Chris OLeary - Ashes to Ashes: The Songs of David Bowie, 1976-2016

ASHES TO ASHES

ASHES TO ASHES: THE SONGS OF DAVID BOWIE, 1976-2016

CHRIS OLEARY

CONTENTS

Trust nothing but your own experience.
David Bowie, 2004

INTRODUCTION

The response to the death of David Bowie in January 2016 may be among the last unified moments in global civilization. Or at least it felt that way, for about a week. His timing, as often, was spot-on. His death kicked off a year that would see his home country and his adopted one upturned by December. Along with the death of Prince that April, it signaled that the twentieth century was well and truly over, and that we were in a new world.

That week in January, some who didnt know Bowies albums after, say, Never Let Me Down discovered the full breadth of his work fifty-two years worth of recordings (with a few gaps, of course). Maybe they heard for the first time The Buddha of Suburbia or Heathen or his wonderfully odd debut from 1967, and learned there was far more to him than the Lets Dance celebrity or Ziggy Stardust.

I began writing about Bowie because I was in a similar state: Id never heard a good chunk of his music. In July 2009, I started a blog called Pushing Ahead of the Dame (I came up with the title a pun on a line from Bowies Queen Bitch and his nickname in some quarters of the British music press in about ten minutes. Its a silly name and Ive regretted it over the years). It was a writing exercise, intended as a contrast to a sprawling blog that Id done in the 2000s that had covered all genres of music from the twentieth century. No more! Now it would be just one artist, just one song at a time, in chronological order. Easily done, I thought. Listen to a Bowie song at breakfast, do a spot of research, write a couple of paragraphs, hit publish, and that would be that. And here we are ten years later, with the second of two books derived from that blog. (The first, Rebel Rebel, which covers Liza Jane to Station to Station, was published in 2015.) The length of this book proves that John Lennon was right when he said lifes what happens to you while youre busy making other plans.

I owe this change of fortune to a few in particular my editor Tariq Goddard, for instance (see Acknowledgements) but more to the fact that people wanted to read and talk about Bowies music in depth. The blog soon attracted a strong readership, many of whom had insights into Bowies work that surpassed my own the musician Momus became a fixture of the comment sections. This was, again, a matter of good timing. The blogs peak years (when I was writing at least an entry a week a rate of production that astonishes my creaky self today) of 2010-2013 coincided with the growing realization that Bowie had possibly retired. He hadnt put out an album since 2003, hadnt toured in nearly a decade. It was unusual to even see a new photograph of him by this point. Hed begun to be missed.

So nearly two-thirds of Pushing Ahead of the Dame (Bowies return with Where Are We Now? coincided with the last Buddha of Suburbia entries) was written about an artist who wasnt quite there anymore. Bowies public absence seeped into the writing. I framed entries in a past tense, describing the music of someone whod departed. And then he came back.

In 2013, the blog suddenly found itself covering a vital contemporary artist who was releasing new music at a pace to shame musicians two generations younger than him. Everything changed. Opinions needed to be reconsidered. Themes no longer fit. Narratives no longer worked. There was so much possibility. Being a Bowie fan from January 2013 to the first week of 2016 was to follow a revived serial whose plots regularly surprised you (hes writing a play! hes doing jazz!). Recall that one weekend in January 2016 when Blackstar had just come out, Lazarus was on stage, and David Bowie was still alive.

When his death was announced, it felt as if the whole point of the blog was for it to be there on that day, as one place for Bowie fans to speak and to mourn. Nothing was quite right again afterward. Already exhausted from writing about Bowie for so long, I now had nothing to say about him. I took about six months off and when I returned, to start the Blackstar entries, I found it to be truly unhappy labor and in autumn 2017, I stopped writing the blog with five entries left to go (to be fair, this coincided with doing the major revisions in this book). I hope that in Ashes to Ashes Ive improved some later pieces, which were as much a processing of information about a song as a criticism of it. The five unreleased blog entries No Plan, Killing a Little Time, Dollar Days, I Cant Give Everything Away, and the title track are found in the Blackstar chapter.

My status as a Bowie critic is still rather a mystery to me. I was never a true fan: never had Bowie posters on my wall, never paid that much attention to his music in my teenage years. I had considered him to be roughly on par with George Harrison or Mick Jagger an older musician who still got on the radio. I saw him once in concert, in Hartford in 1990, and I bought most of his Seventies albums on their Rykodisc reissues around that time, with The Man Who Sold the World and Low hitting me the hardest. But for quite a while, roughly post-Earthling, I lost touch with what he was doing, to the point where in 2002 he played a gig at Queens College, a quick subway ride from my apartment in Sunnyside, and I had no idea he was there.

This objectivity (or ignorance, if youd like) naturally informed my writing on his music. So did being of a certain age (too young for Ziggy Stardust, just a smidgen too old for Labyrinth) and being American. See Rebel Rebel, where I wrote that Britain won the World Cup in 1966. An Englishman complains about that to me every six months or so. With hope, there are fewer cultural errors this time around.

Being a critical study of Bowies music, this book relies greatly on the work of others: concert tapers and compilers, interviewers, documentarians, photographers, biographers. The labors of Kevin Cann and Nicholas Pegg cant be praised enough, and the websites Teenage Wildlife and Bowie Wonderworld provide a miraculous day-by-day chronology of Bowies doings from 1997 on. The David Bowie Tin Machine YouTube account, a thorough collection of Bowie live footage and TV/radio interviews, is also an essential source.

When revising what were, in some cases, essays written eight or more years ago, I had to walk the line between preserving the tone of the original piece and improving it with new information, fresher quotes, a sharper interpretation, and being less flippant and caustic a flaw of the blogs early years. Some pieces were trimmed, others fattened up. I tried to avoid making the book too posthumous but sometimes this proved unavoidable: finality was given its due.

I wanted from the start of the blog to treat each period, each album and each tour, with as much thoroughness as any other. To acknowledge nostalgia but not let it color my interpretations, to ground the songs in the time of their creation but also note how they were heard in later years. I greatly disliked some songs (youll soon see that) but tried to give them a fair shake. I devoted more space to the music its creation, production, and performances than to lyrical analysis, as the latter is too often the ruling party in rock criticism.

My books are an early draft of history. Theres some educated guesswork in them as to how songs were written and recorded. One day, perhaps, the Bowie estate will allow a researcher (someone else, please) to document and annotate all of his lyric drafts, outtakes, demos, studio logs, etc., and thus create a fuller analysis of his music. Until then, what follows is my best effort: a decades labor, now done. I hope that you enjoy it.