To be fair, that Eur 266 does buy you 13 180g audiophile-quality vinyl discs, including these three albums plus The Gouster - the previously unreleased album that became Young Americans, TWO versions of the double album David Live (the 2005 reissue runs to three-discs) and the double Live Nassau Coliseum '76, plus another collection of rarities, Re:Call 2. For the digitally-minded (and those with smaller budgets) the collection is also available as a 12-CD package at a more modest Eur 129.99. Still, an expensive fortnight, following the release last week of Led Zeppelin's Complete BBC Sessions.
Of course, we're appealing to the über consumer here. Most self-respecting Bowie fans - and even those with only a casual interest - will have the three studio albums already. But, inevitably, interest in The Dame has piqued with his death, and if that brings new appreciation for his canon via these luxury re-releases, so much the better.
What makes this particular box set interesting is where Bowie was in this period. It began with his move, first to New York and then Los Angeles, to make America his base of operations. This, as Paul Tryka detailed in his excellent Starman biography, saw Bowie consumed by compulsive behaviour, including wild spending, Olympic cocaine consumption and numerous obsessions with people (Mick Jagger) and themes (post-apocalyptic dystopia). Diamond Dogs was the first manifestation of the latter: his eighth album, it was built on a fascination with George Orwell's 1984 and the bleak vision of the (then) future it depicted.
Diamond Dogs also appeared after Bowie had theatrically 'retired' the Ziggy Stardust character, but in doing so he merely moved on to a new guise, the whey-faced Thin White Duke, eschewing the glam rock that Bowie had pursued in the previous two years. Though recorded at London's Olympic Studios (as well as some work at Ludolph Studios in Nederhorst den Berg, a tiny village in the rural Amsterdam hinterland...and just down the road from where I used to live), Diamond Dogs had a noticeably looser sound, pointing towards the 'Americanization' that would evolve further with Young Americans and its notable shift towards soul and funk.
For some of Bowie's earlier cheerleaders, the Diamond Dogs era marked a less welcome change. John Peel, who'd been one of the strongest champions at the outset of Bowie's career, remarked that Bowie's cover of the Eddie Floyd soul classic Knock On Wood, and released as a single off David Live, was "lazy, arrogant and impertinent". But it was on the tour that produced David Live that Bowie appeared in one of the most fascinating - and disturbing - documentaries ever made about a rock musician: Alan Yentob's Cracked Actor.
Made for the BBC's Omnibus arts magazine, Yentob captured an emaciated Bowie, deep in the grip of cocaine addition, on tour in California, with semi-lucid interviews in the back of limousines interspersed with footage of Bowie performing the Diamond Dogs title track along with earlier entries from the canon like Space Oddity, Aladdin Sane and John, I'm Only Dancing (Again). Sadly, Cracked Actor has never been released on home media, although some dodgy bootlegs - recorded off the last BBC screening - lurk online. See it if you can, but be prepared to see a Bowie in a very different space to the jovial, blokey star of chat shows in the late 1990s.
Who Can I Be Now? could very easily have been called something like 'The American Years'. His desire to explore contemporary American music stretches back to the demise of Ziggy Stardust, when the singer was already looking for a new vehicle. Who Can I Be Now? is one of the tracks on The Gouster, the album that Bowie worked on immediately after the Dogs tour, and is a title reflecting his need to reinvent himself. The album took him to Philadelphia's Sigma Sound studio to immerse in the local music culture with producer Tony Visconti, with whom he had reunited to work with on the David Live release. Though The Gouster was never released, it contained early versions of Right, Can You Hear Me and Somebody Up There Likes Me, along with a reworking of John, I'm Only Dancing (Again) and an early version of Young Americans.
It would be a stretch to say that The Gouster alone warrants buying the Who Can I Be Now? package, but for Bowie completists it marks a curious bridging point between Diamond Dogs and Young Americans. It was, according to Visconti, an attempt at soul - "plastic soul", as Bowie would later waspishly brand it - and even its title (a reference to African-American fashion in the 1960s) was meant to represent a statement of attitude.
It's eventual release is more, though, than a work in progress, but the reason why it didn't appear in its originally recorded form was partly down to Bowie recording too many longer songs to fit a single album, and also to the capricious state Bowie was in at the time. Some of the songs recorded for The Gouster were taken into a New York studio with John Lennon, who gave the prototypes outright Philly soul sound (which included guitar work from Carlos Alomar and then-unknown singer Luther Vandross) more of a pop feel. But given how much we still don't know about Bowie, even the presence of a few previously unreleased tracks interpolates gaps in the fan's understanding of the musical - and physical - state Bowie was in between 1974 and 1976.
The cocaine that Bowie was hoovering up at this point in his life may have affected his increasingly paranoid personality, but not necessarily his creativity. After Young Americans came Station To Station. Lasting only six tracks and running for just under 38 minutes, it is both a demonstration of Bowie's impatience to release new material, but also the inventiveness with which he was still streets ahead of any of his peers at the time. Golden Years still sounds, 40 years later, box-fresh, while TVC 15 stands out for its funk and pace, and remains one of my favourite Bowie songs of all time. And his cover of Nina Simone's Wild Is The Wind became so distinct it's now hard to think of how Simone recorded it to begin with (a live version on the Bowie At The Beeb limited edition three-CD set in 2000 saw Bowie - accompanied by his brilliant band of the time - teetering between torch song and rock epic).
Thematically, Station To Station found Bowie toying obsessively with yet new literary inspiration, namely the works of Aleister Crowley and Friedrich Nietzsche, and reflects a state of mind in some degree of turmoil. It's hard not to wonder how much of that was the result of the cocaine. But the album - which precedes the Berlin trilogy and its starker sound and vision (sorry...) - also evolves the funk that had been the hallmark of Diamond Dogs and Young Americans. Ever the magpie, Bowie had become interested in German industrial rock and the synths and rhythms of Kraftwerk, the influence of which can be heard in spirit on Station To Station. However, even Bowie admitted that the album was also a statement of detachment.
Towards the end of the album's tour (from which the Live Nassau Coliseum 76 release was culled), Bowie arrived at London's Victoria Station in an open-topped Mercedes and was photographed giving what appeared to be a Nazi salute. Having previously been questioned by police for possession of Nazi memorabilia as well as being quoted saying that the UK "...could benefit from a Fascist leader", many felt that, along with his somewhat stark, black and white stage aesthetic, Bowie was indeed leaning to the extreme right. Not long after, a drunk Eric Clapton gave his support to Enoch Powell's notorious comments on immigration, leading to the formation of the Rock Against Racism movement. The popular perception became that Britain's rock elite were not as cool as their fans had expected them to be.
Bowie would later dismiss the Victoria Station episode as a case of a photographer catching him at an unfortunate angle. Others would simply put it all down to a rock star's descent into cocaine-induced mania (and portrayed, inadvertently, by Bob Geldof's 'Pink' in Alan Parker's film version of Pink Floyd's The Wall). No wonder, then, that Bowie's next move would be to decamp with Iggy Pop to Berlin - then Europe's drug gateway - though to sober up, both chemically but also creatively.
It's hard, then, not to view the music contained on the numerous discs of Who Can I Be Now? as the result of a rock star in stereotypical drug-addled exploration. But whereas the mountains of coke being taken by the rock music community in Los Angeles in the mid-1970s led to some of music's blandest output, the reason why Bowie continues to be deservedly exalted is loud and clear in this collection. Whatever his state, whatever his application of outside influences, he was, between '74 and '76, still the most unique performer in rock and roll, then or since.
No comments:
Post a Comment