Bowie Under the Influence
Bowie didn’t cover other people’s songs often. They’re scattered throughout his albums and, of course, there’s Pin Ups. But Pin Ups is an anomaly in the Bowie collection, born of the rabid attention of a fanbase which had never seen anything quite like him before. “This is where I came from,” Bowie seemed to say. And it does a fairly good job of laying out Bowie’s musical influences. So here is a brief sampling of some of the tracks on Pin Ups and how they serve as something of a skeleton key to Bowie’s glam period.
Bowie’s take on Pink Floyd’s “See Emily Play”:
Compare this to the original:
Bowie has a more muscular take on the tune (unsurprisingly considering the difference in style between Syd Barrett and Mick Ronson). Barrett’s psychedelic paean is re-purposed for Bowie as a statement on fellow-travelers with whom one may play with the possibilities and limits of consciousness, but may also play on a number of other levels. Bowie seems to try and flesh out (I use the phrase purposefully) all of the possible connotations of “play”—Ronson’s chunky guitar, Bowie’s slightly fey enunciation, the slightly music-hall gang vocals, the odd noise sections, strings and harpsichord that hint at the original psychedelic intent. Bowie isn’t trying to re-make the wheel in his cover (nor could he, as the cover isn’t all that inventive, certainly when compared with the impact of Barrett’s early work with Pink Floyd), he’s simply trying to acknowledge a certain debt to the psychedelic 60’s—the unexplored ways in which acid and free love constituted a similar sort of performance and transgression. This is cover as explication and criticism; one might even dare to say correction—what the Situationists (a political/art movement not unfamiliar to Bowie) would call détournement, or the placing of ideas or works of art in new contexts and new associations in order to pull something new out of them and enliven or correct them for a different audience, purpose, or time.
Here’s an example of détournement ya’ll will recognize.
The Sex Pistols manager, Malcom McLaren, traveled in circles with the London set of Situationists and was (tell me if this sounds familiar) an artistic impresario, a performance art enthusiast, an enfant terrible of art schools, rock clubs, fashion shops, and art-student bars everywhere. In other words, a Bowie fan. In fact he managed (briefly) Bowie progeny the NY Dolls.
Bowie’s cover of Australian garage-band The Easybeats’ “Friday on Mind”:
And here’s the original:
Bowie’s take on this is, in some sense, an extension of his mission in covering “See Emily Play.” He’s taking a garage rock tune from Australian group The Easybeats (their first UK hit in fact, produced by Shel Talmy [who also worked with The Who and the Kinks according to AllMusic.com]). It’s a 3-minute pop song with a catchy hook, and a bit of a rollicking guitar line and celebrates the weekend and all that it portends—basically, it’s the archetype of British Invasion-era rock, from The Yardbirds (whom Bowie also covers) on down. So why does Bowie cover this? Why did I choose to write about this? Because more than anything here is where Bowie, unbeknownst to himself at the time, draws the line between glam and punk. The pomp and circumstance, the Bolanesque stomp of the rhythm section, Bowie’s dramatic take on the vocals, Ronson’s snotty tone, form this amalgam of snarl and kitsch, that seems to point glam beyond the Wildean trappings of fey erudition, back to the Anglophile take on R&B and other music from the colonies which was primarily about partying. And Bowie wasn’t going to limit his allegiances to the hallowed canon of Clapton, Beck and Page, or Townshend and Daltrey, or Van the Man (though they all get their say here). Bowie could get low-down. Bowie could trade in cutting a rug, downing some spirits, smoking and snorting whatever ya please, and living as if “Come Monday/I’ll have Friday on my mind.” Bowie positions himself beautifully as the linchpin of the entirety of British youth culture in the 20th century. The culmination of decades of absorption of American rhythm & blues music filtered through the disaffection of white American teenagers and peddled over radio waves and slabs of vinyl to jolly ol’ England, fomenting trans-continental rebellion and general waywardness.
Ahem. So, moving on past the glam years to the years of Philadelphia soul, the Thin White Duke, the Berlin trilogy, Nile Rogers, and the wilderness years of the 80’s, into the early 90’s.
There are two important artists here whose covers we must touch on. The reason we focus on these two is because they are, in their own right, transformative figures in the history of music, and because their kinship with Bowie also serve as a skeleton key of sorts into the enigmatic personality of perhaps our artsiest pop icon.
First, Miss Nina Simone; here she is looking for David during her legendary 1976 performance at Montreaux.
Bowie was an encouraging figure for Simone. He saw her and she saw him as a kindred spirit. Time Magazine recounts that Simone said of Bowie: “He’s got more sense than anybody I’ve ever known,” she said. “It’s not human—David ain’t from here.” So what do we hear in Bowie’s cover of “Wild Is The Wind”, a song made famous by Simone?
David Bowie’s “Wild Is The Wind”:
Here is Miss Simone’s original version:
Bowie transforms Simone’s slow burn torch song meets classical virtuosity into a slow burn rock ballad. Bowie’s fondness for the torch song genre is evident in his earliest work (think “Space Oddity”, “Life on Mars”). Here he adopts Simone’s dulcet tone and purposeful phrasing. This isn’t about showiness, it’s about placing the lyric in a context that allows them to carry their own weight. Simone’s interpretation is iconoclastic because of it’s baroque quality; the piano fills seem to wash over the drums measured rhythmic accompaniment. She is invoking the decay, the drama, and the bathos at the heart of the lyric—she wants to be lost, she feels like she feels the wind, but the wind cannot feel. The wind cannot be carried away the way she is.
