"Bowie's cool never faded; his impact only kept expanding," remembers Alan Light of the envelope-pushing musical genius who bended genders long before Miley and Caitlyn, confronted MTV about race decades ago and orchestrated his exit just as he lived: creatively, quietly, brilliantly.This story first appeared in the Jan. 22 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine.Over the course of almost five decades, David Bowie transformed the very possibilities of pop music. Since his arrival at the dawn of the 1970s, every new movement that followed — punk, new wave, hip-hop, electronic, Goth, grunge, industrial — bore his stamp in some way. While age caught up with his peers, making them look old and irrelevant, or (best case) turning them into objects of nostalgia, Bowie's cool never faded; his impact only kept expanding.
Yet one thing that became evident following the shocking announcement of his death at age 69 on Jan. 10 was how far his influence truly reached. From the Broadway stage to the financial markets, Bowie's legacy is perhaps as broad as any other cultural figure of our time.As soon as his Facebook page reported that Bowie had "died peacefully surrounded by his family after a courageous 18 month battle with cancer," tributes began pouring in — from a wide spectrum of musicians including Bruce Springsteen ("Always changing and ahead of the curve …") and Kanye West ("so fearless, so creative, he gave us magic for a lifetime"), but also from the likes of Russell Crowe ("One of the greatest performance artists to have ever lived") and U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron ("I grew up listening to and watching the pop genius David Bowie …").
Performing at Wembley Stadium during his Station to Station tour in 1976. Photo credit: Evening Standard/Getty Images
Bowie displayed a fearless dedication to innovation, constantly changing musical direction. Even his name was a reinvention: Born David Jones, he changed it to avoid confusion with Davy Jones of The Monkees. He grew up in London's working-class Brixton neighborhood — his mother was a waitress, his father worked for a children's charity. He started performing as a mime and cabaret entertainer in the late 1960s, evolving into a Bob Dylan-style singer-songwriter. He scored his first hit with "Space Oddity" in 1969, then dove into rock 'n' roll, initiating the theatrical, futuristic style that would come to be known as "glam rock."
Creating the space-alien rocker persona he dubbed "Ziggy Stardust" and developing a visually striking, loosely narrative stage show, Bowie became a megastar. By July 1973, he had five albums in the British top 40, three of them in the top 15, before abruptly killing off the Ziggy character in a "farewell" concert. The pattern was established; as he ventured into funk-based "plastic soul," spare electronic tones, jagged industrial beats or glossy pop, his music — and persona — remained in perpetual motion.
From left: Bowie, Iggy Pop and Lou Reed at London's Dorchester Hotel in 1972. Photo credit: Mick Rock
David Bowie & Arcade Fire - Five years
Rock 'n' roll always had been inseparable from style — from Elvis Presley's blue suede shoes to The Beatles' haircuts — but it was Bowie who made that link explicit, turning fashion into a focus of his projects. His various identities (Aladdin Sane, the Thin White Duke) were defined as much by their avant-garde looks — often created in collaboration with Japanese designer Kansai Yamamoto — as by their sounds.
"[Bowie] inspired me by his creativity, his extravagance, his sense of fashion that he was constantly reinventing, by his allure, his elegance and his androgyny," said fashion designer Jean-Paul Gaultier.
The last known photograph of Bowie, shot at the December 2015 premiere of the musical 'Lazarus' in New York. Photo credit: Price/Face to Face
As he became increasingly interested in matching music and visuals, he pioneered the concept of music video long before MTV. From there, it was a short hop to film, with Bowie embarking on an ambitious, if not always triumphant, movie career. He appeared in 20 films, some well received (The Man Who Fell to Earth, The Last Temptation of Christ, Basquiat) and others less so (The Linguini Incident, Gunslinger's Revenge). Perhaps his most impressive acting achievement was his highly praised 1980 run on Broadway in the title role of The Elephant Man.
