himself and he strives to ignore his own self-loathing”), futurist fascist, a vain high priestess (“I was an artiste! in a tunnel”), someone so disgusted by aging (“a MIDI-life crisis”) that she dreams of becoming a machine. To play Ramona for the CD booklet, Bowie put his face upon a She-Hulk figure sporting a Mohawk; for her voice, he multiply-tracked himself, altering each vocal with harmonizing synthesizers, including Eno’s Eventide H3000. It was a premonition of Andy Serkis’ “Gollum” voice. On 1. Outside, the only things left untreated on “I Am with Name” are Garson’s gusts of piano — a last bit of old humanity left in the mix.
The Victim, Fourteen Years of Age: Baby Grace Blue
Every mystery needs a corpse. On 1. Outside, it’s Baby Grace Blue (renamed from “Belew” in Bowie’s original Adler diary for Q), whose eviscerated and dismembered body is found at the Museum of Modern Parts, in Oxford Town, New Jersey. It’s described in loving detail in the first section of the Nathan Adler diary, while the first character “segue” on 1. Outside is Grace’s: her last words, discovered on a “horrid cassette.”
On the bootlegged Leon edit “The Enemy Is Fragile,” Grace’s testimony runs from 8:11 to 11:00 (“the first monologue…was 15 minutes long and was very Twin Peaks,” Bowie said) — the 1. Outside version is shorter, cutting some SF jargon (“I’ve got this soul-brain patch… I got the shakers on it with this neurotransmitter”) and having a rerecorded vocal. On Leon, Bowie tries to imitate a teenage girl’s voice in an altered tone — it’s close to his phrasing on “When I’m Five”; on the 1. Outside segue, he’s sped up to near-Chipmunk pitch. What remains is Grace’s gauzy recollection of being given “interest drugs” and being allowed to listen to “popular musics,” but now “they just want me to be quiet… I think something is going to be horrid.”
“It’s Baby Grace’s voice that touches me most. Perhaps because I based her story on a girl I know very well and who’s been through a whole bunch of bad relationships in which she was abused,” Bowie said in 1995. “It seemed like she really picked that kind of man each time.” There was a tangle of other references: Laura Palmer, the dead girl at the heart of Twin Peaks, and as Nicholas Pegg noted, the Moors killers, who taped the ten-year-old Lesley Ann Downey pleading for her life. The “horrid cassette” was also now a horror trope. With tape recorders and video cameras widely available, horror films used videotaped killings (see Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer) and “found” video/audio footage to heighten realism, culminating in The Blair Witch Project, which bored Bowie after fifteen minutes.
Promoting 1. Outside, Bowie retconned Grace’s death — now she symbolized the twentieth century, her ritual murder needed for the next century to begin. It was the century turned backwards, killed in its helpless old youth.
Harmless, Lonely: Algeria Touchshriek
The last character segue on 1. Outside is for Algeria Touchshriek, a refugee from Bowie’s Sixties songs: the confirmed bachelors and elderly shoplifters, Uncle Arthur and the Little Bombardier, the Austrian shopkeeper and the sad scholar of “Conversation Piece.” Bowie also spun Touchshriek from Charrington, a junk shop owner in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, a man who leads a “ghostlike existence,” who rents a room to Winston Smith, and who turns out to be in the Thought Police, baiting the trap that lands Smith in Room 101.
Touchshriek is a seventy-eight-year-old shopkeeper who “deals in art drugs and DNA prints [and a] fence for all apparitions of any medium.” He’s described as “harmless, lonely.” Lonely, yes. Harmless? In a Leon sequence, he mentions walking near the Museum of Modern Parts, where Grace’s body was displayed. He might rent the room above his shop to a fugitive, Wolof Bomberg (a mix of Bowie’s “griot” character and a favorite painter, David Bomberg). Perhaps Grace was once kept there. He says that he “knew Leon once.” His segue, an edited/revised version of the segue in the “Enemy Is Fragile” suite (its last substantive section), opens with Edward Lear and James Joyce-style wordplay. Bowie builds Touchshriek’s empty cupboard of a world in a handful of lines. In the Leon “Enemy Is Fragile” suite, Touchshriek speaks over piano glissandi and guitar arpeggios; on his 1. Outside segue, guitar and piano whisper underneath, as if debating whether to believe him.
Twentieth Century Dies
Given its incomplete state, it’s impossible to predict how Leon would have been received if some form of it had appeared in 1995, a three-CD set to rival Prince’s Crystal Ball. It likely would have gained a cult following and, given how most Bowie albums were received by critics in the Nineties, it likely would have been ridiculed. But in 1994, for the third time in as many years, he was without a record deal, and as with Tin Machine II, he had tapes that few labels would salivate over. “Nobody would take Outside when we first recorded it,” he recalled a few years later. “It was held back for a year until we could find somebody to distribute it in America.” By early 1995, he was making more conventional songs for a more conventional album. Gabrels and Eno had pushed for some version of Leon to come out: a two- or three-CD set, issued without name or hype. “It would have been a very serious musical statement (and maybe pissed off more people than Tin Machine),” Gabrels wrote on his website years later.
The slow tempos and strange asides in Leon, their murky flow and formlessness, convey in music what the internet in 1994 felt like. You click through obscure, barely-readable sites (recall the plague of green script on black backgrounds), stalling out, landing in places you didn’t expect. It’s a stream of continuous juxtaposition. All the distorted and cartooned versions of Bowie’s voice were akin to his love of Photoshop. Creating a character once needed makeup artists, costumers, hairdressers and photographers. Now he could do it in ten minutes, sitting at his desktop.
Leon is Bowie doing comic and horrific voices over a backdrop of semi-improvised art rock. It’s one of the most “Seventies” things he ever did, suggesting he (or maybe Garson) drew on prog-rock instrumental albums like Roger Powell’s Cosmic Furnace for a backdrop. Yet it’s fascinating — truly odd, and truly different from anything he’d recorded before. Had Leon been released as a CD-ROM, listeners could have remixed the suites, bringing up the guitars and machine-gun noises, fading down Ramona Stone.
Once Leon was reincarnated as 1. Outside, it was meant to sound like 1995, Bowie said — a year pressed onto disc, like flower petals crushed in a book. He and Eno would release a new album each year until the millennium, and so chronicle the dying century in a “contextual diary” and continue the un-storyline of 1. Outside. Bowie said he’d use his computer to find out who killed Baby Grace, wrapping up the “plot” early on so he could move on to more interesting things. “One foresees at the end you may well have twenty to twenty-five different characters flying around,” he said. “It’ll be the Nicholas Nickelby of rock by the time it’s finished.” It would culminate in a performance in 1999 or 2000, held at the Salzburg Festival, directed by Robert Wilson, and starring Bowie as Adler. It would be “like Grand Guignol” and would be possibly eight hours long. “Pack a sandwich!”
A SMALL PLOT OF LAND
(Bowie, Eno, Gabrels, Kızılçay, Garson, Campbell.) Recorded: (backing tracks) ca. 1 March-April 1994, Mountain; (overdubs) May-December 1994, Mountain, West Side, Brondesbury Villas. Bowie: lead and backing vocal; Eno: Yamaha DX7, Eventide H3000, JamMan, E-Mu Procussion, Korg A3; Garson: piano; Gabrels: guitar; Kızılçay: bass; Campbell: drums. Produced: Bowie, Eno; engineered: Richards.
First release: 25 September 1995, 1. Outside. Live: 1995-1996.
