Why does nobody talk about David Bowie’s 1967 debut album?
When people dissect the history of rock and roll, David Bowie rightly deserves his own separate chapter.
Aside from The Beatles and maybe Bob Dylan, there isn’t a single act that did anything more for rock and roll than ‘The Starman’, whether that was the fashions that he pioneered, the genres that he dabbled in, or his overall fearlessness to work on anything and everything that tickled his fancy at any given time. But all artists have to start somewhere, so why the hell is Bowie’s proper debut the one that everyone insists on never acknowledging when talking about his career?
Don’t get me wrong: people still talk about the beginnings of Bowie finding himself, but all the conversations usually start with ‘Space Oddity’ and don’t elaborate any further. In most people’s minds, that’s when the red-haired wonder first crash-landed on Earth, and none of us was ever the same, but it’s not like we can’t pay some respect to the younger version of Davey Jones that was just trying his hand at making artsy pop rock.
And, folks, Bowie’s proper debut is a mystifying listen, knowing what we know now. If you end up going through his entire catalogue in chronological order, you’d think that the guy who’s singing a bunch of vaudeville songs would have been the last guy most people would pick as one of the defining artists of his generation. Yes, you heard that correctly. Instead of making the songs that made us think about voyaging to new musical lands, a lot of Bowie’s proper debut feels like it’s coming out a secondrate cabaret show half the time.
Some of the tunes are serviceable, but it’s not like any of them are going to replace what Bowie was capable of on his second album. ‘Rubber Band’ and ‘Love You Til Tuesday’ would have probably made for a decent pop song back in 1967, but for all the twists and turns that Bowie went on, this was the one album in his entire discography that he practically wanted everyone to forget. That might be a bit of teenage embarrassment, but it might also have something to do with what came out around the same time.
Because if you look at the timeline, the fact that this came out on the exact same day as Sgt Peppers is probably what made Bowie realise he needed to change. John Lennon practically summed up the charm of this entire album with ‘Being For the Benefit of Mr Kite’, and Bowie needed to find a way to change with the times or find himself playing the same sideshow attractions that everyone had known him for before.
And when looking at every other song on Space Oddity, most of that album is his debut if it had a little more passion behind it. Not all of the songs were absolutely perfect, but aside from the title track, ‘Memory of a Free Festival’ and ‘Cygnet Committee’ were Bowie saying to the world that he had a lot more to offer and that he could still make music that was a bit more unorthodox for the time.
If there is anything to take away from his proper debut, though, it’s the ending song. ‘Please Mr Gravedigger’ might barely count as a song, given that most of it is a bit of spoken word over the sound of rainfall, but the fact that Bowie thought enough of this kind of tune to include it on the album showed the world that he was still someone who was willing to make something a little bit weird whenever he made a new record.
Regardless of how strange his first album turned out to be, it does at least show Bowie to be someone who didn’t settle for anything ordinary, and even if he would find his true calling listening to bands like The Velvet Underground, there’s still a bit of charm to listening to an album like this. It’s not groundbreaking by any means, and it can be more than a little bit dumb by his standards, but even for a young kid making his breakout record, Bowie was still someone who wanted to push the envelope every chance he could.
