Bowie David - On Bowie

Planet Earth is a lot bluer without David Bowie, the greatest rock star who ever fell to this or any other world. He was the hottest tramp, the slinkiest vagabond, the prettiest star who ever shouted Youre not alone! to an arena full of the worlds loneliest kids. He was the most human and most alien of rock artists, turning to face the strange, speaking to the freak in everyone. He stared into your twitchy teenage eyes to assure you that youve torn your dress and your face is a mess, yet thats precisely why youre a juvenile success. Whichever Bowie you loved bestthe glam starman, the wispy balladeer, the Berlin archdukehe made you feel braver and freer, which is why the world felt different after you heard Bowie. This mans spaceship always knew which way to go.

Thats why he always inspired such fierce devotion. As a teenager in the eighties, at home glued to my radio on a Saturday night because I couldnt get a ticket to the Serious Moonlight tour in Boston, I listened as a group of WBCN DJs arrived at the studio fresh from the show, with a cigarette butt they swiped from the mans ashtray backstage. And I listened with goose bumps as they ceremonially smoked it on the air. Bowie fanatics are like that. Which is why so many different people have heard themselves in his music, whether its Barbra Streisand covering Life on Mars? in 1974 or DAngelo covering Space Oddity in 2012, George Clinton name-checking him on Mothership Connection or Public Enemy sampling him in Night of the Living Baseheads. Somehow I really thought hed outlive us all. After all, hed outlived so many David Bowies before.

The weekend he died, I was listening to nothing but Bowie. On Friday night, his birthday, I went to see the tribute band Holy Holy play The Man Who Sold the World in New York, with his longtime producer Tony Visconti on bass, original Spiders drummer Woody Woodmansey, and Heaven 17 singer Glenn Gregory. After finishing the album, they did another solid hour of early-seventies Bowie classics from Five Years to Watch That Man. Visconti had the crowd sing Happy Birthday into his phone and texted it to Bowie. Davids at his birthday party, he told us. This isnt it. (Were we all secretly hoping maybe the Dame would show up? Of course we were.) I got weepy when Viscontis daughter sang Lady Stardust, a song that has always made me verklempt because it reminded me Bowie was going to die someday, though Friday night, that still seemed far away. I spent the rest of the weekend listening to Station to Station and Lowan ordinary weekend, since those are easily the two most-played albums in my apartmentalong with the 1974 outtake Candidate (Demo), and of course the new Blackstar, an album that sounded very different before Sunday night.

As Visconti said after the news broke, Blackstar was a parting gift. In his last couple of years on the planet, Bowie threw himself back into the music career everyone figured hed gracefully retired from, making The Next Day and Blackstar as his farewells to the flock hed assembled over the years. Heading for the final curtain, Bowie chose to face it the way he faced everything elseit was cold and it rained, so he felt like an actor and went to work, going out at a creative peak. No other rock artist has left a final testament anything like this. Nor like the bizarre yet excellent off-Broadway musical he debuted last year, Lazarus, which I was lucky enough to see in Decemberdefinitely the only time Ive ever seen actors sing Heroes while swimming like dolphins through a puddle of milk.

The whole world was stunned by the news of his death on January 10just two days after he celebrated his sixty-ninth birthday by dropping his newest masterwork, Blackstar. The album was a surprise in itselfhe just announced it last November, presenting the ten-minute title song out of the blueand its release inspired a worldwide outpouring of Bowie love. What none of us knewexcept Bowiewas that this was the end. Hed just been diagnosed with cancer, and knew by November it was terminal. But he had plans for the music he wanted to make in the time he had left. While the world was still toasting Bowies latest creation, the news came that hed died quietly at home, surrounded by his family. Ever the innovator, Bowie found a new way to wave bye-bye and say good night, moving on to his next phase as the late, great David Bowie, teaching us how to hear his old records in different ways. A new career in a new town.

This book is a love letter to Bowie, a celebration of his life and his music. Its a thank-you for the beautiful mess he made out of all our lives. Its the story of how he changed my world and yours. Its a reflection on what he means today and why his death hit us so hard. Its a travelogue following the fantastic voyage of an artist who spent fifty years looking for new ways to surprise and challenge our sense of what was possible. Its a gallery of the faces he showed us. Its a toast to the just-for-one-day we got to share with him. And its also a love letter to everyone who adored him, because bringing us together is what he was really all about. Lets celebrate each other by celebrating him.

For all his spaciness, it was his crackpot compassion that made him Bowie. The lust for human connection is what his music is all about. Thats why the hero of Starman isnt the actual starmanits the two kids who talk about him, after picking up his signal on the radio. (I had to phone someone so I picked on youhey thats far out, so you heard him too?) The starman just shows up to give them an excuse to bond, a secret they can hide from their parents (whod have them locked up if they knew). Bowie did that for all of us who loved him. He was the cracked pastor, shepherding his flock of lost kids. Many a lifelong friendship has begun in that so you heard him too?