Along with character segues, a few songs on 1. Outside were quarried from the Leon improvisations. “A Small Plot of Land” opens with Mike Garson on piano, parrying against a drum pattern — steady fours on the kick; rockslide fills on snare; hi-hat insistence. Reeves Gabrels nags at a pair of notes. The bass is a specter, turning up in corners of the song, as if not caring for the atmosphere.
About seventy percent of Bowie’s lyric (his estimate) came from his computer-generated cut-up program, the “Verbasizer,” likely the mother of lines like “he pushed at the pigmen.” The title was either from the French philosophers Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus (“try out continuums of intensities segment by segment, have a small plot of new land at all times”) or the pop standard “Thou Swell” (“give me just a plot of, not a lot of land”), or both.
The backdrop slowly expands as if lights are being turned on, one by one, in a house — synthesizers emerge as a faction; eventually, there’s a murmuring sea of backing vocals. Bowie plays against it, singing at times in a different key from the arrangement, building and falling, running variations (with some “Nite Flights” in it: “swings through the tunnels”).
He sets a funereal pace with two-note phrases (“poor soul,” “prayer can’t,” “brains talk”), holding the first while letting the second quickly expire (this culminates in the three-bar endurance of “poooooor,” followed by a soft “dunce”). But he never holds to this pattern for long, as he’ll extend lines or raise closing notes in pitch (“inn-o-cent eyes”). Gabrels’ solo has him digging in, while Garson rumbles along the bass end of his piano. Bowie picks his way through the debris in the closing minutes.
In autumn 1994, Eno made a mix of “A Small Plot of Land,” setting Bowie’s voice over “long, drifting overlays” of synthesizers, like battalions of machines humming. Another stripped-down mix appeared on the Basquiat soundtrack: the build to the final “poor soul” was now a humbly-sung, double-tracked closing phrase — the churchyard instead of the cathedral. Julian Schnabel, Basquiat’s director, thought it superior to the 1. Outside version. At a performance in New York in September 1995, accompanied only by Garson, Bowie followed this course, lessening his severity — a gorgeously-sung “poor dunce” swept into a Garson solo that churned up “Rhapsody in Blue.”
During the Outside tour, Bowie often put “A Small Plot of Land” dead-middle in sets, prefaced by a Beckettian monologue about the poor dunce: “he wasted all his life, he was dumb, he deserved to die and now he’s dead!” He’d sing with his back to the audience or pace in a circle. During Gabrels’ solo, Bowie walked across the stage pulling on cords, tugging down banners. Some reviewers thought this symbolized his alienation from the audience, but it was more something for him to do during the solo, and to set the stage for the following number. “Functional theatricality,” as Gabrels called it.
THE HEARTS FILTHY LESSON
(Bowie, Eno, Gabrels, Garson, Kızılçay, Campbell.) Recorded: (backing tracks) ca. 1 March-April 1994, Mountain; (overdubs) May-December 1994, Mountain, Brondesbury Villas, West Side. Bowie: lead and backing vocal, Korg, Ensoniq; Eno: Yamaha DX7, Eventide H3000, JamMan, E-Mu Procussion, Korg A3; Gabrels: lead guitar; Garson: piano, keyboards; Kızılçay: bass; Campbell: drums, percussion; Bryony, Josey, Ruby, Lola Edwards: backing vocals. Produced: Bowie, Eno; engineered: Richards.
First release: 11 September 1995 (RCA/BMG 74321 30703 2, UK #35, US #92). Broadcast: 25 September 1995, Late Show with David Letterman. Live: 1995-1997.
Another outgrowth from the Leon sessions in March 1994, “The Hearts Filthy Lesson” was released as 1. Outside’s lead-off single. Its Samuel Bayer-directed video had minotaurs, Pinhead piercings and a goth-punk Last Supper, but its essential performance was on the Late Show with David Letterman, the day before 1. Outside’s release in the US. Clad in black leather and wearing eyeliner and black nail polish, Bowie had a hostile, jittery vibe. He acted as if the audience wasn’t there, that he was singing to a mirror, then acknowledged the camera with leers and cryptic smiles. Mike Garson played a solo like a Teppanyaki chef; Gail Ann Dorsey was cool charisma.
Officially the perspective of Nathan Adler, its lyric was “made up of juxtapositions and fragments of information. [It] doesn’t have a straightforward coherent message to it. None of the album has any message; it’s really a compression of information, it’s just information: make of it what you will,” Bowie said. While “Ramona” hails from the character segues, other names without backstories, Paddy and Miranda, have as much dramatic import in the song. (“Paddy” could be a nickname for God, a fellow Art Crime detective.) Bowie once said the heart’s filthy lesson was the certainty of one’s death: “that realization, when it comes, usually later in life, can either be a really daunting prospect or it makes things a lot clearer.” The heart is a blood-sponge, a dirty waterworks, an ever-flexing muscle we’ve turned into a warm red icon to represent love. The body’s a prison and we flatter our warden.
What became “The Hearts Filthy Lesson” was taped in the March 1994 group improvisations and then left alone until Reeves Gabrels, Bowie, and engineer David Richards tailored it to a more conventional form that summer. Its foundation was a G-flat bass pedal, droning throughout, that becomes a gravity well — other sections yearn to escape (a Db minor verse, a move to Gb minor on “something in our skies,” the Fb major refrain sections), but “Hearts Filthy Lesson” ultimately sinks back into Gb major, collapsing into itself.
“We moved some of the instrumental hooks around a bit to make them more ‘hooklike’,” Gabrels said. These included a Bo Diddley bassline; piano fills in homage to “Raw Power”; a guitar riff that trills along the low E string, punctuating with quick descending runs on the D string. A dog-whistle sound on alternating refrain downbeats; waves of static; what sounds like shaken chains; a guitar so distorted it could be synthesized strings (around 3:15). Stitching includes an eight-bar Garson piano solo and a sudden sigh to trigger the second bridge (“Paddy will you carry me”). A last touch is the sibilant backing vocals of the Edwards family, four siblings who were in West Side Studio for a workshop for underprivileged children run by the heiress Sabrina Guinness.
Revising the song, Bowie cut a new vocal with a lyric that Gabrels recalled being about “English landscape painting” (one of Bowie’s “inputs” for the Leon lyric improvisations). Gabrels gently told Bowie that this would ruin the song. After restoring his original lyric, Bowie had a fantastic vocal — the snarling presence in his opening verse phrasings, the aspirant lines flooded with reverb, his bridge sequence of “Oh Ra-moan-a… if there was on-ly” that he upends with “be-tween us” while keeping the stress rhythm.
Studied alienation, gasps and mutters, a Nine Inch Nails-style video: for some critics, it was Bowie chasing a moving train while trying to catch his breath. But there was a YouTube comment on its video a few years ago, by someone who’d been fifteen at the time. “Hearts Filthy Lesson” was the first Bowie song they had ever heard, and it had freaked them out. On Letterman, there was an unease in the studio after Bowie’s performance; guest Doc Severinsen likely cracked during the commercial break “what was that all about?” Tell the others, Bowie murmured towards the end. Tell the others. There’s a generation gap in Bowie fandom between those who grew up in the Seventies and those who first knew him with 1. Outside. For the latter, this cadaverous aging creep, muttering about Ramona and blood and filthy things, was their Ziggy Stardust.
SEGUE: NATHAN ADLER (2)
(Bowie, Eno.) Recorded: ca. May-December 1994, Mountain, West Side, Brondesbury Villas. Bowie: lead and backing vocal; Eno: Yamaha DX7, Eventide H3000 SEK, JamMan, E-Mu Procussion, Korg A3. Produced: Bowie, Eno; engineered: Richards.
