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A Man of Sound & Vision: David Bowie - Love Affair with a Legacy By Scott Douglas Keely & Robert E. Martin Photos by Kay McEntee
BOWIE LIVE I remember seeing David Bowie on the cover of Hit Parade when I was seven years old. I remember thinking at the time that he was pretty wild looking and so he must be cool. Bowie was at the peak of his Ziggy Stardust period then and was defining fashion and music along the way. Ten years and several albums later, my friends were off to see
Bowie's Serious Moonlight tour at Joe Louis Arena. He was promoting his
hugely In 2002 Bowie played for about an hour and a half ahead of Moby at the Area 2 festival at DTE Energy theatre. That amazing teaser of a performance certainly left me craving more. Since then Mr. Bowie has been busy answering the call for more. Bowie's latest release Reality comes right on the heels of Heathen from 2002, which Bowie was covering at the Area 2 show. On the evening of Jan. 9, 2004 at the Palace of Auburn Hills, Bowie showed up to give the anxious crowd a huge slice of musical reality. Strong new tunes like New Killer Star and Reality took their place next to old super-classics like Rebel Rebel’ Fashion, Fame, and All The Young Dudes. When Bowie sings 'you're face...to face...with the man who sold the world' you believe it. Every tune is serious business and Bowie seemed to draw enthusiastic energy from the appreciative audience. This became especially evident when he ripped off Panic in Detroit for the first time on this tour. Hello Spaceboy, one of my personal favorites with its fast pace and heavy chords, comes at you like a freight train from the stage, as Bowie proclaims from atop one of the 'bus stops' on either side of the stage: 'this chaos is killing me!' Commenting 'we're gonna play a long show tonight', and being true to his word, classics like Under Pressure, Life on Mars? and Ashes to Ashes just kept coming. A blazing rendition of Heroes at the end of the set brought everyone in The Palace that night to their feet in exaltation. As if all this entertainment wasn't enough, Bowie's 10-song encore played out like an entire second set. Take a great newer tune like 515 or The Angels Have Gone from the Heathen release and shake well with Ziggy-era tunes like Suffragette City and you have an amazing concert experience. Having just celebrated his 57th birthday, Never Grow Old, from the newest release Reality should become David Bowie's theme song. Showing no signs of fatigue, Bowie played 32 crowd-pleasing favorites with equal energy and intensity. Any Bowie fans out there that's never seen him perform live take heart. At this rate David Bowie will be 70 when I will be taking my 16-year-old son to his first show. LOVE AFFAIR WITH A LEGACY Unlike Scott, my own memories of Bowie go back to the '70s, when he was pioneering the 'art of the chameleon' and changing the bar of style & fashion on nearly an annual basis. As the guru of glam, Bowie introduced listeners to a flamboyant and theatrical world where folk, commercial pop and heavy rock collided. Back in 1976, I had the opportunity to interview Bowie while attending the University of Sussex in Brighton, England. It was an usual period for Bowie, having just completed Nicholas Roeg's The Man Who Fell to Earth and experimenting with a new musical hybrid that combined the soulful 'Philadelphia Sound' with a dirge-laden rhythm section that was harsh and unapologetic. At that time Bowie was courting the fascistic elements on rock stardom & mass audience appeal. He was living & recording in Berlin and appeared in London wearing a white shirt and armband, stood on the back of a black Mercedes, and gave the 'Heil Hitler' sign to fans, causing quite a stir with his latest 'transformation'. Always a visual & cultural pioneer, Bowie's incarnation during this period was a hybrid of Brechtian/Weimar Republic 1930's imagery, catering perfectly to the subtleties of the Watergate era zeitgeist of the time. Compounded by the fact he only weighed about 110 pounds and looked white as a ghost, to Bowie's mind the flirtation with decadence carried its own inner logic. "People make such a fuss," he told me at the time, "but the reality is that the energy from an audience can be focused away from the realities that distract them and focused upon solutions that are not inherently evil. The key is to harness this energy towards a productive purpose." Nowadays, it is common to have artists such as Madonna employ controversial behavior as a media tool to springboard their careers, but back in 1976 this approach was relatively new, and again, Bowie served as a pioneer. And let us not forget that from Jerry Lee Lewis to the Stones and the Sex Pistols, Rock 'n Roll has always been most effective when it is truly controversial. Over the years Bowie has moved from asexual alien to middle-aged model with dignity and aplomb, and as he recently told Real Detroit reporter Shannon McCarthy about celebrating 30- years since the release of Ziggy Stardust prior to this recent Michigan appearance, "It almost feels like 50 years." "It does seem so long ago now. In those days, you came on strong with such love and naivete and still a kind of retarded adolescence to a certain extent. All of that disappears over time. And that's the way it goes - life, the world, everything seemed so very different then. Now, it's a far more calculating and scarier place. I don't know whether it's scarier now because one knows so much more. Maybe it was a little scary back then, but it didn't feel like it then." As he moves forward into the future, Bowie's impeccable ear for musical taste & trend remains acute as ever. When asked if there are any newer bands he'd be interested in working with, Bowie was quick and forthcoming. "There are some bands that I really like; they don't get much play, unfortunately, in the States. Like Mercury Rev; I like them a lot. And I think Grandaddy are very good. But what I see on the shelves doesn't really excite me very much. Oh, and I think Blur just made one of the best albums in the last few years. I thought Thank Tank was absolutely terrific." As one of the richest & most successful men in the world of Rock, David Bowie doesn't need to work anymore. He could retire and disappear like Greta Garbo, but the fact that he doesn't - that he remains adamant about exploring the peripheral textures of music while retaining a firm grasp of the center, makes him an artist that still deserves our respect. |
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