Bowie

     I was thinking about David Bowie the other night, not a rare occurrence, I like his music and as a matter of fact he’s probably my favorite artist in all history.  Before I had ever known how to even articulate a single thought on the subject of music, Bowie was already in my life, sneaking in every once in a while on the radio in the Central section of these here United States.  “Space Oddity” was probably first for me, a song about an astronaut was very right up my alley, so to speak, and that one slipped in through the cracks of Styx and Led Zep and Skynyrd and E.L. fucking O.  Then I started noticing that song “Suffragette City”, my first Ziggy sighting, and on rare occasions “Rebel Rebel” rocked my freaking world, loved it when that song came on.  Buying my first Bowie record is a firm memory, I had the FINAL CUT by Floyd in my hands, influenced by a cardboard stand-up they had of some guy in British Army uniform with a knife in his back, and I had it, waited in line, and just as I got to the counter, the dude behind it asked me if I could hold on a second while he changed the album.  I said sure, and as I stood there he put LET’S DANCE on his turntable, and as he came back to the register, the first lines of guitar work on “Modern Love” kicked off, and before he could take the Floyd from my hands I said “Hang on a second” and turned around, put Pink back where he belonged, picked up the Bowie from the “B’s”, laid my money down, and never looked back.  Thank you anonymous counter-man, for steering me in the right direction.

Anyway, the deeper I went into his music the more I loved it, of course, buying everything I could of his, taping off copies from friends who had stuff, taping stuff off the radio, reading magazine articles and interviews, all kinds of crap. I was pretty down on the stuff he did after a certain point, TONIGHT was a huge disappointment, NEVER LET ME DOWN did just that, and it wasn’t until Tin Machine that I really enjoyed one of his albums, then he went on a nice little run, putting out some pretty cool albums, but nothing really hit me the same way as his music from the earlier parts of his career.  My personal favorite Bowie period is from LOW to LET’S DANCE, just some fantastic albums and live stuff from him at that time, top of his game in my eyes. I liked a lot of his early albums, too, of course, but nothing topped SCARY MONSTERS for me, that’s just my favorite piece of work he’s ever done, top to bottom love the songs and can listen to that album or any song from it almost any time. 

Lately though, and by lately I mean the last, oh, 20 years or so, I’ve kinda fallen in a rut for a while when it comes to Bowie.  I had all the albums on cd, burned them into mp3’s, but after awhile I realized I wasn’t listening to the cd’s, and had started weeding out songs that didn’t strike my fancy at a certain moment, probably late one night where the term ‘weeding’ really applies, if you know what I mean and I think you do.  So I was down to about 40 or 50 tunes of his in his catalogue, and just leaving the rest to lay fallow in my memory, as the old folks used to say. 

Bowie isn’t the only musician to suffer this fate with me, but since he’s my favorite he’s the most prominent in my mind right now.  I was thinking about a question my wife asked me recently; “Do you still listen to cds?  I don’t see you take them out much and just wondered if you still just played them sometimes.”  This was a clever ploy on her part to get me to admit that I didn’t need all those thousands of cds and maybe we could get rid of most/all of them.  It’s ok, I’ve had the thought myself, I’ve schlepped boxes and crates of those things up and down stairs, in and out of apartments, for years, I’ve cursed their existence even more than my roommates, whether they be intimate or not, but let’s not get into that. 

I’ve thought about this often too, the way I listen to music now.  I remember sitting at the end of my bed, wedged between it and the stereo stand where I had my cheap little turntable/radio/tape player-recorder and all my albums, staring at the spines or album artwork and liner notes while I listened to whatever I was obsessed with at the moment, I’ll spare you the name-dropping type of thing here and just say I have the coolest musical taste of everyone I’ve ever met.  Or haven’t met.  Just trust me, if I like it, it’s cool, if I don’t, it isn’t, real simple.  And there isn’t a true music fan who doesn’t feel exactly the same way.  And like all music fans, I could tell when an album was missing by the way it messed up the collage of album spines; a color was missing, part of a picture was out of place, so I knew when someone messed with my albums.  I freak myself out a little bit when I think back to just how obsessive I was when I was younger…

Anyway, I don’t listen to music like that anymore.  Back when you played an album, you normally played it from first song to last per side, and usually both sides, cuz if you wanted to hear one song on an album, you might as well listen to ‘em all.  Plus, I was just too damn lazy to get up and move the needle from one song to another if I didn’t want to hear it.  Now, I just hit the ‘next’ button on my iTunes player and I can skip through my whole catalogue of music on my laptop, and I’m not sure but I think something’s been lost.  I’m not quite sure even what’s been lost, but that feeling is there and I’m inclined to go with it. 

But we’ve also gained a lot too.  When cd’s hit their second cycle and had artists who were now realizing, hey, I’ve got 70 plus minutes worth of space to fill up on this disc, I’d better come up with some more songs, well, let’s throw this piece of crap that would normally be on a b-side, and charge you 18.99 for the whole frickin’ cd, well, you can kinda see why people prefer to download one song at a time.  Who can you trust these days to come out with a full album of quality songs?   The cynical side of me of course says trust no one.  I wonder which artist will announce that they’re not even going to make albums anymore, just singles for sale online, and if you want to make an album out of those singles, well, burn it your damn self. Being able to separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak, is a good thing.

So to bring this very long and probably very boring post to an end, my purchase last year of a new laptop kind of made this whole question moot. I have enough space to dump virtually every cd I have onto my drive, and now, instead of having to save space for porn spreadsheets, I can have tens of thousands of songs  available on iTunes. I have an entire playlist of just Bowie that I can put on my iPhone and carry around with me for those boring family gatherings. I've re-discovered songs I hadn't heard in years (and on reflection, HOURS was pretty good, and TONIGHT wasn't as horrible as I remembered), and even though he's basically retired, it's almost like having new material again. Almost.