David Bowie - The Man Who Sold the World
Written by: Moti Kupfer
Release date - 4.11.1970 US / 8.4.1971 UK
In July 1969, the turning point came in the life of a golden boy, a future Starman, but for now in mission control they began calling him Major Tom. David Jones took his protein pills, put his helmet on, and blasted off. He would no longer return to being David Jones; now he was in space, and David Bowie was officially born.
The single "Space Oddity" put Bowie in a different sphere, that of success, and the air suddenly felt a little thin to him, just like in space. He now understood that he had to keep climbing, step by step upward, and it would not be simple; there would be stumbles.
The first stumble was waiting just around the corner. The single was a success, but the album released later that year did less well, partly because the record company, Philips Records, failed to promote it effectively.
By 1970, the attention Bowie had received from the success of "Space Oddity" had faded, and his next single, "The Prettiest Star", failed to chart.
Realizing that his path as a solo artist was full of difficulties, Bowie formed the band "The Hype", with bassist Tony Visconti, drummer John Cambridge and guitarist Mick Ronson, whom he had met in February 1970.
At their shows the band members wore flamboyant, superhero-style costumes. Bowie stopped the band's performances at the end of March 1970 in order to concentrate on recording and writing songs for his next album, "The Man Who Sold the World", released in the US on November 4, 1970, and to settle disputes with his manager, Ken Pitt.
Cambridge was dismissed from the band at the end of March and replaced by Mick "Woody" Woodmansey. Woodmansey said of Bowie: "This guy lives and breathes being a rock 'n' roll star".
By April 1970, the four members of "The Hype" were living at Haddon Hall in Beckenham, an Edwardian mansion converted into apartments and described by one visitor as having a "Dracula's drawing room" kind of atmosphere. Ronson and Visconti built a makeshift studio under the grand staircase at Haddon Hall, where Bowie recorded many of his demos from the early 1970s.
Recording sessions for the album began on April 17, 1970 at Advision Studios in London, when the band started work on "All the Madmen". The next day Ralph Mace was hired to play the Moog synthesizer, after demonstrating his skills on the single version of "Memory of a Free Festival".
At the time, Mace was a 40-year-old concert pianist who was also head of the classical music department at the record company Mercury Records. During this period Bowie ended his contract with Pitt and met his future manager, Tony Defries, who helped him bring the contract to an end. The recording sessions moved to Trident Studios in London on April 21 and continued there until mid-May.
On May 4 the band recorded "Running Gun Blues" and "Saviour Machine". The latter was originally the working title of the title track, but Bowie reworked the song to a different tune, and so the final version of "Saviour Machine" came to be.
Recording and mixing moved back to Advision on May 12 and were completed ten days later. Bowie recorded his vocals for the title track on the last day.
Bowie was busy with his new wife, Angie, and with management problems at the time, so the music was largely arranged by Ronson and Visconti. Ronson used the sessions to learn a great deal from Visconti about production and arranging techniques.
Although Bowie is officially credited as the composer of all the music on the album, the author Peter Doggett quoted Visconti as saying: "The songs were written by the four of us. We would play in the basement, and Bowie would say whether he liked them or not".
Like the music, the lyrics are significantly darker than those of its predecessor. They contain many themes that Bowie went on to explore throughout the rest of the 1970s, including "madness, alienation, violence, identity confusion, power, darkness and sexual obsession".
The lyrics were also seen as reflecting the influence of figures such as Aleister Crowley, Franz Kafka and Friedrich Nietzsche. Many regard the album as an introduction to characters such as Ziggy Stardust and "The Spiders from Mars", and to the genre of punk that would emerge in the second half of the 1970s.
The opening track, "The Width of a Circle", is an eight-minute progressive rock epic. The song, first performed in February 1970 in a BBC session, is led by Ronson's guitar playing.
The lyrics recall the Lebanese poet Kahlil Gibran, and in the second half of the song the narrator has a sexual encounter with God in the devil's lair, in the depths of hell.
The lyrics of "All the Madmen" were inspired by Bowie's half-brother, Terry Burns, who suffered from schizophrenia, and reflect the theme of institutionalized madness. The song features a recorder part that creates an atmosphere which Bowie's biographer, David Buckley, describes as "childlike dementia", while Ronson's guitar, producing distorted sounds, together with Mace's Moog synthesizer, heightens the sense of fear toward the end of the epic.
In the heavy blues-rock song "Black Country Rock", Bowie contributed a small part of the melody and four lines written in a hurry, which he gave to Ronson and Visconti, who completed the lyrics to create the song.
In "After All" the lyrics, which include the singing of "Oh, By Jingo!" reminiscent of music hall songs (entertainment halls of the Victorian era), follow a group of children who have not yet experienced adulthood and have not lost their innocence. Like "The Supermen", the song makes reference to the works of Nietzsche.
The lyrics of "Running Gun Blues" deal with armed assassins and serve as commentary on the Vietnam War, especially the 1968 My Lai massacre, in which American soldiers slaughtered hundreds of unarmed Vietnamese civilians. The massacre became the event that, more than any other, symbolized the war crimes of American forces in Vietnam. Although the lyrics reflect the themes of his previous album, "Space Oddity", the music reflects the heavy rock style that dominates the album and points to Bowie's future musical direction.
Like the previous song, the roots of "Saviour Machine" also run deep in blues rock and heavy rock. The lyrics deal with the concept of computers that overtake humankind. It is amazing to see how much Bowie was thinking about the advance of the machine versus man as early as 1970.
Like most songs on the album, "She Shook Me Cold" was created largely by Ronson, Visconti and Woodmansey, without Bowie's contribution. The song's blues style has been compared to that of "Led Zeppelin". The lyrics deal with a sexual encounter with a woman.
The album's title track, "The Man Who Sold the World", feels like a "haunted" song. Musically, it is built on a "circular" guitar riff by Ronson. The lyrics are mysterious and evocative, and were influenced by many poems, among them the poem "Antigonish" (1899) by William Hughes Mearns.
The narrator encounters a kind of double, as suggested in the second chorus, in which "I never lost control" is replaced by "We never lost control". Bowie's singing is hesitant and very quiet throughout, unlike the rest of the album.
The song that closes the album, "The Supermen", prominently reflects the themes of Nietzsche, and in particular the influence of German Romanticism, as its subject and lyrics refer to his apocalyptic visions.
The original US edition of the album from 1970 featured a cartoon-like cover drawing by Bowie's friend, Michael J. Weller, showing a cowboy in front of Cane Hill hospital. Weller, one of whose friends was a patient there, suggested the idea after Bowie asked him to create a design that would capture the ominous tone of the music.
Bowie was enthusiastic about the finished design, but soon reconsidered and asked the art department of Philips Records, a subsidiary of Mercury, to recruit the photographer Keith MacMillan to shoot an alternative cover.
The shoot took place in a "domestic setting" in the living room at Haddon Hall, where Bowie lay on a chaise longue in a cream-and-blue satin "man's dress", an early hint of his interest in exploiting his androgynous look. The dress was designed by the British fashion designer Michael Fish. Bowie's look and pose in the photograph were inspired by a Pre-Raphaelite painting by Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
For Listening: Spotify, Apple Music
"Face/Off" - Israel's Rock Blog
Comments