First release: 25 September 1995, 1. Outside.
Unlike other character segues, which hailed from the Leon sessions of March 1994, the second “Nathan Adler” segue was a later addition composed by Bowie and Eno. Bowie reworked lines from Adler monologues on Leon while speaking over similar-sounding “jungle” beats as those heard on “I’m Deranged.” Barely thirty seconds long, it’s sequenced on 1. Outside as an epilogue that, properly, resolves nothing.
THRU’ THESE ARCHITECTS EYES
(Bowie, Gabrels.) Recorded: ca. March-summer 1994, Mountain, West Side. Bowie: lead and backing vocal; Gabrels: lead guitar; Kevin Armstrong: rhythm guitar; Eno: Yamaha DX7, Eventide H3000, JamMan, E-Mu Procussion, Korg A3, Garson: piano; Kızılçay: bass; Campbell: drums. Produced: Bowie, Eno; engineered: Richards.
First release: 25 September 1995, 1. Outside. Live: 1995.
Thwarted in his plans to make “The Hearts Filthy Lesson” about English landscape painters, Bowie got his art history piece onto 1. Outside via “Thru’ These Architects Eyes.” It opens with Philip Johnson, American Modernist and brutal aesthete (the “Manhattoes” in “Goodbye Mr. Ed” jump off Johnson’s AT&T Building), and British architect Richard Rogers, in whose Centre Pompidou or Lloyd’s Building the structure’s “guts” — pipes, elevators, gas lines, cables — are exposed, turned into barriers against the street. By the mid-Nineties, Johnson and Rogers’ buildings were inescapable in Western cities.
The singer walks in the shadow of steel and glass towers built by great architects for great multi-nationals. Capitalism’s won, history’s over, so get to work. “This goddamned starving life”: digging for your gold, or the life of an artist, always having to feed on the world. The song hums with resentment, a man cursing in the shadow of Johnson’s Lipstick Building, which housed Bernie Madoff’s office at the time, or seeing Rogers’ Millennium Dome blight Greenwich. (What city is he in? Not New York, which at the time had no Rogers buildings, nor London, where there are no Johnsons. For literalists, say it’s Madrid, where you can look from Johnson’s Puerta de Europa towers and see Rogers’ terminal at the Barajas Airport.)
Which architects, though? A Christian Gnostic heresy is that the world wasn’t created by God, but by a lesser being; that man is a fallen god himself, and gnosis (“knowledge”) reveals this condition. St. Thomas Aquinas wrote that “God, Who is the first principle of all things, may be compared to things created as the architect is to things designed.” For the Gnostics, a poor architect, a bungler who left tectonic plates to crack against each other, who condemned swathes of the globe to ice and desert. Gnostic thought has darker implications: freeing the God within oneself can lead to a “liberation” from society, a ruthless capitalist or fascist life. A young Philip Johnson went to Nazi rallies in Potsdam and Nuremberg and got turned on (“all those blond boys in black leather”), penning pro-Hitler articles. “Hitler’s ‘racism’ is a perfectly simple though far-reaching idea,” Johnson wrote. “It is the myth of ‘we, the best,’ which we find, more or less fully developed, in all vigorous cultures.”
“Thru’ These Architects Eyes,” an ode to vigorous culture, has little reason to be on 1. Outside, though I assume there are theories linking it to the builder of Oxford Town, etc. But its interpretive density suits the album and it was a strong performance, particularly Bowie’s aggrieved vocal. He’s an irritant in his own song, pushing against its harmonic movements, bright A major (verses) yielding to ashen B minor (the bridges), the keys clashing in the refrains. Its weave of guitar tracks is a Tin Machine reunion — Kevin Armstrong and Reeves Gabrels, playing together one last time. Mike Garson closes with a piano figure that, if not for the fade, sounds as if it would keep slowing to a crawl for eternity.
THE VOYEUR OF UTTER DESTRUCTION (AS BEAUTY)
(Bowie, Eno, Gabrels.) Recorded: ca. March-summer 1994, Mountain, West Side. Bowie: lead and backing vocal, Korg, Ensoniq; Eno: Yamaha DX7, Eventide H3000, JamMan, E-Mu Procussion, Korg A3; Gabrels: lead guitar; Garson: piano; Kızılçay: bass; Campbell: drums, percussion. Produced: Bowie, Eno; engineered: Richards.
First release: 25 September 1995, 1. Outside. Broadcast: 14 December 1995, The White Room; 26 January 1996, Taratata; 29 January 1996, Karel. Live: 1995-1997.
With one of the most ungainly titles in the Bowie catalog, “The Voyeur of Utter Destruction (As Beauty)” is aligned in spirit with the Leon improvisations but like “Thru These Architects’ Eyes,” it was a composition Reeves Gabrels began before the sessions, presumably here given enough Eno input to justify a co-write. Its opening guitar lines are Gabrels’ tribute to Adrian Belew (see King Crimson’s “Thela Hun Ginjeet”); its clatter of rhythm tracks, tom fills against buzzing insurgencies of electronic percussion, points towards Earthling.
Another lyric from the alleged perspective of an Artist/Minotaur figure (see “Wishful Beginnings”), it’s Bowie riffing on his interests of the time: body modification, scarification, erotic torture (“the screw… is a tightening atrocity”). There’s some Scott Walker phrasing on lines like “sober Philistine.” In a very Bowie moment, his refrain hook, “turn and turn again,” honors both T.S. Eliot (see the opening lines of “Ash Wednesday”) and Christmas pantomime routines (“turn again, Dick Whittington!”: the errant servant who becomes Lord Mayor of London, summoned by the Bow Bells).
Its arrangement is devoted to propulsion: “O Superman” metronomic vocal loops, Mike Garson sketching with his piano’s treble keys. After a key change so jarring it’s as if another song has invaded, the track swirls into the maelstrom for its closing minute. (The bridge and outro sound so overcooked that it could possibly be an engineering error.) Performances of “Voyeur” in the 1995 tour often bettered its studio take, with Gail Ann Dorsey’s vocals as undercurrent, Gabrels and Carlos Alomar swapping guitar lines, and Garson and Bowie going further upriver.
GET REAL
(Bowie, Eno.). Recorded: ca. March 1994-January 1995, Mountain, Brondesbury Villas, West Side, Hit Factory. Bowie: lead and harmony vocal, Korg, Ensoniq; Eno: Yamaha DX7, Eventide H3000, JamMan, E-Mu Procussion, Korg A3; Gabrels, Alomar: guitar; Kızılçay or Fine: bass; Baron: drums. Produced: Bowie, Eno; engineered: Richards.
First release: 22 September 1995, 1. Outside (Japanese ed., Arista BVCA-677).
Bonus track and B-side “Get Real” is an odd leftover from the Leon/1. Outside sessions. Its guitar tracks suggest Bowie’s unlamented mid-Eighties while its melancholy bridges, the bass tolling through the chord changes, reflect his late Sixties and predict ‘hours…’ and Toy. With a lyric that started life through his Verbasizer (a sheet dated 6 March 1994, included in the David Bowie Is exhibit, has Bowie’s handwriting over paragraphs of computer-generated text), it’s a modest mid-life crisis (“you can’t stop meaningful teenage cries/from deep behind fifty-year-old eyes”), with Bowie asking the kids what’s happened while he’s been holed up in Switzerland.
