The “tense” 1974 album David Bowie never wanted to play again
Has there been any David Bowie that can be classified as ‘normal’?
I mean, the man wasn’t supposed to fit into one genre to begin with, and when looking through some of his biggest records, the majority of them always had the mission to wow the audience in a way that no one had ever heard before. Bowie lived to change things up every single time he made a new record, but there are more than a few times when he could look back at the sorry state that he was in between the songs.
The further you go back in his catalogue, though, the more spotty it tends to get towards the very beginning. ‘The Starman’ hadn’t yet landed on Earth, and especially when looking at his technical debut album, no one would have guessed that guy would be the person to change the music world overnight. He was unsure of what he wanted to do, but it turns out a bit of makeup and a red hairdo can work wonders for one’s artistic ego.
Before anyone kills me, though, Bowie was much more than the glam rock fashions that he pioneered during his prime. He wanted the chance to dazzle everyone from the moment that they saw him or heard him, and when listening to the kind of music that he was making under ‘Ziggy Stardust’, you almost needed that kind of presentation. No one would have been able to pull off ‘Suffragette City’ looking like Bob Dylan, and Bowie’s reinvention as a space alien felt too perfect to fail.
So naturally, it was a disguise that Bowie didn’t last in for long. He didn’t want to be confined to what everyone else expected of him, and by the time that he reached Diamond Dogs, you could tell that Bowie was getting more than a little bit of playing the same kind of music over and over again. That was exactly what he didn’t want to be doing, and David Live felt like the culmination of that era coming to a head.
He was still knocking out every single crowd that he played to, but when you look at his health around that time, you’d have to wonder whether or not it would have been better for him to truly retire his glam persona after that final Ziggy show at the Hammersmith Odeon. He was already starting to become a bit strung out on drugs, and after he started to clean up his act a little bit, Bowie could look back at the record and see that he wasn’t taking care of himself nearly as much as he should have been.
The album itself is very good, but Bowie could feel that he was going to break down if he kept going down that road, saying, “God, that album. I’ve never played it. The tension it must contain must be like vampire’s teeth coming down on you. And that photo. On the cover. My God, it looks as if I’ve just stepped out of that grave. That’s actually how I felt. That record should have been called ‘David Bowie is alive and well and living only in theory’.”
It did eventually take Bowie a few years to clean up his act, but the fact that he was still making some of the best material of his career around this time is insane. Anyone else would have fallen prey to a cocaine-induced stupor by this point in their career, but the fact that Bowie could still find time to make records like Young Americans and Station to Station for the next few years before starting to come clean and move to Berlin is the work of a truly mad genius.
But would you expect anything less from someone like Bowie? Here was a man who was dead set on creating some of the most off-the-wall music that anyone had ever heard, and every single one of his albums was going to reflect where he was at the time, no matter how dark things were bound to get behind the scenes.
