‘Joe the Lion’: the David Bowie song inspired by conceptual artist Chris Burden
Besides an obvious love for music, David Bowie was a keen art fan, owning hundreds of pieces, including paintings by Jean-Michel Basquiat and Damien Hirst. Talking to The New York Times in 1998, the singer explained, “Art was, seriously, the only thing I’d ever wanted to own.”
However, Bowie’s interest included a medium he couldn’t own – performance art. On his 1977 album Heroes, the track ‘Joe The Lion’ references two shocking acts of performance art carried out by Chris Burden. By alluding to pieces of art that he couldn’t physically own, Bowie appears to have used his song to immortalise Burden’s work within his world.
He sings, “Joe the lion went to the bar/ A couple of drinks on the house an’ he said/ ‘Tell you who you are if you nail me to my car.'” The lines refer to Trans-Fixed, performed by Burden on April 23rd, 1974. After inviting a group of friends to watch his performance, unaware of what they were about to witness, Burden lay shirtless on the back of a baby blue Volkswagon Beetle with his arms outstretched, resembling Jesus’ crucifixion.
Then, his attorney nailed his palms into the car before other assistants wheeled the vehicle from a garage, where it sat stationary with its engine revved for two minutes. Although Burden has not explained the meaning behind his performance, critics have interpreted it in multiple ways, such as a commentary on the connection between the Volkswagon and the Nazi Party – a largely overlooked fact. Regardless of his intentions behind the piece, Burden certainly made an impression – enough for one of the decade’s biggest rockstars to sing about it.
Compared to some of Burden’s other antics, Trans-Fixed was relatively tame. One of his earliest pieces, Five Day Locker Piece, involved the artist sitting inside a school locker for five days. In 1971 he held a television presenter at knifepoint during an interview for TV Hijack (she knew it was a performance), demanding that if the transmission were cut off, he would kill her. Two years later, he shot a Boeing 747 passenger jet as it took off.
However, Trans-Fixed is not the only piece of Burden’s work referenced in ‘Joe the Lion’. Bowie also vaguely references Shoot in the lines “I guess you’ll buy a gun/ You’ll buy it secondhand.” For Shoot, Burden instructed his friend to shoot him with a rifle in the shoulder. The performance took place in the F-Space gallery in California, where his friend stood 15 feet away from the artist before firing, which was documented on 16mm film. In the same year that Bowie released ‘Joe The Lion’, Laurie Anderson also referenced Shoot in her song, ‘It’s Not the Bullet that Kills You (It’s the Hole)’.
It’s no surprise that Bowie was interested in Burden’s work. To a much lesser extent, the singer also liked to shock and provocate with his live musical performances. Burden was the most extreme example of an artist using performance to convey meaning, and his highly ambitious nature undoubtedly inspired Bowie.
