A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs

This episode is the first of a two-parter on “Space Oddity”, and the early career of David Bowie. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.

Patreon backers also have a two-hour and twenty-minute bonus episode available, on “I Started a Joke” by the Bee Gees.

Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by editing, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/



Resources

Because of the increasing problems with Mixcloud’s restrictions, I have decided to start sharing streaming playlists of the songs used in episodes instead of Mixcloud ones. This Tunemymusic link will let you listen to the playlist I created on your streaming platform of choice — however please note that not all the songs excerpted are currently available on all streaming platforms.

The single best source on Bowie’s early work is Rebel Rebel by Chris O’Leary. This is an adaptation of parts of O’Leary’s great blog Pushing Ahead of the Dame, but expanded and updated significantly.

Other books used for this and all other Bowie episodes include Starman by Paul Trynka, David Bowie a Life by Dylan Jones, The Complete David Bowie by Nicholas Pegg, The London Boys by Marc Burrows, and Ziggyology by Simon Goddard.

Information on Zoroastrianism came from Zoroastrianism: A Guide For The Perplexed by Jenny Rose. The version of Thus Spake Zarathustra I referenced here is the version translated and with an introduction by RJ Hollingdale.

Because Bowie’s early work was scattered among a lot of different labels, there is no comprehensive collection of his juvenalia — each label has released collections of the four or five tracks they own. However, The Shel Talmy Recordings contains a full album worth of recordings and demos.

The most comprehensive collection of Bowie’s Deram work is this sadly out-of-print double CD. This single-CD version is cheaper and contains most of the important material.

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Transcript

Before we begin, this episode contains discussion of sexually transmitted infection, mental illness, and prejudice against sex workers.

Knowledge of what’s to come in the future can have a funny effect on a project like this. Currently, we’re still in 1969, and over the next few episodes we will be looking at a lot of records that could be seen in one way or another as “the end of the sixties”. Depending on which episode you want to consider the true end, we’ll be leaving the sixties somewhere between song 189 and song 192 — by which time we’ll be well into the spring of 1970 — while the next song is in some ways wrapping up some loose ends from the fifties. Maybe those records felt like “the end of the sixties” at the time, though I doubt it, but what I do know is that here, before the end of the sixties, is where the seventies start.

(Some might argue we’ve already seen the start of the seventies with Led Zeppelin, and I wouldn’t necessarily disagree with them, but to my mind Led Zeppelin are a continuation of things that had already begun in the sixties, whereas David Bowie, when he finally became big, seemed like something totally new and different.)

Realistically, though, absolutely nobody at the time would have thought of Bowie as the future. There were all sorts of new sounds on the charts in 1969 — the swamp rock of Creedence Clearwater Revival or Tony Joe White, the psychedelic soul of the Temptations and Sly and the Family Stone, the horn-driven rock of Blood, Sweat, and Tears — which a listener might have pointed to and said “that’s what music is going to sound like in the seventies” (and to an extent they would have been right — all of those strands of music were popular and influential throughout the decade). But nobody would have guessed that possibly the most consequential record to be released that year would be a novelty track that seemed for a couple of years as if it would be a one-hit wonder, a song by a chancer who had been trying and failing to get any kind of success in the music business for half a decade, written in imitation of the Bee Gees (a band who themselves seemed already to have passed their commercial peak, but who would also have an outsized impact on the decade to come) and featuring a prominent instrumental part played on a toy that had been a brief fad.

Yet somehow, that would turn out to be the case. So let’s look at the start of the seventies, before we go forward in time to the end of the sixties…

[Excerpt: David Bowie, “Space Oddity”]

One of the things people always mention about David Bowie is that he was born twelve years to the day after Elvis Presley, and while he didn’t quite define the seventies in the same way that Elvis had defined the fifties, he’s the only artist who comes close in that much more fragmented decade of media.

But of course, Elvis himself was still around for much of that time, and we’ll be looking at what he was doing when we get to the next song. But one thing that’s worth noting is that he made a return to live performance after nearly a decade away from the stage, and for much of the rest of his life, his opening music would be this:

[Excerpt: Elvis Presley/TCB Band, “Also Sprach Zarathustra”]

That’s the opening to “Also Sprach Zarathustra” by Richard Strauss, one of the most famous compositions of the late nineteenth century. The piece takes its name from a book by the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, usually better known in English under its translated name, Thus Spake Zarathustra, and the piece is in three movements, each divided into three sections, mirroring and titled after the sections of Nietzsche’s work — Sunrise, Of the Backworldsmen, Of the Great Longing, Of Joys and Passions, the Song of the Grave, Of Science and Learning, the Convalescent, the Dance Song, and Song of the Night Wanderer.

