CHAPTER
THIRTEEN:
INAUTHENTIC
REALITY
(2003-2007)
We feel ourselves tangled in a constant, lashing web of crisis.
— George Steiner, “Tomorrow”
I would like to talk about reality sometime, authentic reality, inauthentic reality, and what we have to accept of what we see.
— Hillary Rodham, Wellesley College commencement speech, 1969
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.
— T. S. Eliot, “East Coker”
My integration into civilian life was not easy. It was very gradual.
— Matthew Weiner, on the end of Mad Men
Make the best of every moment. We’re not evolving. We’re not going anywhere.
— Bowie, 2004
NEVER GET OLD
Recorded: (backing tracks) ca. 10 January-15 February 2003; (overdubs) March-May 2003, Looking Glass Studios. David Bowie: lead and backing vocal, rhythm guitar, Korg Trinity, keyboards; Earl Slick: lead guitar; David Torn: guitar; Mark Plati: bass; Sterling Campbell: drums; Gail Ann Dorsey, Catherine Russell: backing vocals. Produced: Tony Visconti, Bowie; engineered: Visconti, Mario McNulty.
First release: 15 September 2003, Reality (ISO/Columbia COL 512555 2/CK 90576, UK #3, US #29). Broadcast: 4 September 2003, Trafic.musique; 11 September 2003, Friday Night with Jonathan Ross; 17 September 2003, Last Call with Carson Daly; 18 September 2003, The Today Show; 17 October 2003, Die Harald Schmidt Show; 21 April 2004, The Tonight Show; 23 April 2004, The Ellen DeGeneres Show. Live: 2003-2004.
A hook for his most ambitious tour in thirteen years, Reality became something far different in the late 2000s and early 2010s: David Bowie’s Last Album. With each year, it appeared more likely that he had retired without notice, thus leaving Reality as his Abbey Road, his Avalon — a “thrusty” (his favored adjective for it) overlong rock album with a wide-eyed anime Bowie as a cover image. His return in 2013 loosed Reality from this trap, restored it to what it always had been: a minor album whose songs were built to be blasted on stage; the work of a man at an armistice with his past, frightened of the world, holding it together for his kid’s sake.
Unlike Heathen, there was “no through line” in Reality, he said. It was a collection of loud major key rock songs and a few covers pulled from his one-hundred-plus-song “Pin Ups 2” list. In its inessentiality was freedom — as a newly-independent artist (see “Saviour”), Bowie was no longer stuck in the release cycles of major labels. “I can put out stuff whenever I want,” he boasted (but as he said, “going back on my word is part and parcel of what I do for you. Part of my entertaining factor is lying to you”). There’s more thematic coherence in Reality than he let on. Like The Man Who Sold the World, it’s an album of extreme figures — Pablo Picasso as cock of the walk, a gluttonous rock star vampire, a Dick Cheney stand-in — and diminished ones: lonelyhearts, frustrated wives, sad husbands.
As he was planning a tour once his daughter was old enough to travel, his sets needed an overhaul: more oldies and new uptempo songs. The rapid pace of his “five borough” shows in 2002 invigorated him. By year’s end, he was “percolating” new songs, recording demos via his home setup: a Korg Trinity, ARP Odyssey, a Korg Pandora effects processor, and a lifetime’s accumulation of guitars. “I was back at home with the baby and wife and doing daily things and I started writing immediately.”
At the time, Tony Visconti was renting Studio B in Looking Glass Studios on Broadway, close to Bowie’s Lafayette Street home (from now on, Bowie used studios within walking distance). Bowie kept a domestic schedule — internet binging and walks in the early morning, breakfast with his daughter, off to the studio around 10am, back for dinner. He could try something on a keyboard at home, play it in the studio a few hours later, take the file home and edit it that night. It was homespun record-making, a far cry from staying up all night at Sigma Sound.
In mid-January 2003, Bowie and Visconti demoed about seven tracks (top melody sketches and scratch keyboard, bass and guitars over a click track), then did overdubs of guitar, vocals and keyboards. “Inevitably we’d hardly redo anything,” Visconti said. “A lot of the demo parts ended up on the final version.” After a break in which Bowie wrote more, he gathered a small group for rhythm tracks, cutting eight in as many days. It was Bowie on guitar and keyboards, drummer Sterling Campbell and bassist/guitarist Mark Plati all crammed into Studio B, with its 12x10 isolation booth. Bowie could have rented the more spacious Studio A, but he liked being boxed in for “a real tight New York sound,” said Visconti, who said he could better judge bass tones in the smaller studio. “We found that this MCI board had a lovely transparent sound and that the room had nice acoustics, with a very honest low end,” he said soon before cutting Reality. “It helped to have a lot of my old gear there — some nice vintage stuff like dbx compressors, a Saturator, a Shure Level-Loc, an old Audio & Design Scamp processing system, and all the synths and modules we could possibly need.”
Plati had been positioned to become Bowie’s regular producer in the late Nineties, but the return of Visconti and the collapse of Toy gave Visconti a stronger hand. For Reality, Visconti often wanted Plati to ink in his demo basslines (Visconti’s original parts remain on “The Loneliest Guy,” “Days” and “Fall Dog Bombs the Moon”), and he’d looked askance at Plati’s use of the Line 6 Bass POD, a preamp that let you “dial up” the sound of whichever bass amp and cabinet you wanted; Visconti preferred to direct-inject his ’67 Fender Precision into the console. For guitars, there was Earl Slick (cranking through a huge Marshall stack), David Torn (again providing “atmospheres,” though he also got some lead riffs, such as on “New Killer Star”), and Gerry Leonard. Bowie was keen to play some Supro guitars he’d bought on eBay, including a retrofitted 1957 Dual Tone and a patched-up twelve-string. He also played scads of Korg Trinity, his old Selmer baritone saxophone, and tried his hand at harmonica again.
By May, he had an album. Bowie typically cut three lead vocals for each track — one right after the rhythm tracks were done, one midway through the sessions, and the last during mixing. Visconti synced them (he’d made sure Bowie used the same mike, a Manley Gold, for all takes) and stitched together master vocals, following a line Bowie had sung in February with one from May. And he was in strong voice — having given up cigarettes at last, he said he’d recovered five semitones.
Angry Old Men
Before Reality’s release, Bowie filmed an ad for Vittel water. He’s a chic brownstone owner sharing house with his discarded personae: Ziggy Stardust in the bathroom, the Thin White Duke at the breakfast table, Thomas Jerome Newton on the stairs (“never gonna get Low!”). The “real” Bowie walks off into the morning, out for a coffee or a Bikram yoga session, leaving the freaks back home. He looks great. The soundtrack is “Never Get Old.”
Unlike many of his peers, Bowie in his mid-fifties had stayed thin, kept his hair, and could pass for at least a decade younger. He’d recently cut a remake of “Changes” with Butterfly Boucher, where he sang “pretty soon you’re gonna get older!” with a smile. “It’s a rather silly song,” he said of “Never Get Old,” about “a petulant fifty-six-year-old… sitting in a half-darkened room saying, ‘I’m not gonna get old.’ I had to write it before someone else my age did.” Playing an aging, egomaniacal creep was too juicy a role to decline. “Today we’re a generation of angry old men,” he said.
In “Never Get Old,” the E major refrains are bloated, full of whining guitars. A grotesque man won’t leave the table, wanting more: cash, food, drugs, women (live, Bowie sang “never gonna be enough bullets!,” making a gun shape with his fingers). Beneath the refrains, a distorted bassline is a gurgling stomach. There are the usual borrows from old songs: a winding verse melody from “Karma Man,” the last vocal tag sharing similar harmonies with the closing ones of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” The verse starts on G major, sharpens the chord, returns to G, then moves to F major (“care of me”). The second time around it ends on E minor, the pre-chorus on C major. These qualified, fleeting movements, driven by a rhythm guitar nagging on one string, underscores a lyric of regret and loneliness. A man locks himself in his room. He goes to the movies, like the mousy-haired girl of “Life on Mars?” The moon floats along, its airy progress the little piano break.
During the album’s promotion, Bowie said he wanted to see his daughter grow up, that he was trying to brighten his despairing nature. Reality was a lightshow meant to keep your eyes from the exits. “I desperately want to live forever,” he said,
I just want to be there for Alexandria. She’s so exciting and so lovely so I want to be around when she grows up. I think, “When am I gonna let go of her? When she’s twenty?” Nah, I wanna see her get married. When she’s thirty? Nah, I wanna see what she’s like as a mother. I don’t want to let her go.
The demands for more and more from a rock star glutton is the human predicament in cartoon form. Life is absurd, and there’s never enough of it. In the early 2010s, a blog commenter disputed my choice of words, as I’d written “when Bowie dies.” Surely I meant if?, they asked. A wonderful complaint, and a true one. Bowie would never die, he couldn’t die: we wouldn’t let him.
REALITY
Recorded: (backing tracks) ca. 10 January-15 February 2003; (overdubs) March-May 2003, Looking Glass. Bowie: lead vocal, Korg Trinity, synthesizers; Slick, Torn: guitar; Plati: bass; Campbell: drums. Produced: Visconti, Bowie; engineered: Visconti, McNulty.
First release: 15 September 2003, Reality. Live: 2003-2004.
George Steiner was born in 1929 into the sort of cultured Viennese Jewish family that would be slaughtered and dispossessed during the war. The Steiners were lucky. Having moved to France, they fled “in the last American boats” to New York before the Nazis invaded. Thirty years later, Steiner, now a writer and professor, delivered the T.S. Eliot Memorial Lectures at the University of Kent in Canterbury. Collected in book form, his lectures were In Bluebeard’s Castle: Some Notes Towards the Redefinition of Culture, in which he argued that after the world wars and the Holocaust, the chain of Western high culture was broken. We were in a “post-culture” now. This wasn’t necessarily tragic. Western civilization had ravaged cultures, animal species, and environments in the name of “progress.” It may well have been an evolutionary mistake. But “we cannot turn back. We cannot choose the dreams of unknowing,” Steiner concluded.
In Bluebeard’s Castle was one of Bowie’s favorite books. In interviews for Reality, he repeatedly brought up Steiner to frame his intentions for his title track, one of the first songs he’d written for the album. “That book just confirmed for me that there was actually some kind of theory behind what I was doing with my work,” he said. “I have an undiminished idea of variability. I don’t think there’s one truth, one absolute.” What he’d found in Steiner was a vocabulary to explain his own catholicity of taste, his love for Anthony Newley, Little Richard and Steve Reich, the Beano and Nietzsche. The glam aesthetic. “There were several of us dealing in this newly-found pluralistic vocabulary,” he recalled. “This whole George Steiner-ism of life, you know?”
But even Roxy Music, who had Lolita and Guernica doing the Strand, or Bowie, who fused Jacques Brel, Judy Garland and doo-wop in “Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide” (“wow, you can do anything!” as he described writing that song), became predictable, he said. “I think that the world caught up really quickly and everybody is so totally aware of the kind of vocabulary that we were throwing around at the time, that one feels kind of superfluous now.” In his 2003 interviews he played a man disappointed in the world he’d helped create. He’d been a vanguard of change but that had long since been co-opted by marketers. Even the internet, his last infatuation with the future, was only further atomizing people. He kept up his Heathen theme of a played-out barbaric future. “I don’t think we want new things. I think we’re kind of scrounging around among the things we know to see if we can salvage some kind of civilization which will help us endure and survive into the future. We don’t need new. We are fucked. We’ve got enough new. Enough!”
