David Bowie: Introduction & David Bowie (1967)

Introduction

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David Bowie is one of the most influential English musicians in the world. His career spanning from the late 60s to the release of Blackstar just this year, he produced masterpieces like "Space Oddity", "The Man Who Sold the World," and albums like The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust. He was a man genre-defiant and stuck with nothing for long, he experimented with pop, rock, folk, electronica, dance, grunge, and bandstand songs throughout his career.

Despite his popularity, my exposure to David Bowie would come later in life. I knew he was a major musician of significant popularity. When I did listen to his discography, it surprised me how many recognizable tunes he had made.

The twenty-seven studio albums of David Bowie represent a wide variety of musical styles. We will see, even in his earliest albums, that Bowie was an experimental musician at heart.

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This first album, David Bowie (1967) reminds me most of the non-mainstream songs of The Beatles' Abbey Road. This says more of my limited exposure than it does his influences. The album sounds happy, but there's a lot going on here, and the range of subject, instrumentation and composition shows off his talents.

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We will go through the album track by track.

1. Uncle Arthur

Favorite Lyrics: "Uncle Arthur likes his mummy, Uncle Arthur still reads comics, Uncle Arthur follows Batman."

The first track is a folk sounding little jingle that uses a good mix of guitar, piano, and horns. There is no track on this album that gets's caught in my head more than this song. The story of "Uncle" Arthur is familiar. People complain about millennials being a bit babyish, well... songs like this one make it clear it isn't a generational problem. Bowie never treats Arthur like a subject of criticism. Arthur is instead painted as a genuinely happy character.

2. Sell Me A Coat

Favorite Lyrics: "Jack Frost took her hand and left me, Jack Frost ain't so cool."

"Sell Me A Coat" is definitely a catchy song, if the inclusion of some "la" hooks didn't make that clear. The melancholy that the horn and drums provide this song is more relevant than the lyrics. While the song seems to be signaling a break-up, it seems more like Bowie is depressed about winter being the season instead of summer. Which... cool, if you can get that much out of weather changes. Winter's not that bad, though.

3. Rubber Band

Favorite Lyrics: "There's a rubber band that plays tunes out of tune."

"Rubber Band" might be the best track on the album. The melody is attractive, but what's really hooking is the variations each measure. The movements of verse and chorus are still here, but the music always does something unexpected. These variations, like spontaneous responses from the music, make the conversation of the body in this song. The final verse where Bowie's character confronts the band leader, followed by the sarcastic sadness in the horns and cymbals drive home the creativity this song possesses.

4. Love You 'Til Tuesday

Favorite Lyrics: "Don't be afraid of the man in the moon, because it's only me."

The darkness of some of the imagery, including a start where he is going to wait outside until his love appears, gives off a sense of the sinister. The idea of a short passion might even be meant as comforting to the target of said love. The last line, "Well I might stretch it to Wednesday," feels like it's back to sinister. This is in contrast to the jaunty music in the background.

5. There Is A Happy Land

Favorite Lyrics: "Tiny Tim sings prayers and hymns, he's so small we don't notice him."

The Happy Land in this song is about being ignorant of the world around you. The best part is hearing a more melodic song from Bowie. The importance and weight lie on lyrical delivery. It's so well done that the lack of a chorus hardly bears recognition. The Tiny Tim line makes for my favorite lyric. Something about his size and the way the other kids include him as if obligatory. Their denial of the adult in the room combines with Tiny Tim to suggest the darker realities.

6. We Are Hungry Men

Favorite Lyrics: "My studies include suffragy / I formed my own society / to study the power of fecundity / the world will overpopulate / unless you claim infertility / so who will buy a drink for me, your messiah"

The most experimental track on the album. A rather political song, as Bowie's target, appears to be the people who sound like his messiah-complex. Unfortunately, the lyrics seem to suggest birth control pills as being step one to "legalizing mass abortions" so... I mean, this was the sixties I suppose.

