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“Something happened on the day he died
Spirit rose a meter and stepped aside
Somebody else took his place, and bravely cried
(I’m a blackstar, I’m a blackstar)
​
How many times does an angel fall?
How many people lie instead of talking tall?
He trod on sacred ground, he cried loud into the crowd
(I’m a blackstar, I’m a blackstar, I’m not a gangster)”

David Bowie died this week.

I never understood, really, why people got upset over the deaths of famous people they had never met. I guess the right person, for me, just hadn’t died yet.

And then David Bowie died. And I feel a little worse about it with every passing day, not better. I cry a little bit more about it, every day, not less.

I never met David Bowie. Never wrote him a fan letter. Never sent away for an autographed picture. Saw him perform live many times in the 70’s (and never since then), and bought nearly all his records … and that’s about it. And yet no public figure who was alive during my lifetime had more of an influence on me. I am who I am at least in part because of David Bowie. How the hell did that happen?

 

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Everything about him was new. And we were looking for something new.

Bowie had written a song for a band called Mott the Hoople. In the middle of “All the Young Dudes” were these lines:

And my brother’s back at home
With his Beatles and his Stones
I never got it off on all that revolution stuff
It was such a drag … too many snags!

That. That was what we were looking for. It wasn’t even on one of his own records and yet it helped define him as someone for whom rock royalty was … irrelevant. We sensed the coming bloat of stadium rock, felt the first stirrings of ‘what else you got?’ when confronted with the musical behemoths of the 60’s, wanted something of our own. That something was David Bowie.

His “breakout” record was released on June 6th, 1972—The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. Ziggy was a rock opera in which Bowie simultaneously celebrated and lampooned rock and roll. The music was glorious, and we took very seriously the admonition printed on the back of the LP jacket: TO BE PLAYED AT MAXIMUM VOLUME.

Bowie played the cadaverous snaggletoothed Ziggy with spiky orange hair grabbing guitarist Mick Ronson’s ass and kneeling before him in mock fellatio. This was the heroin chic velvet underground iggy and the stooges Bowie. When no one knew him and before he was a star. A skeleton of the night. He was a mainlined androgyne, a small scurrying warm-blooded thing in the midst of lumbering dinosaurs. And he was ours.

The final song on the Ziggy Stardust album was “Rock and Roll Suicide.” It also concluded his live performances on the fabled Fall 1972 tour of North America:

“Oh no love! you’re not alone
You’re watching yourself but you’re too unfair
You got your head all tangled up but if I could only make you care
Oh no love! you’re not alone
No matter what or who you’ve been
No matter when or where you’ve seen
All the knives seem to lacerate your brain
I’ve had my share, I’ll help you with the pain
You’re not alone!
Just turn on with me and you’re not alone
Let’s turn on with me and you’re not alone
Let’s turn on and be not alone
Gimme your hands cause you’re wonderful”

I know people whose lives were saved by those words. Who decided to go on because they’d found a kindred spirit. Some of them were gay men; others were not. We were odd, or “arty,” or didn’t fit in, and David sang to us: I’ve had my share. I’ll help you with the pain.

At the conclusion of Bowie’s live shows in 1972, kids would rush the stage and David would scream “gimme your hands,” and audience and performer alike would stretch and reach toward each other, sometimes grasped, sometimes fingertips grazed.

 

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The summer of 1972 was a big one in my world. The Rolling Stones at the Long Beach Arena. High school graduation. Led Zeppelin at the Long Beach Arena. I turned 17. More pot and hashish than you could shake a stick at. We were misfit kings, my crew and I, masters of all we surveyed: we were in the summer before we all went off to college. And we were obsessed. There is nothing as unbearable as a teenager with an obsession. And mine was David Bowie.