Thus Spake Zarathustra is the most difficult work by Nietzsche, a writer who is not generally known for being an easy light read even at his simplest, and it comes towards the end of his career. He wrote several books after it (many of them about how he had fallen out with his former friend Richard Wagner, a composer who had greatly influenced Strauss) but within three years of completing it, he stopped writing forever. This is because in 1889 the tertiary syphilis which he had suffered with for much of his adult life caused him to have a breakdown, and he spent the remaining eleven years of his life slowly deteriorating and suffering from dementia.

(It should be noted here that medical diagnosis in the nineteenth century was not as advanced as it is today, and that some historians have raised doubts as to the cause of Nietzsche’s illness in recent years. I’m by no means an expert and wouldn’t want to say for sure that it was definitely caused by anything, but from my limited understanding he was diagnosed with syphilis many years before the onset of the dementia that killed him, and it was certainly an extremely common illness then, and most of his symptoms match those of tertiary syphilis.)

It has been suggested by many that the illness affected Nietzsche’s philosophy before the breakdown which led to the end of his career, and this seems to me to make a lot of sense. I am not, I think, a particularly unintelligent person or especially impatient with difficult books, but Thus Spake Zarathustra is a very, very difficult book to follow, and not in a way that I find especially rewarding. I spent some years working on a psychiatric ward, and the book does indeed have some similarities to the way several of the patients on the ward used to talk, with leaps of logic and changes of subject based on some internal logic that they believe to be self-evident but which is anything but to the audience.

However, something being the work of someone suffering from a mental illness is no reason to dismiss it — mentally ill people are capable of great art and often have important perspectives that we should be more willing to listen to. And certainly while Nietzsche is very, very difficult reading, his work has inspired a great deal of important music. As well as Strauss’ piece, Mahler set a poem from the book as part of his third symphony:

[Excerpt: Gustav Mahler, Third Symphony, Fourth Movement]

and Delius wrote A Mass of Life, setting text from the book:

[Excerpt: Delius, A Mass of Life]

So, what does Thus Spake Zarathustra say? Well, people have been arguing for over a century about its meaning, and a music history podcast is not going to definitively answer that question, but here’s what I think it’s saying.

Nietzsche has his main character, the prophet Zarathustra, come down from the mountain where he’s been living for a decade, and announce that God is dead and denounce Christian morality. Zarathustra keeps having discussions with allegorical figures (some based on real people like Wagner or Schopenhauer, the philosopher who most influenced Nietzsche), gaining disciples, renouncing the disciples, and going back to his mountaintop. In the course of these discourses he expounds on two main ideas (among many other smaller ones). The first is the Superman — Zarathustra says “Man is a rope, fastened between animal and Superman – a rope over an abyss” and “Behold, I teach you the Superman: he is this lightning, he is this madness!”

Nietzsche’s idea of the Superman is of a creature beyond current concepts of good and evil, someone who embodies his concept of the “will to power”. According to Nietzsche speaking through Zarathustra (there are of course arguments about how much of what Zarathustra says is what Nietzsche believed, but I think we can say he agrees with most of it) all living things want, more than anything else, to have power over others, and all progress is created by gaining power over others. The hypothetical future superman will be, to use the title of another work of Nietzsche’s, Beyond Good and Evil, and will be as much different from humans as we are from apes. Nietzsche also seems to have believed (as many in the late nineteenth century did) in a form of evolution closer to Lamarckianism than Darwinism, in which evolution can happen to a limited extent in one lifetime in an individual, and in which acquired characteristics, not just inherited ones, can be passed on to future generations. Mortals living right now have the potential to be, if not the superman, a step closer to it than they already are.

This idea became hugely influential in all sorts of directions. Most notoriously, Nietzsche’s ideas about the superman and the will to power became some of the pseudo-intellectual framework for Nazism (though it should be noted that while Nietzsche held many abhorrent ideas he spent much of the last part of his active life explicitly arguing against antisemitism and German nationalism — though in ways which look from a twenty-first century perspective still extremely antisemitic.)

They also, though, influenced a lot of culture, particularly science fiction. Obviously the comic character Superman is indirectly inspired by the idea, as in a more highbrow sense is George Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman. And somewhere in the middle are things like the work of Olaf Stapledon, the socialist philosopher and science fiction author who influenced the transhumanist movement and whose creation of homo superior, a next stage of human evolution clearly inspired by Nietzsche, in his novel Odd John influenced everything from the X-Men to Arthur C Clarke.

The other main idea in Thus Spake Zarathustra is the doctrine of eternal recurrence, an idea which is to my mind best dramatised by, of all things, the Monkees film Head and the song from it “Long Title (Do I Have to Do This All Over Again?)”’:

[Excerpt: The Monkees, “Long Title (Do I Have to Do This All Over Again?”]

