Ian Chapman - David Bowie FAQ: All Thats Left to Know about Rocks Finest Actor

O f course, at the very top of the list must be David Bowie. As he did for so many people, he had an enormous positive impact on my life, especially during my teenage years during the 1970s, when he provided a blueprint for the acceptanceeven celebrationof difference. What a life-saver. And what a talent.

Much appreciation for helping me, in your various invaluable ways, to bring this book to fruition: Robin Lumley, Rob Burns, Robert Lecker, Della Vach, Bernadette Malavarca, and Lisa Marr. Special thanks to Sue Videler and my kids, Ben, Mia, and Arlo, who always amaze me and keep me on my toes.

Aladdin Sane, 1973 Authors Collection

D espite all of his different performance personas and the purposeful qualities he would affect at times in his singing (the cockney twang of The Laughing Gnome or Little Wonder being fine examples), David Bowie nevertheless had a very distinctive voice, as all of the best rock performers do. It was a voice that stuck out from the pack and was instantly recognizable as his and his alone. However, determining a distinctive songwriting style is a much more difficult task because of his deliberate and highly successful embracing of diversity and change. Putting aside for just a brief moment his collections of experimental and avant-garde compositions, such as Low, Blackstar, and so on, even when utilizing the long-established and standard songwriters tool kit of melody, harmony, and rhythm, he was capable of great sophistication, complete simplicity, or absolutely anything in between. While well versed in how a song should go according to convention, he was far more inclined than most to go somewhere radically different simply to see what would happen if he did. Running the full gamut from the sheer audacious artistry of Life on Mars to the perfunctory perfection of Rebel Rebel, then, with everything in between, no musical vibe, song form, or even mashup was considered off limits.

Cover of the 1973 UK single Life on Mars Authors Collection

When interviewed on the BBC documentary Five Years (2013), Rick Wakeman described Bowies unique and brave compositional unpredictability. Having played the piano so memorably on the Hunky Dory album (1971), he used Life on Mars as his example and demonstrated Bowies chord choices for the interviewer while sitting at the piano. He recalled, It was a challenge in certain areas because of the chord structure.... He would lead you down the garden path with quite a bog-standard chord structure and then suddenly go awol. [demonstrates]... He throws in a chord that you wouldnt expect. [demonstrates]... Only David would do a thing like that!

One of Bowies most effective points of difference in terms of his approach to his songwriting was his periodic employment of what is termed the cut-up technique. Attributed to beat poet William S. Burroughs and utilized famously in his groundbreaking novel The Naked Lunch (1959), the cut-up technique involves taking written sentences of prose and quite literally cutting them up and rearranging them in a new orderold-school cutting and pasting long before the home computer age. These newly separated excerpts of preexisting sentences can be rearranged as many times as desired until new meanings, to varying degrees of clarity or obfuscation, come through. Sometimes Bowie would use the rearranged words almost verbatim, sometimes he would tweak them, or sometimes he would not use the resultant wordings at all and would start over again. However, the very act of going through the exercise at times resulted in the stimulation of new ideas for him to work with. As he put it in the BBC documentary Cracked Actor (1975), directed by Alan Yentob, the technique was useful for igniting anything that might be in my imagination.

The cut-up technique was one he would continue to utilize throughout his career. On the 1997 documentary Inspirations, directed by Michael Apted and filmed during the creation of the 1. Outside album in 1995, Bowie can be seen at the keys of a Mac laptop using a digital version of the cut-up technique in an application called the Verbasizer, which he developed with technology guru Ty Roberts. As he explains to the camera, Itll take the sentence, and Ill divide it up between the columns, and then when Ive got, say, three or four or fivesometimes Ill go as much as twenty, twenty-five different sentences going across here, and then Ill set it to randomize. And itll take those twenty sentences and cut in between them all the time, picking out, choosing different words from different columns and from different rows of sentences. So what you end up with is a real kaleidoscope of meanings and topic and nouns and verbs all sort of slamming into each other.

On Earthling (1997), Bowies drum n bass album, he was able to take the cut-up technique far beyond manipulating only the lyrics. Recording the entire album on digital technology instead of analog technologya first for Bowiemeant that he could quite literally cut instrumental and vocal tracks at will in the recording studio and reposition them wherever and however he wished to create loops or even complete song structures. He both relished and utilized this freedom as the albums primary producer, alongside the like-minded Reeves Gabrels and Mark Plati, who were given coproduction credits.

At times, geographical location would be a big player in Bowies compositional palette. Young Americans is sublimely Philadelphia-infused, Low and Heroes do far more than tip their hat to Berlin, and Reality rings with multiple resonances of New York. In 2003, Bowie told Bill DeMain, in an article titled The Sound and Vison of David Bowie for Performing Songwriter, Wherever Im writing, that place tends to make itself very known, either in the atmosphere or sound.... I think the one thing that goes through Reality [2003] is the sense of New York. It feels very street. Theres a lot more about being a New Yorker, which indeed I am. The accent may not say that [laughs], but I am. I wrote the songs here, downtown where I live, and it does reflect that.

Bowie was a master at aligning his compositional and instrumental forces appropriately according to the requirement of individual songs, making the instrumentation a part of his thinking during the compositional process rather than an afterthought or something to be worked out after the pen was put down. For example, the beautiful jazz-inflected title track of the Aladdin Sane album became compositionally simplistic at the point where Mike Garsons piano solo began, thereby giving the piano maestro the most fundamental and unwavering of musical platforms on which he could improvise in as avant-garde a manner as he (or Bowie) wished. Because the rest of the instruments stayed put, the harmony simply sliding between G and A, and the rhythm remained unwavering, Garson had free rein to take all the musical risks in the world. It would never have worked if his solo had been required to occur over a complex, changing rhythmic and harmonic base.

How Bowie pitched his melodies was an important part of his songwriting bag of tricks. There is no better example than that of Five Years, the opening track of