The “ultra-masculine” song David Bowie wrote for Marc Bolan
There’s a certain androgynous nature to the brutal creativity of David Bowie that added to his allure. A devotee of fashion and costuming. Bowie’s rise as an alien rock star from outer space allowed him to play with gender forms with ease. Ziggy Stardust had no gender or agenda and operated solely as a lifeform built to be Bowie’s conduit for artistic endeavour. However, Bowie’s fluidity goes back a little further.
The Man Who Sold The World, Bowie’s 1970 album, is often thought of as the record that precedes his popular explosion. Released a year before Hunky Dory – an LP chock full of pop hits – the record would cement Bowie as a one-of-a-kind artist. It is best remembered for the titular track as well as the legendary album cover, which sees Bowie in a beautiful blue dress designed by Michael Fish.
It’s a key to the building blocks of the album which rarely dabble in what might have been considered the du jour genre of the day: rock. After all, this was a time when Led Zeppelin were now beginning to dominate the airwaves, Black Sabbath had found their voice and the foundations of heavy metal were being cemented into the receptive earth of the music scene. Bowie went the other way.
Across the nine album tracks, Bowie delivers gentle tunes with heavily cadenced vocals and a delicacy that his contemporaries either didn’t possess or didn’t care to achieve. So much so that when he began writing the tune ‘Black Country Rock’, he decided to give his backing bandmates a little treat and make it as macho as possible.
“The two guys I was working with, drummer Woody Woodmansey and guitarist Mick Ronson, are semi-pro musicians from the North,” Bowie told Zygote in 1971 before he took the group on full-time as his band The Spiders from Mars. “They had a lot of trouble with my stuff ’cause they’re blues freaks, ah, and it’s all very hard and ultra-masculine stuff, so I thought I’d write one for them. And they loved it; they played their guts out on it!”
However, there was one more person the song was written for, according to the ‘Starman’, and that was his longtime friend, Marc Bolan, as he continues: “Tony Visconti is still producing, doing Tyrannosaurus Rex and such. ‘Black Country Rock’ was written for Marc Bolan.” The two men had not only shared a management team and, once upon a time, equally ditched an unpaid painting and decorating job but also had an affinity for subverting the norms of the day.
“We jammed on this one over and over until it had a form. We didn’t know how to describe it. It was funky, it had twang and it rocked! We dubbed it ‘Black Country Rock’,” explained Visconti, acknowledging that the group had dubbed it such because of its similarities to The Move, a funk-inspired band from the West Midlands. “The lyrics came later and the description became the subject of the song. This was so much fun to play. I love David’s nod to Marc Bolan singing the last chorus.”
It wasn’t enough for Bowie to simply write a song for his friend; he wanted to mimic him too: “David did a great Marc Bolan impersonation,” noted Visconti. “He did it a couple of times on the Space Oddity album. He did it a little bit on ‘Unwashed And Slightly Dazed’, where he does that warble. For Man Who Sold The World, on ‘Black Country Rock’ he originally did the entire song as Marc Bolan and the playback was so funny, it was a perfect impression, but he didn’t want to use it.”
The truth is, Bowie held a deep affection for Bolan at a time when those kinds of male friendships would have been, at the very least, a source of pub-based ribbing, if not complete ridicule. “They adored each other, but their rivalry was very strong,” remembered the producer, “And Marc was less kind towards David than David was towards him.”
It wasn’t the only track Bowie wrote for Bolan; he also penned ‘Lady Stardust’ in tribute to his friend. The duo endured some rougher moments as their careers went in different directions, thankfully reconciling before Bolan’s tragic death. It might seem a little odd for a songwriter to write so many odes to his own songwriting friend, but Bowie always made the idea of “odd” feel absolutely perfect.
