Goodbye David, give Major Tom my best regards...(remastered)

Warning! This week the newsletter goes personal.

The regular ones will be back afterwards.

This is an improved enhanced version of an original article that I published on January 11, 2016, just one day after Bowie's passing.

I read it again a few days ago and decided to improve and expand it.

Those with curious minds may want to read the original article, but I am sure that this remastered version is better.

On January 10, 2024, David Bowie would have been 77 years old. I do not know what he would have looked like at that age. But I guess he would be pleased that we will never know. So, here goes the enhanced version. I hope you like it.

Introduction

"Space Oddity" was?the first Bowie song that I ever heard, it was haunting, beautiful and otherworldly.

I remember hearing it?while looking for new musical stuff for the "school radio" that was my responsibility in high school in the early eighties. Somebody had forgotten a vinyl record compilation of “space-inspired” music, It was an eclectic selection that included a symphonic disco version of the main Star Wars theme and a Carpenter’s song titled “Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft”, which was a cover of an original song written and performed by a Canadian band called “Klaatu” (sci-fi fans will be rejoicing by being able to get this last reference). ?But “Space Oddity” stands by itself.

How did I find him?

In those years?I was a weird and nerdish early teenager living in the city of La Paz, Bolivia. That meant that my connections with what was happening in the rest of the world were limited. Nowadays, the city where I was born has become a hub for young tourists (or travelers as they prefer to be called) that visit places like Machu Picchu, Tiahuanaco, or Cuzco. It has been assimilated by world culture.

As you can imagine, during my teens, I was completely out of sync with what was happening in music and movies everywhere else. We had a lag of between a full?year or even a year and a half with the rest of the world. And cult artists like Bowie were practically unknown. So, I found out about him in the underground.

First steps into the underground

Anywhere where there is some kind of scarcity, there is always an underground market where you could get anything you wanted or needed,?for a price of course.

A real-life proof of that was that my first record was an imported “Blondie” vinyl LP: “Parallel Lines.” You could never imagine how difficult it was even to try to explain the virtues of the music made by a post-punk, early new wave, CBGB-based, New York alt-rock band to a couple of parents that considered the Beatles the limit of avantgarde they were willing to tolerate.

A discovery in reverse

My discovery of David Bowie’s oeuvre followed a backward path. After listening “Space Oddity,” I suddenly realized that he, somehow, had managed to become part of mainstream music. The era of MTV-supported music had just begun.

Those were his golden years, at least from the fame and popularity points of view. That era’s records include his?classic eighty hits, "Let's Dance", "Tonight" and "Modern Love"... Although I liked them, they were pretty much mainstream, he also appeared in fairly insignificant movies.

But there was a lot more interesting Bowie that was waiting for me to be discovered.

The man who fell to earth

On one particularly boring Saturday, I?was lucky to be able to watch a rather disturbing film called "The Man That Fell to Earth", directed by Nicholas Roeg and featuring Bowie as the main character. He completely stole the movie by composing one of the most alien E.T. characters of all time.

He personified billionaire Thomas Newton, who was really a lonely alien who had fled from his original water-deprived dying world, motivated by the hope of being able to save his civilization by finding an alternative source of water elsewhere in the universe.

He finds it in our Earth and, in a surreptitiously way creates a giant corporation by releasing his advanced civilization tech gradually. Eventually, he gets enough funds to build a massive spaceship to fulfil his mission; sometimes reality imitates art in curious ways.

But Thomas Newton becomes ill and frail of health due to his prolonged exposure to an alien environment and, eventually, he contemplates powerless how his creations and developments are stolen?by some corporation related to the government. He is denounced as an alien, apprehended by the government, and set free after all possible information has been obtained from him. He ends up lonely, bitter, consumed by alcohol and the realization that, after almost achieving is mission, he is unable to save his world.

In the movie his alien character probes to be more human than his own company's CEO's and partners, who behave like predators.

A multitalented artist

This movie showed me a different facet of Bowie: he was an outstanding actor. A few years later I learned that he had played the role of Joseph Merrick, better known as “The Elephant Man,” in a Broadway theatre production. Merrick was a man that suffered from a condition called Proteus syndrome, which causes the uncontrolled growth of some bones, thus producing extreme body deformities. The fact that Bowie was able to perform this role without the use of any make up and only employing his talent as a mime actor is simply extraordinary.

Finally, I meet Ziggy.