Bowie's vision was so prescient that at times it really did seem like he beamed down from the future. In 1997, he was the first to securitize royalty streams, selling $55 million of "Bowie Bonds" tied to future earnings from his hits. In 1998, he launched BowieNet, which offered ways to interact with the artist himself online (long before Instagram or Twitter) and operated as a full Internet service provider. Decades before Oculus Rift, the site also offered a 3D chat environment, "BowieWorld."
"Music itself is going to become like running water or electricity," he said in 2002, sensing the direction of the industry long before others could see it. "You'd better be prepared for doing a lot of touring because that's really the only unique situation that's going to be left. It's terribly exciting. But on the other hand, it doesn't matter if you think it's exciting or not; it's what's going to happen."
David Bowie
★
What comes after The Next Day? Wild cosmic jazz represented by a black star, of course. Hello again, spaceboy!
On JANUARY 8, 2016, his 69th birthday, David Bowie’s new album is released, exactly three years since Where Are We Now? appeared unannounced, a gift from a missing star, heralding his return from the wilderness with The Next Day.
Nostalgic and conciliatory, that album felt like a reward for those who had kept the faith. But was this one last hurrah before slipping into retirement? Or might he attempt another act of regeneration? 2014’s reverse-chronological collectionNothing Has Changed contained an auspicious portent: Sue (Or In A Season Of Crime), seven minutes of melodramatic voice and big-band improv in collaboration with the Maria Schneider Orchestra.
Sue is re-recorded here with heightened vigour thanks to Bowie’s core personnel on this album, a smoking group of New York jazz musicians, alumni of Schneider (herself a pupil of Gil Evans), who under the direction of Bowie and co-producer Tony Visconti drive ★ to almighty levels of intensity. There’s little conciliation but plenty of bewilderment amid its opening 10 minutes, where the curtain rises on Bowie declaiming tremulously over a bed of syncopated electronic beats and Arabic drones. This is the title song, elements of which soundtrack television diamond heist drama The Last Panthers, though Bowie’s priestly incantation suggests an occult murder mystery: “On the day of execution, only women kneel and smile/Aaah…”
The claustrophobic mood heightens amid tumbling drums and skronking saxophone, until bright string notes herald a new dawn, and practically a new song. Now there’s sunshine in Bowie’s voice as he announces a leader’s passing – “Somebody took his place and bravely cried: I’m a blackstar!” – but his maniacal uttering of “blackstar” suggests trouble ahead.
“David Bowie isn’t so much back on the horse as riding bareback towards a cliff-edge.”
Bowie stirs a comedic stew of oppositional voices (“I’m not a gangster/I’m not a film star/I’m not a pop star”) as ominous strings muster. Almost imperceptibly the fearful mood of the first third reasserts itself, with Bowie now in a lower register to a straight beat, as if ‘Blackstar’’s dire consequences have been wrought. Burbling flute ushers the piece to a close. If heads are reeling, there is no respite: Bowie inhales twice to count-off ’Tis A Pity She Was A Whore, with tenor sax monster Donny McCaslin exhorting drummer Mark Guiliana and bassist Tim Lefebvre to keep throttling the offbeat pummel until Bowie drops his priceless opening lyric: “Then she punched me like a dude.” Pianist Jason Lindner joins the hysteria, ratcheting needles further into the red, while Bowie slurs Jimmy Durante-style, and thrice whoops in excelsis.
Memories of the primitive home demo version on the Sue B-side are outmuscled amid the sheer escalatory thrill of a band tearing up the roadmap. Proceedings are reoriented towards the known Bowie by the subsequent Lazarus. A pensive guitar line signals a nakedly unaffected vocal – “Look up here, I’m in heaven/I’ve got scars that can’t be seen” – as the sax whirls in sympathy. Spare and emotive, there’s deep intrigue for forensically inclined rune-readers amid such lyrics as “By the time I got to New York/I was living like a king”, or “I’ll be free just like that blue bird”; Lazarus is also the title song of his new musical theatre adaptation of The Man Who Fell To Earth.
