The Old Dad's Records Podcast Is Back!

After about a month I am finally back on the podcast track. This was due mostly to me getting horribly sick and not recovering until the holidays, when I was too busy to do any podcasting. I decided to come back on episode 23 with my favorite David Bowie song, "Life on Mars?" It's a song about escaping this world, a tempting feeling in the last two years. After that I pull a T Rex record from my pile of old records and revel in its wonderfully entertaining cheese. I finish things out with a song by new band called Omni that I'm digging. If you read the blog, please check out the podcast.

David Bowie, "Red Sails"

This Bowie live set on German TV in 1978 justifies YouTube's existence

Try as I might, I cannot get over the deaths of David Bowie and Prince earlier this year. Both men were true musical geniuses, as well as rebels against narrowly-defined masculinity. In the case of Bowie, his death prompted me to finally check out an album I had heretofore ignored: Lodger. I didn't know any of its songs, and although it was recorded in the late 70s, I'd always heard that it was a departure from what Bowie did on Low and Heroes, perhaps my two favorite records of his.

Well, I had been steered wrong. Lodger is phenomenal, a melding of his impressionistic Berlin sound with hard-edged pop rock. It's like a glimpse into the alternate reality 1980s that I wished had come to be. No song illustrates this better than "Red Sails." It has Adrian Belew's chaotic, effects-laden guitar and the humming, slightly ominous (and surely Eno derived) electric groove that underlay Iggy Pop's Idiot album (produced by Bowie.) Beneath it lies the insanely tight, amazing rhythm section of Dennis Davis, Carlos Alomar, and George Murray, setting a rock solid base. There is a theme of travel, accentuated by the fast tempo and galloping beat, but we're not sure where we're going exactly, until the chant on the bridge about going "to the hinterland." It is perhaps the only song ever to properly embody the propulsion of travel combined with its anxiety.

Bowie was so amazing that this song comes from an album usually regarded as relatively minor in his oeuvre, the least notable of his Berlin Trilogy, and is still superb. I hear it now, with its themes of travel, less as part of the Berlin Trilogy and more Bowie pointing the way forward to a new musical territory to explore. He had survived fearsome levels of drug abuse in the mid-1970s, went into a kind of therapy in Berlin, and emerged as the purveyor of a new, nervy kind of poppy art rock with the same sharp angles and adventurous spirit of New Wave, but without being derivative in any way. He and Prince both had a rare ability to both drive and respond to changes in the musical landscape without sacrificing originality. (Well, apart from the mid-80s in Bowie's case.) I despair because I don't know if we will ever see artists capable of that again.

David Bowie "Ashes To Ashes"

Even though I've already written about David Bowie this week, I couldn't not have one of his songs as my track of the week.  I was in the midst of revisiting his work in the week before he died, and since his death I have been listening to his music non-stop.  I've come away with two conclusions: that he was truly a unique genius, and that I want "Life On Mars?" played at my funeral.

"Ashes to Ashes" is an interesting song because although it was the first single from Bowie's first album of the 80s, it was the curtain closer for his "long seventies" between 1969 and 1980.  This was a truly brilliant run where he jumped from peak to peak in stunning fashion.  His first truly great song from 1969 was "Space Oddity," and so it was fitting that the character of Major Tom from that song would be brought back by Bowie at the end of that time in his career.

Of course, this is not a happy return.  "Space Oddity" came out in the midst of the first lunar landing, when the optimism of the sixties had not yet died out and human possibility seemed limitless.  In 1980, after years of economic stagnation and the long hangover from the sixties, the conservative blue meanies were back in full force in Thatcher's Britain while Reagan was poised to sweep into power.  In the song, it's revealed that Major Tom is now a junkie, "Strung out on heaven's high/ Feeling an all time low."  The hippie dream had given way to cold harsh reality in the starkest way possible.  Bowie was never much of a hippie, part of the reason that he was able to thrive in the 1970s.

During the song he seems to be looking back on his own life, "I've never done good things/ I've never done bad things/ I've never done anything out of the blue."  The invocation of "ashes to ashes" implies death, of course.  It seems to be in retrospect a straightforward announcement on Bowie's part that the shape-shifting and wild experimentation are coming to an end, that he has said what he needed to say.  His next album, Let's Dance, would not come until three years later, quite different from the 1969-1980 period, when he put out thirteen studio albums.  Let's Dance would also mark a period where Bowie was making pop music responding to the trends of the time, rather than setting them himself.

