The Man Who Sold the World (30 page)

 

[119] RIGHT

(Bowie)

Recorded August and November 1974;
Young Americans
LP

This song was titled “Right” (rather than, for example, “Never No Turning Back,” the most constant refrain) more, one imagines, to continue Bowie's vague theme of using a single evocative word
*
to define his R&B pieces—though it begged confusion with the “take it in right” chorus of “Can You Hear Me” [108]. Nothing he'd written to date had been draped around such a skeletal frame: a slight movement between Fmaj7 and E major for the choruses, after which band and vocalists alike vamped at length over that solitary E chord.

Those choruses were, effectively, self-help mantras, the second of which had the distinctly personal context of assuaging Bowie's fear of flying. They could also be interpreted more widely, as commentary on a relationship—which was then acted out in vivid colors by the extended interplay between lead and background vocalists, Bowie shifting like a well-oiled actor from pleading to insisting to shrieking for control. As the BBC documentary
Cracked Actor
revealed, this apparently spontaneous call-and-response routine between Bowie and his backing vocalists was meticulously planned.

 

[120] WIN

(Bowie)

Recorded November–December 1974;
Young Americans
LP

Much of this song seemed to exist in that slightly delirious space between drunkenness and morning, where tones matter more than words, and nothing you say would make much sense in the piercing light of day. Nothing was quite in focus: instruments shimmered and echoed, David Sanborn's saxophone flittered up the scale and out of earshot, Bowie's voice swayed between a whisper and a sultry croon, then gradually slipped into desperation as the sexy woman who'd lit his fire refused to believe his reassurances. Whereas “Right” [119] had set up a dialogue between lead and backing vocalists, in “Win” the chorale was there simply to support Bowie's point of view: I must be right, he seemed to be saying, since all these other people think so, too. Totalitarianism assumes many forms.

Rarely was it enacted in such intimate terms, however. Bowie softened his chords throughout the verses by adding a major 6th, creating the sense of unfinished business—and making the climactic shift to an E major chord seem all the more conclusive. Amid the delicate emotional drama of the song, it was easy to miss some of the more subtle elements of the arrangement, such as the cello section introduced portentously, and the Beatlesesque (from the
Abbey Road
era, to be exact) guitar chords unwinding beneath the chorus.

 

[121] FASCINATION

(Vandross/Bowie)

Recorded November–December 1974;
Young Americans
LP

During Bowie's late 1974 US tour, twenty-three-year-old background vocalist Luther Vandross was allowed to open the show with his self-penned paean to the power of soul, “Funky Music (Is a Part of Me).”
*
Bowie begged to be allowed to tinker with the lyric for his own purposes, presumably feeling that he needed to prove his funkiness rather than boast about it. “Funky Music” duly became “Fascination,” with the barest of chorus rewrites, and verses that were revamped only where strictly necessary. The Vandross arrangement was also retained almost unchanged, as an utterly contemporary slice of funk, over which Bowie exhibited his range of vocal personae—from breathy confidant to sly lothario. By midpoint, he had become so dazzled by his own dexterity that he felt the need to ensure he was still feeling something. “I like fascination,” he sang, “still—tick!” checking the box marked “soul.”

Where Vandross was celebrating his cultural heritage, Bowie was playing an altogether more cunning game. Out of his mouth, “Fascination” was a celebration of male lust and power. But two other connotations of the title, both of which he had recently encountered, may have influenced his choice of noun. In the book
Occult Reich
, which he had given to several friends, he had read that “Fascination” had once been an alternative name for hypnotism, originally regarded as “one of the occult arts . . . a spell cast by wizards.” In
City of Night
, John Rechy's groundbreaking novel about homosexual relationships, however, “F*A*S*C*I*N*A*T*I*O*N” shone from the front of a gay nightclub, enticing every he/she in the vicinity to fall under its spell.