Halfway through and it’s breathtakingly apparent that David Bowie isn’t so much back on the horse as riding bareback towards a cliff-edge. The new recording of Sue (Or In A Season Of Crime) compensates for its reduced brass powerage by spiking the city-primeval rhythms with distressed noise, Ben Monder’s guitar suddenly prominent. Then, a supreme mood-shift: with its minimal robotic groove, Girl Loves Me sees the syncopation game upped by the singer himself as he deploys a variant of A Clockwork Orange’s nadsat vocabulary – “Hey cheena!” “Titty up, malchick say!” – plus choice use of the f-word.
In piercing voice, with DFA’s James Murphy on percussion, here’s Bowie reminding 21st century paranoid androids that he patented the form. Dollar Days restores the primacy of saxophone, albeit the instrument’s emollient aspect; in New York jazz argot, this is more Supper Club than Knitting Factory. Bathed in translucent piano and guitar, Bowie sounds wistful, but beware what lurks behind his velvet rope: “I’m dying to push their backs against the wall and fool them all again.”
The song’s confluence of stentorian guitar with McCaslin’s solo saxophone is overwhelming, segueing directly into the motorik pulse of the album’s final masterstroke. On a record that heretofore has barely referenced his past at all, Bowie exits with a song entitled I Can’t Give Everything Away, directly quoting the yearning harmonica from Low’s A New Career In A New Town. The lyric is rueful – “Seeing more and feeling less/Saying no but meaning yes” – the music ecstatic, and that’s even before Ben Monder’s transcendent liquid guitar solo spirits its patron, repeating the title refrain, to the horizon’s vanishing point and this brilliant, confounding record ebbs away.
★ somewhat recalls Station To Station in form – epic multipart title-track opener, seven songs in 41 minutes, odd atmospherics, rhythmic heft, tremendous singing – but otherwise there’s no obvious precedent in the Bowie canon. Real blood pumps in its grooves, unlike his ’90s experimental albums Outside and Earthling where so much energy was expended chasing the technological Zeitgeist.
David Bowie’s genius here has been in jettisoning his regular cohorts, whose safe pairs of hands might have taken these songs to a less visceral, more orthodox place, instead of this new frontier from which to contemplate innerspace. He can’t give everything away – but this will more than suffice.
Reeves Gabrels On Creating With Bowie: “The Studio Was Our Sandbox”
Accomplice on Tin Machine, ‘Hours…’ and more hopes David Bowie’s legacy will be more than a “saucy soundbite”.
DAVID BOWIE’S TIN MACHINE compadre, Reeves Gabrels, has been in touch with MOJO to share his thoughts and feelings on the death of his friend and collaborator.
“Whether it was the Tin Machine albums,Outside, Earthling, ‘Hours…’ or any of the other projects we worked on,” writes Gabrels, “my role never seemed clearly defined… It was co-writer, co-producer, confidant and of course, guitarist. Being art-school boys David and I settled into a conspiratorial friendship early. Throughout the following 13 years, the studio was our Buckminster Fuller sandbox, our safe place to create where time stopped and art was made. there was no careerism, or attention to a ‘marketplace’ but, instead, a desire to tell a story… leave a trail of good work.
“Now is the time to go deep. There is a life’s work waiting there to be heard.”REEVES GABRELS
“During our time together, contrary to the conventional view of David as a calculated manipulator of image, we felt more kinship with various art movements (the beats, Fluxus, German expressionism, the constructivists) than we did competition with the music being made around us.
It was only when the ‘work’ was completed that thought shifted to how to bring it to the marketplace… as any artist does in any medium.
“It is my deepest hope that David is remembered as a man and an artist and not turned into a once-upon-a-time symbol of controversy by the media, a saucy soundbite by the tabloids or a silkscreen on a t-shirt worn by baby boomers and hipsters alike trying to create the appearance of cool without ever looking below the surface.
“It would be wonderful if music fans took this opportunity to listen. Now is the time to go deep. There is a life’s work waiting there to be heard.”
