David Bowie R.I.P

Yeah, the combined does odd things with space if you look closely.

Well a guy from Hawkwind ended up playing with Bowie, so it wasn't so unlikely.

... admittedly not Lemmy though.

They would I'm sure have had a lot to talk about. Not just Nazis, like.

yeah, i would think they would have gotten along okay. they both liked that old time rock & roll. and drugs.

If my timeline is correct, that Playboy interview would've been conducted roughly around the time of Bowie's coke nadir.

― Reckless Recluse (Old Lunch), Tuesday, January 12, 2016 4:01 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

PLAYBOY: How about drugs?

BOWIE: What year is it now?

Another thing the "Bowie Is ..." exhibit (and by the way, supposedly Bowie was not a fan) made me consider was how different my perspective on Bowie was as an American. I often wonder what people would have thought of Bowie, or what his American legacy might have been, were it not for "Let's Dance"/MTV, which of course largely landed well after Bowie's immediate Influence ended. Would he have been just another weirdo to discover?

bcz Alfred demanded it.

"Can you do Bowie for my 5th period class?"

Paris Goodrum, my high school drama teacher, loved my David Bowie. It emerged from a class assignment in lip syncing. Paris stressed that he wanted something more than just mouthing lyrics. He wanted performance, and this I took seriously.

This was 1975, Lawrence, Indiana... I prepped in the men's room. Applied rouge, lipstick, and eye shadow. Covered my face in glitter. Wore a frilly blue shirt with bright red suspenders and denim shorts. Yellow knee socks and platform shoes. Feather necklace and hoop bracelets. Naturally, there were stares on my walk back to class. But I felt empowered.

http://dennisperrin.blogspot.com/2016/01/oh-you-pretty-thing.html

Paris Goodrum! bit Nabokovian

>>>Pin Ups always sounded like his attempt to outdo Bryan Ferry.

I believe those records were released if not on the same day then more or less in tandem. (I know they entered the UK charts the same week.)

Adrian Belew on how he went from working with Zappa to Bowie in 1978, oh man.

https://www.facebook.com/AdrianBelew/posts/10150588871654995

I'm not a fan of Pin Ups, but I find it remarkable that in 1972 he was already able to glom onto both the importance of the VU as well as Springsteen, even if those covers weren't really released at the time.

xpost to Ned: King Crimson just posted this on Facebook: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lm8xCYZjB-M

Nice.

http://pitchfork.com/news/62870-deerhunters-bradford-cox-talks-about-his-lifelong-love-of-beautiful-christ-like-david-bowie/

i like Bradford's write-up. i always get huge Bowie vibes from Deerhunter.

So sweet----meeting her heroes always sucks, but not this time---an important/necessary recharge:
https://www.facebook.com/lordemusic/posts/1141095715908147

lol @ that Belew anecdote

I can't wait for the postscript!

FATHER OF SLENG TENG! hell, why not?

https://axischemicals.wordpress.com/2016/01/11/david-bowie-digital-reggae-kingpin/

New album very hard to listen to today. It's taken on a an entirely new identity. "Dollar Days" breaks my heart.

What made Bowie so interesting in the 70s: he had so many radio hits, but refused to settle into one predictable approach. Some of this was going against the grain--- coterie singer-songwriter goes glitter and glam, when most Brits are still bringing us denim mustache boogie, etc----but there was also a sense of restlessness, which went with the shrewdness: especially after, bout even before, his production helped elevate Reed, Iggy, Mott, he moved away from "Queen Bitch" pastiche, "Panic In Detroit" Creem/Midwestern commentary, hard rock itself, for Young Americans, then rock and dance with Station To Station, way before post-punk etc---but still looking for something, working with Eno etc. When he finally seemed to go pop all the way, in the early 80s, the albums didn't work as well as the singles, then he walked away. Came back with much more uneven albums, and no more big singles, but he sure tried with the albums, even though the balance of speculation (in the art and commercial senses) was off.
But he kept plugging away, long after many of his contemporaries ran out of energy and/or ideas. And everything I've heard from Blackstar (haven't had time for the whole thing yet) is lovely, and was before I got the news.

"Against the grain" as marketing decision, I meant (he'd already been plugging away since pre-Beatlemania, so learning to think hard about these things, and make tough calls).

huh that sleng teng claim is ... interesting

"*but* even before" etc. etc. (typoing on phone, sorry)

Still working my way through the discography.