We spent every day that summer in the water on either the north or south side (depending on where the swell was coming from) of the Huntington Beach pier, our Voit duck feet swim fins propelling us onto the faces of beautiful lefts or rights … and when the waves weren’t breaking we’d swim around the pier, keeping just out of the reach of the lines of bonito fisherman and hollering out “whale piss” and “polar bear piss” whenever we’d hit a warm or cold patch of ocean water.

Almost no one had heard of Bowie. He was ours. Ziggy had just come out. That record led us backwards, to explore Hunky Dory and The Man Who Sold the World and Space Oddity. And we bought the Mott the Hoople record in order to hear “All The Young Dudes.” But it was Ziggy we came back to that summer, always Ziggy, ultimately.

The beach was our home, had been for years. We were bodysurfers. We laughed at guys who used boards, considered ourselves the true “watermen,” learning to windmill our ways onto waves that other kids couldn’t catch. Learning when to be patient, when to explode, when to risk a hurtle “over the falls,” and when to pull back and re-position for the next set.

I’d seen The Stones right before graduation. People were envious, but it wasn’t really about The Stones, anymore. It was more about Zeppelin, my god, they were huge and if you wanted to stop people in their tracks you told them your Zeppelin stories, about how you scored your tickets, or the way they perforated your eardrum or how high you’d gotten by the time they came on and roared into “Immigrant Song,” and how Plant really did hit the high notes in that opening wail. Plus, chicks. All the chicks were into Zepp.

But Bowie. He was a secret. He spoke only to us. This was a difficult, troubled, haunted young man who at the conclusion of a glorious rock opera nightmare pleaded with us to give him our hands because we were wonderful. This was the underground rock’n’rollin cryptkeeper who was a science fiction horrorshow come to life.

There were radios every day that summer on the beach—but no David Bowie. And so one day in August, 1972, I decided to do something about that. I’d combine these two worlds. Bowie. And the beach.

 

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I came to a high place of darkness and light.
-Bob Dylan

And, oh, David got dark. He led us to Roxy Music, back to the Velvets and The Stooges, forward to Kraftwerk and Eno, and rejuvenated solo careers for Lou Reed and Iggy Pop. He produced great scary ground-breaking records while he was strung out, coked out of his gourd. He described one day in LA in the mid-70’s: he blew his nose and it was as if half his brains came out. He retreated to Europe and made more great records.

And then got less interesting as he became more mainstream. We got the tanned, healthy Bowie of Let’s Dance. He exploded then and became more popular than he had ever been. But after an uninspired 80’s he had the sense to go back underground, although he never quite again managed to capture lightning in a bottle. His tours became smiling, almost wholesome affairs and he reveled in his history and basked in the adulation. There were some good records and some bad ones but not until The Next Day and ★ (pronounced Blackstar, in spite of the red ink of the WordPress link) did he regain his form, truly, as an artist who reveled in the certainty of his vision, who did not chase trends, or pander to tastes.

He was never that popular. He went off on weird self-effacing tangents like playing keyboards and singing backup vocals in Iggy Pop’s backing band, or deconstructing his entire career by starting a hard rock band called Tin Machine with the sons of comedian Soupy Sales. He didn’t have a top-10 record in the U.S. until Diamond Dogs in 1974. ★, his final, nearly posthumous, record, was his first and only U.S. #1. Ziggy, often cited by critics as his best album, only cracked the top-100, peaking at #75.

He became world-famous, of course. But he was still a bit elusive, a bit of an acquired taste. And there was still something secretive about him. Something just between you and him, no matter how well-known he was. That was one of his gifts.

He disappeared for nearly 10 years, after a near-death “coronary event” while on tour in 2004. When he returned, three years ago, with the single “Where Are We Now?”, followed by the album The Next Day, it was as a mystic elder dispensing snarling dispatches from beyond time:

Here I am, not quite dying
My body left to rot in a hollow tree
Its branches throwing shadows on the gallows for me
And the next day, and the next, and another day

Which brings us to darkness become black in ★. That record, viewed posthumously, is beyond hope and hopelessness. It takes blackness into a realm so black it might, just might, evoke a light at the center of it all. There is a spirit of courageousness, of unblinking resolve, of a wisdom gained by experience that makes this new record a spine-tingling achievement. David had always lived in that “high place of darkness and light.” And at the end of his life, he found yet another remarkable new way to make art of that dichotomy.

