The Man Who Sold the World (25 page)

While the Astronettes' sessions enabled Bowie to ease himself out of the Ziggy Stardust straitjacket into a more liberated way of making music, they were probably more important for him as a way of consolidating his romantic partnership with Ava Cherry. Until now, Bowie and Angie had both enjoyed the freedom of their open relationship, neither of them making any attempt to hide their numerous affairs and dalliances. None of these flings had threatened the core of their marriage, which seemed to operate as a mutually beneficial system of emotional and career support. Bowie knew that Angie would always be there to advise him, regardless of where they had both spent the previous night. But in Ava Cherry, Bowie discovered a young woman who could excite him emotionally, physically, and professionally. While theirs was never quite a union of equals—their affair was carried out strictly on Bowie's terms—it did mean that Angie's central role in his life, and his career, was diminished. Although they continued to maintain the fiction that their marriage was functioning as before, Bowie increasingly kept his wife, and her influence, at a distance.

Not that Bowie's passion for Ava Cherry was enough to encourage him to complete the Astronettes' album. Tony Defries retained the rights to the unfinished tapes when his business relationship with Bowie was severed in 1975, and eventually issued an Astronettes CD in 1994. The song selection betrayed several of Bowie's private obsessions: Frank Zappa, Roy Harper, standard songs, even the Beach Boys' “God Only Knows” (cut at these sessions in an arrangement he clearly copied for his 1984 album
Tonight
). As a commercial (rather than archival) release, the album subsequently titled (by Defries)
People from Bad Homes
would have damaged Bowie's reputation if it had appeared at the time—which is presumably why he chose to leave it unfinished.

Of the four songs that Bowie contributed to the project, “I Am Divine” gave the most accurate indication of what would happen when he visited Philadelphia the following year for the
Young Americans
sessions. Indeed, it would have been a worthy contender for that album, its rhythmic breakdowns and disco-funk arrangement providing a thrilling vehicle for the glorious voice of Geoff MacCormack. The combination of R&B trademarks—gospel voices, wah-wah guitar—with the daredevil piano of Mike Garson was positively inspired, Garson's ability to send out jazz feelers across the standard funk changes making one wish that he had survived in Bowie's band long enough to participate in
Young Americans
. Besides the ecstatic rush of the music, the track had its biographical intrigue: its portrait of a megalomaniac contained a sly reference to someone who considered himself the “MainMan”—which was exactly how Tony Defries used to sign his seventies correspondence.

 

[93] I AM A LASER

(Bowie)

Recorded by the Astronettes, November 1973

Of interest solely because Bowie returned to the song briefly in 1974 [111], and then rewrote it as “Scream Like a Baby” [187] in 1980, “I Am a Laser” was a ghastly exercise in theatrical soul that contained some of the most embarrassing lyric writing of his entire career—patronizing, clichéd, ultimately laughable. In other circumstances, a couplet about the excitement of a “golden shower” might have been amusing; given to Ava Cherry as a statement of power and pride, it was nothing less than insulting.

 

[94] PEOPLE FROM BAD HOMES

(Bowie)

Recorded by the Astronettes, November 1973

Bowie's mid-sixties songwriting demos [A8–A13] illustrated that writing to a pop formula did not come naturally. “I Am a Laser” [93] and “People from Bad Homes” confirmed that he found it no easier to come to terms with the demands of R&B. No reputable music publisher would have offered him a contract on the basis of those two songs—though the latter was marginally more effective, thanks to its vague similarity to the Drifters' “On Broadway” (as quoted in the fade-out of “Aladdin Sane” [70]) and the brief spasm of excitement spurred by the opening to the chorus. As yet, Bowie had no reliable guide for constructing a soul melody, or indeed an appropriate lyric: “People from Bad Homes” had a tune that seemed to be running a bar or two behind the band, and a social comment lyric that was little more than inane. It left at least a subliminal mark on its creator, however, as the title reappeared in the lyrics to the altogether more successful “Fashion” [185] in 1980.

