Shaping the Starman: The two musicians David Bowie called “mentors”
Without wanting to make assumptions about the man, it’s not difficult to imagine that trying to give David Bowie any form of advice would be like talking to a brick wall. This is not to claim that he was somehow wildly egotistical or maniacal, but his entire brand was based on the point of walking to the beat of his own drum and never bowing to anyone’s judgement, so you’d be hard-pressed to find any occasion where he happily took the back seat on any decision.
This never faded from Bowie’s persona at any time of his career – from grafting for years on end before seemingly bolting out of the blue on ‘Space Oddity’, to the various twists and turns that his musical output took over the years to make him as visionary as he was unpredictable. Not all of the gambles paid off, granted, but it was this spirit of constant reinvention that kept him so permanently evergreen and fresh in the eyes of the industry, even after half a century of playing the game.
Yet as much as it seemed like Bowie was mostly fuelled by individualistic ambition to the outside world, his inner psyche told a very different story. Indeed, as much as Bowie the rock god didn’t seem to care what anyone thought of him, it would be ridiculous to think that he wouldn’t stick his head above the parapet once in a while to see what was going on around him, and take notes from his sonic contemporaries.
This was exactly how he came to view two particular musicians as “mentor” figures, from whom he never stopped learning even long after you’d think he’d become a seasoned professional. “When things go bad, I’ve always looked to my peers and, in a way, my musical mentors to see what they’ve done in similar situations,” Bowie explained in 2004. “Neil Young and Bob Dylan have done similar things: They have both made a few disastrous albums, but they always end up coming back to the point of what they started in the first place.”
The longevity shared between Young, Dylan, and Bowie is ultimately rooted in their lack of fear in failure, with the latter Starman then noting that: “You’ve got to go back to what you were doing when you were rooting around with experimentation, ideas that are going to work for me, not my audience.” These are certainly qualities possessed by both Young and Dylan by the bucketload, but were there any particular moments in their careers that gained Bowie’s respect the most?
“There’s youthful redemption in everything he [Young] does, a joyfulness about being an independent thinker in America,” he said previously, and famously in relation to Dylan wrote ‘Song for Bob Dylan’ on 1971’s Hunky Dory. Describing the singer’s voice as being “like sand and glue,” Bowie’s penchant for bizarre imagery made his allure to Dylan all the more electrifying; a beacon, in fact, whose innovative approach to the world evidently rubbed off on him more than words alone could express.
They may each have hailed from entirely different sonic backgrounds and, in some instances, held opposing views on each other – Dylan was never known to be a fan of the Starman’s – but nevertheless, the power of this unconventional rock trinity knew no bounds when it came to their capacity for changing the world. Bowie may have embodied more of a space-age orbit, while the others were grounded firmly in reality, but this ebb and flow was exactly what the music universe needed to keep spinning, and for Bowie to ultimately keep his feet on the ground.
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