There is darkness at the beach, too: when you miscalculate, or get cocky, or just don’t get to the right spot in the wave, when you wipe out, when you are pummeled and held under by the power of the sea. You know that only a few feet away people are tanning themselves, kids are yelling, radios are playing … but for that minute or so you are not entirely sure you can make it back up in time before your lungs burst. It’s dark down there. It can even seem black.

 

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I wrapped my vinyl copy of Ziggy Stardust and my sister’s portable record player in my beach towel, grabbed my fins, and threw the lot into the back seat of my car and headed out. Picked up the gang. Drove to the beach. Parked. Got high around the corner from the Surf Theatre on 5th. Headed for the pier.

—What’s in the towel?

—Nothin. It’s a surprise.

We got to our spot. It was a raging summer day. Periodic nice sets rolled in outside, and there was a fair amount of decent shore break action, too. I spread my towel out, revealing the record and the turntable.

—Gentlemen, behold, I announced.

—No fuckin way. Bowie at the beach.

Set the player up. Slipped the vinyl from the sleeve and fitted it on. Dropped the needle on Side One, Track One … and Woody Woodmansey’s stoned intro drum pattern from “Five Years” began to play on the sands at Huntington Beach. People started to come over to our towels. One girl asked “Is that Bowie?” More chicks. “You brought Bowie to the beach?” This was going very, very well.

But, by the time “Soul Love” kicked in, something felt weird. Maybe it was the waves, the chatter all around us, the tourists and fishermen up above on the pier. No. Something was wrong. Ronson’s solo on “Moonage Daydream” sounded off, sounded … wobbly.

—Uhh, Kiley?

—Yeah?

—Your record. It’s melting.

And that indeed was what was happening. The merciless summer sun was warping the Ziggy platter beyond all recognition. Murmurs of appreciation turned to howls of laughter as I knelt to take the wavy disc off the turntable.

 

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Tonight I sit in a warm home, surrounded by love and light, and I am a very lucky man. I myself descend into the darkness now and again, to find a nugget, to pursue an idea, to retrieve a dream I might burnish into something worth telling you about … but I return by morning and am welcomed into the silver arms of a wonderful girl. But now something is gone. Irretrievably gone.

Why is it so sad? Why am I so sad? I can still listen to all of his music any time I want. So, why? At least part of it is the quality of ★. To have no more music after that pinnacle seems a crime. What new wonders might the man have revealed, given more time?

Is that it, though? No, not really. It’s my own mortality, of course. Someone who helped make me who I am has died. And now one day it will be my turn. That’s what we’re really mourning when we hashtag R.I.P. on our social media pages. We know our turn is coming. And we hope that we will all rest in peace.

This way or no way
You know I’ll be free
Just like that bluebird
Now ain’t that just like me

I couldn’t have been more impressionable than when I first discovered David Bowie. He was new, largely undiscovered, and 25. I was 16 and looking for … someone who’d had his share, who could help me with the pain. You did that, David, you helped me with the pain of being alive and aware and goofy and weird, and right now, at this very moment, I smile through my tears and would like to say, simply: thank you.