WISHFUL BEGINNINGS
(Bowie, Eno.) Recorded: ca. summer-December 1994, Mountain, West Side, Brondesbury Villas. Bowie: lead vocal, Korg, Ensoniq; Eno: Yamaha DX7, Eventide H3000, JamMan, E-Mu Procussion, Korg A3. Produced: Bowie, Eno; engineered: Richards.
First release: 25 September 1995, 1. Outside.
One of the few 1. Outside songs never performed live, “Wishful Beginnings” was even cut from some reissues (where deleting “Too Dizzy” was an act of criticism, axing the 5:09 “Wishful Beginnings” was done for a more practical reason — room was needed on a lengthy CD for the “Hallo Spaceboy” remix, a minor hit). Its lyric was the perspective of an “Artist/Minotaur” figure that Bowie made the occasional gesture at explaining. He once said it was one of his Diamond Dogs reincarnated, and he made postcard drawings of a minotaur for a 1994 exhibit in London (“Minotaur Myths and Legends”), one showing a muscular beast-man grasping his enormous cock. That same year he made “We Saw a Minotaur” (by “Joni Ve Sadd”), an art piece about an unfortunate play performed only once at the Globe Theatre in 2002 due to the “hideous construction playing the part of the Minotaur” and, in a foreshadowing, “the density and complexity of the script, written in part by a Macintosh Quadra 650 computer.”
The world of 1. Outside is a bloody one. Fourteen-year-old girls are gutted for art; Mark Rothko slashes each arm below the elbow and is found lying in a pool of his blood. The young pierce and ink themselves. There are severed limbs, diamond-studded umbilical cords, intestine webs, bloodstained tissues strung on wires. The galleries have casts of heads filled with blood, and the bisected corpses of cows. Bowie called it modern paganism, going “back to the Romans and their drinking the blood and eating the meat of the bull to enable us to go forward into the new era… a kind of appeasement to the gods to allow us to go into the next millennium.” Some lines in “Wishful Beginnings” suggest the Minotaur’s performing a sacrificial ritual on himself (“I’m no longer your golden boy… flames burn my body”).
There was a shallowness to 1. Outside, with Bowie taking concepts from art pieces, yanking them out of context, reducing them to gore. He deconsecrated works: for instance, turning Ron Athey’s scarifications, with their sacramental reflections on AIDS and its ravages of the body, into little more than tongue-piercing or a knock-off Silence of the Lambs scenario. He’d always worked this way, true, but it used to be more fun. His need for an artistic pedigree, to give his stolen goods some weight, bogged down his lesser songs. Imagine an exploitative comic book with pages of footnotes.
“Wishful Beginnings” has a wintry soundscape. Bowie sings over a few loops, including a “chime,” a thudding kick sample on every other downbeat, a three-note “death rattle” and a thwacked tambourine. At first, the only harmonic structure is a synthesizer chord synced to the kick sample. His mostly single-tracked voice flutters around the mix. Patterns alter, gather dimension — more melodic fragments; the tambourine loop lengthens and shortens. By the midpoint, where Bowie’s at his gentlest (“we flew on the wings”), a few tiny melodies escape via keyboard, but the track ends as it began.
It was a dark revision of Lou Reed’s “Make Up” (compare Reed’s “you’re a slick little girl” with Bowie’s “you’re a sorry little girl”): where Reed had warmly detailed a makeup ritual, Bowie describes someone as meat readied for the blade or, in its best-case scenario, the submissive in a BDSM relationship. His greatest debt on “Wishful Beginnings” was to himself: his 1967 song “Please Mr. Gravedigger,” another horror piece with a spoken-sung melody and scant harmonic grounding. “Are you going to re-record ‘Please Mr. Gravedigger?’” a fan asked in a 1998 web-chat. “I did already,” Bowie said. “It was called 1. Outside.”
THE MOTEL
Recorded: ca. March-summer 1994, Mountain, West Side. Bowie: lead vocal; Gabrels: lead guitar; Garson: piano; Eno: Yamaha DX7, Eventide H3000, JamMan, E-Mu Procussion; Kızılçay: bass; Campbell: drums. Produced: Bowie, Eno; engineered: Richards.
First release: 25 September 1995, 1. Outside. Live: 1995-1997, 2003-2004.
As recording sessions for 1. Outside kept on, so did Bowie’s role-playing. A fresh idea: he’d create the album that Scott Walker never would. Walker had vanished after 1984’s Climate of Hunter; his reputation had preceded him. He was a critical nullity in the Eighties, particularly in his birth country, where he was mostly out of print: none of his records are listed in the 1983 Rolling Stone Record Guide and various editions of the Trouser Press guides; he merits a single line in a brief Walker Brothers entry in the Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock ‘n’ Roll. In Britain, the Sunday People offered a reward for Walker sightings, as if he was a Yeti.
Walker’s “The Electrician” still fascinated Bowie and Eno, fifteen years on (see “Nite Flights”). Eno called it a lost future of music; he said he was frustrated to hear new bands content to rip off Roxy Music instead of moving beyond what Walker had done in 1978. “The Electrician” opens with massed atonal strings, a tolling bass, Walker’s groaning baritone; it shifts to a section where Scott and John Walker harmonize; it cuts to a flight of strings and Spanish guitar. These shifts have no dramatic impetus; the song resets itself each time it moves. It’s tropical extremes of mood, from violation (the torturer drills through the spiritus sanctus) to resistance (whose dream is the strings-and-guitar idyll? the torturer? the person on the rack?). Walker’s opening lines are set in the torture chamber, and the Ink Spots could have sung them: Baby, it’s slow/when lights go low.
Whenever asked for a list of favorite songs, Bowie cited “The Electrician,” but he never tried to claim it on stage as he did another favorite/obsession, “Waiting for the Man.” On 1. Outside he channeled “The Electrician” into a new song, a centerpiece for a centerless album.
“The Motel” opens in the lobby. Murmurs of conversation; in one corner, an effusive pianist, a secretive bassist. A guest wanders over. “For we’re living in the safety zone…” Everything’s provisional, fluid. A motel is a nowhere, a purgatory, a vestibule between reincarnations. Chords blur from F major to F-sharp, Bowie often moves between singing A or B-flat notes. A brief interlude: dancing piano, fretless bass figures. Drums kick in. Bowie sharpens his tone, singing “there is no hell,” a line he took from “there’s no help” in “The Electrician” and what he’d seen on a Gugging Clinic wall: THIS IS HELL (see “Outside”). The pianist becomes grandiose. Bowie closes the refrain with his highest notes yet: “it’s lights up, boys.” A body twists in an electric chair; inmates are rousted from their beds.
Another verse, but upon the “there is no hell” hook, Bowie keeps on, elaborating his melody, hitting a high E-flat as the song hardens into E-flat major. He gave “The Motel” a grand finale, a Judy Garland spotlight moment, with vocal pyrotechnics for the benefit of a clunky last verse: “re-exploding you… like everybody doooo.” The motel lobby becomes a Vegas stage; Bowie ended “The Motel” as he had “Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide.”
While Bowie was making his Scott Walker sequel, so was Walker. Learning that Walker would release a new album, Tilt, in 1995, Eno wrote in his diary that he feared Tilt “could occupy much of the territory of Bowie’s” and, if so, “Bowie won’t release those things and, as time passes, more will get chipped away or submerged under later additions.” Bowie got an advance copy of Tilt. He phoned Eno, relieved: it sounded nothing like their album. When first played in the NME offices, Tilt’s opener, “Farmer in the City,” reportedly caused staffers to beg for someone to yank the CD. On “The Cockfighter,” Walker sings over what sounds like a rat gnawing through paper; later, a horn sounds like a horse being slaughtered. Bowie’s favorite album of the year, Tilt was the record 1. Outside could never be. Nearing its twenty-fifth anniversary, Tilt still stands apart from its time; the future hasn’t risen to meet it yet.