Playing Reality to a journalist, Bowie introduced one track (not identified) as “based on this author who wrote rather bad science fiction stories.” One candidate is the title track, his description being an inside joke. Who was David Bowie but an author of bad SF? He enjoyed being a fraud. “I hid among the junk of wretched highs,” as he sings in “Reality.” It was life in Steiner’s post-culture: you’ll to have live off the land more, so learn to compost. David Bowie “is the medium for a conglomerate of statements and illusions,” he’d said in 1976. Like “Heroes,” reality exists in quotations. Reality has a saucer-eyed anime Bowie that, once the CD cover was flipped open, is replaced by the “real” Bowie, who’s merely the image that David Jones chose to represent himself in 2003. “There’s a fakeness to the cover that undermines” its title, Bowie said. “It’s the old chestnut: what is real and what isn’t? It’s actually about who’s stolen this world.”
“Reality” is built of clashes between major chords (D and E for verses, C and F# for refrains) and has a lyric where Bowie’s an aging rake, lusting for youth in the mirror. The track soon starts shaking apart — the guitars are at war. The refrain is someone walking off a movie set, with a run of ha-ha-ha-has like slaps to the face. Bowie sings one of his self-epitaphs: “I still don’t remember how this happened/I still don’t get the wherefores and the whys.” A life devoted to change had wound up not dissimilar to one where you had hunkered down: a David Jones who stayed in Beckenham, watching television with his grandchildren in 2003, regarding post-modern life with the same bewilderment as the pop singer promoting his twenty-third album and talking about George Steiner.
Bowie has a blast in “Reality,” in its guitar-crazy recording and raucous live performances — throwing himself around in it. In a post-culture, “progress” is for suckers. “If you accept that we live in absolute chaos, it doesn’t look like futility anymore,” he said.
It only looks like futility if you believe in this bang up structure we’ve created called “God” and all. [But] all of these structures were self-created, just to survive, that’s all… It wasn’t handed down to us from anywhere… We’re leaving those old structures behind, whether we like it or not; they are all crumbling.
Let’s dance and watch them fall.
PABLO PICASSO
(Richman.) Recorded: (backing tracks) ca. 10 January-15 February 2003; (overdubs) March-May 2003, Looking Glass. Bowie: lead and backing vocal, rhythm guitar, baritone saxophone, Korg Trinity, keyboards, Yamaha digital piano?; Gerry Leonard: “Spanish” guitar; Earl Slick: lead guitar; Garson: digital piano?; Plati: bass; Campbell: drums. Produced: Visconti, Bowie; engineered: Visconti, McNulty.
First release: 15 September 2003, Reality. Live: 2003-2004.
Jonathan Richman of Natick, Massachusetts, like Lou Reed of Freeport, Long Island, was a suburban Jewish boy saved by rock ‘n’ roll. Richman’s catalyst was Reed’s Velvet Underground. By the time he was twenty, Richman had his own band, the Modern Lovers, and was making demos with John Cale. Richman sang of the straights of the Sixties, those who only knew the counterculture from television. His “Roadrunner” isn’t on the open road but on Route 128, the traffic-thick belt encircling Boston. He found the sublime in Stop ‘n’ Shop supermarkets and AM radio; he honored old people, praised the functionaries of Boston’s charmless Government Center. Hippies, when they showed up, were wastrels and creeps.
“Pablo Picasso,” which he wrote around 1970, was the Picasso from a Life profile: a bald, short, intense man living with beautiful women in canvas-strewn ateliers. He was photographed shirtless, thrusting his chest out, king gorilla of the art world. Richman makes Picasso king greaser of the block, as seen through the eyes of an envious geek. The song vamps on an E minor chord, a lower-rent take on the VU’s “Sister Ray.” (“They were like the Velvet Underground, except with whimsy,” Bowie said of the Modern Lovers.) On the Cale-produced demo of “Pablo Picasso,” there’s a piano/bass drone, the drums in a chugging pattern (Richman wanted to invoke a New York subway train), guitar solos as jitters along the Em scale. “The original is a little dirgelike,” Bowie said. “It doesn’t move much, which gives it a power, but it gives it the power of another era.”
Wanting “a more contemporary feel,” Bowie changed the lyric (as everyone from Iggy Pop to Richman had done) and fattened “Pablo Picasso” with new chords, in part because he’d jacked up the tempo and needed some embellishments, like an ascending sequence (Bb-C#-G#-Bb-G#-F#) for an intro/bridge section. Gerry Leonard played an out-of-phase, panned “Spanish” lead guitar, and later soloed against Bowie’s baritone saxophone (Bowie’s refurbished Supro is likely one of the scraping rhythm guitars). A digital piano makes incidental sounds for a desktop; Sterling Campbell’s drums were among those Tony Visconti remixed at Allaire Studios for more reverb. Bowie called it Reality’s equivalent to his cover of “Cactus” on Heathen, but it was more a sequel to his other painter song, “Andy Warhol.” It’s a comic-strip autobiography — replace “Pablo Picasso” with “David Bowie” in the lyric and it works as well. Good luck coming up with a better rhyme than Richman’s, though.
FALL DOG BOMBS THE MOON
Recorded: (backing tracks) ca. 10 January-15 February 2003; (overdubs) March-May 2003, Looking Glass. Bowie: lead and backing vocal, rhythm guitar, keyboards; Slick, Torn, Plati: guitar; Visconti: bass; McNulty: drums, percussion. Produced: Visconti, Bowie; engineered: Visconti, McNulty.
First release: 15 September 2003, Reality. Broadcast: 4 September 2003, Trafic.musique; 23 September 2003, Sessions @ AOL. Live: 2003-2004.
A wartime album, made during the United States’ invasion of Iraq in spring 2003, Reality was written by a British expatriate living in a city whose attack was the war’s justification. “The sword… is unsheathed. The blade… stands ready,” as Oliver North intoned on Fox News, two days before the invasion began.
Bowie favored a news service called Truth-Out.org, “a fabulous storehouse of information of what’s written in the alternative press, or the rest of the world’s press, that never really sees the light of day here.” There he discovered that Kellogg Brown & Root, five days after the invasion, had won a bid to repair and operate Iraq’s oil fields. KBR had been accused of bribery, expense padding, and sexual abuse and intimidation of employees. Until July 2000, its parent company Halliburton was run by the soon-to-be vice-president, Dick Cheney.
Cheney lived to claim power and brooked no checks on it. He didn’t care what you thought of him. Carrying on about Halliburton just meant that you weren’t serious. His public persona was of a doctor telling you that the news isn’t good and the bill’s due. “What tends to happen is that a thing like an issue or a policy manifests itself as a guide,” Bowie said. “It becomes a character of some kind.” He began the song with a Cheney caricature. “There’s this guy saying, ‘I’m goddam rich… throw anything you like at me, baby, because I’m goddam rich. It doesn’t bother me.’ It’s an ugly song sung by an ugly man.”
“Fall Dog Bombs the Moon,” similar in chords and tempo to “New Killer Star,” came together quickly: Bowie said he wrote the lyric in a half-hour. Neil Young and Crazy Horse are heard in its plaintive vocal and artless drums, the latter by engineer Mario McNulty. Bowie kept Tony Visconti’s demo bassline and layered in guitars: a pack of players vying to be the lead, with a harmonized solo for the outro. “It’s pretty enjoyable to thump about at extremely loud volume,” he said.
Some read its title as George W. Bush, a “fall dog” instead of a fall guy, with the “moon” the Islamist star and crescent. A soldier sees a girl in a marketplace with a bomb strapped to her. She runs towards him; he waits, as if ready to embrace her. Soon he’s an exploding man, whether victim or bomber. Yet despite Bowie framing his song as a picture of a late capitalist, his phrasings undermined his own reading. He sounds wistful, lets lines trail off. His Fall Dog (sometimes sung as “full dog”) is Iggy Pop’s dog — a man who yearns to submit. The second verse is the United States’ endless need for a fresh enemy, but also applies to someone sitting at home chuckling at the news on The Daily Show. Who was Bush but a convenient moron to take the heat? “This whole world is run by brutes for the common and the stupid,” Bowie had said in 2002. These blackest of years… No shape, no depth, no underground. In the twenty-first century, even the villains lack stature.
LOVE MISSILE F1-11
(James, Degville, Whitmore.) Recorded: (backing tracks) ca. 10 January-15 February 2003; (overdubs) March-May 2003, Looking Glass. Bowie: lead vocal, rhythm guitar, Korg Trinity, keyboards; Plati: bass; Campbell: drums. Produced: Visconti, Bowie; engineered: Visconti, McNulty.
First release: 29 September 2003, “New Killer Star” (ISO-Columbia COL 674275 9/ISO-Columbia 38K 3445).
A cover of Sigue Sigue Sputnik’s “Love Missile F1-11” cut during the Reality sessions was issued as a B-side of the European/Canadian “New Killer Star” single. Bowie didn’t try to top the original in excess; if anything, his version is closer in spirit to “the anarchic dub sound of the [track’s] Portastudio demos,” as Sputnik leader Tony James described them.
According to legend, EMI signed Sigue Sigue Sputnik for £4 million (it was reportedly far less). For its investment, the label got a #3 single (“Love Missile”) and a brief tour marked by performative violence. Sputnik used film dialogue in its songs and wanted companies to buy ad space between LP tracks (L’Oréal and i-D Magazine did): they were the KLF 1.0. “I want to be successful and yet never out of touch with things. I don’t want to be someone who’s made into a pop icon and then doesn’t know how to save himself,” Sputnik’s Martin Degville said in 1986. “I don’t want to become David Bowie or Mick Jagger… they’ve cheated an awful lot of people. They’ve manipulated an awful lot of people and they’ve become cliches of themselves.” (That said, Sputnik’s Neal Whitmore later told Nicholas Pegg he’d been thrilled that Bowie had covered him.)
“Love Missile F1-11” had a Cold War sex and drugs lyric (nuclear missiles as hard dicks and heroin needles), Bo Diddley beats and Eddie Cochran riffs, and a Giorgio Moroder mix with chunks of dialogue from Scarface and A Clockwork Orange. Bowie recognized the single for what it was — the Ziggy Stardust of 1986, and a flashier beast than old Ziggy had ever been. He sang it straight, digging into his lines (“there goes my love rocket red!”), cheerleading another American war underway.
NEW KILLER STAR
Recorded: (backing tracks) ca. 10 January-15 February 2003; (overdubs) March-May 2003, Looking Glass. Bowie: lead and backing vocal, rhythm guitar, Korg Trinity, keyboards; Slick, Torn: lead guitar; Visconti, Plati: bass; Campbell: drums; Dorsey, Russell: backing vocals. Produced: Visconti, Bowie; engineered: Visconti, McNulty.