 

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Months after that bleached-out day by the HB pier, in October of 1972 at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, he strode onstage to strobe lights and Wendy Carlos’s synthesized intro from Beethoven’s Ode to Joy off the A Clockwork Orange soundtrack. I swore to my friends he was an alien. The way he moved, the way he cocked his head, the way he jerked under the lights. He was an otherworldly marionette who put us on notice, right up front:

If you think we’re gonna make it, you better hang on to yourself

An hour and a quarter later, I was there, at the front of the stage, reaching up, trying to give him my hands. Our fingers never quite got there, our eyes never quite met. But David Bowie touched me, all the same …

David Bowie is a savvy enough consumer—and manipulator—of popular media to understand that he will never produce another “TVC 15,” another “Ziggy Stardust,” another “We Are the Dead.” Those days are long gone and his gift has morphed over the decades into … something different. There have been peaks and valleys since his remarkable 10-album run in the 70’s, but even the peaks (1. Outside, Black Tie White Noise, and Heathen, e.g.) paled in comparison to the earth-shattering impact of his best earlier records.

The Next Day, his “comeback” album from 2013, was a strong addition to the post-70’s Bowie oeuvre, but ultimately played as too derivative and self-referential to be memorable. Its charms evoked past glories in a nearly convincing way, but it broke little new ground and therefore—for a Bowie record—it felt like a lesser effort.

George Carlin once said that “it’s important in life if you don’t give a shit, it can help you a lot,” and David Bowie, on his 69th birthday, with the release of ★, has clearly arrived at his quintessential moment of not giving a shit. While there were tunes aplenty in The Next Day, ★ (Blackstar) is memorable more for its difficulty, its unusual syncopation, its oblique messaging, and, yes, its hard-earned thorny beauty. The lack of any detectable desire to be “commercial” has proven to be its creator’s liberation.

And speaking of giving a shit: as with The Next Day, you can certainly wonder whether anyone who is not already a Bowie fan will care much about ★. That is the curse of the few remaining “classic rock” musicians still releasing new music … no one cares. People will still line up in droves to see human jukeboxes like The Rolling Stones perform their greatest hits (almost all of which were recorded during a 5-year period in the late 60’s-early 70’s), but no one outside deep fandom wants or would care about a new Stones album.

But Bowie, in his deliberately obstinate way, has burrowed into that paradigm and eaten his way out the other side: he refuses to tour (which is the current working musician’s only reliable way to make big bucks), he grants no interviews, and he drops new music with (relatively speaking, at least) little advance fanfare. It’s as if he knows no one cares … and yet in his very withdrawal from the PR game, he has recaptured that one element that eludes almost everyone else in his field: a sense of mystery. What’s he on about? What does this record mean? A 10-minute chamber-pop single with three disparate sections tied together? A backing band of jazz musicians? One guitar solo on the whole album? Where’s “Rebel Rebel”? Where are the damn rockers?

His only real remaining peer in popular music is Bob Dylan. Both have drilled down deep into the heart of their respective mythos and produced late-career records that can stand comparison to those of their youth.

One of the first things that leaps out at you after even just a few listens to ★ is what a “band” album this is. (Here’s the core band of ★ in action, away from David Bowie.) These guys are amazing and are as integral to the ambience of ★ as Bowie himself is. The record feels “of a piece” and the stuttering grooves the band lock into, overlaid with waves of unearthly synths and the mind-blowing honking skronk of bandleader Donny McCaslin’s sax, conspire to make ★ feel in some ways like one extended suite.

Reinforcing this sense of cross-track continuity are the two (so far) music videos Bowie  has released in conjunction with the new album. In the short film for “★”, Bowie plays three characters, one of which is a stumbling, twitching man who wears a blindfold of gauze bandages and who stares out at the world with black buttons for eyes. This same character (now institutionalized and doing his twitching in a hospital bed) is one of two played by Bowie in the music video for “Lazarus.” Typical of Bowie, these videos are haunting, cryptic, and open to endless interpretation; one possible view is that it is only in helpless blindness (those black buttons) and removal from the modern world (by virtue of insanity) can one possibly hope to actually “see” with any profundity.

Bowie’s voice is relatively restrained throughout the new record. He sounds beautiful, frail, exhausted in places. There is a sense of a scarred seer having gained the mountaintop after a lifetime of bloody battles on the plains below. His singing has glorious moments, especially when he doubles his own lead vocal line or drops in achingly touching harmonies, but his fabled power-croon rarely makes an appearance; rather his voice has an ethereal, wispy vulnerability that bespeaks both timelessness and mortality.