In the meantime, "Ashes to Ashes" still to this day sounds strikingly fresh.  It is layered, intricate, and edgy all at once with synthesized noises that I've never heard replicated elsewhere.  Critics have noted how influential this all was on the "New Romantic" New Wave acts like Duran Duran and Human League, who through MTV would bring together the marriage of sound and vision pioneered by Bowie into the living rooms of America.  It is a telling fact that "Ashes to Ashes" was a number one song in the UK, but didn't crack the top 100 in America.  Bowie had a towering influence on the bands coming out of England, Americans were impacted by him in a more second-hand fashion by the wave of British New Wave hitting American shores in the 80s.  By that time Bowie had figured out how to assault the American charts, and it was with "Modern Love," not "Ashes to Ashes."  For that reason, I think it's Americans my age, who went back to Bowie's 70s work after being curious about his impact on the British stuff we liked in the 80s, who have been the most saddened by the man's death.

A Bowie Farewell Playlist

The death of David Bowie has hit me really hard.  The two most personally revealing things I've probably written for this blog were about my life during the period between 1997 and 2000 when I was in full-on Bowie obsession mode.  So what the hell, I'll be even more personal.  His music and performances really helped me to be comfortable with what I would call my non-traditional masculinity.  I went from years of feeling like I was some kind of abnormal being incapable of being manly to realizing that those standards were stupid and that I was right for not conforming to them.

It's been very difficult for me to put my feelings into words, and so many other people have been doing it and doing it better, so I don't have a lot to offer.  Instead, I'd like to offer up a short playlist of five songs that have been comforting this week, and which will probably stay with me forever.

"Life on Mars?"

I put this one on last night, and my wife enthusiastically said "Yes! This is what I want to hear!"  It is a haunting song from Bowie's early period ostensibly about a mousy young woman going to the movies by herself feeling lost but looking for the company of the images on screen.  These movies end up being a "saddening bore," leading her to ask whether there is life on Mars, or at least some other world less dreadful than this one.  The lyrics are not completely straight-forward, but that's the beauty of Bowie.  I can picture this song perfectly in my mind every time I hear it, but it won't be how anyone else pictures it.  I am now firmly convinced that I want it played at my funeral.

"Width Of A Circle"

Although it may be a cliche to say this, cliches are cliches for a reason.  Bowie's shape-shifting ways made him the first post-modern rock star and had a huge influence on others.  Before he figured out the Ziggy Stardust persona, he could rock out, glam style.  As good as the Ziggy era was, none of his songs, including "Rebel Rebel," rock quite like "Width Of A Circle."  This hard-rocking version of Bowie came after his being a mod in the mid-60s and slightly folkie in the late 60s, before letting his camp side out on Hunky Dory, which came right before Ziggy.  He changed images so often that The Man Who Sold The World gets lost in the shuffle, mostly because his work from 1969-1980 is so fertile that is probably the greatest run of that length by any rock act.

"Heroes"

This is one of those few songs that the first time I heard it I literally could not believe what I was hearing.  I had never listened to anything quite like it before, and I must've listened to it ten times a day for a month afterward.  Bowie's Berlin music is probably my favorite of his many phases, and this song takes the amazing, otherworldly sound he was creating with Tony Visconti and Brian Eno, and applies it to one of the most stirring rock ballads of all time.  I am going to just stop talking because this song really speaks for itself.

"Queen Bitch"

On Hunky Dory Bowie paid homage to many of his idols, from Andy Warhol to Bob Dylan.  This song was meant for the Velvet Underground's Lou Reed, and pushes ahead with a truly wonderful propulsion that makes it one of my favorite highway driving songs.  Bowie was one of the first people to understand the revolution latent in the Velvets' sound and adapt it to something new, rather than just imitate it. That act may very well be one of the most important great leaps forward in rock music history, and one of the least known.

"Word On A Wing"

When I heard of Bowie's death, this was one of the first songs to pop into my head.  It comes from Station to Station, the album he recorded in the mid-70s when he was at a low point of failing health and cocaine psychosis.  It's a song about grace, with heavy religious overtones.  In the midst of the worst, he sees a way out and a spiritual awakening. Yesterday I thought a lot about how Bowie's life could very well have ended forty years ago.  We were so fortunate to have him for so long, and now his breath has gone out, no longer lies like a word on a wing.  All that remains are the memories, and the music, and those I will carry with me.

