“I want to do that”: The artist that made David Bowie love rock and roll
All rock stars should be encouraged to be themselves before trying to emulate their heroes. It’s always nice to have someone to look up to, but it’s important to be inspired by them than trying to steal their work and pass it off as your own when you start making records. David Bowie may have been one of the few artists who never managed to make the same album twice, though, and that came from an upbringing of listening to anything he could get his hands on that fell under the rock banner.
Granted, it would be underselling ‘The Starman’ to say that he was strictly a rock and roll artist. He was never the kind of frontman that someone like Mick Jagger was, and while he certainly commanded the stage like any rock god could, it was all done in service to a kind of performance art rather than trying to make something genuinely rock and roll. Because for Bowie, half the battle onstage was an element of theatre.
Looking through every one of his bold transformations, he always wanted to keep the audience guessing. The whole point behind glam rock was to tear down the preconceived notions of what rock stars were supposed to be, but the minute that everyone else started to wear makeup and put a little bit of glitter into their performance, Bowie had already moved on to genres like soul and krautrock.
If there’s one defining element in all of Bowie’s works, it’s usually always visceral. Bowie was never one to halfheartedly commit to an idea, so when he played the role of ‘The Thin White Duke’, it made people genuinely concerned for him, and when he made Let’s Dance, people were thinking that he had finally decided to cower to the corporate overlords of the recording industry.
And that kind of intense reaction only came from watching people from the glory days of rock and roll. Elvis Presley left nothing to the imagination when he performed, and Chuck Berry could get the job done with how much intensity he put into the music, but if they were intense for some, Little Richard was a musical wrecking ball. When people heard tunes like ‘Long Tall Sally’, Richard’s voice was an air raid siren for some people who had only been brought up on Rosemary Clooney records.
“There was this one by Little Richard, and that was it. I was sold. When I heard that, I thought, God, I want to do that.”
David Bowie
Bowie may not have had the range to sing every Little Richard song, but he knew that he had found his calling when he heard him, saying, “I had a plan from when I was eight. My father brought home all these American records, 45s with no centres. And he said, ‘Go on, you can take your pick.’ I said, ‘I’ll just take a few out.’ There was this one by Little Richard, and that was it. I was sold. When I heard that, I thought, God, I want to do that. Actually, my ambition at eight or nine years old was to be one of Little Richard’s sax players.”
While Bowie could show off his saxophone skills behind the scenes, it would have been a musical tragedy if he had stuck with a calling as a horn player. Many of his best stage moves were all about inhabiting every part of his body, and whether that was strutting his way across the stage during ‘Modern Love’ or donning his trademark Ziggy Stardust apparrel, he wanted to wow the crowd with the same kind of visuals that Richard had done a few years before.
For someone who identified as a low-key child when first being brought up, though, the biggest lesson Bowie could have learned from Little Richard was to be himself. The piano legend may have taken a verbal beating from parents who insisted that it wasn’t “real” music, but it much more healthy for any artist to get onstage doing what they love rather than compromise themselves.
