When David Bowie was going to write a series of fake Bob Dylan song
The main story of the David Bowie Broadway show Lazarus is already complex in its final form. The stage adaptation brings in elements of Walter Tevis’ The Man Who Fell to Earth, which Bowie starred in a 1976 film adaptation of. But according to Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Michael Cunningham, the original version of what later became Lazarus was much wilder.
According to Cunningham, he was contacted by Bowie in 2003 to gauge his interest in writing a stage show featuring Bowie’s music. The idea was for the show to revolve around alien lifeforms, although the direct connection to The Man Who Fell to Earth had not yet been established. Bowie only had a few ideas with him at the time, including an ambitious rewriting of history.
“David reluctantly told me that he imagined the musical taking place in the future,” Cunningham told GQ about the project. “The plot would revolve around a stockpile of unknown, unrecorded Bob Dylan songs, which had been discovered after Dylan died. David himself would write the hitherto-unknown songs.”
“It was not what I’d been expecting. Yes, David had recorded ‘Song for Bob Dylan’, for the album Hunky Dory, in 1971, but that was a song about Bob Dylan; it wasn’t a song supposedly written by Bob Dylan,” Cunningham added.
The idea that Bowie would write his own takes on Dylan’s catalogue was enough to give Cunningham some worries. Still, this was David Bowie, after all. “Who could write a convincing fake Dylan song? Well, okay, that would be David Bowie, if anyone, but who (including David Bowie) would want to?” Cunningham openly wondered. “And how would the actual Bob Dylan feel about that?”
“I, however, said nothing about any of this. I expressed no surprise at all,” Cunningham said. “No problem: an alien and some recently unearthed Dylan songs.” This version of the stage adaptation was eventually shelved after Bowie suffered a heart attack and underwent surgery in 2004. More than a decade later, Cunningham would be given a seat to see the final version of Lazarus on its opening night.
“The Lazarus at New York Theatre Workshop resembled David’s and my musical only in that it centred on an alien,” Cunningham said, also confirming that the title of the play stems from Emma Lazarus’ name: “It wasn’t quite clear, at least not from the production, where the title Lazarus had come from, or anyway, not clear to anyone but me.”
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