First release: 15 September 2003, Reality. Broadcast: 4 September 2003, Trafic.musique; 11 September 2003, Friday Night with Jonathan Ross; 17 September 2003, Last Call with Carson Daly; 18 September 2003, The Today Show; 22 September 2003, Late Show with David Letterman; 23 September 2003, Sessions @ AOL; 17 October 2003, Die Harald Schmidt Show; 24 February 2004, Rove Live. Live: 2003-2004.
He keeps a lost city in his head but keeps losing pieces of it. Was there a cobbler stand on Dey Street? Were the non-fiction books in the World Trade Center Borders upstairs or downstairs? Were there trees in the lobbies? What kind? What color were the walls of the Cortlandt Street subway station? Who but we remember these? No, we’ll forget them, too.
“I’m not a political commentator, but I think there are times when I’m stretched to at least implicate what’s happening, politically,” Bowie said in his promotional piece for Reality. “There was some nod, in a very abstract way, towards the wrongs that are being made at the moment.” “New Killer Star” shares qualities of other “public” Bowie songs, its disconnected details like those recounted by the shell-shocked narrator of “Time Will Crawl.” After visiting the empty bowl that once was the World Trade Center, the singer watches the skies and TV, cottons his memory in old movies, waits for the next blow to fall. “There is a feeling [in NYC] that it’s not over yet,” he said in 2003. “I think everyone’s sort of expecting something else to happen. I think the idea of terrorist action in bars and restaurants and that kind of thing, being cited as targets, is somewhere in everyone’s mind.”
The song structure is another Reality comic strip: a four-panel grid (bubbles and actions, little details in color) with establishing shot, start joke, build joke, punchline. Here: “stuttering” guitar riff, A minor verse, pre-chorus, E-flat refrain (punchline: a Brit mocks how the President of the United States pronounces “nuclear”). Eight-bar break. Repeat. The guitar/bass riff becomes the pre-chorus vocal melody (duh-dah dah, “I’m red-ee”). Guitar atmospherics by David Torn are hurricane weather. “New Killer Star” was another Bowie magpie construction: its bass/guitar riff is the chorus hook of Little Peggy March’s “I Will Follow Him,” while as Nicholas Pegg noted, “’87 and Cry” was shaken down for melodies and hooks.
Without intending to, Bowie had become a New Yorker. “It’s a bit like being on holiday in a place I’ve always wanted to go to, that doesn’t come to an end,” he said of living there. “I always feel like a stranger here. I am an outsider… But I’ve got friends here. I probably know this town better than I know the new London.” “New Killer Star” was a native’s response to his city being made the stage of a national tragedy. “Others are watching us [now]. I don’t think we ever felt that before,” he said in 2003. “There’s a slight unease. We really felt freewheeling and that ‘tomorrow belongs to us,’ anything can happen. Now there’s not quite that swaying surge of hopefulness.” He’ll do his part and be optimistic despite everything that he sees and hears. “The ghost of the tragedy that happened [in NYC] is reflected in the song, but I’m trying to make something more positive out of it.”
LOOKING FOR WATER
Recorded: (backing tracks) ca. 10 January-15 February 2003; (overdubs) March-May 2003, Looking Glass. Bowie: lead and backing vocals, rhythm guitar, Korg Trinity, keyboards, synthesizers; Torn, Slick, Leonard?: guitar; Plati: bass; Campbell: drums, tambourine. Produced: Visconti, Bowie; engineered: Visconti, McNulty.
First release: 15 September 2003, Reality. Live: 2003-2004.
“Looking for Water” shifts location from a burned Manhattan to a Middle Eastern country picked to answer for the crime. Bowie started with another comic-strip idea: the cliché of a man wandering lost in the desert, looking for palm trees. Instead he finds an American perversion of deliverance — a row of oil derricks. There was also The Man Who Fell to Earth, where Thomas Jerome Newton comes looking for water for his depleted planet, and “Glass Spider,” with its “the water’s all gone” hook. “Virtually looped” between D major and F# minor, “Looking for Water” has verses incited by guitar breaks (“a secondary consideration was the melodic content on top,” Bowie said). Against a single left-mixed guitar that keeps to its high strings, there’s a blunt retort: a descending riff doubled on bass and some ferocious counterpoint figures, starting around 1:40. This sound — bright, guitar-fattened, punched through with overdubs — would be the template for The Next Day tracks like “The Stars (Are out Tonight).”
QUEEN OF ALL THE TARTS (OVERTURE)
Recorded: (backing tracks) ca. 10 January-15 February 2003; (overdubs) March-May 2003, Looking Glass. Bowie: lead and backing vocal, guitar?, Korg Trinity, keyboards, tenor saxophone; Torn, Slick, Leonard: guitar; Plati: bass; Campbell: drums; Dorsey, Russell: backing vocals. Produced: Visconti, Bowie; engineered: Visconti, McNulty.
First release: 15 September 2003, Reality (limited edition: Columbia/ISO COL 512555 9).
Used as pre-show music for the Reality tour, “Queen of All the Tarts (Overture)” is a guitar impasto, with a militant line heard towards the outro. The two-tiered (likely two-fingered) synthesizer solo is courtesy of the composer; Mark Plati sounds as if he’s downed a few espressos; Sterling Campbell tracks in some thudding tom fills (there are also low-mixed sleigh bells, possibly synthetic). Its refrain, a vocalized keyboard line that suggests the track was a late-in-the-day upgrade of an instrumental, has two-note harmonies from a multi-tracked Bowie, Gail Ann Dorsey, and Catherine Russell. It’s a throwaway with some intriguing details — take the arpeggiated diminished C# passing chord (first heard at 0:20). Bowie’s use of passing chords (chords often not in the song’s underlying key but which “bridge” two that are) is, as Momus noted, a favorite composition trick, done to inject feelings of transience and unease into a song’s progression (see “Ashes to Ashes” or “Absolute Beginners”). Here the passing chord derails a confident progression in B-flat major, as if the title Queen has stumbled into a darkened room.
SHE’LL DRIVE THE BIG CAR
Recorded: (backing tracks) ca. 10 January-15 February 2003; (overdubs) March-May 2003, Looking Glass. Bowie: lead and backing vocal, baritone saxophone, harmonica, rhythm guitar, synthesizers, marimba?, handclaps; Slick, Torn, Leonard?: guitars; Plati: bass; Campbell: drums; Dorsey, Russell: backing vocals. Produced: Visconti, Bowie; engineered: Visconti, McNulty.
First release: 15 September 2003, Reality. Broadcast: 4 September 2003, Trafic.musique. Live: 2003-2004.
On Reality Bowie revived his framework for ‘hours… ,’ pairing a desperate husband (see “Fly”) with a desperate wife. In “She’ll Drive the Big Car,” the latter speeds along Riverside Drive in Manhattan, wondering if she should cut the wheel and plunge into the Hudson. “My favorite suicide song,” he called it. “All her plans have been disassembled by her thoughtless boyfriend.” The cad was supposed to “take her back to the old bohemian life” but instead he stands her up, like the friend of the girl in “Life on Mars?” So she’s “stuck with this middle-class family and is absolutely, desperately unhappy as she’s peeling along Riverside Drive. In my mind she just swings it off to the left and takes the whole lot down.”
With some wordplay (Riverside Drive is a sylvan place with “cormorants and leaves”), the lyric’s central image is of a family always about to crash in the same car, with the driver’s useless husband sitting behind her and her eyes on a daughter whose life she’s thinking about ending along with her own. The verse’s move from home chord (C major) to subdominant (F major) is paralleled in the lyric’s shift from lost hopes (“back in millennium/ meant racing to the light”) to potential death on Riverside. The refrains sink to F# minor, more an immersion than an escape. The refrain of the song-within-the-song — blasting on the radio “so that she doesn’t have to think anymore” while she drives like a demon — is the Isley Brothers’ “Shout” or, in a more self-referential world, Bowie’s 1964 cover of “Louie Louie Go Home,” which had borrowed the refrain.
A trudge of a song, it lived in its overdubs: Bowie’s harmonica, heard for the first time since “Never Let Me Down,”; a twanging guitar figure mixed left in refrains (a feedback burst at 3:22 is like a rip in the mix); a synthesizer bed that sounds like a harmonium; marimba fills; a snare drum hiccup to cue the refrains; Bowie’s baritone saxophone as a dark layer in the foundation. The harmonies are Bowie as frantic advocate and Gail Ann Dorsey and Catherine Russell, spanning octaves, as reassurance.
FLY
Recorded: (drums) ca. August-September 2001, Allaire Studios; (backing tracks) ca. 10 January-15 February 2003; (overdubs) March-May 2003, Looking Glass. Bowie: lead and backing vocal, guitar; Carlos Alomar: lead guitar; Slick, Torn, Leonard?: guitars; Plati: bass; Matt Chamberlain: drums; Dorsey, Russell: backing vocals. Produced: Visconti, Bowie; engineered: Visconti, McNulty.
First release: 15 September 2003, Reality (limited edition).
The marooned suburbanite is a constant of Bowie’s songs. Dana Gillespie, a girlfriend from his teenage years, once recalled how grim the Jones’ house was in Bromley, that it had seemed like Bowie’s parents kept silent when no one else was there. Bowie flew away: Los Angeles, Berlin, Bermuda, New York. His turn-of-the-century albums find him regarding those who didn’t escape as creatures in a zoo. What’s it like to have lived only in one’s imagination? In the refrains of “Fly,” a broken father takes refuge in his dreams, a jarring D# minor chord (“but I can fly”) giving him unexpected turbulence.
A man sits in his car in his driveway, weeping, watching the TV play to an empty room in his house. His wife is bored, his son might be on drugs, the kids down the street are playing “on their decks” in a garage, working up a set for an “all-night rave” (Bowie hadn’t been getting out much in the early 2000s). None of this seems particularly tragic, even a line about a kid overdosing. It’s more in the line of the Police’s “On Any Other Day,” with middle-aged suburban ennui played for dark laughs. The world of “Fly” and “She’ll Drive the Big Car” would return in Floria Sigismondi’s video for “The Stars (Are out Tonight)” a decade later, with Bowie playing a haunted suburban husband.
“Fly” is an Eighties waxwork — its guitar riff is derived from Devo’s “Whip It”; a holiday camp keyboard is a tinny voice in a mix overrun by stray instruments. There are even some party bits, like a “dying for the weekend” tag. It marks the end of the line for Bowie and Carlos Alomar. By the late Seventies, Bowie and Alomar had developed a sort of industrial songwriting: Bowie as foreman/engineer, Alomar as shop steward. “He comes up with the goods and makes sure of delivery all down the line,” as Scott Walker once said of Bowie. But it was Alomar who ensured that the deliveries were made. He hung on through Tonight and Never Let Me Down, toured Glass Spider, was the odd man out on 1. Outside and its subsequent tour. His riff on “Fly” is barbed with hooks, as his riffs always were — it’s one last funky blessing from Bowie’s finest collaborator.
THE LONELIEST GUY
Recorded: (backing tracks) ca. 10 January-15 February 2003; (overdubs) March-May 2003, Looking Glass. Bowie: lead and backing vocal, guitar?, synthesizers; Torn: lead guitar; Garson: Yamaha Disklavier; Visconti: bass; Campbell: drums. Produced: Visconti, Bowie; engineered: Visconti, McNulty.