★ comprises 7 tracks and clocks in at about 41 minutes. The best way to experience the music is via the ancient Side One/Side Two rhythm of an LP. Plus, you get a lovely package (die-cut gatefold cover, 180g vinyl, and glossy black-on-black combination lyric sheet/photo book). Some track-by-track notes:

SIDE ONE

“★“: The record’s masterpiece. A stunning three-part 10-minute suite that evokes “Station to Station,” not in a musical sense, but in the way that that lengthy multi-part leadoff title track set the tone for the marvelous record that followed. The opening and closing sections of the suite are reminiscent slightly of Earthling-era drum’n’bass … but here the groove is way deeper, and the Middle Eastern vibe is wonderful and ancient. The mid-song r&b section is lovely and hysterically funny: “I’mma take you home/take your passport and shoes/and your sedatives, boo.” Really, a majestic achievement.

“‘Tis a Pity She Was a Whore“: McCaslin’s horns are just ridonkulous on this wicked up-tempo rave-up. Bowie can’t contain himself, either, whooping (atypically) “whoa” at the sax solos toward the end of the song.

“Lazarus“: Lovely, lovely guitar-sax intro leads into Bowie’s pleading whisper. Nice cascades of electric guitar. More funny shit: “Look up here, man, I’m in danger/I’ve got nothing left to lose/I’m so high it makes my brain whirl/dropped my cell phone down below/ain’t that just like me.” The track climaxes with some of Bowie’s crooniest, most passionate singing on the record … and then outros brilliantly for TWO MORE MINUTES of vintage McCaslin sax work and the return of the pretty electric guitar figure that began the song.

SIDE TWO

“Sue (Or In a Season of Crime)“: Drummer Mark Guiliana drives this odd tale about god knows what, playing patterns that are tricky at first but ultimately irresistible. The band really wails in, around, under, and on top of Bowie’s weird, sometimes nearly atonal lead vocal. Fascinating stuff.

“Girl Loves Me“: Employing a kind of Clockwork Orange-y patois, this song at first seems a bit of a lark, kind of a lighthearted break from some of the heaviness of its predecessors … but the sheer aching drone beauty of the “girl loves me/hey cheena” chorus eventually breaks you down and you realize you’re in deeper waters than you thought.

“Dollar Days“: Pretty piano and acoustic guitar, simple, lovely, a bit of lush mournful sax, and then David’s pleading “it’s nothing to me, it’s nothing to see.” This one feels a bit generic and it certainly is the song on the record that makes the least use of his tremendous band. The repetition of “it’s nothing to me, it’s nothing to see” (which becomes “I’m trying to, I’m dying to”) elevates the track periodically … but not quite enough.

“I Can’t Give Everything Away“: Can’t figure this one out. It has a harmonica (!), whose childlike presence seems almost shockingly warm in the midst of all this angst. Is David really singing about his entire career here? “Seeing more and feeling less/saying more but meaning less/this is all I ever meant/this is the message that I sent.” That is truly awful stuff. Would give “sophomoric” a bad name. Bowie has made a career out of confounding expectations in the most innovative and infuriating ways, of weaving complex and contradictory narratives throughout his work … to have that all reduced to “this is the message that I sent” would be criminal, and if that is the way Bowie wants to leave us, if this is in fact his valedictory track on his final album … Jesus, I’ll punch the guy in the nose if I ever meet him! Maybe I’m missing something here and will feel differently about the song one day. I have friends whose opinions I value who absolutely love it, so chances are there is something I’m not seeing. But this one and “Dollar Days” make for a disappointing end to an otherwise ravishing sonic experience … for me.

