The 1967 song David Bowie called the most important: “A revelation”
The entire world that we’re living in right now is the one that David Bowie helped create.
Even though he might not have had the biggest hits in rock history by any stretch, the way that he forged or defied trends throughout his career is what gave the rest of us permission to go outside the norm and be brave enough to make music that didn’t always have to appeal to the masses to be good. ‘The Starman’ was willing to show all of us new worlds, but he was always looking for the next song that would thrill him the same way that some of his heroes did back in the day.
There was never a moment for Bowie to take a breath throughout his career, and even if that meant him making some of the finest albums ever made, that also meant dealing with more than a few strange twists and turns. No one would have expected the same guy who made Ziggy Stardust to form Tin Machine or anything, but Bowie was playing a different game than most people. He wanted the chance to play more exciting stuff, because that’s what rock and roll was all about to him.
Chuck Berry and Little Richard didn’t get into the business trying to make the safest music possible, and whenever Bowie looked at the new school, he was always more intrigued by the people on the cutting edge of rock. His idols weren’t meant to be the biggest superstars in the world or anything, but what they did with their music was what Bowie wanted to do whenever he heard his heroes.
Bob Dylan had taken rock and roll to new heights every single time he sang one of his tunes, and the same could be said of what was coming out of other branches of America. Iggy Pop was a sight to behold whenever he got onstage with The Stooges, but Bowie felt that The Velvet Underground took everything dangerous about rock and roll and put it into one unique package when he heard them.
Lou Reed took the building blocks of rock and roll and made songs that had a lot more to do with the street life that he saw every day, and ‘I’m Waiting for the Man’ practically served as Bowie’s massive awakening moment, saying, “‘I’m Waiting for the Man’ is probably the most important [song]. Our manager brought back an album. It was like a plastic demo of The Velvets’ first album, and [Andy] Warhol had signed the sticker. He said, ‘Well, this music’s as bad as his paintings.’ And I thought, ‘Hmm I’m gonna like this.’ It was a revelation to me.”
A lot of the songs on there might seem a little bit tame compared to what the rest of the world is doing now, but if you put yourself in the mind of a teenager in 1966, this would have been enough to scare you to death. The biggest songs out at the time were Motown hits and rock and roll pop songs, so if the harshest thing that you’d ever heard was ‘Satisfaction’ by The Stones, you would probably be chilled to the bone the moment that you heard ‘Heroin’ or ‘Venus in Furs’ on that first record.
And a lot of people seemed content to not go back to the Velvets again, but Bowie wasn’t ready to give up on the band. He may have seen the group and mistook Doug Yule for Lou Reed, but when Reed ended up becoming a solo superstar, Bowie was going to do everything that he could to make sure that he repaid Reed for teaching him everything he knew on records like Transformer.
So while Bowie was the epitome of what someone does when they have creative tunnel vision about their music, we have to thank Reed for helping give him that sense of confidence. Bowie wasn’t going to be strumming away on 1960s folk tunes for that long, and when you hear him singing a tune like ‘Hang on To Yourself’, he’s practically putting his own twist on the nervy energy that the Velvets were so good at.