 

[95] THINGS TO DO

(Bowie)

Recorded by the Astronettes, November 1973

After two songs that displayed little flair for melody or structure, “Things to Do” did at least provide the Astronettes with an adventurous backing track—the only indication in Bowie's song catalogue of his passion in 1973 for the Latin music he'd heard in New York's clubs. Musically, this was strongly inspired by the Cuban standard “Oye Como Va,” recorded by Santana on their
Abraxas
album in 1970. Its basic chord sequence (Cm-Eb-Fm) and bubbling percussion were pure Latino, but Bowie had yet to learn that on a track dominated by congas, the drummer did not need to match their frenetic pace, and “Things to Do” sometimes suggested that the Muppets' puppet Animal had entered the studio. The Astronettes grasped the special harmonic blend of the Latin sound but were hampered by a melody that merely filled the track, rather than enhancing it.

 

[96] 1984/DODO

(Bowie)

Recorded ca. September 1973;
Sound + Vision
CD set

 

[97] DODO (AKA YOU DIDN'T HEAR IT FROM ME)

(Bowie)

Recorded September 1973;
Diamond Dogs
extended CD

 

[98] 1984

(Bowie)

Recorded October 1973–February 1974;
Diamond Dogs
LP

“I'm an awful pessimist,” David Bowie conceded in 1973. “That's one of the things against me. I'm pessimistic about new things, new projects, new ideas, as far as society's concerned.” He was not alone. In America, the Watergate scandal was undermining the public's faith in the nation's most trusted institutions. Across the West, a new era of austerity loomed, as the Yom Kippur War sparked an energy crisis that soon led to what the British chancellor of the exchequer, Anthony Barber, described as the nation's “gravest economic crisis” since World War II.

It was a season for visions of apocalypse and repression, which for Bowie reinforced the impact of a train journey across the Russian continent in April and May. The grim bureaucracy and acute poverty of the fabled communist paradise stoked his prevailing sense of panic and claustrophobia in the run-up to his final tour as Ziggy Stardust. Back in London, he told his wife, “After what I've seen of this world, I've never been so damned scared in my life.” So intense was his feeling of dread that he vehemently resisted the notion of compressing his experiences into an album. “If I ever wrote about it, it would be my last album ever,” he said. “I don't think I'd be around after recording it.”

It was hardly a coincidence that instead he chose to map out a rock musical around George Orwell's fictional re-creation of a Stalinesque society,
Nineteen Eighty-Four
. Other musicians had flirted with Orwell's theme, notably the rock band Spirit, whose “1984” single was banned by many US radio stations in 1969 for its political content, and jazz drummer Hugh Hopper, who issued an instrumental album titled
1984
in 1973. But Bowie's fantasies, as ever, were fashioned on an epic scale: a Broadway revue with a huge cast, and perhaps a television film to document it for posterity. Instead of resting after completing
Pin Ups
, he threw himself into a weeklong frenzy of writing and emerged with a skeleton script and several songs that would propel the action forward.

There was a certain irony in Bowie's attempting to translate the devious operations of Orwell's (or more accurately Big Brother's) Ministry of Truth into song. Minitrue's constant rewriting of history was no more audacious than Bowie's ability to fashion a fresh version of his own past whenever he was confronted with a microphone. But his sincerity was transparent: nothing he had conceived since the original blueprint of the Ziggy Stardust project had exerted such a hold over his imagination. So his sense of disappointment—almost betrayal—when the proposed musical had to be abandoned was crushing.

The problem was simple, and intractable: “Mrs Orwell refused to let us have the rights, point blank. For a person who married a socialist with communist leanings, she was the biggest upper-class snob I've ever met in my life. ‘Good heavens, put it to
music
?' It really was like that.” Not that Bowie was given singular treatment: so protective was Sonia Orwell of her late husband's legacy, and so appalled had she been by a 1955 film adaptation, that she had turned down everyone who approached her wishing to translate
Nineteen Eighty-Four
into another medium. As her biographer noted, “Rejected applicants inevitably found her approach tiresome and high-handed.” Bowie was left to mold his Orwell-inspired rock musical into something equally apocalyptic, but sufficiently removed from the original to keep Sonia's lawyers at bay.

Without access to Bowie's notebooks from the period, it's impossible to determine how thoroughly he had sketched out the scenario for
Nineteen Eighty-Four
. Several songs—“We Are the Dead” [102] and “Big Brother” [103] among them—explored themes or phrases that can be traced back to Orwell's novel. Others, composed during his experimentation with lyrical cut-ups, were sufficiently vague to fit into almost any category, and could perhaps have been revised to make them more specific. Some (“Rebel Rebel” [101] is the most notable example) were difficult to imagine inside even the loosest
Nineteen Eighty-Four
frame. It was also not clear whether Bowie was intending for the narrative to be carried forward entirely in song, or whether he would create dialogue to link the musical segments.

