The Farewell Of The Thin White Duke, AKA “my life with Bowie in 5 songs.”

I saw another piece of writing this week that was discussing the enormous outpouring of love, support, commentary, analysis, astonishment, etc. in the wake of David Bowie’s unexpected passing last Sunday, and how it was difficult to offer anything new to the dialogue—so overwhelming was it all, so much of everything already said.  I certainly have no revelations to give, and so instead will simply write about what Bowie meant to me personally.  The best way I can do this is to tell the story of how I came to love Bowie and his music, through five pivotal songs of his that coincide with very specific times in my own life.

It took me a long time to get to Bowie, as far as my musical tastes were concerned.  Sure, I’d first seen him in Labyrinth like a million other ‘80’s kids, and while his appearance in that film was memorable, I was a child and not yet curious enough to pursue the matter further.  As far as his songs and albums went, well…I grew up in a household dominated by folk music, and so David Bowie, like so many other rock artists, didn’t register on my radar at all.  Mine was an existence of softly fingerpicked acoustic guitars and introspective lyrics, not androgynous superstars and electric bombast. 

It wasn’t until many years later, in my early ‘20’s, that his themes of pride despite—no, because of—alienation really started to resonate with me.  Also, as a catalogue completist, Bowie offered that rare thing that other favorites like The Beatles and Parliament-Funkadelic did, that is, every album was a sonic and lyrical journey, and no two records sounded quite the same as each other.  Once I began to immerse myself, I was hooked, and never looked back.  As the years passed, David Bowie became for me like many of my other still-living creative influences—someone I took for granted, someone who would always just be, you know, around.  In fact, Bowie may have felt more like that than most, as he had so doggedly and determinedly invented and built upon his own mystique, to the point where the average observer such as myself began to think such a creature could be nothing less than superhuman, nothing short of immortal.  And yet when I woke up Monday morning, he was dead.  Dead, but not gone.

1.  “Five Years,” from The Rise & Fall Of Ziggy Stardust & The Spiders From Mars.  I imagine this must have been a lot of folks’ entry-level initiation into Bowie-world, kicking off as it does the legendary Ziggy LP.  Ziggy wasn’t the first album of his I picked up, but it may as well have been, so momentous were its shockwaves.  However, “Five Years” is significant to me not because of its Ziggy association, nor its tale of the impending apocalypse, but because it always happens to come on when I’ve reached these peak transitional points in life, all occurring at a rate of just about, you guessed it, five years.  Leaving Olympia, WA for my hometown of Omaha, not quite in defeat but not sure of anything, driving towards Tugboat Annie’s on the Puget Sound with my old friend Graham, and singing the chorus while faintly tearing up.  Resigned to, and even content with, the approach of my dreaded thirties, having started careers as both a musician and teacher by that point, while managing to marry a woman so incredible she doesn’t mind my endless hours of pontification about subjects such as, I dunno, David Bowie and his song “Five Years.”  Tears streaming down my face mere days ago, as I watched the man himself perform the song on The Old Grey Whistle Test, thinking of how this tune has accidentally marked such crucial points in my own experience, while realizing that the face on the screen—that gaunt, slightly sad, slightly bemused face—is no more, at least not as we've known it.

2.  “Young Americans,” from Young Americans.  When I first committed myself to investigating David Bowie’s music, to see what all the fuss was about, I didn’t know where to start.  I bought Aladdin Sane and it left me cold, which, oddly enough, it still does to this day, and is the only Bowie album I own that I feel that way about, though I dig certain tracks (“Panic In Detroit” is the biz!).  So, wanting to give it another try, I copped the Young Americans LP, and though I was initially startled at the difference in the sound (hardcore glam to Philly soul is more than a bit of a jump), I immediately liked it, and remember smiling so much it hurt, especially when listening to the title track.  I can’t even speak about the song “Young Americans” objectively, so ingrained is it in my psyche at this point.  I learned it myself, played it at countless open mics and actual shows, and even used to do a hyper-exaggerated version as a sort of alarm clock to awaken my always-sleeping cousin when I would go to his house in Omaha, at top volume and with excessive ridiculousness.  The lyrics to this song are unbelievable, some of the most soulful and devastating Bowie ever wrote, and in my own days as a “young American,” I felt like he was singing about me and everybody I knew, directly addressing and even mocking our contradictions, our over-inflated sense of self-importance, our fickle love lives and our days as pimps and hustlers, all at once. 

