“You have to”: the David Bowie song his mother made him make
There are no rules as to where inspiration comes from for any artist. Some people can think of writing a song purely about their dog, and sometimes, they pull memories out of themselves that they didn’t expect anyone to listen to. Although David Bowie had been through many different incarnations throughout his career, sometimes he had to take the advice of one of the least likely mentors in rock and roll: parents.
Despite being one of the biggest genres in the world, rock and roll started as music to piss your parents off. While the cowardly rock and roll of today is more about pleasing the crowd that is old enough to grill hot dogs at the family barbecue, the whole point of Bowie’s music was to scare people out of their skin, usually making characters that would have had any of his contemporaries either with stiff competition or running scared.
In fact, there’s a lot in common between what Bowie was doing in his prime and what Little Richard had done in the 1950s. The world hadn’t yet seen a man be that androgynous onstage, and when Ziggy Stardust officially fell to Earth, most people didn’t know what the hell they were looking at, especially when he started singing some suggestive lyrics in tunes like ‘Suffragette City’.
By the time of the 1980s, though, Bowie had mellowed out quite a bit. He was on the verge of making pop crossovers like Let’s Dance, and if people didn’t understand him and labelled him as a sub-species with his makeup and platform boots, perhaps they would accept him a little more now that he had a sharp suit on when taking the stage to play ‘Modern Love’. But if that satisfied the parents, Bowie was also interested in getting the grandparents to know his name as well.
Although the older crowd in the 1980s wanted absolutely nothing to do with anything slightly related to rock and roll, Bing Crosby was one of the only saviours that could have worked with rockstars. And while Bowie despised the idea of making a by-the-numbers Christmas carol with Crosby, he eventually was persuaded to do it when his mother demanded he work on the song.
‘Peace on Earth/Little Drummer Boy’ was a lot more toned down compared to his other work, but for Bowie, it was enough to make his mother proud, with Crosby’s daughter Mary saying, “David wasn’t going to do the show, and his mum said, ‘No, you have to work with Bing Crosby!’. She was a fan. She was like, ‘You have to do this.’”
But if this was what Bowie needed to do to keep both older fans and his family on his good side, he did it in the best possible way. The ‘Peace on Earth’ segment is a great way to spruce what is one of the most one-note holiday classics ever committed to tape, and by singing it on top of Crosby’s melody, many people could have fooled themselves into thinking that the same person who strutted up and down the stage in white makeup and lipstick was nothing more than a fresh face on the easy listening scene.
Bowie was never afraid to try on new styles like that, but the fact that ‘Peace on Earth/Little Drummer Boy’ worked wasn’t a case of him phoning it in. He was going to do things his way no matter what, and even if that meant collaborating with someone new, he would make sure that his version was anything but normal and turned in a musical Christmas miracle.