“He’s true to himself, whereas other artists are traitors to themselves,” Bowie said of Walker in 1995. For the rest of his days, Bowie used Walker as a symbol of the uncompromised artistic life, as a boundary rider off in the wilderness, from whose sporadic reports he’d chart his own future movements (see “Heat”).
NOW OUTSIDE
(Bowie, Armstrong.) Recorded: ca. summer 1994, Mountain, West Side; January 1995, Hit Factory. Bowie: lead and harmony vocal, Korg, Ensoniq; Eno: Yamaha DX7, Eventide H3000, JamMan, E-Mu Procussion, Korg A3; Gabrels: lead guitar; Alomar: rhythm guitar; Garson: keyboards, piano; Kızılçay or Fine: bass; Campbell or Baron: drums. Produced: Bowie, Eno; engineered: Richards.
First release: 25 September 1995, 1. Outside. Live: 1989 (“Now”), 1995-1997 (“Outside”).
Many Bowie albums come from multiple revisions: 1. Outside was an extreme case. Things kept being troweled on. One was an interest in “outsider art.” There wasn’t much of this on Leon, which was more a pulp of the internet, CD-ROMs, millennial terrors, and body artists. But in September 1994, Bowie and Eno visited the Maria Gugging Psychiatric Clinic, which housed patients with artistic inclinations in a wing where they could paint walls, couches, even trees. Bowie sketched the artists and their work; Eno recorded conversations.
Outsider art, a term coined by Roger Cardinal for a 1972 survey, was the focus of an exhibit, “Parallel Visions: Modern Artists and Outsider Art,” that had run at museums near Bowie’s homes: the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in late 1992, and Kunsthalle Basel in summer 1993. Exhibited artists included Karl Brendel, who modeled figures he made from chewed bread; Carlo Zinelli, who graffitied hospital walls with bricks and nails; J.B. Murray, who drew “spirit script” on bank calendars and receipts; Martin Ramirez, who made collages on paper scraps that he glued together with mashed potatoes.
What united them, the institutionalized and the obscure, was being “compulsive visionaries,” argued exhibit curator Maurice Tuchman. An outsider artist had extreme focus, fixating on repetitions of patterns or structures, as if compelled to flush an image from their mind and trap it on paper. Alfred Kubin, an early advocate, admired their work’s “secret regularity… these wonders of the artists’ minds that come from the depth outside all thoughtful thinking and make you happy just looking at them.” During their time at Gugging, Bowie and Eno met artists including August Walla, who had painted a room floor-to-ceiling with mythical beings and unknown alphabets. “We felt an exhilaration watching them work,” Bowie said. “None of them knew they were artists. It’s compelling and sometimes quite frightening to see this honesty. There’s no awareness of embarrassment.”
He’d always been taken with obscure, prickly, even possibly deranged musicians — Wild Man Fischer, Biff Rose, The Legendary Space Cowboy, Vince Taylor — and bohemians like Brion Gysin (see “Hallo Spaceboy”) and William S. Burroughs. “These ‘outside’ people were really the people I wanted to be like,” Bowie said. “I derived so much satisfaction from the way [Burroughs] would scramble life and it no longer felt scrambled reading him.” He thought they had greater access to the “realms of the unreal,” as titled the outsider artist Henry Darger’s fifteen-thousand-page opus. Bowie’s creative process was one of trying to outfox his mind, setting snares to push him outside his parameters. He rarely needed such tricks for composition — his chord progressions, those of a self-taught experimentalist, could be strikingly odd, harmonically “erratic” yet following a sound internal logic. It was elsewhere, in his lyrics and structuring concepts, where he struggled with overcoming self-awareness. 1. Outside, in its final form, is a would-be “outsider” work — the dense amounts of cryptic detail, the indecipherable symbology of the liner notes, the sense of some overarching structure that the audience can’t quite discern. It was a move away from the liminal, flowing Leon suites towards a more clotted-up, hermetic work. Eno, hearing the final album, noted this: “strong, muddy, prolix, gritty, Garsonic, modern (self-consciously, ironically so)… Some acceptable complexity merging into not-so-acceptable muddle… The only thing missing: space — the nerve to be very simple. But an indisputably ‘outside’ record. I wish it was shorter.”
Its title track, however, didn’t come from a group improvisation, wasn’t generated via Eno’s role-playing scenarios. It was a rewritten Tin Machine song from 1989, originally called “Now.”
Bowie kept potentially strong songs on retainer, holding off on finishing pieces until the mood was right (see “Bring Me the Disco King”). Written by Bowie and Tin Machine rhythm guitarist Kevin Armstrong, “Now” was played twice during the band’s 1989 tour (they may have cut a studio version as well). It had developed from Bowie’s reworking of “Look Back in Anger” with Armstrong and Gabrels, being bookended with similar guitar barrages. Its downtempo verses and bridges, presumably in part Armstrong’s work, hung on an ascending four-note bass hook. Bowie’s lyric was so threadbare — “I need your love! Talk about love!” — that he apologized for it before the song’s live debut (all he kept for “Outside” was the “now… tomorrow…
yesterday” hook, which may derive from a line in Steven Berkoff’s West (“it’s not tomorrow any more/ it’s now/ the readiness is all”).)
The 1995 “Outside” is colder, more reserved. It holds back and never quite climaxes — Bowie doesn’t move to his higher registers until the second bridge, doesn’t double-track his voice until the third verse. (On stage, he sang the first verses and bridges seated, rising to his feet for the climactic section; by 1997, he’d turned the song over to Gail Ann Dorsey.) Its harmonic base is two stereo-panned guitar volume swells that parallel the ascending bassline. In the last bridges Gabrels shadows the bassline, then solos off it. The drums are tremendous: the little fill to bring in the bass hook; the subtle shifts in patterns to trigger the bridges; the widescreen tom fills at 2:38. The percussion roster includes tambourine in the first verse, chimes and congas in the second, Eno squiggles throughout.
The album’s grandmaster of ceremonies, “Outside” would be a statement of purpose for Bowie’s embattled mid-Nineties tours. It was his hard commitment to the present; he wasn’t singing “Space Oddity” tonight. “Now… not tomorrow,” he’d sing. “It happens today.”
WE PRICK YOU
(Bowie, Eno.) Recorded: 13-16 January 1995, Hit Factory. Bowie: lead and backing vocal; Eno: Yamaha DX7, Eventide H3000, JamMan, E-Mu Procussion; Alomar: rhythm guitar; Fine: bass; Baron: drums. Produced: Bowie, Eno; engineered: Richards.
First release: 25 September 1995, 1. Outside. Live: 1995-1996.
In mid-January 1995, Eno flew to New York for more work on an album he felt might never be done. Sessions booked at the Hit Factory were meant for overdubs, but Bowie showed little sign of wanting to refine his songs. In his journal, Eno wrote that upon arriving in New York, Bowie called him “full of tangential ideas, the kind of ideas people usually have when their lyrics aren’t ready… no mention of actually finishing the album, for which I’m ostensibly here.”
Eno wanted “to leave here with some kind of result, not just more promising bits and pieces, all half-finished.” On the first day of recording, devoted to a track called “Dummy” (see “I’m Afraid of Americans”), he went over what he and Bowie had recorded in 1994. It sounded “underdisciplined… rambling, murky, over- and over-dubbed — things just left where they happened to fall.” He blamed forty-eight-track consoles, which had too many options. If Bowie was the director who kept shooting new footage, Eno was the film editor who had to get a work print out of it.
