David Bowie - Young Americans: C or D?

SAY HELLO TO THE GOUSTER

“Can I be real?”

The follow up to Parlophone’s award-winning box set, David Bowie - Five Years (1969 – 1973), will be David Bowie - Who Can I Be Now? (1974 – 1976). (More of which, next week)

Exclusive to the set is The Gouster, which is previously unreleased as a complete album. Featured on the sleeve for this box set version, is a previously unpublished picture from the original photo session for the album.

Here’s how The Gouster’s tracklisiting looked before it morphed into Young Americans.

Side 1
1. John, I’m Only Dancing (Again)
2. Somebody Up There Likes Me
3. It’s Gonna Be Me

Side 2
1. Who Can I Be Now?
2. Can You Hear Me
3. Young Americans
4. Right

As we say, watch out for full details and the release date of David Bowie - Who Can I Be Now? (1974 – 1976) next week.

We’ll leave you with an excerpt from Tony Visconti's excellent notes on the album, taken from the box set book.

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“Gouster was a word unfamiliar to me but David knew it as a type of dress code worn by African American teens in the ‘60’s, in Chicago. But in the context of the album its meaning was attitude, an attitude of pride and hipness. Of all the songs we cut we were enamored of the ones we chose for the album that portrayed this attitude.

David had a long infatuation with soul as did I. We were fans of the TV show Soul Train. We weren’t ‘young, gifted and black’ but we sure as hell wanted to make a killer soul album, which was quite insane, but pioneers like the Righteous Brothers were there before us.

So ‘The Gouster’ began with the outrageous brand new, funkafied version of David’s classic ‘John, I’m Only Dancing’, a single he wrote and recorded in 1972, only this time our version sounded like it was played live in a loft party in Harlem and he added (Again) to the title. It wasn’t the two and a half minute length of the original either.

We maxed out at virtually seven minutes! With the time limitations of vinyl (big volume drop with more than 18 minutes a side) we could only fit two other long songs on side one, ‘Somebody Up There Likes Me’ and ‘It’s Gonna Be Me’ both about six and a half minute songs. We had hit the twenty-minute mark. Technically that worked because ‘It’s Gonna Be Me’ had lots of quiet sections where the record groove could be safely made narrower and that would preserve the apparent loudness of side one.

Side two also hit the twenty-minute mark with ‘Can You Hear Me’ saving the day with its quiet passages. Forty minutes of glorious funk, that’s what it was and that’s how I thought it would be.”

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‪#‎WCIBNBox‬ ‪#‎WhoCanIBeNowBox‬

(featuring none of the demos/half-finished bits from this it would seem)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Yvw0U-bRXw

So "previously unreleased album" = 7 previously released and widely available tracks. Right, then.

I'm kinda delighted the LP wasn't released in this configuration, without 'Win' and 'Fascination' ...

Who Can I Be Now is and always has been one of my alltime favorite DB cuts, I love that it's getting more attention, even though it's been around forever and ever.

So, who's listened to The Gouster? Though I agree with what niels said on the Stage thread that it's a bit boring (in that it lacks up tempo tracks), I have to say it sounds phenomenal (320kbps download). The remix (some tracks are different from the earlier available versions)/remaster is very spacious, the percussion sounds wonderful - it's a joy to turn up loud on a good system, a treat for the ears.

Is that a weird glitch on the vocal 1:27 into 'Right'?

Well, as someone said upthread, it was pretty anticlimactic when you expected a "new" album since I already had all the tracks... So I didn't bother much with it.
On the other hand, the other mix for "Station to Station" is quite interesting and exciting (not to say it's better than the original... it's just good to listen to it from another perspective).

Appetite for a YA vs let’s dance poll?

I think LD slays with the lyrics but YA takes it with the music

This is not even a contest

those are not v similar albs?

You ain’t a hustler

Win for the win.

You’ve never seen me standing snackin’ and wired

Jeff Rougvie of Rykodisc mentioned that Bowie was very much against releasing Gouster when they were distributing his catalog - apparently EMI requested it a number of times and Bowie made his views clear. After reading up on this album's history, it makes a lot of sense why Bowie didn't. There were so many work-in-progress iterations, and ultimately the only one that was seriously marked for release was the one they sequenced before his session with Lennon. The three bonus tracks on the Rykodisc reissue covered both songs that were replaced by "Fame" and "Across the Universe" and the one-off single they eventually released, and all three had been programmed into the Gouster sequence earlier (the only songs that didn't make it to Young Americans, so it's easy to see why in Bowie thought releasing that version was pointless. Wonder why he changed his mind?

