The one artist that made David Bowie love rock and roll: “I got my father to help me”
David Bowie didn’t strike anyone as the kind of guy who could fit into a band mentality.
He had many fantastic musicians who played with him, but even when he split off to do his own side project on Tin Machine, no one believed for a second that the whole thing was a joint effort between every single member of the band. Bowie was the one calling the shots about what was going to end up on one of his records, but he did have a lot more fun whenever he had someone to help guide him through many of his classics.
When you look at some of the greatest records that he ever made, ‘The Starman’ always had a partner in crime to work with throughout every single song. Tony Visconti and Mick Ronson were the ones who made his glam records sound fantastic, Brian Eno was the one stretching his musical psyche when he eventually moved to Berlin to reinvent himself, and even though Bowie has a strained relationship with his pop star period, there’s no conceivable way to hate on any of Nile Rodgers’ guitar parts on Let’s Dance.
But before any of those chapters even happened, Bowie needed to make sure he fully got off the ground starting off. There’s probably some distant multiverse out there in the cosmos where the man who would become Ziggy stayed a vaudeville character for the rest of his life, but when everyone was introduced to Major Tom in ‘Space Oddity’, they had finally seen a true original up close. There was no reference for what Bowie was, but there were still pieces of rock and roll’s past in there somewhere.
When he was still discovering what rock and roll was all about back in the day, Bowie had an initial plan of playing saxophone in Little Richard’s band if he had the chance, saying, “What I wanted to do when I was 9 years old, I wanted to be the baritone sax player in the Little Richard band. I probably also wanted to be black at that particular time as well (laughter). And so I got my father to help me out with the saxophone. And we bought it over, like, a two-year period.”
Bowie wasn’t a snob when it came to more sophisticated music, but Little Richard was the first person to embrace that kind of wild man aesthetic he was looking for. It would have been bad enough for someone to come out of the woodwork as a gay black man in Macon, Georgia, nowadays, so to see Richard taking chances all the way back in the 1950s, singing ‘Good Golly Miss Molly’ was the kind of bravery that Bowie always wanted to have when making his first hits.
Sure, none of the legends of rock and roll had done themselves up to look like an alien, but the greatest stars of the 1950s were already outsiders when they started making music. Elvis Presley was shaking his ass and causing utter mayhem when he first started, and even though Muddy Waters and BB King were some of the giants of blues, they were already at a bit of a disadvantage when most people wanted to listen to more smooth pop music like Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby.
Being a member of one of the first rock and roll bands may have been out of the question, but it’s not like Bowie didn’t put his saxophone skills to good use. That smooth line at the end of ‘Changes’ is one of the tastiest musical moments of his early career, and when he eventually did transform himself into a rock and roll alien, he seemed to tip his hat to Richard’s manner of presentation, thanks to the layers of pancake makeup that he wore every single time he sang.
No one was going to be able to follow in Richard’s footsteps whenever he came onstage, but even if Bowie couldn’t play with his idol throughout his lifetime, the rest of his music career was devoted to making his hero proud. Everyone would have been happy to make one of the stops Bowie made during his career, but every risk he took was about being brave the same way Richard was when he was a kid.