A couple of years?later I discovered the "Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars" album. By then I was living in Buenos Aires, Argentina, studying engineering. That record made me realize something I have not been aware before.

I had become?an immigrant. A strange in a strange world: Buenos Aires is a city that is quite different from what you would think as the typical Latin America one.

Argentinians are mostly?first- or second-generation descendants from Spanish or Italian immigrants. So, the city has a very European flavor, with extensive parks, ample avenues guarded by old trees and a strong French influence in its architecture. It has been called the Paris of South America. I simply feel in love with the city and all that made as peculiar as it is.

The discovery of a new musical universe

The sheer size of the city of Buenos Aires gives it a cosmopolite?nature. BA is connected to the world, and that means there is ample space for the underground to grow. I went through University while discovering a huge amount of music, stuff like pre-Phil Collins “Genesis”, post “Genesis“ Peter Gabriel, lots of “Velvet Underground” and Lou Reed albums, ?the strange Talking Heads music, Laurie Anderson's weird early records, (you cannot fully comprehend the meaning of the term “weird” until you have heard either "Sharkey's Day" performed by Laurie Anderson and “Sharkey’s night”, a version performed by beat poet hero William S. Burroughs himself).

I was baffled with the amount of music I was discovering, and I became aware that some music is eternal. No matter how long ago some songs were recorded or composed they become timeless. Whatever may be your age, you will always enjoy a performance by “The Who.” Specially the moment when, after an amazing drums solo by Keith Moon accompanied with the hypnotic initial chord sequence of “Won’t get fooled again” played by a synthesizer, Roger Daltrey screams the wildest Yeah! ever recorded. That kind of music will affect you forever.

Underground FM Radio

And then, listening?to an underground FM radio (which was a particularly cool thing to do in those years) I found a radio show of similarly minded guys: they played “King Crimson” (the heavy mental era with Adrian Belew, Bill Bruford and Tony Levin ), Peter Gabriel's epic 4 first records, more Lou Reed, jazz like Miles Davies, Keith Jarreth, and really weird stuff like Peter Hammill, David Sylvian and the shocking German post punk industrial?rock group Einstürzende Neubauten.?

That lead me?to spend a brief time doing underground radio myself with a group of?friends, which?I left after discovering their too folkish musical taste.

A man ahead of his time

Bowie was so much ahead of his time that if you listen to any of those records now, you will think that they are modern, almost contemporary.?????????????????????????????

There was and?there is so much Bowie to discover that this article would go on for thousands of words.

For this reason, I will limit myself to mention some of the minute details that set Bowie from other musicians and composers:

The musician that fell to earth

You must listen to Space Oddity with a good pair of headphones. That songs creates a sense of space where you can locate and distinguish every instrument. Such clarity is almost unheard of in today’s music. It is almost unbelievable that this song was composed 54 years ago.

In Starman, he tells a story of a guy who suddenly discovers that the music being played in the radio is not being selected by a DJ, but by a Starman who would like to come and visit us, but he is afraid that such an event would blow our unprepared minds, so he suggest that we let the children listen to his music, since only they will be able to understand those sounds.

Life on Mars?

After failing to write an English version of a French hit called “Comme d'habitude", first made popular by Paul Anka and later by Frank Sinatra, who would turn it into his signature song My Way. Bowie decided that he could create a better song, and he definitively did.

Life on Mars is perhaps the best song Bowie ever composed, the song is musically extraordinarily complex, and the lyrics are apparently about a girl who escapes from her house to refuge herself from reality at the movies. The girl is absorbed by the screen, although she had seen those movies several times, but cannot escape from their seductive nature. Overall, the question “Is there life on Mars?” becomes to mean “Is there life on Earth?” This song is a masterpiece, both in composition and in performance. And whoever had any doubt about Bowie’s talent as a singer he must listen how beautiful is his vocal performance in this piece.

Plastic soul

His switch to soul music was proof that he was not limited to genre boundaries. Young Americans is a complex blend of Philadelphia’s soul and R&B, as perceived from an Englishman view. He describes the seventy’s USA from, again, an alien perspective, picturing with vivid images the life in the ghetto, and includes subtle references to American politics. At the song’s climax he sings in an incredible falsetto “Ain’t there one damn song that can make me break down and cry?”

Ironically, there is a quote from the Beatles song “A Day in the Life” near the end of the song, which does a similar study on English daily life in the 60s.