First release: 15 September 2003, Reality. Broadcast: 27 November 2003, Parkinson. Live: 2003-2004.
“A very despairing piece of work,” Bowie said of “The Loneliest Guy,” whose subject is “a guy qualifying his entirely hermetic, isolated existence by saying ‘actually I’m a lucky guy. I’m not really alone — I just have myself to look after.’” This type, someone cooped in his room and subsisting on art and memory, is another version of the coked-up magus trapped in his circle, overlooking the ocean; the shut-ins of Low; old Algeria Touchshriek. If one end of the Bowie spectrum is the charismatic performer, “The Loneliest Guy” is in his deep ultraviolet range.
Content in domesticity and a parent again, Bowie said he no longer had “that sense of loneliness that I had before, which… became a subtext for a lot of things I wrote.” There’s no subtext to be found in “The Loneliest Guy,” whose sense of lugubriouness and despair is so overwhelming it borders on parody. Bowie’s character is such a colossal sad sack that he calls to mind Steve Martin’s The Lonely Guy, who eats at a table for one with a spotlight trained on him and queues on the Manhattan Bridge to jump into the East River.
Bowie said he’d been inspired by the idea of “a city taken over by weeds,” the modernist city of Brasília, which had been built from scratch in the Sixties. The city of a future that never came, its neighborhoods were built in grids, its squares full of modernist stadiums and concert halls. For critics such as Robert Hughes, Brasília was “miles of jerry-built platonic nowhere infested with Volkswagens… the last experiment of its kind. The utopian buck stops here.” Bowie called Brasília
the perfect standard for an empty, godless universe… The architect Oscar Niemeyer designed all these places thinking that they were going to be filled with millions of people and now there are about 200,000 people living there, so the weeds and the grass are growing back up through the stones of this brilliantly modernistic city. It’s a set of ideas… being taken back over again by the jungle.
This wasn’t true about Brasília, whose population is well over two million and is not returning to the wild any time soon. It suggests more Bowie’s Hunger City, a modernist grid that’s become a dystopian playground, or the capitalist wasteland of “Thru These Architects’ Eyes.” But the metaphor of a fallen Brasília, the modernist dream consumed by nature, fits the track. “The Loneliest Guy” rots from within, moving as if sleep-stung, rousing to life only to gutter out again, shivering with waves of David Torn’s atmospherics (it’s possible Bowie recalled the Pretty Things’ “Loneliest Person,” with its arpeggiated acoustic guitars). Its remote E-flat minor key allows embassies from E major — it yearns to pull into the major in the third verse (“all the pages that have turned…”) until an Eb minor chord snuffs out the coup on a precisely-timed sad “oh.”
WATERLOO SUNSET
(Davies.) Recorded: (backing tracks) ca. 10 January-15 February 2003; (overdubs) March-May 2003, Looking Glass. Bowie: lead and backing vocals, acoustic guitar, Korg Trinity, keyboards, theremin; Torn, Slick: lead guitar; Garson: Yamaha Disklavier; Plati: bass; Campbell: drums. Produced: Visconti, Bowie; engineered: Visconti, McNulty.
First release: 10 November 2003 (UK-only download). Live: 2003.
At a Tibet House concert in 2003 (see “People Have the Power”), Bowie duetted with Ray Davies on “Waterloo Sunset.” In the days before the show, they walked around Soho together and Bowie also recorded the song in the studio, issuing it as a bonus track later that year. He and Davies had met in 1964, and for a time shared a producer. More essentially Davies, through his songs, had taught Bowie how to write. He’s deep in Bowie’s work, from the debut album to the not-so-hidden pieces in later compositions (see “Baby”).
“Waterloo Sunset,” from 1967, was a capstone for its time. “I started writing a song about Liverpool that implied that the era of Merseybeat was coming to an end, but I changed it to ‘Waterloo Sunset’ not only because that gave me a bigger canvas to work on but because it was about London, the place where I had actually grown up,” Davies wrote in his semi-fictional memoir X-Ray. He began with a memory of Waterloo Bridge, watching the Thames nearly cresting its banks. As in many of his songs, an older, homelier England is washed away. If the Beatles promised the world could be new, Davies sang of what was being thrown out: steam trains, china shops, palais halls, dance bands, virginity. The singer of “Waterloo Sunset” keeps to his flat, watches the young on the streets, writes their stories. There’s such restless life outside: the dirty river, flowing ever eastward to the sea; the millions in Waterloo Station, pooling from across London and streaming in veins to the suburbs.
Bowie chased away the song’s melancholy, made a “Waterloo Sunrise.” Embellishments included a nagging two-note synthesizer riff, handclap-fattened drums, shimmering theremin as scene-changer. Only in the coda did he attempt the original’s plangent harmonies. In “Waterloo Sunset” the world of movement still has its hiding places — sunset lingers for a while in the summer. Bowie’s version has no need of these: it’s the sound of a winner’s Sixties, a flattened Sixties.
DAYS
Recorded: (backing tracks) ca. 10 January-15 February 2003; (overdubs) March-May 2003, Looking Glass. Bowie: lead and backing vocals, twelve-string acoustic guitar, synthesizers, baritone saxophone; Torn?, Slick: lead guitar; Visconti: bass; Campbell: drums. Produced: Visconti, Bowie; engineered: Visconti, McNulty.
First release: 15 September 2003, Reality. Broadcast: 4 September 2003, Trafic.musique; 23 September 2003, Sessions @ AOL. Live: 2003 -2004.
Tucked midway through Reality, “Days” is a sunny self-evisceration. An obvious reference was the Kinks’ “Days,” that most generous-spirited of breakup songs, in which Ray Davies is heartbroken but grateful for the happiness he was allotted. His memories are all he has left: his gratitude is obsessive. In Bowie’s “Days,” a man has taken his lover/muse for granted: “all I’ve done, I’ve done for me/all you gave, you gave for free.” He’s racked up such emotional debt that he could never repay it; in the bridge, he finds the nerve to ask for more. Call it another thanks to longtime assistant Coco Schwab (see “Never Let Me Down”), or a prayer (see the Psalm 23:6 reference for the title line, “surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life”), a man atoning to a God he doesn’t believe in. “I sometimes feel I wrote this song for so many people,” Bowie said on stage in Melbourne.
Feinting at G minor to steady itself in F major in refrains, “Days” opens with a modest arrangement — three acoustic guitars, a lead guitar peeking in every other bar until settling down to arpeggiate, a conga/kick drum rhythm. The second verse carts in drums and a piano line soon taken up by synthesizer, which in turn is chased by baritone saxophone. The bridge has a descending bassline, a rumpled bed of synthetic strings, and a small gallery of Bowie voices. Over in a wink, with Bowie sweetly atoning for past and future offenses, its sound would return on The Next Day, especially in “So She.”
TRY SOME, BUY SOME
(Harrison.) Recorded: (backing tracks) ca. 10 January-15 February 2003; (overdubs) March-May 2003, Looking Glass. Bowie: lead and backing vocal, guitar, Korg Trinity, keyboards; Visconti: bass. Produced: Visconti, Bowie; engineered: Visconti, McNulty.
First release: 15 September 2003, Reality. Live: 2003-2004.
George Harrison died in November 2001. Two years before, he was knifed by a psychotic housebreaker in an attack — close to fatal, with one stab wound nearly puncturing his superior vena cava — that left him weakened against the lung cancer that claimed his life. (In a way, half of the Beatles were murdered at their homes by so-called fans.) A bus driver’s son from Liverpool, Harrison was a pop emperor by twenty-one. He tried to ground his wealth and fame in a Hare Krishna blend of stoicism. To use a Philip Roth line, he was the Beatles’ unchaste monk, and by middle age, he cared more for gardening than making records. The Beatles songwriter voices were autobiographer (Lennon), novelist (McCartney) and, with Harrison, sermonizer. His sermons could be trying. He lived in a mansion while singing of the illusions of material life; he decried the false wisdom of drugs after having spent years tripping. Yet throughout his work he kept to the same truths. Life is brief, we spend it worrying over pointless things, we lie to ourselves and to each other too much, everything we love will die, and we ultimately know nothing about existence. Why not make peace with your god, or at least tend to your garden?
“For [Harrison], there is a belief in some kind of system,” Bowie said in 2003,
But I really find that hard. Not on a day-to-day basis, because there are habits of life that have convinced me there is something solid to believe in. But when I become philosophical, in those “long, lonely hours,” it’s the source of all my frustrations, hammering away at the same questions I’ve had since I was nineteen. Nothing has really changed for me. This daunting spiritual search.
Written in 1970, Harrison’s “Try Some, Buy Some” was a song of māyā, the Hindu/Krishna concept that the perceived world is illusory. The material world is a funfair. You overeat, go on rides, buy trinkets, but one day you need to go home. The verses look back to the Sixties — drugs, sex, celebrity parties — while his refrains face the future, to a humbled reconciliation with God. It was a typical Harrison piece in construction. His songs moved like orreries, in weighty orbits “through an unending series of harmonic steps,” as Simon Leng wrote. Composed on piano, which Harrison said led to all the “weird chords,” its spine was a descending chromatic bassline that hits every semitone from E to B, and a progression that starts on A minor and corkscrews down to D major. As if wanting to make the song more ungainly, Harrison wrote a seesawing top melody and set the piece in 3/4 and in a G minor key that Ronnie Spector, for whom it was intended, found uncomfortable. She said she didn’t understand a word of the lyric (nor did he, its composer reportedly replied) but she was a trouper, mastering the rhythms and hitting the high notes.
Issued as Spector’s debut single, “Try Some, Buy Some” only hit #77 in the US and didn’t chart in Britain. Among the few who bought it at the time was a Beckenham songwriter with a yen for obscurities. “I got [the single] because I was totally ga-ga over Ronnie Spector,” Bowie recalled.
“I always thought she was absolutely fantastic.” He’d wanted to cover “Try Some, Buy Some” as far back as 1979, when he raved about it during a BBC guest DJ gig. “For me it was a Ronnie Spector song,” he said. “It never really occurred to me that I was actually covering a George Harrison song.” He said he’d never heard Harrison’s version.
“We were pretty true to the original arrangement but the overall atmosphere is somewhat different. It’s a dense piece,” Bowie said of his cover, which he shifted to D minor. He wanted to free the song from Phil Spector’s over-arrangement and give it a more forgiving setting. Unfortunately, this meant a chintzy-sounding Korg Trinity bed. There are some fine touches — his baritone saxophone leading the march to the basement and a guitar hook to distract from the harmonic grinding underneath — and Bowie doesn’t try to out-sing Spector but keeps to a comfortable range. Harrison, in his take on the song, had strained at the top of his range, giving it a desperate quality. There’s little desperation in Bowie’s version, but plenty of sadness. “My connection to the song is about leaving a way of life behind me and finding something new,” he said, which suggests he wrote “She’ll Drive the Big Car” inspired by it.
His favorite Beatle was his friend John Lennon, but as the years went on Bowie’s work became more aligned with Harrison’s, even if Bowie could never bring himself to become a believer, or even a gardener. “Try Some, Buy Some” sits near the end of Reality, taking up space, spoiling the mood. Harrison would have approved: the song was never meant to go down easily.