 

[122] IT'S HARD TO BE A SAINT IN THE CITY

(Springsteen)

Recorded November 1974 and September–November 1975;
Sound + Vision
CD

The second of Bowie's Bruce Springsteen covers was billed as an outtake from the
Station to Station
sessions when it was released belatedly in 1989. But Bowie certainly attempted this song in Philadelphia during November 1974, on a night when Springsteen visited him in the studio; also, many fans believed that they recognized a Tony Visconti string arrangement in the mix, alongside an Earl Slick guitar track presumably overdubbed in 1975. Yet the song wasn't one of those for which Visconti supervised orchestral accompaniment in December. The clinching argument seemed to be the unmistakable presence of Mike Garson's keyboards over the closing bars, suggesting that at least part of this track did predate the creation of
Station to Station
.

The finished piece emphasized the stark difference in approach between the two sets of sessions: other artists could have picked up a year-old track and continued happily in the same vein, but Bowie brought a markedly different sonic agenda to each project in the seventies. If the 1974 track had been intended as a faithful tribute to Springsteen's urban romanticism, then the addition of Slick's bombastic guitar and cacophonous drums undermined the pretensions of glamour, as if Travis Bickle from Martin Scorsese's movie
Taxi Driver
had wandered onto the set of
West Side Story
. Bowie, meanwhile, drew on a wide palette of vocal identities, imitating Springsteen at one moment, squeezing his throat into an agonizing falsetto the next. The result hinted that his enthusiasm for the naïve imagery of Springsteen's early work might have waned after spending more than eighteen months in America.

 

[123] FOOT STOMPING/SHIMMY LIKE KATE

(Collins/Rand; Smith/Goldsmith)

Recorded for NBC-TV, November 1974;
RarestOneBowie
CD

This medley of early sixties R&B hits would have been forgotten had Bowie not performed it during his rather alarming appearance on the NBC-TV staple
The Dick Cavett Show
, and guitarist Carlos Alomar then twisted the riff at the heart of this arrangement into the skeleton of “Fame” [125].

“Foot Stomping” was written and recorded in 1961 by the Flares, a Los Angeles–based vocal group who had earlier scored memorable hits as the Jacks (“Why Don't You Write Me”) and the Cadets (“Stranded in the Jungle”). “Shimmy Like Kate” was a 1960 adaptation—by the Olympics, of “Western Movies” fame—of a New Orleans jazz tune known as “I Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate.” The Olympics' producers took the writing credit on their single; jazzman Armand Piron originally copyrighted the tune, to the disgust of other Crescent City players who had known it for decades.

Bowie's medley found him rasping as he had with the King Bees a decade earlier, though now it was “exhaustion” rather than inexperience to blame. On the same show, he delivered equally ragged but compelling renditions of “Young Americans” [113] (having perfected the Elvis moves he'd been parodying in his
Love You Till Tuesday
film in 1969) and “1984” [98].

 

[124] ACROSS THE UNIVERSE

(Lennon/McCartney)

Recorded January 1975;
Young Americans
LP

While producer Tony Visconti was in London, supervising string overdubs and the final mixing sessions in the belief that the
Young Americans
album was complete, Bowie covertly arranged a collaboration with John Lennon in January 1975. Perhaps believing that the Beatle would attend only if he had a personal stake in the session, Bowie announced that he wished to record “Across the Universe,” a song that had caused Lennon immense difficulty in the late 1960s before being remixed by producer Phil Spector for the Beatles'
Let It Be
LP.

At a period of creative inertia, Lennon had toyed with a simple chorus around the Indian spiritual phrase “jai guru dev.” Later, as he seethed silently in bed after an argument with his wife, Cynthia, he began to channel his frustration into a song that celebrated the poetic muse, and the triumph of the unconsciousness over intellectual intention. He combined this with the Indian chorus, added a refrain to the effect (rather inaccurate, as it transpired) that nothing in his life was about to change, and emerged with a song that he proposed as a potential Beatles single. Instead he struggled to bring his creation to life, remaining dissatisfied with the two strikingly different mixes of the song issued by the group.