From his groundbreaking "Ziggy Stardust" concerts of the early '70s to Lazarus, the divisive off-Broadway alt-musical that premiered in the final weeks of his life, David Bowie was a chameleonic creature of the theater.
His stage alter ego in Lazarus is Thomas Jerome Newton, the same flame-haired humanoid extraterrestrial played onscreen by Bowie in 1976 in Nicolas Roeg's The Man Who Fell to Earth. Portrayed in this quasi-sequel by Michael C. Hall, Newton is still stranded on the planet decades later, a marooned immortal starman yearning for release.he character's tortured struggle now seems suddenly prophetic and more poignant in light of Bowie's death, and the news that he had been fighting cancer for 18 months.In perhaps the most extravagant theatrical gesture of a career that at its peak was a dazzling succession of them, Bowie released a video just last week for the title track from the show. The song is also featured on his final album, Blackstar, a work as audacious and rich in mesmerizing ambiguity as any that he ever produced.
In the video, Bowie appears as a patient straining to levitate from the hospital bed that confines him, with buttons sewn over his bandaged eyes. At the same time, a more vigorous version of him dances in the room, in a jerky strut that's both convulsive and defiant, before sitting at a desk to pen what seem to be farewell words that won't come fast enough.I won't be the only lifelong fan to have teared up this morning, watching those images as Bowie sings the opening words, now loaded with fresh significance:
"Look up here, I'm in heaven
I've got scars that can't be seen
I've got drama, can't be stolen
Everybody knows me now."
I've got scars that can't be seen
I've got drama, can't be stolen
Everybody knows me now."
Bowie was a master of reinvention and of persona as performance. His flirtation with the theater began with his emergence in 1972, three years after the indelible anthem "Space Oddity" first put him on the map while also defining the artist he was to become.For his "Ziggy Stardust" concerts, he chose the avant-garde mime and dance maverick Lindsay Kemp as a collaborator, resulting in a legendary series of shows that were landmarks in their radical incorporation of theater and multimedia elements. But a full-fledged plunge into musical theater, though frequently mooted, only happened late last year withLazarus.
There was, however, a three-month run on Broadway in The Elephant Man, when Bowie stepped into the part of Joseph Merrick, the grotesquely deformed outcast embraced by Victorian London society, in the 1979 revival of Bernard Pomerance's play. Bowie called the role, which is performed without prosthetics or disfiguring makeup and thus is purely a feat of theatrical illusion, "undoubtedly the biggest single challenge of my career."Belgian theater director Ivo van Hove and his longtime partner and design collaborator Jan Versweyveld traveled to New York together to see Bowie in that play soon after they met.
Many years later, after van Hove had already made distinctive use of Bowie songs in his bracing stage distillation of Tony Kushner's Angels in America, he was approached by producer Robert Fox, who had been in discussions with Bowie about revisiting his character from the Roeg film in a theatrical context.
The resulting production, co-written by Bowie with Irish playwright Enda Walsh, became the fastest-selling show in the 36-year history of off-Broadway's New York Theatre Workshop, the East Village incubation tank that spawned Rent and Once. The extended run plays at NYTW through Jan. 20, and its sold-out final performances will now acquire the additional haunting dimension of a memorial.Bowie was never going to do a conventional jukebox musical, a genre that has cheapened the work of some of his contemporaries. But Lazarus, in a sense, is an abstract career retrospective, with songs lifted from across Bowie's discography, from the glam-rock '70s nuggets through the ambient Berlin period to the recent albums that ended his 10-year studio hiatus and reinvigorated his critical reputation, The Next Day and Blackstar.eviews were mixed for Lazarus. Most critics admired the show's dynamic multimedia presentation, committed performances and the hypnotic sounds of both the recent material and newly arranged vintage hits like "Changes," "Life on Mars?" and "Heroes." (A recording is in the works.) But many expressed frustration with the piece's stubbornly oblique storytelling.
However, even the naysayers might now reconsider what they dismissed as solipsistic, instead reading the multilayered show in a more personal vein, as a soulful and characteristically iconoclastic farewell.
