Bruna. 28. Bisexual. Brazil. I've got a film degree.
Sometimes I post mature content, so I'll ask to only follow me if you're 18+.
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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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).
Allusive but affecting, bizarre but beautiful, uplifting but unsettling – The Bewlay Brothers is the tour de force that concludes Hunky Dory. From the gentle strum of the almost intangible acoustic verses to the weird, uncanny and complex choruses to the coda which feels as if it – and we – falling into the abyss in slow-mo, the song is musically inventive and lyrically elusive. A gay hymn utilizing polari (‘real cool traders’)? A drugged up nightmare (‘Shooting up pie in the sky’)? Identity shifts (‘chameleon, comedian, Corinthian and caricature’)? An ode to schizophrenia? Bowie himself has been somewhat evasive, saying, at different times, many different things. It is ‘another vaguely anecdotal piece about my feelings about myself and my bother’ Terry Burns. That ‘it’s so personal… I inflicted myself upon other people with that track’. That it is named after a tobacconists David knew of: ‘I used “Bewlay” as a cognomen – in place of my own’; and that ‘It’s possible I may have smoked something in my Bewlay pipe’. Even that the song is ‘Star Trek in a leather jacket’. The swirl of words are probably best seen as a collage or mosaic of unconscious thoughts rising to the surface: ‘I had a whole wad of words that I had been writing all day’. The basic track was cut late at night after everyone but Ken Scott, producer, had gone home – it was a new song, its first performance delivered that night of 30 June 1971. Scott remembers Bowie telling him at the time that ‘the lyrics make absolutely no sense’. Bowie has said ‘I wouldn’t know how to interpret the lyric of this song other than suggesting that there are layers of ghosts within them. It’s a palimpsest’; that ‘I can’t imagine what the person who wrote that had on his mind at the time’; and that people can ‘read whatever in hell they want to read into it’. And while in keeping with the album, in many ways it is the one track that looks back toward The Man Who Sold the World; yet at the same time looks forwards, way forwards, towards Scary Monsters: the speeded up / slowed down mockney vocal. It was not performed again in any way till a BBC session in 2002…
‘The Bewlay Brothers’: Track 11 of the Hunky Dory album. Released 17 December
1971. Written
by David Bowie. Available on Hunky Dory (1971).
Queen Bitch is the brassy rocker of Hunky Dory – overflowing with glamour and seediness, guts and camp. The track kicks off with an acoustic guitar riff for four bars; and is then mirrored with Ronson’s electric fuzz chords; before drums and bass tumble into the fray along with a second electric guitar double-tracking the first. It’s rough-hewn and utterly glorious. A foot-stomping Lou Reed / Velvet Unground inspired mise-en-scene of cheap hotels, prostitution, gay love and righteous jealousy. The penultimate track of the album, it’s the hurricane before the eye of the storm (Hunky Dory’s incredible final cut); and a sign towards of the musical direction of the Ziggy period coming hot on its heels. Queen Bitch was first previewed at the BBC live session in June ’71 (trackbytrack 80); included on the Bowpromo disk (trackbytrack 83) and played at Aylesbury Friars Club live (trackbytrack 90). And it’s gonna be – as mentioned, and as we’ll see – a mainstay in the early Ziggy era: performed on both radio and TV. And one day, in the far future, Reed will join Bowie on stage for a version…
‘Queen Bitch’: Track 10 of the Hunky Dory album. Released 17 December
1971. Written
by David Bowie. Available on Hunky Dory (1971).
Track 87: Life on Mars? (album version; single [June ‘73])
Life on Mars? is often called cinematic – but if it is cinematic it is not so simply because of the lyrical references to the cinema; nor due to the wonderful widescreen musicality created through the synthesis of Rick Wakeman’s grand piano with Mick Ronson’s epic orchestration. Rather, it is cinematic in the sense of having something in common with what the early Soviet filmmakers and film theorists Dziga Vertov called the Kino-Eye (or camera-eye) or Sergei Eisenstein the collision of shots. Montage. Yet while most films attempt to hide cutting and editing, to create a seamless flow from image to image, the Soviet’s foregrounded montage. Disparate images could be brought together to generate affects and inspire action in the world. Accordingly, it is not the images themselves that matter so much as the way in which they are formally composed: as a collage, or a mosaic. The girl with the mousy hair enters the cinema and encounters the escapism of the film – but it is a pale shadow of life. The song then bombards us with a cascade of disparate iconic cinematic images, in fastmo, hyper-rapid montage. The images of classic cinema are disrupted, torn-up and scattered in the wind. Is there Life on Mars? – the song reveals – is the wrong question. Is there life in you? One of Bowie’s most iconic tracks, it is easy to forget it languished as an album track until it became a single around the time of the Aladdin Sane album, when it was released as a single with an accompanying Mick Rock video, an elegantly and eccentrically besuited Bowie bleached out against a white background. The song started life as a take on My Way, a French song Bowie had unsuccessfully written lyrics for a few years previously (see trackbytrack 39) – the Hunky Dory sleeve notes say ‘inspired by Frankie’ after Frank Sinatra. There is a demo, but I cannot get hold of it (there is snippet online, see more stuff below). The song would go on to be played live on TV and at concert in many different ways – as we will see – in the years to come….
‘Life on Mars?’: Track 4 of the Hunky Dory album. Released 17 December
1971.
The A Side to the
Life on Mars?
Single. Released 22 June 1973.
Written
by David Bowie. Available on Hunky Dory (1971).
Eight Line Poem is a kind of tonal companion piece to Oh! You Pretty Things – and when the latter is played the former most usually follows. Such is the situation with the Bowpromo disk (see trackbytrack 83 – which has an alternative vocal); with the radio session in September of ’71 (see trackbytrack 82); and – as we’ll see – live. One song leads into the other – and while Oh! You Pretty Things is sci-fi Nietzsche and bouncy chorus, Eight Line Poem is the most quiet and gentle moment of Hunky Dory, with the most enigmatic of lyrics. An under furnished room in the city, a cactus and a cat. The piano shimmers with a trippy chorus effect and Ronson’s country guitar introduces the song before Bowie’s voice enters the frame. Often overlooked or passed by, Eight Line Poem has one of the most wonderful of Bowie’s vocal performances ever – fragile, affected, weird. A fragment… composed of fragments. A scattering of images…
‘Eight Line Poem’: Track 3 of the Hunky Dory album. Released 17 December
1971. Written
by David Bowie. Available on Hunky Dory (1971).
David Bowie, 1971. Two very different approaches to the cover of Hunky Dory by Brian Ward, featuring Ward’s wardrobe (including his salamander ring, seen in both).