Lennon can hardly have been more encouraged by Bowie's deliberately bombastic interpretation, which seemed to have been inspired by
Pussy Cats
, the gloriously ramshackle album that Lennon had recently produced for Harry Nilsson. In particular, he channeled Nilsson's ragged version of “Many Rivers to Cross,” a version itself intended as a tribute to Lennon's own vocal sound. Bowie double-tracked his voice for much of the song, as Lennon always did, and by the climax he was roaring in an uncanny imitation of his collaborator's more throat-searing moments. Earlier, his voice had sounded so mannered that he might have been parodying Bryan Ferry. Either way, it was a bizarre way of impressing Lennon, especially as Bowie chose to ignore the “jai guru dev” refrain that was at the heart of the song. But the ex-Beatle generously heard him out, adding some distinctive guitar touches to the spaces where his spiritual mantra had once been.

A veteran of his own managerial disputes with former financial guardian Allen Klein, Lennon was able to advise Bowie during the disintegration of his relationship with Tony Defries. He subsequently wrote a song about Bowie. Its identity was never confirmed, but “She's a Friend of Dorothy's,” an unissued Lennon composition from circa 1976–77, was an intriguing portrait of a multi-personalitied denizen of Manhattan and Hollywood high life, with a penchant for bisexuality. “I never really knew what he was,” Lennon recalled affectionately in 1980, “and meeting him doesn't give you much more of a clue, because you don't know which one you're talking to.”

 

[125] FAME

(Bowie/Alomar/Lennon)

Recorded January 1975;
Young Americans
LP

 

I WOULDN'T INFLICT FAME ON MY WORST ENEMY.

 

—David Bowie, 2002

For all his attempts to master the sweet sound of Philadelphia soul, it was a track recorded almost by happenstance in New York that finally carried Bowie's music onto R&B radio stations, and also produced his first major US hit single.
*
The track emerged during a jam session at which John Lennon was present, and to which the ex-Beatle made the briefest of lyrical contributions, which was enough to win him a co-writing credit. Mick Ronson must have wondered at the injustice of life.

Numerous explanations have been offered for the creation of this track, from both participants and supposed bystanders, and they are so contradictory as to be (collectively) worthless. It is possible, of course, that while John Lennon believed they were reworking “some Stevie Wonder middle eight,” and the co-composer Carlos Alomar felt they were revisiting his arrangement of the R&B oldie “Footstompin',” Bowie had a Machiavellian plan to create a magnificent hybrid of rock and funk. Or, more likely, a bunch of seasoned musicians in a professional studio fell into a riff (more accurately, an interlocking collection of riffs) and hardened it until it felt tight enough to crack. They emerged with something that was right in the pocket of black American music at the beginning of 1975: a cousin of Kool & the Gang's “Hollywood Swinging” (check the rapidly stroked rhythm guitar against Alomar's), James Brown's “The Payback,”
*
or the recent No. 1 hit “Do It (Til You're Satisfied)” by the B. T. Express. Other potential sources of inspiration included the Rascals' 1972 single “Jungle Walk,” the Average White Band's “Pick Up the Pieces,” and a highly uncharacteristic funk track, “Brighter Day,” by Bowie's Beckenham friend Keith Christmas, issued shortly before “Fame” was recorded.

So complex was the relationship between the motifs offered by the electric piano, the guitar, the bass, and the drums that one could waste pages of prose or musical transcription describing how they work. But what made them function was accident and instinct, not planning—which is why it didn't matter when the drummer turned the beat around, and encouraged the bassist to mess with an entirely different pattern for a few bars; or when the acoustic guitar dropped in and out of the track at apparently random intervals. Even the vocal interjections weren't consistent. But one of them, at some point during the session, hit upon the word
fame
.