BRING ME THE DISCO KING
Recorded: (“first version,” unreleased) ca. summer/fall 1992, Hit Factory. New York. Bowie: vocal; Nile Rodgers: guitar?; Garson: piano; Barry Campbell or John Regan: bass?; Sterling Campbell or Poogie Bell: drums?; (“second version,” unreleased) ca. August-November 1996, Looking Glass. Bowie: lead vocal; Reeves Gabrels: guitar, loops; Plati: keyboards, loops; Garson: piano; Dorsey: bass; Zachary Alford: drums, loops; (Reality version) (drums) ca. August-September 2001, Allaire Studios; (vocal, piano) ca. spring 2003, Looking Glass. Bowie: lead vocal; Garson: Yamaha S90; Chamberlain: drums; (“Loner Mix”) Bowie: lead vocal; Maynard James Keenan: lead vocal; John Frusciante: lead guitar; Lisa Germano: piano, vocal; Danny Lohner: synthesizers; Josh Freese: drums; uncredited musicians: strings (arranged: Ed Shearmur). Produced: Visconti, Bowie, Lohner (the “Loner”); engineered: McNulty, Visconti.
First release: 2 September 2003 (“Loner Mix”), Underworld (Lakeshore LKS 33781); 15 September 2003, Reality. Live: 2003-2004.
Interview transcript, 5/9/2005, D. Osterman, Rhinebeck, NY:
I missed the ’76 tour but I was there at the Garden in August ’77. You’ve heard the show, right? Yeah, right? My kid got that boxed set a while back. I didn’t want to hear it. I heard it there, you know? All you need. All I need, at least. [inaudible] Well, okay, the show took forever to get going. Like two hours of lights dimming and going back up, to all these big moaning groans from the crowd, and this metal-shredding noise kept playing on the PA, setting everyone on edge. The mood, you can expect, was just… off. Everyone in my group, five of us, was seriously high — we had some ludes and some pot that was laced with who knows what. Not just us. The whole crowd was high on something, or were just tensed for something. Finally the lights went down for good and Bowie came out. He was pin-thin and wore all black — black suit coat, black rosette in his lapel, black shoes. Black hat? Maybe. Black cane. Leaned on it a lot. His face and hands were just… I’ve never seen skin shine like that. Like moon-skin. And he was still living in LA then, right? I guess he never went outside [laughs].
He started, I remember, with “Five Years,” and it was just the slowest, most dragging version that you could imagine — it was like a year between the drum hits. And he just stood there, just propped against the mike stand, and after a long while he started singing, low, real ghostly. [sings] “Pushing through the market square…” You know how it goes. Then he seemed to kind of wake up and the band really kicked in. He had, maybe, three guitarists? A guy on a huge keyboard too. Drummer had a gong.
There was a bunch of disco stuff, really savage-sounding stuff. Couldn’t really dance to it: too fast… like “Fame,” “Stay,” “Calling Sister Midnight,” “Gimme Sweet Head.” He would sing some, then let his band jam for like ten minutes, then pick it up again. While they played he looked out at the crowd, like he was looking for someone he knew. He did some new stuff, too, maybe ones he never recorded, like this one song I just remember he was yelling “bring me the disco king!” over and over again. That was most of it. His hands were up in the air, like someone had a gun on him. Then he did this lunge, this weird pivot, at the mike and said something like, [deep voice] “here’s a new one for you New Yorkers, it’s called ‘Blackout!’”
And remember the blackout had just happened just the month before and everyone in that room was probably there during it and… I mean, parts of the city were probably still on fire then! And he sent what was like an electric current through the place. Have you ever been on a boat during a storm? The crowd was… listing? Listing, like, say, the right side of the Garden kind of convulsed and then it sort of shivered across until the left side got all worked up. Screams, really big screams, you know. This guy the row down from us started shaking, having a fit. Making this awful noise, I still remember it, this little hut-hut-hut-hut-hut sound. Bowie was really caught up in the song, just wailing, but then he’d crouch, almost squat down on stage, like he was like holding off punches. I couldn’t breathe all of a sudden and my friend Cindy was crying, so when the strobe lights started, I figured we just had to get out of there. Nearly got in a fight just getting into the walkway.
We got out on Eighth Ave., probably by “Station to Station,” when that kid got stabbed, right? I was happy to be out. Though I loved Bowie, you know? Really. I was such a fan. But that wasn’t a good place. And what happened to him in ’78 — well, you can’t be surprised, really, though, can you?
“It kind of crawled along through the years with me,” Bowie said of “Bring Me the Disco King.” The song dated to the start of the Nineties, its first version recorded in the Black Tie White Noise sessions, with Mike Garson brought in to play a “rather eccentric” piano part for it. Thanks to a journalist for the Straits Times who heard it on a demo tape in 1993, we know that much of its final lyric was there at the start: “Bowie sings of a time of ‘stiff bad clubs,’ ‘streets with the good-time girls’ and ‘a river of perfumed limbs,’ as if bitterly contemptuous of that horrid chapter of his life.”
He cut it from Black Tie because it clashed with the overall mood, he said in 1993. “I think the song was written with a sense of irony. I have some fond memories of the Seventies, especially near the end when I was living in Berlin, but yes, the song was more about the negativity of the Seventies.” Ten years later, he said the song had been him
trying to summarize my feelings about certain events in my past. I was in a very happy period when I wrote ‘Disco King’ in 1991. I was just the most delighted guy, in a bright new groove. It was a glorious time in my life back then, and I can still feel that vibe now... But I couldn’t get the actual feeling of the song right; it was too cynical when I was doing it before.
The track came off too parodic, “play[ing] to the title, alarmingly… I wanted it to sound cheesy and kitschy, and be a kind of real uptempo, disco-y kind of slam at late Seventies disco. And the trouble is, it sounded cheesy and kitschy, ha ha! It just didn’t work. It didn’t have any weight to it.” He filed it away and moved on.
Excerpt from Musician and Performer, May 1990 (“The London Boys Are Back”):
Musician: So everyone in the group was in London with you? In the ’60s?
Bowie: Yes, although we didn’t all work together then, except for John [Hutchinson] and I. Andy [Mackay] wasn’t quite there — he was still at university until 1969 or 1970, I believe. But he knew the scene, went to a lot of the shows, same as I did. Bill [Legend] of course was Marc Bolan’s drummer, on all the great T. Rex singles. Oh and yes, Herbie [Flowers] was on one of my records and one of Lou’s, and he even produced a single of mine that no one ever remembers, called “Holy Holy.”
M: And the band’s name is a tribute to one of your other old singles? That no one remembers?
B: [Laughs]. It was too obscure to be forgotten! But I always considered it my first proper recording, my first proper song, and it meant a great deal to me. Though to be fair we weren’t quite proper London Boys! I was in Beckenham until 1971 or 1972. Hutch was in Canada.
M: Have you gotten flak for going down this nostalgic route? You’re going to be playing a lot of old songs, and you haven’t made any new records since Never Let Me Down.
B: Which has few friends, I’ve found. No, I wouldn’t call us a nostalgia act at all. There’s a Buzzcocks song that goes, “nostalgia for an age yet to come.” Well this is a nostalgia for a past that never was. I think we bring something new to the table. Though of course we’ve all been on the scene for quite a while. But never quite in this combination.
M: And this is the last time you’re singing your old songs? Are you recording new ones?
B: That’s the plan, yes. Once we’re back from South America later this year, we’re going to see what happens in the studio. One possible title is Bring Me the Disco King [laughs]. You can see the cover image, right? Henry V, ordering some flamboyant conquered foe to be brought to him in irons.
Bowie had another go at “Bring Me the Disco King” in the Earthling sessions four years later (“we did it in a sort of muscular way, like the band was at that particular time”). The second version is documented in a Rolling Stone article on a late Earthling session in which Mike Garson — through-line of all the song’s incarnations — is playing an overdub for it. “It’s more Kurt Weill than Hollywood strip,” Bowie tells Garson. “Keep it expressionistic and float between the chords… Think Gil Evans — think of the long, plaintive notes in the Taxi Driver score! Less virtuosity, more anguish!”
The Earthling version had a “pulsating, Kraftwerk-style synth groove,” which Bowie described as having “the strange gloss of the Seventies attached to it.” Again, there was too much of the past inscribed into the song — he said it still couldn’t escape feeling like a heavy-handed parody. Though in the running for Earthling until late in the day, “Bring Me the Disco King” again was an outtake.
Excerpt from Simon King, The Royal Scam: A Misspent Youth in the Advertising World (Clearwater: 1999):
Bill said DJ wanted me in his office yesterday. First, a trip to the men’s room (I still had some coke from the night before). I was bracing for the worst. So, it seemed, was Bill. “King, bring me the disk before you go upstairs,” he said as I was putting on my jacket and pinching some life into my face.
I’d never ever spoken to DJ before, only seen him from across the floor. He worked in three offices — London, Tokyo, here in New York — but was more like some global embodiment of Jones & Bond, his official residence a first-class airplane seat. DJ was a figure of terror in our office. He’d show up on a Friday afternoon and within an hour three people would be sent packing and you’d be reassigned to a new account with a project due Monday morning at 8 AM.
His secretary, who looked like a Modigliani come to life, waved me through. DJ was at his desk, which had nothing resembling work on it. He asked me to sit. It’s hard to describe how incredibly striking he was. He was around forty but looked at least a decade younger. No visible work done, just a sense that life hadn’t managed to touch him yet. He was steeped in charisma. This was a guy who’d started in the business in ’63, when he was barely out of high school or whatever the Brits have, and in two years he was all but running the show at Collett Dickenson Pearce. His own shop by ’68. He could have been anything — an actor, a prime minister. (Rumor was that he cut a few Beatles-type singles back then, but no one at J&B ever turned up anything.)
I tried to meet his gaze but it was hard. He had an irregular right pupil, permanently dilated, so naturally you were drawn to it but you also kept trying not to stare at it. He, of course, was entirely aware of this situation and used it as a power play, making whoever sat across the desk look at something else. There was a small Japanese lute mounted on the wall, I noticed.
“Simon,” he began. “You consider advertising to be beneath your talents. Is that a fair assessment?”
I must have flushed. “You spend your nights in the East Village and say that you’re some sort of corrupted artist. I quite empathize, but you must realize yours is a rather tedious existence.” He took a Gauloise from his jacket pocket and lit it with a bone-handle lighter that he produced out of thin air. “Substantive art is not born from such a cliché. I was in your shoes once, but I came to realize that advertising has a far greater purchase on the imagination than any painting. What’s the promise of art, after all? Immortality? Fame? Sublimity? Power? No, if you want to colonize dreams, if you want to create a true desire, something that never existed until you thought of it — if you’d like to stage how people regard reality itself, my field, our field, offers great promise.”
He retrieved another cigarette and pushed it across his desk. “A Tibetan lama once told me there are two forms of art — black magic to turn people’s heads and “white” reality art. We’ve well enough of the latter. Simon, would you care to work on some black magic with me? It should prove interesting, at least.”