Bowie taps into the genius of Simone’s interpretation and, compared to much of the other material on the ambitious turning point that is Station to Station, the Thin White Duke adopts the typical pose of reflection as consideration, which ebbs and flows until it nearly spills over. But Bowie’s performance contains a reserve that Simone’s does not. Her vocal is reserved, that is where the melancholy lies. Bowie’s, however, is total. From the languid balladic tempo, the strumming acoustic guitars the soft verb on everything—he’s not interested in building to payoff so much as he in carrying the listener along, like the wind, on the merits of the lyric. To force them to inhabit a mood. Whereas Simone is trying to reach and touch the listener, to identify with them, to achieve with them what she cannot seem to with the lover of the song. Simone sings “Love me, love me, love me, love me, say you do” as if she wants to be loved; Bowie sings it as if he knows what you as the listener do not—you can’t, really. Bowie’s version is about the inevitability of disenchantment and loss. Simone’s is a quest to free herself from their clutches. The differences say so much about Bowie’s transitional state between Ziggy and Berlin and about his indebtedness to Nina Simone as an example of what it means to carry the weight of a lyric.
Now for our final Bowie fellow-traveler, the indelible Scott Walker. Bowie appeared in the documentary about Scott’s career and the making of his difficult (to say the least) album The Drift (the film 30th Century Man). It takes us from Walker’s beginnings as a teen pop icon to an MOR interpreter of Jacques Brel to avant-gardist. Bowie (and his partner during the Berlin years, Brian Eno) sing Walker’s praises and admit that he made an important mark on both of their careers. It’s evidenced right at the beginning. How much of a mark?
Here’s David Bowie getting choked up on the BBC when Scott Walker calls in to wish him a happy birthday:
Here’s Bowie’s first attempt at modeling himself after the man he referred to as his “idol” in the clip above.
David Bowie’s “Port of Amsterdam”:
And here is Scott Walker’s take:
And here is Jacques Brel’s original:
Walker is clearly paying tribute to an idol of his own. Bowie is, in some sense, paying tribute to his idol by paying tribute to his idol. Bowie’s recording is almost cute because it is just him and an acoustic guitar, sounding like a high quality recording of countless teenagers over countless decades who’ve played his songs with the exact same arrangement alone in their bedrooms.
Bowie would return to Walker on 1993’s Black Tie White Noise when he would re-unite with Nile Rogers for the first time since his biggest hit Let’s Dance. The record isn’t among the best in his discog, but it marks the beginning of a shift out of something of a wilderness period. It was the most critically acclaimed record he’d made in over a decade (though acclaimed is a strong word—tolerated). It taps into some of the sounds and grooves of what were contemporary dance music at the time (the album sounds terribly dated now) but he chose to cover “Nite Flights,” one of the first 4 songs off of The Walker Brothers’ final record of the same title. The first 4 songs were penned by Scott Walker and represented a shift in tone and style for him and certainly for The Walker Brothers (who were a teen pop group with 60’s hits like “The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore”—one can hear in Scott’s somewhat vibrato-laden baritone the origins of Bowie’s own voice). This record however, was different. The last record the group would ever make, Scott challenged the rest of the band to do what they wanted and not worry about commercial success. The result was astounding. In 30th Century Man, Eno extolls these first 4 songs originality, claiming that he was almost embarrassed to listen to it because the industry still hasn’t caught up to it. The songs (of which “Nite Flights” is one) marked a turning point for Scott Walker. From that point on, he Walked the line of post-punk and the avant-garde, his albums alternately blending Throbbing Gristle or Joy Division and Gyorgy Ligeti. The first 4 songs of the album represented a statement of purpose.
David Bowie’s “Nite Flights”:
Here’s Walker’s original:
Bowie and Eno and Visconti heard “Nite Flights” upon it’s release in 1978. One can tell they all paid close attention to the Scott-penned first 4 songs on 1979’s Lodger and 1980’s Scary Monsters & Super Creeps. The dread, the adventurous arrangements, the hints of out harmony, the post-punk(ish) production and engineering. Bowie choosing to cover this song on what would begin his “return to form” (somewhat—that wouldn’t really come until his Eno collaboration Outside or his first record back with Visconti, Heathen; some might even argue that didn’t arrive until the penultimate The Next Day or his recently released final record). Whatever critical assessment one buys into, it is this moment where one can seriously argue Bowie begins to sound like Bowie again. As if he stops fighting himself, goes back to his roots (one of his idols) and takes courage from Walker’s refusal to play the game of commercial success or kowtowing to critical success. Walker made the records he wanted to make and one can imagine Bowie beginning to turn that corner himself.
Does the cover do justice to Walker’s original? No. But then, Bowie’s covers were never about doing justice. They were breadcrumbs for the fans, or grounding exercises for himself, or critical assessments born of praxis rather than contemplation. What remains undeniably true, however, is that his covers (from his choice of covers to the ways in which he engaged in them) contributed to Bowie’s construction of his own artistic narrative, the performance of his career. They are not asides and they are not novelties. They serve a purpose and remind us of the incomparable artistry and talent which the man possessed and on how many levels it operated at any given moment and for any given purpose.
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