Bruna. 28. Bisexual. Brazil. I've got a film degree.
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This is a multifandom blog. Expect lots of Hannibal and Star Trek. Also Vampire Chronicles. Lots of movies. There will be on occasion rock bands and singers. Also books and TV shows and random stuff.
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Track 108: Moonage Daydream (Sound Of The Seventies: 16-05-72)
This version of Moonage Daydream is killer. It’s like a psychadelic fairground ride. It is one of the five tracks recorded for Bowie’s third BBC Radio session of 1972 (see trackbytrack 102 for the first two sessions). Apart from the almost obligatory Velvet’s cover – which kicks off the cuts – this session only steals from the as-yet-to-be-released Ziggy Stardust (which sets it apart from the other four ’72 sessions – all of which include Hunky Dory and even Space Oddity tracks). The song had begun life as an Arnold Corns song – a short lived side-project – even being released as a single back in early ’71 (see trackbytrack 77). The album version (as we will see) had been recorded in November of that year; some six or so months later, the band have taken it on the road. It has been played live night after night since February. And that’s what we get here – Moonage Daydream raw, visceral, live. Bowie and the band are having a blast on this session (see more stuff below) – and nowhere is this more apparent than Moonage Daydream. The verses have a loose jive about them, very unlike the Ziggy cut; Ronno’s solo is immense; and the dudes in the studio have some fun with the mixing desk and Bowie’s vocal towards the end. Amazing stuff…
‘Moonage Daydream’:
Track 2 of the Sound Of The Seventies: John Peel session. Recorded 16-05-72 and broadcast 23-05-72. Written by David Bowie. Available on Bowie at the Beeb.
Track 107: All the Young Dudes (Mott the Hoople guide vocal version)
Here is a wonderful curiosity: Mott the Hoople’s All the Young Dudes with Bowie on vocals rather than singer Ian Hunter. In January of ’72 Bowie had sent the Hoople a demo of a new song called Suffragette City (now lost, I believe). The success of the Ziggy Stardust era was still but a dream, so Bowie was doing what he’d been doing for years, writing songs for other bands (the classic example being Oh! You Pretty Things for Peter Noone – see trackbytrack 76). They didn’t like the song and said they were splitting up anyway. So Bowie did two things: recorded Suffragette City for the Ziggy Stardust album (can you imagine…?); and set about writing the Hoople a song they couldn’t refuse, that would make them think again about breaking up, and that would give them a hit! Enter All the Young Dudes! Hoople’s bassist Pete Watts recalled: ‘Bowie played me this song… on his acoustic guitar. He hadn’t got all the words but the song just blew me away. Especially when he hit the chorus.’ Drummer Dale Griffin added: ‘I’m thinking: he wants to give us that? He must be crazy!’. It was recorded on 14 May with Bowie producing, and even laying down some guide vocals for Hunter. And that’s what you have here. The completed version was released 28 July hitting #3 in September, the song going on to be a defining glam-rock hit of the 1970s. Bowie himself – as we will see – would revisit the song a number of times in the future…
‘All the Young Dudes
(Mott the Hoople guide vocal version)’: Recorded 14 May 1972. Unreleased. Written by David Bowie. Available on All The Young Dudes: The Anthology(1998).
In September 1971, Bowie flew over to New York to sign a new contract with RCA (negotiated during the successful Bowpromo trip by manager Tony Defries – see trackbytrack 83). While there, it was arranged for Bowie to meet pop artist and cultural icon Andy Warhol. Hunky Dory was in the can, and Bowie brought along a test pressing in order to play the track Andy Warhol to its inspiration. ‘He absolutely hated it’ remembered Bowie. Warhol apparently left the room. ‘He was cringing with embarrassment. I think he thought I really put him down in the song, and it really wasn’t meant to be that – it was a kind of ironic hommage to him. He took it badly, but he liked my shoes’. After the shoe-based conversation had run its course, Warhol and his team shot some film of Bowie miming an evisceration; and further footage exists of both entourages milling about (see more stuff below). Warhol and Bowie appear almost to avoid each other, sticking to their opposite ends of the room, barely appearing in the same frame together, except for a fleeting moment when both - ignoring each other - turn away from the camera’s blurry gaze. Bowie – of course – would go on to play Warhol in the film Basquiat (1996); but their relationship begins with the Hunky Dory track, which famously kicks off with faked studio chatter… How do you pronounce Warhol? (How do you pronounce Bowie?) Then the dueling acoustic guitars kick in – almost a pre-echo of the encounter between the two artists. The track has a stunning riff. It is heavy, and almost impossible to believe it is just two acoustic guitars. Written for Dana Gillespie (see trackbytrack 81), the song premiered in June ‘71 with Gillespie on vocals for a live BBC session (trackbytrack 80); and was then recorded by Bowie at another radio session in September – although it was never broadcast (trackbytrack 82). In the wake of the album release, it would become the B side of the Changes single in early ‘72; and then be included in one of the five Ziggy era radio sessions of that year.