On the afternoon of 13 January 1995, Eno started a new track based on the drum programming he’d done for “Dummy.” By the following day, “Robot Punk,” whose refrain went “we fuck you — we fuck you” (“[it] leaves something to be desired,” Eno wrote), was coming together quickly. Eno created new drum loops and added synthesizer colors like “marimba” fills and a four-note riff slightly distorting towards the close. By 16 January, the track was “pretty well finished” — Bowie had cut his vocals and Carlos Alomar, for refrains, played a hustling guitar line worthy of the Miracles’ “Love Machine.” Eno was amazed: “he plays like a kind of liquid, always making lovely melodies within his rhythm lines.”
“We Prick You” (its final title) moves from modest beginnings (a bassline over two drum loops, mixed far left and right; soon joined by drum machine and two main keyboard tracks) to become baked in hooks: loops of “ooohs” high in the mix in later verses; low counter-melodies (“shoes, shoes, little white shoes“); a righteously-sung “tell the truth!” and the title line, repeated thrice like an anathema, pummeled by snare fills. Bowie wanted Camille Paglia for the “you show respect, even if you disagree” vocal loop, but had to do it himself, his voice sped up to sound like an officious house elf (he called Paglia’s office, but she thought it was a joke and never responded). On stage Bowie responded to the voice as if being annoyed by God; he’d talk back and shake his head.
His lyric shares the density of the arrangement: his refrain lines alone are a dirty joke; a Merchant of Venice nod (“if you prick us, do we not bleed?”); a prosecutor in the trial of Leon Blank (“tell the truth!”); a reference to the alchemical symbol of Christ being pierced with a spear, and to body scarification, inspired by Ron Athey’s Four Scenes in a Harsh Life, where Athey carved patterns into the flesh of another performer. A compression of scattered ideas into a tight ball of sound, “We Prick You” is a minor masterpiece.
I’M DERANGED
(Bowie, Eno.) Recorded: ca. late 1994, Mountain; January 1995, Hit Factory. Bowie: lead and harmony vocal, keyboards; Eno: Yamaha DX7, Eventide H3000, JamMan, E-Mu Procussion; Gabrels: lead guitar; Alomar: rhythm guitar; Garson: piano; Fine: bass; Baron: drums. Produced: Bowie, Eno; engineered: Richards.
First release: 25 September 1995, 1. Outside. Live: 1995, 1997.
Another song inspired by Bowie and Eno’s trip to Gugging Clinic, “I’m Deranged” references an artist inmate who called himself the Angel Man, who told Bowie “I was exactly who I was up until the 5th of February 1948, and then I became an angel… it was just after lunch.” Bowie said the inmate “believed that his old person disappeared, and his angel took over him. He was totally reborn at that moment.”
Bowie puréed a lyric via his Verbasizer software, then improvised more, possibly on the mike (“be real” becomes “before we reel”; “blonde” summons “beyond”). Its perspective is of someone with high hopes of growing mad (“I’d start to believe… if I were to bleed,” he sings, gently extending his long eees), while some lines suggest Bowie was reading John Rechy’s City of Night again (“cruise me baby,” “the fist of love”). Though assigned to his Artist/Minotaur figure (see “Wishful Beginnings”), any attempt to fit “I’m Deranged” into the 1. Outside storyline would devote more effort than its composer did.
Making the track was a grueling process. Reeves Gabrels worked for two days on “serious orchestrated guitar stuff” that got scrapped; Carlos Alomar recalled a three-part harmony track later removed. Eno didn’t think much of “I’m Deranged” when he turned to it on 17 January 1995 at the Hit Factory. “A poorly organized song with no meaningful structure. It goes something like ABBBBBBBBBCBBBBBBBB but the hook is A. I’ve had relationships like that, where the bit you liked never happens again.” It embodied the “lack of rigour” of some 1. Outside material and by lunch he gave up, not referencing the song again in his diary. Bowie apparently carried it to the finish line in later sessions that month.
With an F minor progression that’s a long, winding path before landing on the home chord, “I’m Deranged” was indebted to Eno for its would-be drum ‘n’ bass rhythms, though it also owes something to Bowie and Nile Rodgers’ “Real Cool World” (there’s even “Billie Jean” in its opening four-note synthesizer hook). The arrangement is both propulsive and tinny — the drum machines sound like video game effects at times; piano interludes seem generated from a sampler track labeled “Off-Kilter Mike Garson Solo.”
Bowie considered it a strong song, “with a really intelligent use of jungle… that sort of quasi-Arabic melody line and the really rather disturbed words.” Its strongest element is his vocal. There’s a cool precision in his opening lines — by the second verse, he’s weighing each word, miring himself in syllables, building to his long, lovingly strangled “deraaaanged”s. It suited the title sequence David Lynch had it score on Lost Highway — a driver’s-eye shot of a cranked-up stream of highway center lines, a loop of auto-motion.
HALLO SPACEBOY
(Bowie, Eno.) Recorded: (backing tracks, loops) summer 1994, Mountain; 17-20 January 1995, Hit Factory. Bowie: lead and backing vocal; Gabrels: lead guitar, loops, textures; Alomar: rhythm guitar; Eno: Yamaha DX7, Eventide H3000, JamMan, E-Mu Procussion; Garson: keyboards; Fine: bass; Baron: drums. Produced: Bowie, Eno; engineered: Richards.
First release: 25 September 1995, 1. Outside. Broadcast: 2 December 1995, Later with Jools Holland; 14 December 1995, The White Room; 20 January 1996, Det Kommer Mera; 26 January 1996, Taratata; 29 January 1996; Karel; 19 February 1996, Brit Awards; 29 February 1996, Top of the Pops; 27 June 2000, Bowie at the BBC Radio Theatre. Live: 1995-1997, 2000, 2002-2004.
Brion Gysin was a poet, historian, mystic, painter, filmmaker, musician, inventor (of “the Dreamachine,” a trance-inducing light-box). Born in Britain during World War I, Gysin lived in New York, where he was a ship welder and Broadway set designer; Tangier, where he ran a restaurant whose house band was the Master Musicians of Joujouka; and Paris, where he died in 1986.
His greatest legacy was his cut-up method, in which he applied techniques from painting and film (collage and montage) to the assembly of words. After slicing through a stack of newspapers, he’d make poems from the filleted strips of paper. For Bowie, it became his standard method for writing lyrics.
Gysin’s was an unrefined creativity, compared to the austere order of a Scott Walker. For Gysin, being a dilettante was a noble calling. Life’s a game, not a career, he often said. Bowie’s “Hallo Spaceboy” is, among many things, a eulogy to Gysin, an architect of 1. Outside: a tribute to a force of motion stilled by death. “Your silhouette is so stationary… Don’t you want to be free?” “Moondust will cover you” references a line in Gysin’s The Process: “I look for my guide to find him, too, buried in moondust.”
“Hallo Spaceboy” opens with a tornado on the horizon — a swirl of synthesizers, a chopping loop mixed right, a distorted guitar line. Sixteen bars in: a cannonade of electronic beats and crushing drums, undergirded by a low-mixed bassline and bursts of guitar. If the “Moonage Daydream” guitar hook was glam in miniature — dream this: go! — the hook of “Hallo Spaceboy” finds you out, hunts you down. In refrains, the guitars spit and tear from B major to G major chords (the main harmonic sequence, along with a brief A major progression in the bridges). Before the second refrain, Bowie holds off the onslaught for a few bars, whispering “moondust” before the door’s kicked in. The rest is counter-rhythms: ping-ponged electric guitars; a mousechase across piano. Bowie’s muttered syllables work as crash cymbals.