-Diamond Dogs is such a weird dip (I think I even prefer Pin Ups as an album) and feels like he's running out of steam...and then Young Americans happens and he's right back in it. He could've done a straight soul album and I'm sure it would've been great but YA is such a wonderful synthesis of that thing and his own thing.

-I'm listening to the Rykodisc reissues and realizing that I've really unfairly slighted some of these b-sides and otherwise-unreleased tracks. I might prefer some of the extras on Diamond Dogs to stuff that made it onto the album proper.

-I'm hard-pressed to think of many 10-minute songs that breeze by as quickly as 'Station To Station'. A fantastic groove succeeded by a fantastic rave-up.

I was listening to a bunch of his albums on shuffle last night and when "Young Americans" came on it was so great, that was one of the records I came to last as a punk rocker and it totally won me over.

https://youtu.be/8nKb2JC7Qn0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nKb2JC7Qn0&feature=youtu.be

Great interview here, good comments on the nascent internet:

https://www.facebook.com/FACTmagazine/videos/10153819928364687/?fref=nf

i went to amoeba yesterday to honor bowie with a couple of acquisitions but blackstar was sold out, as was literally everything else (it had opened only 30 min before) but i found a nice copy of station to station in the employee picks section and grabbed it. so good.

also on my way there i flipped through all the L.A. radio stations to find one that was doing a Bowie marathon (you'd think) and finally landed on one playing 'Young Americans' and settled in for a listen sesh, but then they followed it up with something by Capitol Cities(?) and then Sheryl Crow and then...idk, i put on a cd at that point.

the DMCA prevents any station that does streaming from playing more than 2 cuts by an artist per hour, FYI -a maximum of three cuts from an artist in 2 hours is allowed.

(I hate this rule so much)

ugh

there should be a new rule when a musician dies, call it 'the bowie exception'

OTM

x-posting to me: at one point he excitedly calls the internet an alien life form, then asks "is there life on Mars? Yes! And it's landed here!" This is as the interlocutor poo-poos its importance and Bowie essentially says "no way, we're at the cusp, we have yet to even scrape the surface of the internet, which will surely one day produce some of the most exciting and terrifying things the world has ever known." Which is totally OTM prescient, given his vantage.

Oh, here it is, in tube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJTGXOwH1u0

Fuck that, not that. This:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FiK7s_0tGsg

Old lunch u mad diamond dogs is so fucking great! GTFO with this peopleoid nonsense!

that tinkling piano on Bowie's Watershed commercial soundtrack is super visionary though

Ryko extras: the ones on scary monsters are so sweet. I love that plastic Ono slow ass space oddity and don't even ask me about crystal Japan

there should be a new rule when a musician dies, call it 'the bowie exception'

― nomar, Tuesday, January 12, 2016 6:40 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

OTM

― sleeve, Tuesday, January 12, 2016 6:40 PM (1 minute ago)

YES

xpost Only two tracks by the same artist in same hour? Must not apply to college/NPR stations, or maybe it was just ignored by the one I heard streaming an hour of Bowiesongs, Ziggy-zagging through the years, on Friday night---followed by a second hour, incl. live versions, interview excerpts, guest shots (like on Mick Ronson's Slaughter On Tenth Avenue), productions of Lou, Ig, Mott etc

xxp best Ryko CD extra IMHO is 'Who Can I Be Now?' from 'Young Americans' - it's so great, I don't understand why it wasn't the closing track on the original release.

that Lazarus video is something else. I waited to watch it and it's a tough one. Bowie scribbling down his thoughts before it's too late...

I think the most moving part is that little shimmy dance he does.

xpost Or the manic Hard to Be a Saint in the City cover, maybe, which would fit on ... "Station to Station?"

The Ryko extras prove he didn't leave many good songs lying around. The YA extras, "Candidate (Demo)," "Some Are," "All Saints," "Velvet Goldmine" – what is it?

xposts Yeah, I just properly listened to 'Who Can I Be Now?' for the first time about half an hour ago. Excellent.

I love the stripped down bonus track version of Quicksand on Hunky Dory. But that's the only CD I've got of his with the bonus tracks. The bonus stuff never got reissued again after those 1990-ish CDs did they?

Must not apply to college/NPR stations, or maybe it was just ignored by the one I heard streaming an hour of Bowiesongs

they were ignoring the regulation (not every college station has a lawyer as a GM, but we do, for better or worse)

i watched the "lazarus" video for the first time last friday and thought, "oh, he looks great!"

:\