The David Bowie song James Williamson called “pretty lame”
The fact that fans could get three albums out of The Stooges is a miracle. From day one, the band operated as one of the most explosive forces in rock and roll music, taking the basics of artists like Chuck Berry and Little Richard and turning them into the most feral sounds rock music had ever seen. Although Iggy Pop was destined for a solo career with the help of David Bowie, one of his major hits never sat well with one of his ex-bandmates.
When working on his first handful of solo releases, Iggy Pop got a major boost by working with ‘The Thin White Duke’. Having been one of the giants of the music industry for a few years, Bowie had been a massive fan of The Stooges and was more than happy to work with the frontman to finesse his career as a solo artist on albums like Lust for Life and The Idiot.
While there were still common elements left over from The Stooges, the sense of melodicism that came from songs like ‘The Passenger’ was enough to give pop a new lease on life. Although Pop may have been able to notch a few hits on the charts, that didn’t mean he started to leave the experimental stuff behind.
Throughout each of his solo outings, Pop was known to indulge himself in some outlandish ideas on his records, contributing songs along with Bowie that were focused more on how weird they sounded rather than their mainstream potential. While some of the tracks may have been considered off-putting at the time, a track like ‘Nightclubbing’ would become foundational for rock a few years later when Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails co-opted it for ‘Closer’.
During their various experiments, one of the songs that both Bowie and Pop took a liking to was ‘Don’t Look Down’. Recorded for Pop for the album New Values and released by Bowie on Tonight, the song came together when former Stooges guitarist James Williamson began putting the song together in his apartment.
When speaking to Songfacts, Williamson said that the song was completed and finished months before Pop had even heard it, recalling, “I wasn’t playing in the band or anything at that time, so it just laid dormant for a couple of years until Iggy asked me to produce his album, which would become New Values. During the pre-production, I showed him that song, and he immediately wrote the lyrics. I always loved the way it turned out”.
Even though Williamson was proud to have contributed to Pop’s version of the song, he was not all that impressed with what ‘The Starman’ did with it, explaining, “I always thought it was kind of lame. But I loved the royalties that started coming in from his recording”. Then again, this was the era when Bowie began to embrace the mainstream in a greater context.
While Pop would feature on many songs from Tonight, the aftershock of Let’s Dance still looms large over the record, especially since Bowie didn’t contribute nearly as many instrumental passages as before. Despite the lacklustre sounds of Bowie’s version, ‘Don’t Look Down’ is still a bold look at what The Stooges could have looked like if they had lived to see the 1980s.