“Bring Me the Disco King” first appeared in public in 2003, as a remix on the soundtrack of Underworld by Nine Inch Nails guitarist Danny Lohner. “We never got in the room with Bowie,” Lohner said at the time. “He just sent me some vocals of some stuff he was working on for his new album. I just took the vocals and built a song around it. We used one mono mic on the drums, and they don’t sound great... [But we] literally got an e-mail of a vocal and just did our thing. Then we sent it back and he said, ‘sounds good.’”
The “Loner Mix” was an alternate version of a track that Bowie was still making, with Lisa Germano on piano and John Frusciante on lead guitar. Josh Freese drums, Maynard James Keenan sings much of it. With Frusciante’s looped Fender lines and even a string arrangement, it makes the Reality version sound like a cold, polished demo. Given the song’s broken history, it’s easy to imagine this remix being the only version of “Bring Me the Disco King” ever released. That one of Bowie’s great finales would only be known as a mood piece on a Kate Beckinsale vampire movie soundtrack.
“Expatriates In Berlin: Works, 1975-1995” (James Cohan Gallery, until May 23):
…The exhibit includes six works by David Bowie, the former rock performer from the 1970s best known for his gender-fluid chameleon style. Bowie has worked as a painter and avant-garde filmmaker since his retirement. Yet on the canvas his technique shows little improvement over the course of two decades. His subject matter remains obscure and, in its way, provincial.
Of the pictures (three in oil, one black pencil, two mixed-media), the most promising is “(Bring Me) The Disco King and His Wives,” a 6′ x 12′ abstract with some furious brushwork and a good sense of scale. That said, it pales next to the work of the other Berlin-based artists featured, especially the Archine sisters. One has to wonder why Bowie has abandoned a field in which he was so capable to devote his time to one in which he’ll always be so second rate.
As there are no circulating demos or outtakes of the song’s earlier incarnations, it’s impossible to trace the evolution of “Bring Me the Disco King” but through speculation. As per articles at the time, the song apparently evolved from cheeky parody through aggression to end in solitude as the closing track of Reality.
On Reality, Bowie reduced “Disco King” to a trio of elements. A four-bar drum loop by Matt Chamberlain, taken from the Heathen session for “When the Boys Come Marching Home.” It’s a lesser tempo than the original speed of “Disco King” (“I had those drums on it, the works, you know, it’s a 120-beats-a-minute,” Bowie said of the Black Tie track). There was Bowie’s vocal, which he recorded over the Chamberlain loop. And another Garson piano track.
Bowie played Garson the vocal/drum loop track and asked him to develop the song chordally on a Yamaha S90 — to be the middle ground between Chamberlain’s loop and his own top melody. “A lot of the voicings and motifs in the chart were just improvised,” Garson said in 2004. “I never play it the same way twice.” It was meant as a demo performance — Garson returned home with the digital files and played them through his Disklavier MIDI grand player piano, capturing the results with top-quality mikes for a commanding sound. Then Bowie used the original Yamaha S90 track on the recording. Asked why by a baffled Garson, Bowie said he liked it, that’s all.
“Short Picks,” JazzWeb, 10 May 1998:
Label: King (Disco 1). “Bring Me the French Reserves.” Zurich free-jazz ensemble Malachi (reportedly including David Bowie among its ranks, though its LPs never have credits) offers two 30-minute free form jams, wildly-distorted alto saxophone, vibraphone, car horns and arco bass. ★★★★
“Chordal solos can be very interesting. You don’t always have to play lightning riffs: they wouldn’t support this song’s mood anyway,” Garson said of his work on “Bring Me the Disco King.”
It was a world away from his percussive wizardry on “Aladdin Sane,” a piano solo that reportedly terrified Duncan Jones as a child. Garson went to his roots, playing rich jazz chords, his closing solo full of F# minor 11s, F minor 11s and 13s, Bb minor 11s. His opening riff sounds like a slow, truncated version of the intro to Steely Dan’s “Kid Charlemagne.” Favoring his bass keys, he uses briefly ascending and descending chord figures as hooks, laces Bowie’s verse lines with discreet note runs, provides chordal support on Bowie’s dramatic pauses, plays off Chamberlain’s looped drum figure. In his closing solo, he often only plays two chords per bar, though moving through the occasional harmonic thicket (dense bars with falling triplet chord figures), his hands often working in parallel. In the last bars, he plays whole notes for a bassline and bristling chords with his right hand, keeping within the circle of F minor, E minor, and G minor (the closing chord). He works in gracious service to the song. It was his last performance on a Bowie record.
Excerpt from Hollywood’s Greatest Disasters (Methuen: 1988):
By May 1980, The Cubists was $10 million over budget, only four complete scenes had been shot and Tom Stoppard’s script was still being revised. After having seen dailies, producer Dino De Laurentiis called a halt for a week and said that he would recast the Braque and Léger roles, much to the consternation of De Niro, who had developed a good rapport with Gérard Depardieu during the shooting of 1900 and was reportedly upset to learn Depardieu would no longer be Léger.
The replacement leads, however, were warmly received, particularly David Bowie, who played well against De Niro. To the shock of all concerned, the first weeks of resumed filming went smoothly, with most Paris exteriors completed. The move to Cinecittà, however, proved disastrous. Walken fell ill with colitis, De Niro was acting increasingly erratic (at times speaking to the crew in his private dialect of Italian). A stage hand fell to his death, the atelier set was lost in a mysterious fire (some suspected the desperate producer’s hand). There was, consecutively, a flood, a rat infestation, a bomb threat by the Red Brigades, a supporting actor suddenly becoming mute, and a second fire.
Throughout it all, Bowie was unflappable, even when summoned to the set by De Laurentiis calling “bring me the disco king.” Bowie’s long years in live television, co-hosting revues with Petula Clark and Cher, had inured him to chaotic situations on set, and he entertained fellow actors with impromptu songs he played on guitar during the many breaks in filming. De Niro recalled hearing one “about some kind of astronaut rock star” and wished Bowie would have made a “proper album, as he was never really given his due.” Walken agreed. “Bowie was the only good thing about it,” he said. “It should not have been his last movie.”
Throughout “Bring Me the Disco King” Bowie plots the demise of a character he’d played for decades. A command to let him disappear. Nothing left to release: expiring in jail but free from the album cycle at least, as he’d earlier punned on “balance” as a life goal and bank statement. There are lines of half-remembered decadence: Los Angeles coke runs; nights in walled Berlin. Killing time in the Seventies: wasting one’s life in nightclubs but also standing victorious over time (temporarily). You promised me the ending would be clear, he begins. Labored over for a decade, existing in a host of parallel lives, “Bring Me the Disco King” set the stage for a world in which David Bowie is a memory.
SONG 2
(Albarn, Coxon, James, Rowntree.) Live: 7 October 2003- 25 June 2004. Bowie: lead vocal, rhythm guitar, twelve-string acoustic guitar, Stylophone; Slick, Leonard: guitar; Garson: piano, keyboards; Dorsey: bass, vocal; Campbell: drums; Russell: vocal, guitar, keyboards, percussion.
Bowie’s last tour — nine months, 22 countries, 112 shows — was hubristic in its energy and length. Every night he played for at least two hours and sometimes had thirty-plus song setlists. Take it easy, man! you want to yell when you see a concert clip. But fan reports, newspaper reviews, the tour diaries of Gail Ann Dorsey, and videos all document a man in apparent robust health, in fine voice, eager to play.
After his road-heavy mid-Nineties, where he’d held his own with Nine Inch Nails and the Prodigy, he’d gotten a taste for the stage. “It was not something I looked forward to very much,” Bowie said of touring,
I’ve always loved the putting together everything. I love the idea of making albums and writing albums and conceptualizing and all that side of the thing, you know? The actual going out on the road side of the thing — one, I never thought I was that good at it, and two, I just didn’t enjoy the process too much. I don’t know, maybe because I didn’t feel competent as an artist.
Planned since 2001, the Reality tour’s impetus was in great part financial (i.e., the impetus behind every tour). Bowie’s later albums had sold modestly, and making a living by selling albums was becoming impossible, he said. “I don’t see any hope for the industry at all. We’re watching it collapse — it’s definitely imploding — and it’s become a source of irrelevance.” It would be his widest-ranging tour in years: he hadn’t been to Singapore and Hong Kong since 1983, Australia and New Zealand since 1987. Using the goliath Clear Channel Entertainment, Bowie’s team drafted a flexible schedule — he’d play the arenas he knew could sell out but would book two-thousand-seat theaters in less predictable markets. He often underestimated demand. The tour wound up grossing $46 million, even with its premature end.
His band — Dorsey and Sterling Campbell, Mike Garson, guitarists Gerry Leonard (playing the “Fripp,” “Belew” and “Gabrels” role) and Earl Slick (playing himself) and a recent addition: Catherine Russell, a utility player who sang, played keyboards, percussion and guitar — were an adept, no-nonsense crew who kept to established arrangements, aided by a sound mix in which “David’s voice sits on top, but this is not a Vegas-style show. The band is every bit as present as they need to be,” said front-of-the-house engineer Pete Keppler. Learning that Bob Dylan had seventy songs in his touring repertoire, Bowie pushed his band to learn sixty of his, altering the setlists regularly. This churn was hard on his players — after one show in Paris where Bowie swapped in a bunch of under-rehearsed songs, Dorsey wrote the band “all felt as if we had fumbled through a tough football match we knew we had lost from the beginning.”
Bowie put hits (“singalong time,” he called it) cheek-by-jowl with the likes of “The Motel” and “The Loneliest Guy” in a typical set. “I can’t do a full evening’s worth of those songs [like “Starman”] because I’ll go barmy. You become a karaoke machine,” he said (“look mum, I’m a jukebox!” he said after singing “Starman” one night). “Judging by the audience reaction, I think I’ve done the right thing,” he said midway through the tour. “I think I’ve chosen quite accurately how far I can go with quite new and obscure things, and how much I should balance that with pieces everybody knows.” The fair-weather portion of audiences grew impatient. “Give us some hits, Davey!” one man yelled in Toronto between songs.
Wearing a tattered jacket, jeans, t-shirt and scarf and leather boots or Chuck Taylors, Bowie had regular bits (a runway strut for “Fashion,” Pierrotisms for “Ashes to Ashes,” drag queen moves for “China Girl”), joked and bantered with the crowd, had them sing “All the Young Dudes.” “Constantly grinning,” Billboard noted of his performance in New York. In Berkeley he “pranced theatrically, calling himself the Artful Dodger, imitated Americans and Americans imitating the British.” It was shtick, he told journalists. “If there’s a sense of seriousness, that comes in the songs themselves… Performing isn’t a life-threatening situation in the scheme of things.” He was back to being the fey, witty singer of his folk duo “Bowie and Hutch,” who’d made his hippie audiences crack up between numbers. Or the would-be cabaret star from 1968, breaking into medleys during songs, he or Dorsey or Russell singing bits of Frank Zappa’s “It Can’t Happen Here” or Dionne Warwick’s “Do You Know the Way to San Jose.” A favorite bit was for the band to tear into Blur’s “Song 2,” revving up crowds, as if Blur had written the song for Bowie to use as incidental music.