David Bowie "Sweet Thing/Candidate/Sweet Thing (Reprise)"

As I say a lot on here, I am the type of person who is particularly sensitive to the changing seasons.  This also means that because I first heard certain songs during a change in the seasons, that those songs remain associated in my mind with certain times of the year. These associations also seem particularly acute when it comes to autumn.

Because I have spent my adult life working in education after years of grad school, I have faced a lot of transitions with the beginning of school in the fall.  One of the toughest was moving to Chicago right after college to start my master's degree.  I loved being in the big city, but I was there by myself, and without a lot of money.  The worst was that my graduate classes were very challenging, and the university treated the students in my master's program like orphans.  We were neither undergrads or doctoral students, essentially caught up in a revolving door that was quite lucrative for that particular university.  I really and truly felt alone, the only consolation was that one of my college friends was living on the other side of the city, and that we could get together from time to time.  (I would find a good gang to hang with, but that was a few months away.)

I passed many nights in my lonely studio apartment trying to work while the particularly harsh autumn nightfalls came crashing down on the South Side of Chicago.  For the first time I could remember, I was studying my favorite subject (history) but not automatically "getting it."  Those months of difficulty and loneliness happened to coincide with my David Bowie phase.  I went with my aforementioned college pal to see Velvet Goldmine that autumn, which only piqued my interest in Bowie's glam rock era that much more.  That's where I was when I picked up a used copy of Diamond Dogs at the record store around the corner from my apartment.

It's a somewhat maligned album, coming after Bowie had decided to leave glam and the Spiders From Mars (his old backing band) behind, but before he had jumped off into his more daring experiments of the mid and late seventies.  He had wanted to write a musical based off of Orwell's 1984, but couldn't get the rights.  For that reason, the Diamond Dogs album doesn't quite cohere.  It has stuff from that failed project, a daft concept-album plot about a post-apocalyptic London that seems to go nowhere, and radio-friendly singles like "Rebel Rebel."

In the middle of this is a three song suite, "Sweet Thing/Candidate/Sweet Thing (Reprise)."  It has some beautiful singing from Bowie, who was finally learning how to use his lower register and screech less.  The suite ping-pongs between high and low, fast and slow, with some of his best sax work providing great texture and a gorgeous guitar solo. According to a Bowie interview, these songs were reworked remnants of the Orwell musical, and evoke very well the mix of dread, paranoia, and hope in the novel.

To me, because of that tough autumn seventeen (!) years ago, I come back to this song cycle on a day like today, when daylight savings time is over and night falls early and dark. It's at this point, around Halloween, that I begin to realize that winter is around the corner and relentless.  Just as in the song, hope coexists with dread, but the latter seems poised to dominate.

Track of the Week: David Bowie "Always Crashing In The Same Car"

I was watching a documentary about David Bowie last night called Five Years, and I appreciated that it focused primarily on his music (rather than personae), and included a lot of conversation with his musical collaborators.  It helped me to realize that after he left his Ziggy identity and the Spiders from Mars band behind, Bowie succeeded because he had such great musicians and producers working with him.  Those collaborators came from different places, and the resulting friction really enabled a lot of interesting results.  My favorite moment was guitarist Carlos Alomar discussing his frustration with producer Brian Eno's methods, and Eno's admission that at that point in his life he simply hadn't worked with musicians as accomplished as Alomar, and thus was using methods better suited for rudimentary punk rockers than a session man like Alomar.

The results, on albums like Low and Heroes, were amazing.  Those two records, though they came out in 1977, still sound fresh and unique.  "Always Crashing In The Same Car" is one of my favorites of this era, and it seems especially suited to the bleakness of winter time.  It is a lament about making the same mistakes again and again in life, and not being able to break the pattern despite knowing that it exists.  Despite the poignant nature of the lyrics, I tend to focus on the shimmery, textured sound of the music.  You'd probably never guess that the thudding drums come from a soul/jazz session player like Dennis Davis, but the more I listen to it the more I can hear the subtle feel.  The guitars are layered and trade feeling for heroics, acting much the same as the synthesizers beneath them.

It's less a song than a peak in Bowie's damaged psyche at the time, making it all the more powerful.  Another thing I noticed in the documentary was that Bowie's practice of emodying a character took a hiatus in his Berlin period.  The reason that I like his work at that time above all others may very well be that he was not trying to play a different person, but to actually dig a little deeper within himself.  I don't think Bowie was ever more vulnerable and real than on this track.

