The 1950s band David Bowie wanted to join the most: “I want to be in that”
The raw essence of David Bowie was about much more than being a musical chameleon on every one of his records.
He wanted to voyage to new lands just like he talked about on ‘Space Oddity’, and for the longest time, it felt like he was truly invincible every single time he got onstage. There was nothing that stood in his way from whatever he wanted to work on, but the humble beginnings for him came when he was first falling in love with what rock and roll could do to people.
Then again, not all of the golden age rock artists were doing anything all that show-stopping compared to what Bowie did. Elvis Presley did excite his fair share of people and definitely knocked down the door for what Bowie did, but he needed a little bit more to get behind when he started adding his own theatrical influences to everything that he played.
There was no real rulebook for the career that he had, but he understood that the presentation was just as important as the actual music he was making. He didn’t want to spend his time making music that seemed completely faceless, and while everyone might not have been in love with what he sounded like as a folksy artist on his first album, ‘Ziggy Stardust’ fit him perfectly when he hit on his masterpiece.
But compared to the ballads that he would write, some of Bowie’s best songs didn’t need to have the most complex chords in the world. A lot of the biggest names in the glam scene were pulling from the golden age of rock and roll, and if you knew the basic blues chords that everyone starts out with, you could pull off a pretty decent version of ‘The Jean Genie’ if you could put together a half-decent red-hot hairdo.
And a lot of that theatricality was all there when Bowie first laid eyes on Little Richard for the first time. Other rock stars may have had the eye-catching theatrics that he was looking for, but Richard took everything one step further. Wearing glitter and even alluding to homosexuality was enough to get people locked up around that time, but when Bowie heard Richard playing with his band, he wanted to try to sneak his way onto the stage and be anywhere close to the icon.
Aside from the throat-shredding voice that he had, Bowie felt that Richard opened his eyes more than just about anyone else when he performed, saying, “If it hadn’t been for him, I probably wouldn’t have gone into music. When I was nine and first saw Little Richard in a film that played around town—I think it was probably Girl Can’t Help It —seeing those four saxophonists onstage, it was like, ‘I want to be in that band!’ And for a couple of years that was my ambition, to be in a band playing saxophone behind Little Richard.”
Of course, Bowie didn’t have the same kind of vocal chops that Richard did whenever he screamed, but he didn’t want to use his instrument in that way. He was using his voice like an instrument, just like everything else on all of his records, and even if his visuals were even more eye-catching than Richard’s, it was impossible to tell how he was going to sound from one album to the next by the time that he started mixing things up in the late 1970s.
And with the rest of the rock and roll world taking their cues out of Richard’s playbook and trying to push their voice to the absolute extreme, his legacy in American music history is all but secure. There are many people who fell in love with Elvis Presley singing rock and roll classics, but anyone who only listened to ‘The King’s versions of songs like ‘Tutti Frutti’ hasn’t truly lived until they’ve heard what Richard could do.