Just for One Night
Early summer 2004 was dismal in northern Europe, with many Bowie festival appearances that June plagued by rains and wind. At the Norwegian Wood Festival in Oslo, on 18 June, he was struck in the eye by a lollipop, causing him to understandably lose his shit for a moment. The next festival, in Finland, passed uneventfully. Then came Prague.
He opened with “Life on Mars?” for the first time on the tour. Eight songs in, while singing “Reality,” those in the front rows saw him struggling to finish the song. He left the stage, the band going into “A New Career in a New Town” and “Be My Wife” (sung by Catherine Russell). “That’s not supposed to happen,” Leonard recalled thinking. “He was really feeling terrible. It happened right there on the stage: that’s showbiz.” Returning to apologize, Bowie blamed a trapped nerve in his shoulder. He sang “China Girl” and left again after an aborted “Station to Station.” The show still didn’t end. The persona he’d developed, the music man who gave you a bang for your buck, wouldn’t let him rest. He returned to finish “Station to Station” and sing “Modern Love” and “The Man Who Sold the World,” sitting on a stool, clutching his arm. Maj Halova of Prague, who was at the show, told me that the crowd knew something was wrong: “There might have been a few boos because it got cut short, but I think mostly we were confused and a bit worried.” Bowie apparently had a heart attack that night, and it may not have been the first. Reeves Gabrels later told Marc Spitz that he’d known for years that Bowie was dealing with chest pains.
There was one more show.
The annual Hurricane Festival is held on a motorcycle racetrack in Scheeßel, a German village southwest of Hamburg. It’s an unassuming place to close a story that began on 16 June 1962, when the fifteen-year-old David Jones had his first-ever public gig, playing with the Kon-Rads at the Bromley Tech PTA Fete. At Hurricane, those in the crowd noticed nothing amiss during the set, with Bowie moving around and playing guitar (he seemed to have a twinge of pain during “Ashes to Ashes,” clutching his arm again). As evening drew in, it got colder, the North Sea winds coming across the Lower Saxony plains. Bowie donned a grey hooded sweatshirt. He looked like a handsome, tired dad at a football game. Or as the writer Chris Barrus said, like a fishing boat captain weathering a storm.
The next day, at St. Georg Hospital in Hamburg, a surgeon performed an angioplasty to treat a blocked artery in Bowie’s heart, inserting a stent to open a blood vessel narrowed by plaque. He was in hospital for over a week and cancelled his remaining festival appearances. He said he was unhappy that the tour had ended this way but that he was feeling better and hoped to “get back to work” within a month.
At Scheeßel, Bowie closes his main set with “Heroes.” Leonard plays an ascending, choppy figure on guitar, moving against Campbell’s snare and cymbals. Bowie holds back, knotting his fingers beneath his chin (he does a little dolphin dance). Slick comes in, cool and indifferent, chewing gum. At last, the wailing Fripp riff (via Leonard’s EBow) and Bowie starts drawing power from somewhere in him, diving into the song, surfacing, pushing through it. And the SHAME spread on the OTHER SIDE!, gesturing towards Berlin to the east. And NOTHING and NO ONE will HELP us! Campbell plays hard enough to light a city. The moment has chosen itself. This is the wake for David Bowie.
(SHE CAN) DO THAT
(Bowie, Transeau). Recorded: (vocals) ca. winter-spring 2005, Looking Glass. Bowie: lead and backing vocal; Kristeen Young: backing vocal; (music) ca. winter-spring 2005, Los Angeles. Brian Transeau: synthesizers, keyboards, programming. Produced: Transeau, Visconti.
First release: 12 July 2005, Stealth (Epic EK 94475).
For seven long years, the last new recording issued under Bowie’s name was “(She Can) Do That,” a dance track on the soundtrack of Stealth, a 2005 film that was a commercial and critical disaster. He wrote the lyrics and topline melody; the rest was by producer Brian Transeau (aka BT) and the Berklee professor Richard Boulanger. After he’d convalesced, after years of making brooding albums and “Last Songs,” here was something new: keep going — don’t stop now — keep going — take cover — keep going — be cool.
In early 2005, Bowie cut his vocal at Looking Glass, with Kristeen Young on harmonies. “I was just hanging around the studio. It was a time when (on a few songs) David had me double his vocal an octave higher,” she wrote in 2016. Bowie “kept saying, ‘I don’t want to write this. Do YOU want to write this?’ I was naïve and thought he was joking… but now, I don’t think he was.” Bowie sent the Pro Tools files to BT in Los Angeles, where BT filled the track with trademarks like “stutter” edits, vocal pitch shifting, and subtle time changes.
What was Bowie doing? A tip of the hat to the Hamtaro theme song? An update of “Right,” another song where he’d bucked himself up in a dark time? Most likely he put as much thought into “(She Can) Do That” as he did his coffee order at Dean and DeLuca the morning he cut it. If the brief was to make a dance song for a Jamie Foxx version of Top Gun, updated for the War on Terror, there aren’t many viable options.
It was a tentative step back into the studio after his recuperation. Visconti and Bowie were planning a new album, with Bowie telling jazz musician Courtney Pine, in a radio interview in September 2005, that he was currently writing songs (“it looks pretty weird, so I’m happy”). There was ambivalence in his tone. Asked what his fans were expecting, Bowie said “oh they don’t expect anything these days, I think they just sort of wait and see what I put out… it’s the luck of the draw and sometimes it works really well and sometimes it’s godawful… but that’s the way it goes and I like that.” He wanted a break from the Heathen/Reality sound — cutting an instrumental album, doing something “experimental” or “techy,” with David Torn in a central role. Did he listen to playback of “(She Can) Do That” and swear off making records for a decade? Happily, in 2013 this atrocity became trivia.
THE CYNIC
(Eistrup). Recorded: March-April 2005, Sun Studio, Dortheavej 4, 2400 Copenhagen, Denmark; (Bowie vocal) ca. late April-May 2005, Looking Glass. Bowie: lead vocal; Kaspar Eistrup: lead vocal, guitar; Henrik Lindstrand: keyboards, guitar; Mads Tunebjerg: bass; Asger Techau: drums. Produced: Kashmir, Visconti, engineered: Visconti, McNulty, Andreas Hviid.
First release: 10 October 2005, No Balance Palace (Columbia 82876 72767 2).
Bowie spent the years after his operation in semi-retirement but not in seclusion. He sampled bands who played New York, wearing a cap and sporting, at times, a mustache and beard. He became a routine sighting for blogs like Brooklyn Vegan, to the point where if Bowie didn’t show up at your gig, your band had some issues. How did he have so much time? Dave Itzkoff asked him in 2005. “Fortunately, I’m not working [laughs]. So I’m resting. I get out a lot… I love seeing new bands, art shows, everything. I get everywhere — very quietly and never above 14th Street. I’m very downtown.”
“I remember turning around, at a Mission of Burma reunion show at the Bowery Ballroom, and seeing Bowie, alone, standing in the shadows, soaking the music in, slipping away before the last song,” the writer Alex Abramovich recalled. “Friends in the city were always seeing him at shows — he might have been secretive, but Bowie was so distinctive, and so beautiful, he wasn’t easy to miss — and not at all the ones you’d have expected him to attend.” Bowie saw TV on the Radio and the Arctic Monkeys, Secret Machines and Scissor Sisters (he sent an email to the latter’s Jake Shears, saying “it sounded very good from where I was sitting,” causing Shears to frantically parse that line for days, wondering if it was an insult). He saw Franz Ferdinand at the Roseland Ballroom, Interpol at the Hammerstein Ballroom, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah! at the Knitting Factory, Arcade Fire at the Bowery Ballroom, the Killers at Irving Plaza.
Tony Visconti attended the latter (in October 2004), bringing as his plus-one the Danish singer and guitarist Kasper Eistrup of Kashmir, a band Visconti was planning to produce. They met Bowie in the VIP balcony.
True to form, Bowie knew Eistrup’s band, praised their albums, then talked about culture, politics and whatever else was on his mind that evening. The three shared a ride afterward.
When working on Kashmir’s album in Copenhagen in March 2005, Visconti thought one track, “The Cynic,” (“it had the vibe of a Kurt Cobain song influenced by Bowie”) could use a Bowie vocal, to the point where he did Bowie imitations for scratch vocals. In New York in late April 2005, when Visconti, Eistrup and Kashmir bassist Mads Tunebjerg were doing mixing and post-production at Looking Glass, Bowie appeared “fresh as a daisy and enthusiastically sang the be-Dickens out of ‘The Cynic’ as if he’d written it himself,” Visconti said. Tunebjerg recalled that Bowie already had the track on his iPod, so he “had one or two runs and he was there.” Bowie even played a role in the video, a Constructivist-inspired piece in which he, looking like the Patrick Troughton incarnation of The Doctor, played Death as a butler. “The Cynic” was adequate post-Radiohead rock, with Bowie easily handling Eistrup’s melody, enjoying the long vowels of the refrains. Bowie could’ve fashioned a take on Interpol or Franz Ferdinand well enough, but he was happier in the audience now.
PROVINCE
(Malone, Sitek.) Recorded: ca. June-August 2005, November 2005, Stay Gold Studio, Williamsburg, NYC. Tunde Adebimpe: lead vocal; Kyp Malone: lead vocal; Bowie: harmony vocal; Dave Sitek: guitar, bass, sampler, keyboards; Gerard Smith: piano; Jaleel Bunton: drums. Produced: Sitek; engineered: Sitek, Chris Coady.
First release: 6 July 2006, Return to Cookie Mountain (Interscope B0007466-02/4AD CAD2607, UK #90, US #41).
In 2003, Dave Sitek, an artist and musician from Brooklyn, gave a painting to Bowie’s doorman, who promised he’d pass on the CD of Sitek’s band, TV on the Radio. Two years later, Bowie sang on one of their tracks. (Advice to the ambitious young: cultivate good relations with doormen.) Sitek formed the band with fellow illustrator Tunde Adebimpe, soon adding Kyp Malone, Jaleel Bunton, and the late Gerard Smith. They were part of the turn-of-the-century Williamsburg scene that also spawned the Liars and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs (a short-lived era — Sitek had to close his studio in 2009 after his landlord tripled the rent).
Bowie mentored TV on the Radio, listening to early mixes of their first album. He was making up for lost time — for much of his life, he’d been so consumed with work that he’d had few opportunities to develop younger acts (like Devo, whose debut he’d wanted to produce but starred in Just a Gigolo instead). So when the band was recording in summer 2005, Bowie offered to help, even if it meant coming to Brooklyn. “I told him, ‘If you want to come into the studio and be the boss of things, you totally can,’” Sitek said in 2008. “I gave him the demos of the songs, and ‘Province’ just really resonated with him… He just showed up at my studio and did it.” The challenge was how to fit Bowie into an already-dense vocal arrangement with Adebimpe and Malone. He starts the first verse as the high end of the harmony (his typical guest-star role) but is soon overshadowed by Malone. He spends the rest of the track fighting to be heard, sometimes following Adebimpe’s lead, capturing the occasional phrase, sliding in low for refrains. One of his more democratic moments since Tin Machine.