3.  “1984,” from Diamond Dogs.  I was constantly listening to David Bowie when I lived in Omaha from ’05-’07, and I started digging into the Diamond Dogs LP right at the beginning of that period, living in the basement of the house I grew up in, not re-adjusted at all to midwest sensibilities or midwest weather.  That being the case, the desolate future-now tone of Diamond Dogs felt more appropriate than ever, and I took a special shine to the Shaft-meets-Brecht funk of “1984.”  Keep in mind that these were also the George W. Bush years, and while the concepts of Big Brother and double-speak certainly weren’t new to the American political landscape, they were now being taken to new heights—or is it depths?—and seemed to have freshly sinister undertones that wormed away at anyone paying attention during those dreary times.  To numb myself from it all, I’d throw this cut on at maximum levels, drowning out everything else that was and wasn’t, ‘til none of it mattered other than that razor-sharp guitar and airtight groove, with Bowie singing so woefully and passionately he could have been in the damn basement with me.  Well, he was, I suppose, or at least his records were, and what more can one ask of an artist, really, in moments of confusion and distress?  Bowie was everywhere for me in those days, he filled up the empty spaces and the awkward silences with joy and fervor and maybe not hope, but something close.  Something more real than hope, even…pragmatic funk and fearless rock. 

4.  “Stay,” from Station To Station.  There are two reasons I have such fondness for this particular track.  One is the lyrics, which expertly summarize the kind of romantic entanglements I frequently found myself in in my early ‘20’s, before I wised up and stopped messing around with women who, for the most part, were of extremely limited substance.  The whole chorus, if it can even be called a chorus, of “stay/that’s what I meant to say or do something”…I found myself in that situation far too many times, not being assertive enough to capture the moment and then, of course, losing said moment.  The other reason is that this has got to be the absolute funkiest cut that Bowie ever did, with the guitar conversations of Carlos Alomar and Earl Slick riding over the slick groove laid down by bassist George Murray and drummer Dennis Davis, all creating a whirlpool of pocket.  David Bowie always surrounded himself with superb musical talent, but the Station To Station-era band is easily my favorite, so absolutely next-level was their interplay and sense of rhythmic intensity.  Many evenings were spent bouncing around my apartment in South Omaha to this song, all by my lonesome and completely content with that reality.  Well, mostly content, anyway. 

5.  “Blackstar,” from Blackstar.  And so we shall end at the end.  I bought Blackstar before Bowie’s death, but hadn’t had a chance to listen to it before I found out.  I took it to school with me on that Monday morning, more than a little shaken by the news, and forced myself to listen as I readied myself for the week ahead.  While it was extremely difficult to listen in an objective and/or emotionally removed sense—especially considering the bleak, letter-from-a-dying-man tone—the one thing I kept thinking was, despite all that context, the music I was listening to was still taking me somewhere, it was still new and fresh, it was innovative and dark and harsh and abrasive and beautiful, but it never ceased to be anything less than one helluva ride.  That blinding force of intentional creative provocation, I think, is what Bowie intended to convey throughout his career, though he of course made a few missteps here and there, as any artist does.  Yet he never really compromised his art, and always stayed true to his own muse, regardless of what the buzz may have been about each given album and song.  He killed Ziggy Stardust at the height of that character’s popularity, and became a blue-eyed soul auteur instead.  When the Thin White Duke had outlived his usefulness, he retreated to Berlin and created, with Brian Eno, what is perhaps the most transcendent and influential work of his career.  As the eighties loomed he returned to (relatively) straightforward rock and then pop, and continued to dance around all of the aforementioned styles for the next thirty years, never stopping, never phoning it in, never losing that starry-eyed sense of imagination and possibility that made all of his work such a joy to listen to, for those with open minds and ears.  Finally he gave us Blackstar, and while it’s tempting to say this last statement is frighteningly somber, it is at the same time adventurous, and restless, and—I keep coming back to this word as I’m thinking about Bowie—fearless.  So as I move forward in a world without David Bowie, I internalize his fearlessness as strength and comfort, and though the stars look very different today, they remain, and are perhaps brighter than I’ve seen them in quite some time.