The Thin White Duke

And of course, this record marks the start of a new Bowie’s impersonation: “The Thin White Duke,” and this one is dreadful. Bowie spent five years living in Los Angeles and became addicted to cocaine, which in those years was easily available in the LA music scene. This addiction, combined with his role at the movie “The Man Who Fell to Earth” mark the low point of Bowie’s addictive nature.

Curiously, the result of this situation is one of the best Bowie albums: Station to Station. The title song shows a radical change in style. Gone are the soul and R&B influences, a new industrial rock sound heavily influenced by German electronic Krautrock takes its place and the results are dark and eerie. The song Station to Station features more innovation than most current composers’ whole careers.

Strange sounds and screeching guitars following a mechanical drumbeat announce that things have changed. The cryptic lyrics refer to occultism and magic, with which Bowie seems to have been fascinated by at that time. It is a dark record, but extremely rewarding after the first listening.

Berlin

To escape from his drugs habit, Bowie moved to Berlin where he recovered and recorded some of his finest work: the German Trilogy.

Listening to the German trilogy enables you to understand?the reasons that lead U2 to record "Achtung Baby" and "Zooropa". Both albums are heavily influenced by the three records of the trilogy: "Low", "Heroes" and "Lodger".

Few songs exist that are as haunting as the hymn of freedom called "Heroes", which is basically drone guitars music before the term drone was invented. Robert Fripp's guitar performance is amazing. It is certainly not a coincidence that the U2 albums recorded in Berlin were produced by the same person, the English producer Brian Eno.

A circle is closed.

Most Bowie songs tell stories of common individuals who are placed in extreme circumstances, many refer to them as Zeroes.

The most personal of them is Space Oddity’s Major Tom, who works like a reflection of Bowie’s personal evolution through time.

In his 1967?record "Space Oddity", Major Tom was a brave astronaut that ventures into space after his spaceship has broken.

But in the 1980’s “Scary Monsters and Super Creeps” album, he continues the story in the song "Ashes to Ashes", where he warns: "Ashes to ashes, funk to funky We know Major Tom's a junkie ".

This record was Bowie’s peak in quality. He achieved massive success taking advantage of his looks, which fitted perfectly with the era’s symbol MTV. He had become mainstream.

Resurgence at the end

He recorded some forgettable records in the nineties, where he looked like trying to catchup with the new styles of music, but seemed only able to create more of the same music that characterized those years.

But he came back in full form in 2002 with the release of the album "Heathen". In this record he seems to have realized that age eventually catches with your life. Acceptance of this fact grew stronger with his following records, where his voice sounded much like a crooner who has seen too much of life. His last record, titled Blackstar, was released on January 8, 2016. Bowie died of liver cancer two days later. He was born as David Robert Jones on January 4, 1967. So, he never got seventy, never really got old.

It is difficult for me to judge his final records, perhaps because they became darker as his health started to fail. One had become used to his last performances, captured during the “Reality” tour, with him dressed in immaculate tailored suits and looking lie he was enjoying every second. His sardonic smile never abandoned him.

He disappeared from public life in his final years. I think he wanted to be remembered as the never aging performer of the Reality tour. We will never know.

A personal memory

I was lucky?to be able to watch David perform live in Buenos Aires in 1990, he played with Adrian Belew as lead guitar, his sense of stage and performance were astounding.

Bowie always looked?like?an alien, but an alien that had managed to live comfortably adapted to his non alien environment. He refused to get stuck into any style, social, cultural or gender ghetto and that meant that he was chameleonic, ambiguous, bizarre, and controversial.

And in some way, he helped me and many others, to accept our weirdness. Because that weirdness defined who we are.

That was his?genius, and with these words I put a last point to end this article, which is just short of being too long.

Goodbye David,?give Major Tom my best regards...

“You would think that a rock star being married to a supermodel would be one of the greatest things in the world. It is.”

David Bowie.

Mirko Torrez Contreras is a freelance Process Automation consultant who loves music in all its forms, except for cumbia and reggaeton. He has tried to like both styles but something deep inside him resists all attempts to modify his taste.

But let's make on point clear: he does not think is bad music, it is simply that he cannot stand it.

As is mandatory in these kinds of articles, I have created a Spotify playlist with the music mentioned in this one. Enjoy it! https://open.spotify.com/playlist/52zXbSct2qNQA4A7aafUyY?si=c7ba6a53f3604c06