‘Andy Warhol’: Track 8 of the Hunky Dory album. Released 17 December
1971. Written
by David Bowie. Available on Hunky Dory (1971).
Track 105: I Feel Free (Live at Kingston Polytechnic)
I Feel Free is a song by late ‘60s psychedelic-blues legends, Cream. Bowie and the Spiders covered the tune during the early gigs of the first UK leg of the Ziggy Stardust tour (29 January – 18 July ’72). A version exists on the earliest recording of we have of the show, a tape of the Kingston Polytechnic gig from 6 May (more of which a bit later) and this track eventually appeared on RarestOneBowie. The Spiders version is killer – and Ronson, Woodmansey and Bolder take centre stage for a wild and riotous jam. Ronson rips it to shreds. The solo screams and soars, growls and roars over the manic and freeform trajectory laid down by the rhythm section. This interlude will – in later shows – be incorporated into The Width of a Circle, which will replace I Feel Free. This cover, however, will return some twenty-one years later on the Black Tie White Noise album, again featuring Ronson, playing with Bowie for the first time since 1973…
‘I Feel Free’: Track 12 of
Live at Kingston Polytechnic. Recorded 6 May 1972. Written by Pete Brown and Jack Bruce. Available on RarestOneBowie.
Track 103: Five Years (Old Grey Whistle Test version)
Five Years on the Old Grey Whistle Test is one of the most iconic moments in the Bowie corpus. Kicking off with that solo drum beat, the camera captures Woody Woodmansey from various angles before the lights come up, and there is Bowie. Hair shorn to a rough cut, in a black and grey jumpsuit with his acoustic guitar. A slow strum and the line ‘Pushing through the market square…’, behind him revealed Mick Ronson at a grand piano and Trevor Bolder on bass. Stunning. The show was named – so the legend goes – after an apocryphal Tin Pan Alley story: a song would be a hit if after hearing it only once the aged doorman in a grey suit was heard whistling it. OGWT was a show known for serious music, filmed live without an audience and with complex camerawork: zooms, fades, tracking shots. This TV performance by Bowie is the first of the Ziggy era, and the earliest footage existing of Bowie in a studio except for Space Oddity at 4-3-2-1 Musik Fur Junge Leute (1969) and the Ivor Novello Awards (1970) (see trackbytrack 47). Five Years was also accompanied by two songs from Hunky Dory: Queen Bitch and Oh! You Pretty Things (the latter taped twice and neither originally broadcast) (see more stuff below). The show went out on 8 February 1972, a couple of days before the Ziggy Stardust tour kicked off…
‘Five Years‘: 1 of 2 tracks broadcast (and 3 tracks recorded) for the
Old Grey Whistle Test. Recorded and broadcast 08-02-72. Written by David Bowie. Available on The Best of Bowie DVD.
“'Cause love’s such an old fashioned word And love dares you to care for The people on the edge of the night And loves dares you to change our way of Caring about ourselves”
Shadow Man is a fragile folk ballad concerned with a haunting – the haunting of the I by the self, the person you are now by its shadow. Bowie’s voice is tortured, and always on the edge of breaking: ‘He’ll show you tomorrow / He’ll show you the sorrows / Of what you did today’. There is thus an essential Bowie twist here: it is not the past which haunts you – but rather the future. The consequences of your actions now will necessarily impact the times to come and it is this indistinct doppelgänger of possible outcomes from tomorrow that haunts you. It is – although apparently an unfinished cut – really an acoustic track, but one accompanied by the band with a certain country-style. In this way it feels more akin to the Space Oddity period (which – as some claim – is when it was originally composed). Accordingly, it is hard to see how it would have fitted – musically at least – with the Ziggy album form which it was dropped. Though before the concept of Ziggy was guiding the selection of tracks and the later writing, the new record was looking very different if the out-takes we know of are considered: remakes from the past, covers of Brel and Berry, not to mention the other out-takes we have encountered of new compositions and those that are either lost or still in the archive (One Paper Left; It’s Gonna Rain; and even a new version of Looking For A Friend – see trackbytrack 81 and more stuff below). This version of Shadow Man would never be officially released; however, the song was re-recorded by Bowie around 2000 for the ultimately abandoned Toy project.
‘Shadow Man’: Out-take from the The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars album. Unreleased. Written
by David Bowie. Available onbootlegs.