WAKE UP REFLEKTOR
(Butler, Butler, Chassagne, Kingsbury, Parry [+ Gara on “Reflektor”]) Broadcast: “Wake Up,” 8 September 2005, Radio City Music Hall, New York. Win Butler: lead vocal, guitar, tambourine; Bowie: lead vocal, twelve-string acoustic guitar; Régine Chassagne: keyboards, vocals; William Butler: rhythm guitar, vocals; Richard Reed Parry: bass drum, tambourine, accordion, vocals; Sarah Neufeld: violin; Owen Pallett: violin; Tim Kingsbury: bass; Jeremy Gara: drums. Recorded: “Reflektor” (music) ca. 2011-2012, Sonovox Studios, Montréal; (Bowie backing vocal, ca. late March 2013, Electric Lady Studios, New York City). Produced: Arcade Fire, Markus Dravs, Mark Lawson, James Murphy.
First release: (“Wake Up”) 14 November 2005, Live at Fashion Rocks; (“Reflektor”) 9 September 2013 (download, UK #44, US #99). Live: (“Wake Up”) 2005.
Some of it’s the lighting and TV facepaint. For the first time in his life, Bowie looks frail and old. Something’s been wrung out of him. The band Arcade Fire crowds around him on the stage and he’s happy for the company, happy to be mistaken for one of them.
On 8 September 2005, he performed for the first time since his heart operation, for a ceremony in which the fashion industry donates to a catastrophe elsewhere (post-Katrina New Orleans that year) — “Fashion Rocks.” Strumming a twelve-string acoustic guitar, Bowie takes the first verse of Arcade Fire’s “Wake Up,” his phrasing two-beat jabs. Some-thing… filled up… my heart… with nothing. His movements are guarded. On the communal refrains (even the string players join in), he holds back, stepping away from the mike then swaying back in, a shaky pitch in the harmonies.
It was a performance by “Bowie in Recovery.” He’d shown up that night dressed as if he’d been in a fight, with a bandaged hand and one eye made up to look blackened, and he opened with “Life on Mars?” with only Mike Garson on piano. In diminished voice (the vault on “sai-lors” a modest lift), he took the song at a distance, appraising it. And he sang “Five Years,” with Arcade Fire as his backing band. “Five years! God, that’s all we got!” he shouted towards the end, his voice fraying.
Arcade Fire’s Win Butler was an American, from Texas, no less, home of the president; his father had worked for Halliburton. He ran off to Canada, fell in love, formed a band in Montréal with his wife, brother, and friends. Arcade Fire trafficked in childhood: flip-books in their Neon Bible box, Yellow Submarine graphics in their videos, their neighborhood jamboree performances, the school music room garnishes — sleigh bells, accordions, harpsichords, xylophones. Bowie was fascinated. “Arcade Fire has a very strong theatrical flair, a boisterous, college kind of feel to what they’re doing, and also there’s a wave of enthusiasm to it,” he said in 2005. “But their show is theatrical nonetheless, because it doesn’t alter much from night to night.” After the Fashion Rocks performance, Bowie joined the band the following week, singing “Queen Bitch” and “Wake Up” in their encore at SummerStage in New York.
Arcade Fire’s records became more spacious, losing the edge of Funeral. The title track of their fourth album, 2013’s Reflektor, was a secret reunion with Bowie (credited only in the “thank you” section of the liners). Soon after the release of The Next Day, he visited the band in New York while they were mixing. Richard Reed Parry said he liked “Reflektor” enough that “he basically threatened us... ‘if you don’t hurry up and mix this song, I might just steal it from you!’ So we thought, well why don’t we go one better, why don’t you sing on our version?” A few days later, engineers set up a Neumann U47 mike and “when Bowie came in he sang quite a bit, giving us many options even though his was not necessarily a featured part,” engineer Korey Richey said. In 2016, Arcade Fire would be among Bowie’s more prominent mourners, organizing a second line parade for him in New Orleans.
ARNOLD LAYNE COMFORTABLY NUMB
(Barrett [“Arnold Layne”]; Waters, Gilmour [“Comfortably Numb”].) Live: 29 May 2006, Royal Albert Hall, London. David Gilmour: lead vocal, lead guitar; Bowie: lead vocal; Phil Manzanera: guitar, vocals; Richard Wright: keyboards, vocals; Dick Parry, Jon Carin: keyboards, vocals; Guy Pratt: bass; Steve DiStanislao: drums, vocals. Produced: Gilmour.
First release: (“Arnold Layne”) 26 December 2006 (EM 717); (“Comfortably Numb”) 17 September 2007, Remember That Night: David Gilmour, Live at the Royal Albert Hall (EMI 504 3119/Columbia Music Video 88697 13913 9).
Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour played the Royal Albert Hall for three nights in late May 2006. At the first show, with no fanfare, Bowie walked out to sing “Arnold Layne” and “Comfortably Numb.” Along with his performances with Arcade Fire the previous autumn, it suggested he was testing the waters for a return to public life.
On Pink Floyd’s misanthropic The Wall, “Comfortably Numb” has B minor verses with Roger Waters in his favorite role as a manipulative bureaucrat — here, a doctor reviving the catatonic rock star Pink so he can perform. Its Gilmour-sung D major refrains were the needle hitting the vein. On stage, Bowie struggled to find his footing in “Comfortably Numb,” particularly the verses, which had a near-conversational melody that Waters had written for his cracked voice (it began as a Dylan parody), Bowie elevated his phrasings and worried through the song.
He was more comfortable singing “Arnold Layne,” Pink Floyd’s first single. The characters of Bowie’s debut album — the little bombardier, cross-dressing barkeep and Uncle Arthur — were kin to the knicker-thief and jailbird Layne. Bowie savored the Mockney rhymes (“now ‘ees cort/a nahsty sort”) and jibed the refrains: “takes two to know! Two to know!”
flashing a V-for-victory sign. Gilmour and Waters keep on, with Waters still touring The Wall, which has been around longer than the Berlin one was. Bowie never performed in Britain again.
PUG NOSED FACE
(Bowie, Gervais, Merchant.) Recorded: 5-7 June 2006, Elberts, Pegs Lane, Hertford, Hertfordshire. Bowie: vocal; Clifford Slapper: piano.
First broadcast: 21 September 2006, Extras (Series 2, Episode 2 “David Bowie”). Live: 2007.
Bowie was a fan of Extras, Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant’s follow-up to The Office. Where The Office was provincial failure, Extras diagnosed a broader malaise: millennial Britain’s obsession with fame and status. Plots centered on the humiliations and grievances of Gervais’ character, actor Andy Millman. Gervais asked Bowie to perform in an episode. The set-up has the barely-famous Millman at a high-end bar, hoping for a sympathetic ear from Bowie. After a few nods, Bowie turns to a piano for an impromptu song: “Little fat man, who sold his soul… chubby little loser… see his pug nosed face!” It’s a fan’s nightmare: you fail Bowie’s hip test and get stilettoed in public.
Bowie asked for an English rock pianist, so producer Charlie Hanson contacted Clifford Slapper (who would later write Mike Garson’s biography). Gervais and Merchant had written the lyric as part of their script, so both Bowie and Slapper were asked to write chords. When they met, they discovered their pieces were nearly the same: A major progressions with “classic” Bowie modulations, as Slapper told me. Bowie filmed his Extras scene in the first week of June 2006, with one day for rehearsal and another for filming. As “Pug Nosed Face” was cut live, Slapper played off-camera to voice the piano that Bowie played on set (the latter’s action was disengaged). It was the last public image of Bowie for years: a nattily-dressed man leading yuppies in a round of joyous humiliation. In 2007, for his final performance in public, Bowie introduced Gervais at Madison Square Garden with an a cappella “Pug Nosed Face,” the crowd joining on the refrain. He bowed out with a jeer.
FALLING DOWN FANNIN STREET
(Waits [“Falling Down”], Waits, Brennan [“Fannin Street”].) Recorded: ca. late April-May 2007, Dockside Studio, 4755 Woodland Road, Maurice, Louisiana; (Bowie vocals) ca. late summer 2007, Avatar Studios. Scarlett Johansson: lead vocal; Bowie: harmony vocals; Bunton: acoustic guitar; Sitek: guitar, sampler; Nick Zinner: slide guitar; Sean Antanaitis: pump organ, “guitorgan,” vibes, banjo, piano, bells, tambourine, synthesizer; Ryan Sawyer: drums, tambourine, vibraphone, tom tom. Produced: Sitek, engineered: Sitek, Chris Moore.
First release: 19 May 2008, Anywhere I Lay My Head (ATCO 8122 79925 8/R1 454524, UK #64, US #126).
Scarlett Ingrid Johansson is a New Yorker, born and raised. She’s made over fifty films and is not yet thirty-five. Though she wanted to sing in musicals in her youth, she never got the Annie or Cosette roles thanks to having a deep voice even as a child. But in 2006, she sang “Summertime” for a compilation distributed by Rhino, who then asked her to record a full album. Knowing she’d get belittled for whatever she made, she decided to be truly indulgent and hit upon the idea of a Tom Waits cover album.
Early sessions with jazz musicians “sounded awful,” so she sought out Dave Sitek from TV on the Radio. Sitek saw his chance to cut a Lee Hazlewood/Nancy Sinatra mood record, the dream of every indie dude in the 2000s. Cut in late spring 2007 in Louisiana, the album (Anywhere I Lay My Head) was mostly latter-day Waits compositions. Sitek went for what he called a “cough medicine tinker-bell vibe,” making Johansson part of a gentle clatter: Tibetan bowls, music boxes, pump organs, bass harmonicas, kalimbas, cicada buzzes.
Johansson and Bowie had both acted in Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige, though having no scenes together. Afterward they met at a dinner in New York, where Bowie said he’d heard she was working with Sitek. “I jokingly said, ‘You know, let me know if you want to come! Anytime — I’ll drive you!’,” she said. “And then one day when I was in Spain shooting [Vicky Cristina Barcelona], I got this call from Dave, and he was like, ‘You’ll never guess who I have in the studio right now’.” Bowie showed up at Avatar Studios during mixing, having gone to the trouble of getting sheet music. Sitek had suggested he sing on “Falling Down” and “Fannin Street,” which he did, and “I Don’t Wanna Grow Up,” for which he felt he couldn’t add anything.
In “Fannin Street,” Waits leaned on Leadbelly’s song of the same title. He recalls a warning he’d never heed, with a refrain melody that seemed fished from a riverbed. For Leadbelly, “Fannin Street” was where the night never ends; for Waits, it’s a damnation. In her version, Johansson slips into the murk on her lowest notes. She cedes the mourning to Bowie, whose four-part harmonies build, by the closing refrain, to gorgeous hysteria.
Given its line “come from St. Petersburg/Scarlett and me,” her singing “Falling Down” was inevitable. Waits had exploited his smashed voice — a man, a hotel, a world is in freefall, shattering itself apart. Johansson moves through the wreckage, watching through glass like Iggy Pop’s passenger. Bowie starts by muttering in the margins (“I’ve-come-five-hundred-miles” he whispers) and then rises to shadow her in the refrains. By the last verse he’s her equal: sounding the loss that she refuses to accept.