Geezer Rock of the 1980s

I just finished reading Peter Dogget's exhaustive analysis of David Bowie's work from 1969 to 1980, a period he calls "the long Seventies."  Ending in 1980 is obvious in Bowie's case, since he output since Scary Monsters has a few bright spots, but none of it is as good or as innovative as what he did in his prime.  That reminded me that in the 80s there were a lot of artists from the sixties and seventies that kept right on making music well past their expiration date.  The audience goodwill they had amassed in their primes remained, and people would buy the records and go to the concerts to remember their own glory days.  Since I grew up in the 80s I was unaware of their pasts, and didn't get why their videos were on MTV.  I remember seeing the one for "We Are the World" and when Dylan sang I wondered who the hell that old weirdo with the awful voice was.  (My opinions on the Bobfather have changed, obviously.)

It's strange to think that the forgettable stuff they produced in the 80s is now longer ago than the glory days these artists were still cashing in on back then.  Here's some of the good, bad, and plain ugly of 1980s geezer rock.

The Rolling Stones

In the early 1980s the Rolling Stones had one last flash of brilliance, mostly because the Tattoo You album was made up of songs first essayed during the 70s.  "Start Me Up" is one of their greatest grooves, and "Waiting On a Friend" perhaps their best ballad.  After that, things went downhill fast.  "Undercover of Night" tried to sound relevant with its New Wavey guitar and failed.  That song's album of the same name and Dirty Work were are awful as the pastel suits worn by the band on the cover.  When Steel Wheels came out at the end of the decade everyone acted like it was a return to form when it was in fact a boring piece of crap.  That record was positively brilliant compared to Jagger's self-parodic solo work of the time.

Neil Young

Young put together an amazing run during the sixties and seventies with his solo work, as well as with CSNY and Buffalo Springfield.  Then came the 80s.  He made albums so odd and trading in so many styles (electronica on Trans, rockabilly on Everybody's Rocking, and country on Old Ways) that his record company sued him for not making Neil Young albums.  Somehow Young broke out of his funk and managed to release the all-time great "Keep On Rockin' In the Free World" in 1989 and go on to put out some quality records in the early and mid-1990s.

Bob Dylan

Oh boy did Dylan fall off in the 80s.  The album titles themselves betrayed a lack of vision: Knocked Out Loaded, Down In The Groove, Empire Burlesque, etc.  He began the decade still in his evangelical Christian phase before being mired in a holding pattern in the mid-80s.  He famously did not release the best songs he recorded in the era, like "Foot of Pride" and "Blind Willie McTell," as if he didn't want people to hear what he could really do.  Finally, in 1989, he put out Oh Mercy, an inspired album that he says in his own memoir saved his interest in making music.  "Ring Them Bells" never gets old.

David Bowie

As I mentioned above, Bowie started the decade with a bang, and then suddenly decided that he'd rather be a pop star than an art rocker.  While "Let's Dance" is a great slice of 80s dance pop, his approach led to much diminishing returns, to the point that Never Let Me Down was the album I saw most often in used CD stores in the 1990s.  On the Glass Spider Tour for that album he began each show by being lowered, you guessed it, out of a giant glass spider, which is as tacky as things got in the 1980s.

Rod Stewart

Rod the Mod has been the punchline to a joke for more most people my age, but his early 70s solo output and work with the Faces was truly fantastic, and if you don't agree I'll fight you.  By the late seventies, however, he was cashing in with the endlessly silly "Do Ya Think I'm Sexy."  His 80s output continued that trend, with utter dreck like "Love Touch."  However, in the early 80s Stewart did manage to do a little good with the edgy pop of "Young Turks," which borrowed the New Wave sound without being derivative.  It was the exception to prove the rule.

The Kinks

Of all the geezer bands, The Kinks probably produced the best music in the hairspray decade.  They began in the mid-1960s with some rip-roaring proto-hard rock, and then from Face to Face in 1966 to Muswell Hillbillies in 1972, the Kinks had an amazing run of albums that did not fit any of the prevailing styles of the time.  After that they got lost in a wilderness of lame concept albums before returning with some decent hard rock albums in the late 70s.  In the early 80s they scored their biggest American hit with the fun nostalgia of "Come Dancing."  "Don't Forget to Dance" and "Living on a Thin Line" are great songs.  They ran out of gas afterwards, but it's always good to see a great band squeeze out one last hurrah.

