The artist David Bowie was petrified working with: “I felt so intimidated”
Anyone who had ever worked with David Bowie was usually just in awe of his presence most of the time. Considering his history of being one of the most enigmatic figures in rock history, it wouldn’t be shocking for him to be floating around on a spaceship throughout the final years of his life before making his final album Blackstar. But Bowie could get starstruck just like the rest of us, and when he was just reaching glam rock immortality, he remembered being petrified by the idea of working with Lou Reed.
Then again, if it weren’t for Reed, Bowie might not have existed. The Velvet Underground were responsible for kicking down the door for underground music, and since Bowie was still strumming his acoustic guitar and bringing back vaudevillian-style music, he figured they were the next step for rock and roll.
Quickly reinventing himself as a rock and roll Martian descended from another planet, Bowie seemed to transform into the kind of artist Reed had only suggested with The Velvet Underground. There had been darker songs in their catalogue, but the minute that songs like ‘Space Oddity’ or ‘Queen Bitch’ were released upon the world, Reed knew this was his vision bursting wide open.
But by that time, The Velvets had called it a day. It was clear that they had done all they could together after working on Loaded, and if the record company were completely honest with themselves, Squeeze could have just been a Doug Yule solo album instead of them slapping the Velvet Underground name on top of everything.
Reed had already washed his hands of his old band, but when he set his sights on the big time, he knew Bowie would be the perfect fit. After all, he was the one who would sing tracks like ‘I’m Waiting for the Man’ or ‘White Light/White Heat’ in the middle of his set, so it felt like Reed’s brand of off-centre rock and roll would have fit perfectly.
For Bowie, this would have been a dream come true, but he did admit that it was more than a little bit intimidating, telling PBS, “The thing is with Lou, he was so generous to work with. I mean, I was petrified that he said, yes, he would like to sort of work with me in the producer capacity because I had so many ideas, and I felt so intimidated by my knowledge of the work that he’d already done.”
While albums like Transformer sound that much sweeter because of Bowie’s occasional background vocals and Mick Ronson’s guitar work, no one would ever mistake this for a Bowie record. Reed always had an uncanny ability to put his personality into only three lines if he needed to, and when listening to songs like ‘Perfect Day’ or ‘Walk On the Wild Side’, this was just his Velvet Underground-style wordplay in different clothing.
In fact, there’s a case to be made that Bowie enhanced Reed’s later career by including those massive vocal runs at the end of the song ‘Satellite of Love’. Say what you want about Reed as a singer, but there’s no one who could have added that kind of magic to a song like ‘The Starman’. It’s hard for anyone to work with the person who dared them to dream bigger, but by joining forces, Reed and Bowie made visions that no one could ever touch.