The medley of “1984” and “Dodo”—his first studio work on
Nineteen Eighty-Four
, and his last with both producer Ken Scott and the remnants of the Spiders—provided a clue as to how the album might have been constructed, if not the stage musical it was meant to accompany. With its cinematic scoring and constant iteration of the title, “1984” would have provided a striking theme for the project, even if its links with Orwell's book were more suggestive than representational. “Dodo,” meanwhile, was a tightly assembled series of snapshots and incidents that could be located (with some musical license) in the novel. It is possible to imagine an entire album in a similar vein: a collage of emblematic fragments linked by repeated themes, spotlighting selected crisis points and characters from Orwell's imagination, carefully scored to ensure continuity of tone as much as story line. But it would have required a degree of concentration and focus that was perhaps beyond the mercurial Bowie at this stage of his career.

“1984” and “Dodo” were clearly intended from the outset to stand as one discrete piece of music: they were previewed in that form during Bowie's last television appearance with the Spiders from Mars, in October 1973. Issued as a single, it might have altered the public perception of Bowie, and certainly banished all memories of
Ziggy Stardust
. It would have revealed him as the first major rock act to incorporate the stylistic innovations of a generation of US soul performers who had been invited to score so-called blaxploitation movies in the early seventies. Instead, it languished in Bowie's archives until it was exhumed for the retrospective
Sound + Vision
project in 1989.

With its chattering wah-wah guitar deep in the mix, and its dramatic, percussive blend of bass and piano, the “1984” theme was instantly reminiscent of Isaac Hayes's “Theme from
Shaft
.” The use of strings evoked another blaxploitation soundtrack, Curtis Mayfield's
Super Fly
. But there was much more to the arrangement than pastiche: the repeated use of a cavernous bass-drum beat that was detuned as an eerie commentary on the landscape; the four-note piano motif that underpinned the verses; the almost visual impact of the strings, from the cellos introducing the middle section to the spectacular swirl and fall of the violins that ended it; and the way in which the vocal chorus filled out the sound palette, from baritone to soprano, building on the root of the first verse, and then a harmonic third in the second.

Drums and piano (the latter offering a variation on the opening to Strauss's “Also Sprach Zarathustra”) signaled the switch to the much sparser soundscape of “Dodo.” The song focused initially on Orwell's doomed lovers, Winston and Julia, before switching to Winston's neighbor, the hapless Mr. Parsons (who is betrayed by his own child in the novel), and then to the world that those children would inherit. Cellos and electric piano dominated the arrangement, while Mick Ronson laid a surf-guitar motif under the chorus in a surreal juxtaposition of moods. Then the “1984” theme returned, its rhythmic string score acknowledging the pioneering work of Philadelphia soul producers Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff.

Once the
Nineteen Eighty-Four
musical was abandoned, “Dodo” was isolated as a possible duet vehicle for Bowie and sixties pop star Lulu (for whom Bowie had recently produced a hit version of his own “The Man Who Sold the World”). That might explain Bowie's casual vocal on the surviving mix of the separated song, pitched two semitones above the original recording. (That was presumably for Lulu's benefit, although Bowie was not there to hear the results. “No Bowie?” Lulu said when she arrived at Olympic Studios, before adding her voice like a true professional.) There was no such prevarication about “1984,” which was stripped of its “Dodo” elements and retooled for the
Diamond Dogs
album, at a harsher tempo and with the
Shaft
-inspired wah-wah guitar of Alan Parker at the front of the mix. The full dramatic potential of the piece was laid bare here, from the tinkling siren (played on electric piano) that introduced and closed the track to the eight-to-the-bar cymbal rim shots that sizzled beneath the keynote riff. Once again, Bowie found room amid the drama for subtle, sometimes almost puzzling sonic touches—the harpsichord that was audible during the verses, the Byrds-inspired electric guitar beneath the middle section, and the electric piano decorations in the final verse that operated in a different key to the rest of the track, perhaps meant to symbolize Winston Smith's separation from Big Brother's society. The only weakness of the track was the rather redundant third verse, added when the two halves of the medley were separated. One mystery remained: was Bowie warning of the “savage jaw” of 1984—Big Brother's harsh words, perhaps, plus the image of a rabid, slobbering hound—or the “savage lure,” which enabled Big Brother to retain power? The naked ear suggested the former; the printed sheet music insisted the latter.