Paul McCartney

Macca's solo work is easy to malign as treacly and silly, but he put out a lot of good tunes in the seventies amidst the dross.  In the 80s, however, he became a complete and utter cheeseball.  The only misstep on Michael Jackson's Thriller album is his duet with McCartney on the ridiculously frivolous "The Girl Is Mine."  With Give My Regards to Broad Street he managed to produce a film even less inspired than The Magical Mystery Tour.  The soundtrack album contained "No More Lonely Nights," one of the eightiesist songs that ever eightesed.  That's not a compliment.  Through much of the decade he was sporting perhaps the most ridiculous mullet of the era, and that's saying something.

David Bowie and Iggy Pop in Berlin (a playlist)

Last Friday when we got eight inches of snow dumped on us I had to do my duty as a new homeowner and start shoveling.  Our extra-wide driveway suddenly began to look a lot less attractive.  I made a playlist to listen to while I worked consisting of the albums that David Bowie and Iggy Pop cut in Berlin in the late 1970s, and it was perfect.  I spent two hours busting my hump, but the time passed pretty fast due to re-immersing myself in music that I had let slip from my ears for far too long.

The albums in question are Low, Heroes, and Lodger by Bowie, and The Idiot and Lust for Life by Pop.  Each is a masterpiece in its own right, but together they form a distinctive corpus of work that sounds like nothing else.  Here, in my own idiosyncratic order, are five of my favorite tracks, one per album.

Iggy Pop, "Sister Midnight"
This is the first song on The Idiot, and a statement of purpose.  The old Iggy Pop rocking out in front of the proto-punk riffage and caveman beats of The Stooges is gone.  The rhythm is angular and robotic, like a funk song run through Kraftwerk's computers.  The guitars are droning textures devoid of hooks.  Pop sings in a kind of quietly deranged way about Oedipal dreams and heroin addiction.  This is a man who has been to the brink and managed to come back and talk about it, but the damage is impossible to ignore.  The sound is completely arresting no matter how unsettling it is, and I have been listening to "Sister Midnight" over and over again for the past few days.  It's an uncanny sound that will give birth to some great music. For example, without this song there would be no Joy Division, a sadly ironic fact since Ian Curtis is said to have killed himself after listening to The Idiot.

David Bowie, "Boys Keep Swinging"
Lodger is the least dark of Bowie's Berlin albums, and one that points to his future after his Berlin phase.  (It's good, but my least favorite of the trilogy.)  Robert Fripp's guitars signal the heroics he will unleash on Scary Monsters, and "Boys Keep Swinging" has seeds of the popper sound Bowie would ride to world conquest in the early 1980s on Let's Dance.  Here in '79 he still retains some of the edge on a song that is one of the weirdest things I've spent a weekend humming to myself.

David Bowie, "Joe The Lion"
Heroes is justly best known for the anthemic title track, which is one of the few songs that have ever stopped me in my tracks the first time I heard it.  There's plenty of other good stuff on that record, however, with "Joe The Lion" running a close second in my book.  The guitars are overwhelming, putting the listener into the claustrophobic mind of the protagonist until they drop out and Bowie purrs irresistibly about the morning routine before the guitars jump back in with increased ferocity.  I've never been totally sure about what this song is about, but it replicates the feeling of going crazy from the boredom of daily like nothing else I've heard.

Iggy Pop, "Tonight"
Lust for Life is also best known for its stomping title track, but just about every song is killer.  My second favorite on the album is probably "Tonight," which starts with an operatic opening about a drug overdose that segues into a sweet mid tempo ballad backed by airy synthesizers.  It has the sophistication of art rock but drained of it pretensions, replaced by a hearty dose of Iggy's punk fervor.

David Bowie, "Warszawa"
The first side of Low is made up of electro-rock tracks reflecting the singer's state of mental breakdown.  The second side is something else entirely, a bunch of soundscapes midwifed by ambient master Brian Eno.  "Warszawa" is the best of them, and a song that to me is one of the most beautiful and haunting that I know.  Bowie is famously afraid of flying, and he spent some time on a train layover in a still war-damaged Warsaw , which generated the impressions that inspired this song.  I've always felt this song described a dark city where people are less living than waiting to die, and it speaks to the fear and dread often lingering just below the surface in our daily lives.  Not many rock songs ever speak to that.