One starting point was Eno’s “Third Uncle” (esp. as covered via Bauhaus); another was the Swiss industrial band the Young Gods, particularly on T.V. Sky (1992): see “Skinflowers,” with its buzz-swaths of guitar (a hollered “outside!,” too) or the juxtaposition of guitar loops and percussion on “Dame Chance.” Another source was closer to home. During the second 1. Outside recording session in Montreux in summer 1994, Reeves Gabrels wrote and recorded an ambient instrumental piece. Bowie then recited some lines over it, including “moon dust,” which Gabrels said came from a “book of poems” Bowie was reading in the studio (possibly this was his slight misremembering of Gysin’s The Process). After that “I did a bunch of long sustain guitars thru a vocal formant patch from an Eventide 4000 signal processor (which makes it sound like a human voice) and I used a slight variation on the ava rava (sic) middle eastern scale,” Gabrels wrote on his website in 2003. On a subsequent visit to Switzerland, Gabrels asked about the track, provisionally called “Moondust,” but Bowie said “he didn’t feel there was anything special going on with that piece and that he’d pretty much forgotten about it.”
However, he had apparently recalled “Moondust” by the New York sessions in January 1995. On 17 January, he and Eno broke the song down “to almost nothing,” as Eno wrote in his diary. “I wrote some lightning chords and spaces…and suddenly, miraculously, we had something.” Bowie came up with the “hallo spaceboy” vocal hook, Eno added “a bass sax thing” and a bass part that he described as “very African, with wide, bouncing intervals — pygmy anarchism with Lagos Mack-truck weight.”
Upon hearing “Hallo Spaceboy,” Gabrels noted its similarity in harmonic structure to “Moondust,” but Bowie had no interest in sharing credit with anyone but Eno. Gabrels, who knew when to pick his battles, let it drop. But in 2003, he noted that “Hallo Spaceboy” “follows the chord changes of my original ‘ambient’ track which was dismissed as just being ‘ambient’ and not really a song or contributing to the existence of ‘Spaceboy’.” For Bowie, “Hallo Spaceboy” was a song that he’d alchemized from an unpromising ambient piece that he’d then conveniently forgotten about.
God can be an ironist: “Hallo Spaceboy” was itself nicked from Bowie. When the Pet Shop Boys asked to remix “Hallo Spaceboy,” Bowie agreed, as he let the world and his wife remix his songs. But upon learning Neil Tennant would sing new, “Space Oddity”-connected lyrics, Bowie had doubts. 1. Outside was meant to be his pre-millennial tension record and here was bloody Major Tom/Starman again. (“I only used [the word] ‘space’ — there’s nothing about it that’s even remotely like ‘Space Oddity,’ frankly,” Bowie said in a press conference in 1995.) In an inspired move, Tennant cut up the lines of “Space Oddity” Gysin-style, with words put into new alliances: “Ground to major bye-bye Tom/dead the circuit countdown’s wrong/Planet Earth is control on?” The remix shifted the song’s axis: “this chaos is killing me!” became the voice of an astronaut strung out in heaven.
Issued as 1. Outside’s third single, the remix nearly broke into the UK Top 10. On British TV performances, Tennant calmly sang while Bowie thrashed around, as if in a zoo exhibit. Bowie would spend the last decade of his performing life trying to get “Hallo Spaceboy” back under his thumb, sometimes succeeding (three drummers pounded the song into submission at his fiftieth birthday concert), sometimes acting as if he was covering it.
I HAVE NOT BEEN TO OXFORD TOWN
(Bowie, Eno.) Recorded: 17-20 January 1995, Hit Factory. Bowie: lead and backing vocal; Gabrels: lead guitar; Alomar: rhythm guitar; Eno: Yamaha DX7, Eventide H3000, JamMan, E-Mu Procussion; Fine: bass; Baron: drums. Produced: Bowie, Eno; engineered: Richards.
First release: 25 September 1995, 1. Outside. Live: 1995-1996.
Abandoning “I’m Deranged,” Eno started making a track from scratch. He’d clear the air instead of overdubbing another half-finished song. As Bowie wasn’t in the studio, Eno worked up a rhythm piece with Carlos Alomar and Joey Baron, appropriately titled “Trio.” A basic G major progression, its verses kept on G, a refrain shifted between G and C major, a bridge brought in the dominant chord, D major. The following evening, Eno embellished “Trio” so that by the next morning, 19 January 1995, he had a new track for Bowie to consider.
Though frustrated by Bowie, Eno was awed by how quickly his collaborator could move. “He’s the hunter to my pastoralist — he hangs around for a long time and then springs for the kill.” In a half-hour that morning, Bowie wrote and cut his vocal for “Trio,” renamed “Toll the Bell” and finally “I Have Not Been to Oxford Town.” He began writing during the first playback, then asked for a replay and for five tracks to be cleared for vocals. As Eno wrote in his diary, “he went into the vocal booth and sang the most obscure thing imaginable — long spaces, little incomplete lines.” His second vocal track complemented the first, the third posed a “‘question’ to which tracks one and two had been the answers,” and he devoted the last two to his top melody. “He unfolded the whole thing in reverse, keeping us in suspense for the main song.”
Using an F major to A minor turnaround as the hinge of his two-note backing vocal hook (“all’s… well”), Bowie made his words work as rhythms first and foremost (“my attorney seems sincere”: the internal rhyme of “nee” and “seem,” the conga line of esses). Subconsciously or not, he channeled David Byrne’s vocal on Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime” — his verses have a similar chant-like phrasing, which Byrne had picked up from evangelical radio, “where the text was almost turned into music.” Long repetitions, mainly keeping on one note, that pay off with soaring, rhyming phrases (“behind the wheel of a large automobile!”). On “Oxford Town,” Bowie favors short vowels, gives curt appraisals of each syllable, letting some pass, haranguing others (“Baby Grace is the victimmm”). It’s balanced by the jovial lightness of his refrains: one long, dancing melodic line.
It swings thanks to Alomar. “I do my stuff knowing a lead guitarist will come in. So I stay away from certain frequencies, concentrate on making a sturdy frame,” he said. In the second pre-chorus, Alomar counters the verse melody, then connives against the beat in the refrains. He plays arpeggios in the bridge and riffs through the verse returns. By the last forty seconds, his guitar makes filigrees around Bowie’s vocal lines. The track ends with Alomar alone, a sideman holding the spotlight, hooking into a riff.
Bowie’s lyric, whether it was fully improvised or a working-through of ideas he was already considering, shows how he’d internalized the scenarios he’d done in the past year. He was an actor who’d gone off book, able to dash out a fresh lyric about Leon Blank and Ramona Stone without blinking. And he wrote as close to a finale as 1. Outside would ever have.
Leon Blank, accused killer, is seen through the eyes of others until “Oxford Town” finally gives him a voice. It’s his last words from a jail cell, a favorite scenario from Bowie’s youth (see, in Rebel Rebel, “Bars of the County Jail” and “Wild Eyed Boy from Freecloud”). The food’s bad, the bedding’s good, his attorney means well, the priest’s willing to listen. In the bridge, Leon talks to his author: “This is your shadow on my wall… this is what I could have been.” I have not been to Oxford Town isn’t an alibi, it’s a criticism. Leon kicks against the cheap story he was conscripted into and walks out of it. On stage in Paris a year later, Bowie gave another possible ending. Someone threw a white scarf on stage. He took it up, played with it, twined it around his neck, made a sling with it for his arm. Then he strung it into a noose and, while singing the end refrains, aped hanging himself.
