Archives for posts with tag: david bowie

Endless Nights

October 23, 2022 //
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Mason Alexander Park and Mike Garson and band at The Sun Rose in West Hollywood, 22 October 2022.

I’m not sure how I heard about this show – something shared on Twitter, it must have been. Park plays Desire on the Netflix series The Sandman and Garson played piano for David Bowie for years. (‘72-‘74 – Aladdin Sane, Pin-Ups, Diamond Dogs, and David Live, and was a constant member from 1995’s Outside through 2013’s The Next Day.) Park has other credits to their name, but nothing I’d seen. I just know that people thought it pretty cool they’d found a trans actor to play Desire. The theme to the show was songs associated with desire and dreaming, but in general it was a cabaret with a heavy Bowie emphasis. (Park mentioned that the two of them had done whole sets of Bowie covers together – that must have been a treat.)

Most of the songs in the set were pretty well known, but opening with a deep cut from a late Bowie album (Bring Me the Disco King from 2002’s Reality) was an odd choice. But the audience seemed ready for anything. Moving from that to Space Oddity (the second time on this trip to the US I’d seen that performed – Megan Slankard covered it in her set opening for John Doe) and Oh! You Pretty Things got everyone focused.

They then moved on to other artists for a while – two songs called Desire that I’d never heard – by Meg Myers and Bob Trask, a nice version of Mr Sandman incorporating first a torch song arrangement, and concluding with a couple of verses in the style of the Chordettes’ version.

Michael Thomas Grant of the show Zoe’s Extraordinary Playlist (yes, I had to look that up – I had no idea who he was, but he has a tremendous voice) joined in a cover of the Cranberries’ Zombie. (The guitarist tuned in to some amazing energy on that song – gracious but it’s good to be near good musicians when they’re in the zone.)

Keeping with the theme, the set also included pop standard Dream a Little Dream of Me, Jacques Brel’s My Death (covered by Bowie on the Ziggy Stardust tour and later on the Outside tour, when Garson was back in the fold) which Park introduced as being ‘about my sister,’ a nice little Sandman joke.

They continued with a quartet of songs from the Rocky Horror Show (which explained the young lady in the front dressed as Columbia). Garson introduced this with a story of getting a call from Richard O’Brien in ‘74, after he’d finished a Bowie tour, to play in this new production. The first night, he played the score straight, the second added some of his own flourishes, and the third had turned it into a Mike Garson score, at which point he was fired. They started with Sweet Transvestite (with Grant returning to do Brad’s lines – ‘We’ll say where we are and then go back to the car’) and moved into the show’s closing medley of Don’t Dream It – Be It, Rose Tint My World, and I’m Going Home.

The main set closed with a sweet rendition of the Kinks’ Celluloid Heroes. It was strange to be in Hollywood listening to a performance of a song about Hollywood. Even though I grew up in Los Angeles, I’m rarely here now and I felt an odd doubling of my emotional response to the tune – a combination of nostalgia and longing and infinite presence all at once.

The audience clamored for more – a slightly ramshackle version of T. Rex’s Cosmic Dancer, which the bassist didn’t know, but the guitarist showed him the tabs and he picked it right up. Jazz musicians don’t mess around. I had to go after that having not paid enough for parking to stay longer, but I think they kept going – somewhere in the set there was a song from Hedwig and the Angry Inch and I think they were considering doing another, but I was well satisfied with almost two hours of excellent music. I recommend this bunch highly.

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Categories Music, rock and roll, Writing

See these eyes so red – David Bowie’s Let’s Dance

August 17, 2018 //
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Of all David Bowie’s albums, Let’s Dance is one that’s had very little airplay in my headphones. Which might be a shame. I’ve been listening to it lately and trying to place myself in the shoes of someone giving it an honest listen in 1983. Fans had waited three years for a follow-up to Scary Monsters and Super Creeps, his last album for RCA which had spawned minor US hits in Fashion and Ashes to Ashes. In the meantime, MTV had launched and given some airtime to videos from his previous albums. I recall seeing the videos for those two songs and DJ from 1979’s Lodger. That said, the title track from Let’s Dance landed like a bomb on MTV, followed by Modern Love and China Girl. Those three songs and a reworked version of Cat People (Putting Out Fire), originally recorded for the closing credits of Paul Schrader’s film of the same name and released in March 1982, comprise half of the album’s eight tracks. A fourth single from the album, Without You, didn’t get much airplay and didn’t chart.

db-ldThe problem, for me, is that by the time I listened the album in its entirety a few years after its release, those first three tracks had turned into background noise. Modern Love barely sounds like a Bowie song at all – the piano and horns driving the sound instead of the guitar, and lyrics that don’t seem to be about anything at all. The live video didn’t give a story to it. Mind you, that’s what was expected of 80s videos and even 35 years later, when I listen to the songs that did have story videos – China Girl and the title track – I still see the videos in my head. And by the time Modern Love was released as the third single in September, we’d spent the summer being bombarded with tracks two and three.

China Girl is a reworking of a song Bowie had written and produced with Iggy Pop seven years earlier and released on Pop’s The Idiot.

