The David Bowie song recorded in one take: “Let’s not kill it”
Living life with David Bowie as your supreme leader must have been a pretty exhilarating ride. In many ways, the blur between the studio and the stage was exactly the thing that kept the Starman moving – the notion that he permanently had to keep moving and creating, continuing to produce music quite literally until the final hour. To witness that phenomenon would be one thing, but to actually be at the heart of it was another – and the memories of this life still stop The Spiders from Mars’ Woody Woodmansey in his tracks.
Being at Bowie’s right-hand side for perhaps one of his most prolific periods throughout the 1970s, Woodmansey would have to learn to simply not be fazed by the stratospheric achievements that were lauded on them. That said, when you’re pressed to pick standout moments from the heights of The Man Who Sold the World, Ziggy Stardust, Hunky Dory, and Aladdin Sane, it’s a pretty tall order. However, in a recent interview with Far Out, Woodmansey was steadfast in singling out one tune as the epitome of Bowie’s blazing process.
“David was not into this perfection thing. It might sound like he was, but he wasn’t,” the drummer explained. “It was like he knew instinctively when something had that special something in a song, or when you’d captured it, even before we did.” Naturally, for someone with such an array of seismic hits, however, you’d expect the recording process to be endless. But as it turns out, Bowie’s fleeting persona also extended into the creation of his music, as Woodmansey stressed the point that committing a song to the tape was never something he focused huge amounts of time on.
Woodmansey recalled that: ”We expected to do maybe five versions of a song and pick the best one. But we’d sometimes just do the first one, and he’d go, ‘Yeah, that’s it,’ and you’d go, ‘What? That’s the first time we’ve played it,’ and he’d say, ‘Yeah, that’s what I want.’ I thought, ‘Oh, no, he’s lost the plot. He’s written these amazing songs, but he can’t be bothered to get them done right.’”
However risky the strategy was, it was nevertheless the key to Bowie’s perfect imperfection and the exact way that one of his most seismic sonic exports was created. “We never went past three takes of a song. It was usually first take, second take, or third take. Second take, mainly. Like ‘Life on Mars’, second time we’d ever played it. ‘Jean Genie’ – first take, first time we’d ever played it. And he just went, ‘No, that’s it, you got it. Let’s not kill it. That’s got what it needs.’”
For a song born out of a process seemingly so frivolous, ‘Jean Genie’ certainly made a crater of impact. Becoming Bowie’s biggest hit to date at that point, spending a massive 13 weeks in the UK charts, it marked the true ascension of a rock icon. From an interior perspective, Woodmansey felt as though this was the precise epitome of what Bowie stood for. ”I realised he didn’t want you to labour it. He didn’t want you to work it out and get it all pristine and exact, and he just wanted that feel. So that’s pretty smart to have the confidence that what you think is right is right.”
This intoxicating combination of confidence, intelligence, and sonic vision was undeniably what set Bowie on the trajectory to godliness. To some, his recording process may have been erratic, but in reality, it heralded all the markers of genius that all his songs had, with free-flowing, electrifying elements. ‘Jean Genie’ may have been a one-take wonder, but it certainly wasn’t Bowie’s singular hit.