NO CONTROL
(Bowie, Eno.) Recorded: 19-20 January 1995, Hit Factory. Bowie: lead and backing vocal; Gabrels, Alomar: guitar; Eno: Yamaha DX7, Eventide H3000, JamMan, E-Mu Procussion; Fine: bass; Baron: drums. Produced: Bowie, Eno; engineered: Richards.
First release: 25 September 1995, 1. Outside.
Bowie and Eno’s late lucky strike in New York produced in four days as many new tracks, finally solidifying 1. Outside. Having amassed enough “commercial” material to balance the remnants of Leon and more esoteric tracks like “Wishful Beginnings,” Bowie soon had a deal with Virgin Records to release the album.
On 20 January 1995, Eno’s last day in the studio, he and Bowie completed another track they had pulled out of the air: “No Control.” Eno started it the night before with engineer David Richards. The following morning, he added “a lovely descending bell line” so when Bowie arrived at the Hit Factory, he “heard the body of a great song,” as Eno wrote in his diary. Along with Eno’s purling banks of synthesizers and sequencers, Carlos Alomar was the pivotal rhythmic force, his guitar lines spinning webs beneath Bowie’s mood-swing phrasings.
Soon Bowie was in the vocal booth and had his tracks done within the hour. For a melody, he cribbed from his childhood favorite “Inchworm” and, as Momus noted, “Well Did You Evah” from the Fifties musical High Society: another melody that “slides ascending phrases down a chordal slope.” In an octave-doubled vocal for the verses, Bowie warns a collective “you,” his nearly one-note melody hooked to the song’s harmonic progression (A major moving to its flattened VII chord, G major, on “deranged”). He has a wider-ranging, ascending melody in the bridge, a loftiness in his single-tracked intonation over the same progression in G major.
Then in the second bridge, Bowie moves to a stagy phrasing that suggests a character from Oklahoma! has turned up in Oxford Town. “Watching him tune it to just the right pitch of sincerity and parody was one of the most fascinating things I’ve ever seen in a studio,” Eno wrote. “You’ve gotta have a scheme! You’ve gotta have a plan!” Bowie sings in a booming, open-throated optimistic voice, with “one arm extended to the future,” as Eno described it. It’s the voice of a fanatic ad man, of a propagandist who believes his lies, selling the delusions he’s warned against in the verses.
As with some other late 1. Outside tracks, Bowie mostly discarded his art-murder storyline, with a few lines here (“stay away from the future,” “don’t tell God your plans”) having the aphoristic bite of his best Seventies songs. “No Control” was a strong closer that got lost in the over-heaped platter of 1. Outside, especially as Bowie never played it live. Bizarrely enough, its stage debut came in 2016 with SpongeBob SquarePants: The Broadway Musical, fitted with new lyrics by Jonathan Coulton.
A Contaminated Epilogue
In 1999, the satirical newspaper the Onion ran a series of letter-writing campaigns to celebrities. One begged Bowie to finally complete his 1. Outside storyline:
Your musical tale of the art-murder of Baby Grace was all fans could talk about for months; during that time, you could step into any small-town bar and the topic of conversation would always be the same: Who killed Baby Grace? Some suspected tyrannical futurist Ramona Stone.
By then, the idea that Bowie would ever finish his art-murder mystery was as shaky as the storyline itself. In the immediate years after 1. Outside, Bowie kept promising that sequel albums would appear, along with a theatrical production. In January 1995, Eno wrote how Bowie was “excited about his idea for a staging of ‘Leon’: a conflation of the original Leon things and what we’re doing now. He’s tempted both by the prospect itself and by the vaguely offered financial backing.” But the proposed five-album “hypercycle” was soon diminished to a trilogy. While 2. Contamination, slated for spring 1997, would have “some bearing on the first one… it’s completely different,” Bowie said. “It goes backwards and forwards between Indonesian pirates of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and today… it’s really becoming a peculiar piece of work.”
In 1997 Eno relocated to Saint Petersburg, Russia, while Bowie spent much of the year touring Earthling. The sequel albums were still always about to begin. Along with the sequels, Bowie and Eno would release an outtakes album called Inside Outside (“that stuff is pretty far-out, and I’m not sure if it has much of an audience at all... it’ll be available — although I wouldn’t recommend that you put it on at a party”). In March 1997, Bowie said he and Eno had “formulated the storyline and decided to do it ourselves with no other musicians and to not meet while recording it… we’ll send the tracks back and forth between St. Petersburg and wherever I am.” The Vienna production directed by Robert Wilson was still underway, but Contamination’s internet component was going to do a lot of the work (“what we’d like to do is bump up all kinds of stuff on the internet, so you get lots of photographic references… it’s kind of a Ripley’s Believe It or Not premise”).
While pirates were still in the mix, the focus now centered on infectious diseases (“Ebola, AIDS, that new tuberculosis”), hence the title. Trent Reznor and Goldie were supposedly recruited. More time passed. The director of the Salzburg Festival went public, saying that he’d stopped hearing from Bowie and that the millennium stage production wouldn’t happen (Bowie later said he was thinking of having the artist Tony Oursler stage a performance). In a late 1999 web-chat, Bowie said he still hadn’t found time to sift through the “over 24 hours of material.” In February 2000, he told BowieNet users this would be the year he “pieced together” Contamination. Instead he played Glastonbury and re-recorded his Sixties songs (see “Hole in the Ground”).
There would be nothing else. No CD-ROMs, websites, operas, movies, new Adler diaries. No grand concert with Eno to mark the millennium in Vienna. (No more work, ever, with Eno.) Bowie ended the twentieth century doing everything but continuing the Outside sequence. It may have been a blessing: 2. Contamination and its follow-up (per fan rumor, 3. Afrikaans, though Bowie never said this) could’ve been his Matrix sequels.
The jig was up by 1999, when Bowie said in a few interviews that he lacked the time or interest to go through the tapes, and Eno showed no signs of wanting to revive a project that had been such a slog in its first go-round. 1. Outside and its sequels were more a conceptual art project that Bowie (and to a lesser extent, Eno) conducted in the press. From the beginning, Bowie was thinking of this as the endgame, writing in his 1994 journal about “falsifying a concert at a mythical venue” and at a 1995 press conference saying he and Eno “wanted to create some kind of situation that never really happened, but film it as though it had happened, document an event which never took place.” The longer that the sequels and concerts didn’t exist, the grander they became. When fans circulated hoax sequences of 2. Contamination (“Ebola Jazz,” “Segue: The Mad Ramblings of Long Beard”), it was as inspired an ending as any.
His last thoughts on the project were in 2003. “We did record an awful lot of stuff, and there really is every intention of going through it and putting out Part II and Part III... it would have been nice to have somehow done it as a theatrical trilogy. I just don’t have the patience. I think Brian would have the patience.” Toward the end of his life, Bowie reportedly wanted to pick up the threads, get back together with Eno to finally complete 1. Outside. Who’s to say it wouldn’t have happened — he did finally write his musical, after all. But the end products were beside the point. The process is what mattered. The vast pile of stuff, the reels of tape, the role-playing games, the asylum visits, the Minotaur paintings and obscurantist diaries — Bowie had needed all of it, a sprawling apparatus, a great jerry-rigged dirigible, to get off the ground. Still, now he was in the air.