So, that’s it. At 69, in spite of how the world has turned, in defiance of how his industry has mutated almost beyond recognition, David Bowie has written, recorded, and released an album of new music that is unusual, difficult, experimental, brilliant, maudlin … it’s amazing the heights that not giving a shit and following your muse can allow you to scale.

 

 

 

 Between 1970 and 1980, David Bowie released the following 12 studio records:

THE MAN WHO SOLD THE WORLD
HUNKY DORY
THE RISE AND FALL OF ZIGGY STARDUST AND THE SPIDERS FROM MARS
ALADDIN SANE
PIN-UPS
DIAMOND DOGS
YOUNG AMERICANS
STATION TO STATION
LOW
“HEROES”
LODGER
SCARY MONSTERS

Scorecard for the above:

4 masterpieces (HUNKY DORY, ZIGGY, STATION TO STATION, LOW)
3 great albums (ALADDIN SANE, “HEROES,” LODGER)
4 very good albums (THE MAN WHO SOLD THE WORLD, DIAMOND DOGS, YOUNG AMERICANS, SCARY MONSTERS)

(PIN-UPS, a delightful album of covers, is exempted from this discussion.)

Bowie has done post-1980 work that is, in parts, as interesting, innovative, and challenging as anything he did in the 70’s (parts of the Tin Machine records, OUTSIDE, and HEATHEN, especially). But his reputation as one of rock’s greatest stars rests in that incandescent run from the 1970’s.

Which brings us to THE NEXT DAY, which, among many other things, is the non-1970’s David Bowie record which FEELS and SOUNDS most like a 1970’s David Bowie record. It’s provocative, tuneful, filled with irresistible hooks and memorable lines. It’s the record of an old man, but not one who’s preaching wisdom from a mountaintop. Bowie’s personae here range from acidic resignation through raging fury to haunted self-doubt.

And yet it doesn’t matter. Not at all. Bowie’s record, as accomplished and fascinating as it is, just doesn’t matter. And that’s largely because music doesn’t matter anymore.

There is no band or solo artist alive today whose new records command the attention, sense of anticipation, and cumulative pop-cultural mind-share that rock stars of yore (beginning in the late 60’s) commanded. Music today occupies a far narrower niche than it did when new records by The Beatles, the Stones, Zeppelin, and Bowie, et al, were milestone rite-of-passage-style EVENTS.

All of which, in a weird way, makes me love THE NEXT DAY even more, while noting its irrelevance. Bowie’s newest rock record is as obscure as a poetry reading or a sparsely-attended gallery opening. Not one of these songs will be on the tips of everyone’s tongues for years like “Rebel Rebel” was; not one of them will confound the pop cognoscenti like Side 2 of LOW did.

And so, ultimately, you could say about THE NEXT DAY that this new tune echoes that one on “HEROES,” or that the sax on this record is a buzzing, sexy, honking beast, or that most of these songs not only have hooky choruses, they also have actual, musically integral BRIDGES, for chrissakes … but its most accurate description may be that it is: quaint.

A really good old-timey record that will be heard by relatively few made by a old guy who thinks he still has things to say about how we live today.

There’s a poignance to that which makes me wonder: why did David Bowie make a record at all, at this point in his life? He’s too smart not to know how the landscape has changed. And yet he soldiered on, as if it were 1978, and released an album of new material as if it mattered. Why?

It’s not like he made a difficult, arcane record. He did not write an ambient opus or dabble in post-modern electronica. He recorded an album of Bowie-esque pop-rock songs … expecting who, exactly, to listen to it?

Perhaps at this point, Bowie is simply playing the long game. Has decided he’s still got something to say, and has the means to say it. It’s what he does, after all, make pop records. He “gets” the lay of the land, the new digital world order, and is just working, just tilling the soil, trying to lay good seed and hope that one day, some day, someone will come along and appreciate the fruits of his labor.

Which, ultimately, of course, is what all of us in the “art” game do: challenge ourselves, work hard, worry, and keep our fingers crossed. Why should David Bowie be any different?