7. When I Live My Dream

Favorite Lyrics: "I'll wish, and the thunder clouds will vanish,"

This song swings back to similar things we heard in "Love you til Tuesday." Here Bowie's character renders himself a dreamer of types, but that he's okay with it. This is uplifting, and he sings of hoping he can be with someone he wants to be with when he lives his dream. I wonder how he felt about this song later in life.

8. Little Bombardier

Favorite Lyrics: "Why was he friends with the children? / Were they just a game? / Leave them alone or we'll get sore / We've had blokes like you in the station before."

So to be honest I hadn't paid the closest attention to this song before. Maybe it's the accordion accompaniment that makes it easier to ignore. Or maybe the background is just so carnival like that it seems happy. This song is tragic. The idea of a soldier being undone by the social construction around him is heartbreaking. If Bowie has more songs like this (which tracks like "The Man Who Sold the World" suggests to me that he does) then I can't wait to get to them.

9. Silly Boy Blue

Favorite Lyrics: "Yak butter statues that melt in the sun / cannot dissolve all the work you've not done,"

Silly Boy Blue is a slow mournful song. Bowie's voice sells this. The way that he communicates and holds the notes. As a music listener, I am not much of a voice person. Bowie shows a consistent ability to include his voice as part of the composition. And then some songs, like this one, show off his remarkable talent.

10. Come And Buy My Toys

Favorite Lyrics: All the lyrics

This song is poetically more interesting than some of the others. Image after image, whether it is the "monkeys made of gingerbread" or the "golden hair and mud of many acres on their shoes." There's a pure innocence in the lyrics that works with the clean combo of acoustic guitar and bass (there's a bass right? Here's where I get all unsure about my ears).

11. Join The Gang

Favorite Lyrics: "Sit together doing nothing all together very fast."

From what I understand of Ziggy Stardust, "The Man Who Sold the World," and Space Oddity, the songs are commentary about the dark side of music, bands, fame, tabloids, popularity, and the party lifestyle. Drugs are a common theme in Bowie's music, and this song feels like a prototype for these eventual lyrics. This is also a drummer's song rather hardcore with the intro and the endings, and what's not to like about that?

12. She's Got Medals

Favorite Lyrics: "Her mother called her Mary, she changed her name to Tommy, / she's a one, oh / she went and joined the army, passed the medical / don't ask me how it's done"

And here we have a crowning moment of Bowie's popular identity. If the odd conservatism of the lyrics that were anti-birth control and abortion in "We Are Hungry Men" seemed out of character, songs like this are the reason why. Mary, Tommy, Eileen, the back and forth identity politics of a single person make a backbone for this heroic drinking song. It is of note that this is a song in which Bowie does not sing in the first-person point of view.

13. Maid of Bond Street

Favorite Lyrics: "This girl is made of lipstick / powder and paint / sees the pictures of herself / every magazine on every shelf."

"Maid of Bond Street" is describing the character of a girl. By starting with the make-up I'm reminded of people who criticize women for wearing too much make-up as if someone else's body is any of their fucking business (sorry it isn't Opinion Sunday yet). Bowie does a great job here, reaching out a hand to yet another character that he's bringing to the forefront over his own self.

14. Please Mr. Gravedigger

Favorite Lyrics: Every line that isn't actually a lyric "Ahchoo! Excuse me."

This little experimental album finisher is a complete left-field track. Here Bowie tunes into the same type of background real life sound that Pink Floyd would be best known for. His first-person character singing about himself accompanied by the sounds of rain and thunder, grave digging, and it seems like maybe that thunder is actually far off bombs. At the end, he seems to be confessing to murders, but he could also just be singing to himself. It's a creepy song with a rough and gritty atmosphere, a black comedy element, and a pretty decent way to send us off.

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So that was David Bowie (1967) a good debut album that already has trace elements of the DNA that would later make him great. While Bowie does not have much in the way of songs or music "before he was Bowie" this album seems to defy the idea that what he was missing was something defining. Bowie has the identity most saw in him already at this juncture of his career.

Next week we'll be talking about Space Oddity (1969) and that junkie Major Tom. Get your tin can sitters ready folks.

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