The band David Bowie thought he would have ruined: “I would never be forward enough”
Rock and roll bands have always thrived on playing the purest music they know how to make. Although many songs could work on the charts to fit the moment, any band that respects their craft knows that the best way for them to leave an impact on the world is to sing from their heart rather than sing about what they think is going to popular for a few weeks on the charts. David Bowie may have listened to that muse in his head before anything else, but he knew that his talents could be used for evil if he had been placed in the wrong context on any of his records.
Then again, Bowie was never someone to back down from a challenge. Most of his greatest records were based on something that someone thought he could never do, and yet he would manage to make the kind of musical statement that either paved the way for the future or embraced a completely different style of music with ease.
But even if some people like the idea of changing styles the same way that most people change clothes, that doesn’t mean everything is a good fit. Bowie had put his hand up numerous times when he thought something didn’t work, and as much as he may have liked the idea of working with someone on a project, that didn’t always equal rapid success. After all, the idea of him being a vaudeville crooner in his early days was dead on arrival, and that kind of failure was so big he had to attempt a mulligan on ‘Space Oddity’.
If you want to look at the flimsiest era of Bowie’s career, it has to be the 1980s. It might seem strange to say that about the decade that earned him some of his biggest hits like ‘Let’s Dance’ and ‘Ashes to Ashes’, but there are many songs from this era that don’t work that well, whether it being some cheap excuse to make something new or songs that were bad from the beginning like half of Never Let Me Down.
Still, Bowie knew the talent out there when he saw it. He had already started working with the likes of Iggy Pop when working on some songs for Let’s Dance, and being able to have a guitarist like Stevie Ray Vaughan on his record is the kind of opportunity no one could pass up. Outside of the musical gods, though, Bowie had his ear close to the ground when listening to alternative acts like The Screaming Blue Messiahs.
While the band’s brand of rock and R&B blended well with what Bowie was doing, he figured that he could only screw it up when working with them, saying, “I would never be forward enough with most bands to suggest producing them, because I always like what it is they have themselves. It would never occur to me to suggest to, say, the Messiahs that I want to get involved with them. Because they seem to be so right on course with what they’re doing that they need me like a hole in the head.”
That hardly seems fair on Bowie, either. Lou Reed may have needed some parts of his career boosted when working on Transformer, but giving ‘The Starman’ free reign of his music never sacrificed any of his quality, so why not work his magic in the same way that he did with one of the legends of rock?
But in that case, we’re talking about two very different artists. Bowie was the new kid on the block when working with Reed, and since he was becoming his own version of a living legend at this point, bringing in his ideas to The Screaming Blue Messiahs could very well have resulted in the same genre clash that birthed his collaboration with Mick Jagger around the same time.