And then there’s the title track. I’ve heard those opening snares and Ah Ah Ahs hundreds of times and tried to feel that moaning ‘tremble like a floooow-ah’. But the album version is a different beast. Clocking in at seven and a half minutes (as opposed to the single/video at just over four), it takes the listener on a different journey. Dub elements which at the time were used to create club mixes sit right in the middle of the album mix and pull it into the fade out.

Without You relies on Bowie’s falsetto, and what sounds like plinking keyboards but is either Stevie Ray Vaughan or producer Nile Rodgers who shared guitar duties throughout. It doesn’t have the drive of the other songs on side A, but as a simple declaration of love it’s not without its merits.

Whereas side one has one song that’s not so well known to me, side two’s Ricochet, Criminal World, and Shake It are all tracks I’ve never listened to much.

Ricochet is proper weird Bowie. Sometimes, its underlying sax lines sound lifted from Low; elsewhere the song is much funkier. Lyrically, it seems to be addressing industrialization and fascism, some of those big themes that he’d explore in songs like Loving the Alien and Time Will Crawl later in the 80s. Moving on, Criminal World is a cover of a 1977 song by Peter Godwin’s band Metro – musically it fits with the rest of the album because Rodgers has arranged it (and the whole album, for that matter) to flow.

And then the album concludes with a throwaway piece of disco/funk called Shake It. Lyrically it doesn’t have much to say – the most interesting lines are ‘We’re the kind of people who can shake it if we’re feeling blue / When I’m feeling disconnected well I sure know what to do.’ In his catalogue, it seems most connected to the discofied John I’m Only Dancing (Again) released around the time of Young Americans. That’s not to say that it’s bad, just that it’s not worthwhile as a Bowie song.

My overall assessment is that it holds together or hold up not as a David Bowie album, but as a Nile Rogers or Chic album that just happens to have Bowie doing the singing and most of the words. Lyrically the album is half-baked and musically, it’s mostly disposable. According to interviews in a recent issue of Mojo, this is, on a certain level, what Bowie was after. At the height of New Romanticism, Bowie heard his own influence on new music and felt the current crop had drained the life from pop. Having not had a serious hit stateside in almost eight years (Fame), he made the leap, and spent the next six years barely involved, by his own admission, in his own music making at all.

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Categories 80s, Music, rock and roll

Dramarama

December 15, 2014 //
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I gotta say, I had forgotten how good Dramarama’s Cinema VeriteShe's so subliminal was. I bought it in ’86 or so after seeing them open for the Psychedelic Furs at the Warfield. They were the epitome of the absolute cool the 19 year old me could not hope to achieve. Bought the album, taped it, and played it loads. I know I got sick of how much Anything, Anything got overplayed, to the exclusion of so much other good stuff they produced both on this and on subsequent albums. Not having heard it in a few years (possibly only once or twice in the last 12 years – it doesn’t get airplay on NL on CZ radio, as far as I can tell), listening to it again tonight, I hear the brilliance in it. “I got wasted, she got mad, called me names and she called her dad,” captures the immaturity associated with love and desire and how it’s all wrapped up with possession and that desperate ned to hold on to someone captured in the refrain “I’ll give you candy, give you pills, anything you want, hundred dollar bills.”

They married some of the lowlife dinginess of the Velvet Underground’s third album to a sparkling 70s power pop aesthetic.And while Anything, Anything got the airplay, it’s not the only perfect pop song on the album. The pounding tom-toms that open Visiting the Zoo introduce a song of fuzztone guitar artistry that Cheap Trick would have been proud to own.

At a time when the VU were still in legend status – in the mid-80s Lou Reed was still growing up in public and hadn’t made the elder statement of New York – Dramarama closed side A with Femme Fatale, imbuing it with a combination of sadness and bemusement, perhaps at the gap between the warnings to a suburbanite dropped in mid-60s New York and the harder first-person experiences of the originals on the album. (Note that Cinema Verite‘s cover sports Edie Sedgwick, about whom Femme Fatale was written.)

The album’s other cover, David Bowie’s Candidate (an album cut from 1974’s Diamond Dogs) opens the more varied side B. It’s an odd choice, but helps the band lay claim to the glam sensibility that dominates the second half of the album. The piano introduction to Some Crazy Dame reflects that, though the song is squarely in the seedy downtown category, as its subject seems to be a porn starlet (“She’s on camera she’s an actress now / Such charisma on the mattress now”).

When I say the second side has a glam sensibility, I might mean that stylistically, the second side wanders somewhat. Etc’s cryptic lyrics (“30 biscuits on 30 plates / Different colors cause they were made on different dates”) supported by a lead bass line are followed by the almost folk of Transformation, the introduction for which wouldn’t have been out of place on a 70s era Styx or Andrew Gold album, ditto for its guitar solo. All I Want is nearly a proper punk song, whereas the solo acoustic closer Emerald City almost feels like a folk song. The drugged haze of lyrics such as “I’m lost in a sweet dream / I’m living on chocolate ice cream / I’m letting off my steam” indicates that all is still not well

Nearly thirty years later, I still give it four stars. While Cinema Verite, and follow-up, Box Office Bomb are available on iTunes, only the subsequent studio albums are available on Spotify.

You can enjoy all of CV on youtube, however: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x59-cFofXu8

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Categories 80s, Music, Rock