*ultimately the only one besides the final release

Cool-- also lot of good talk about Bowie/Ryko here: Christgau's Consumer Guide Grade List: A+--which is where Tarfumes and Alfred prevailed on me to finally check out the 2016 Parlophone/Rhino Young Americans, which is very fortifying.

I posted in that thread! Yeah, the 2016 remaster is good. Lucky too, the recent Bowie remasters are hit-or-miss - had they been consistently good, I might've gotten the box sets. But of the core albums, Ziggy, Aladdin Sane and unfortunately everything from Low on are marred by varying degrees of excessive compression.

The 1974-1976 box set sounds great, but I hate the remixes on there - I also already have the 2010 Station to Station deluxe set, so with that in mind, it just made more sense to get the standalone remasters for the remaining albums I'd want.

I guess I should add I've been listening to Bowie's studio albums chronologically. This stuff may be very familiar, but man, Hunky Dory through Aladdin Sane really floored me. I usually name Hunky Dory as one of my two or three favorites (and my favorite of the glam years), but listening to those glam albums in order, his work just grows and builds momentum. All three came off as fully realized, but they seemed to get better and better. I bring this up because when I got to the next few, they really felt like a huge step back, and in the case of YA I thought that album had been growing on me. I still like it for what it is, but I was kind of reminded of why it took so long to get into it beyond the singles - it just doesn't hit like those earlier glam albums. Station to Station seemed to really refine whatever he got from making YA into something truly new and glorious. So in that context YA comes off as very much a transition album and not one of his greats. Still a necessary one - I can't see how he could've gotten to Station to Station otherwise - and also still enjoyable on its own terms.

If you haven't read O'Leary's book, you should.

Is it kind of like Revolution in the Head, but for Bowie's songs?

oh yes

Start here, his first drafts: https://bowiesongs.wordpress.com/

Hah, awesome! Thanks Alfred!!

Yeah, I dug your contributions to the A+ thread, bird! that mention was more for the gen. public.
Getting back to fascination w permutations of the Philly Soul Gamble-Huff-Bell-Creed-MFSB etc.-associated sound---with YA, and before that, the Philly sessions on Dusty Springfield's The Complete Atlantic Singles 1968-1971, thanks to Alfred's enticing Pitchfork review---wow, too bad she didn't come back there and work with Bowie a little bit (but at least she got in w the Pet Shop Boys)(There's a whole collection of her Philly work. although I see that xgau thought the original releases from that were too similar--should be good for cherrypicking, anyway) (Fave from her Philly singles: "Let Me Get In Your Way," which I can totally imagine Bo and Luther & co. getting in on, though she doesn't really need them.)

Thanks dow!

And yeah, that would've been interesting to see Dusty collaborate with Bowie. I mentioned this in another thread, but if it wasn't for her illness, I could easily see her handling all the lead vocals on Elvis Costello & Burt Bacharach's Painted from Memory. (Costello's phrasing often recalls her own as if he was trying to emulate her, which would have been appropriate.) It's too bad she never got to make a follow-up album on the level of Dusty in Memphis because I think she had it in her to do at least a few more as good as that.

On another topic, here's a later mix of "It's Gonna Be Me" created around 2007:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIPnSu0msFI

If I got this right, when Visconti and Bowie programmed what they thought was going to be THE album (well after they deemed Gouster unsatisfactory), "It's Gonna Be Me" was included with a healthy dose of string overdubs. After it got ditched (along with "Who Can I Be Now?") in favor of two new Lennon recordings ("Fame" and "Across the Universe"), what would've been the master mix was eventually lost. By the time somebody was ready to release it (namely Rykodisc), they had to use an alternate mix without the string overdubs. This is the same alternate used for the Gouster reconstruction in the 2015 box set. The 2007 mix was Visconti's attempt to re-create something closer to the lost master mix, complete with string overdubs, but it's doubtful that it's a close match. To date, the 2007 reissue is the only place to find it, which is unfortunate because not only is it out-of-print, it doesn't sound very good as it was mastered with NoNoise, excessive compression and a very harsh EQ pattern.