While the idea of the superman points to a belief in progress of a sort (not a kind of progress I personally find very appealing, but one that definitely sees a future that’s distinct from the past), the eternal recurrence is the opposite. Nietzsche (in the voice of Zarathustra, but again it seems to be something Nietzsche himself believed) claims that everything that has happened before will happen again, in exactly the same way, saying:

“if you should die now, O Zarathustra: behold, we know too what you would then say to yourself … ‘Now I die and decay … and in an instant I shall be nothingness … But the complex of causes in which I am entangled will recur – it will create me again! … I shall return … not to a new life or a better life or a similar life: I shall return eternally to this identical and self-same life … to teach once more the eternal recurrence of all things, to speak once more the teaching of the great noontide of earth and man, to tell man of the Superman once more”

When the concept of the eternal recurrence is first introduced, Zarathustra reacts with despair, but later he embraces it, saying “Did you ever say Yes to one joy? O my friends, then you said Yes to all woe as well. All things are chained and entwined together, all things are in love; if ever you wanted one moment twice, if ever you said: ‘You please me, happiness, instant, moment!’ then you wanted everything to return! you wanted everything anew, everything eternal, everything chained, entwined together, everything in love, O that is how you loved the world,you everlasting men, loved it eternally and for all time: and you say even to woe: ‘Go, but return!’ For all joy wants – eternity!”

Nietzsche believed that the superman would want everything to be exactly as it is and to last eternally, and thus would love the idea of eternal recurrence because all things, both “good” and “bad” would recur infinitely. He was less interested in whether the idea was true or false than in the emotional reaction it caused — despair that you’d be doomed to repeat the worst moment of your life forever, or joy that you’d repeat the best. And Zarathustra’s progression from despair to joy is presented as a positive thing. While there are many ideas in Thus Spake Zarathustra, Nietzsche said that the idea of eternal recurrence was the most important and the central idea of the work.

The character of Zarathustra himself is an interesting choice for Nietzsche’s protagonist, because Zarathustra is believed to have been a real historical person from around three thousand years ago — or at least in much the same way as Homer is the name attached to the author of the Iliad and Odyssey, Zarathustra is the name attached to the Gathas, one of the oldest surviving texts in any Indo-European language, written roughly contemporaneously with the Hindu Vedas, with which they share some similarities. The word Gatha, in the Avestan language in which they are written, means “song”, and if Zarathustra is indeed their author, he may be the earliest songwriter of whom we have any record (we say there is no first anything, and of course there have been songs as long as there have been people to sing them, but it does seem likely that any songs written before Zarathustra’s time have evaded preservation.

[Excerpt: Dr Rashin Jahangiri, “Ahunavaiti Gatha”]

The Gathas still exist, even though they were created in an oral culture that had not yet become literate, because they were passed down through generations as the central core of the liturgy of a religion, usually known in English as Zoroastrianism, though its believers generally refer to it as Mazdayasna, meaning worship of Mazda — Mazda meaning wisdom and being part of the name of their highest deity Ahura Mazda, Lord of Wisdom.

Now, I’m not going to go too deeply into the beliefs of Zoroastrians, although they’ve come up before — in the episodes on Pinball Wizard — and will come up again when we get to Queen, because Freddie Mercury is undoubtedly the most famous Zoroastrian of modern times. But it’s worth having a quick look at them because of just how different they are from those of the character of Zarathustra in Nietzsche’s book.

Now, before I begin with this there’s an important thing to say here. Zoroastrianism is a real living religion with a few hundred thousand adherents, mostly in India, Iran, and North America. I don’t — as far as I’m aware — know any Zoroastrians personally, as it’s an extremely small religion, so everything I’ve learned about it has been from books and the Internet, and usually written by Western scholars of comparative religion, not by Zoroastrians themselves (Zoroastrians are, by and large, opposed to proselytising their religion, and so there’s not a lot of stuff by them aimed at outsiders). This means that even more than when I’m talking about other cultures I don’t belong to, I may get stuff very wrong. So please don’t rely on anything I say here, and I apologise for any offence caused to any Zoroastrian listeners by what follows.

But also, when we’re talking about Zoroastrianism in the context of Zarathustra himself, we have to recognise that Zarathustra lived about three thousand years ago, as best we can tell (the latest estimates place him about 500 BCE, the earliest at about 2000 BCE, but most seem to agree he lived in roughly 1000), and the beliefs of the religion have changed over the millennia, as they have influenced and been influenced by contact with other religions.

The basic belief of Zoroastrianism is that the universe was created by a benevolent, omniscient but not omnipotent being called Ahura Mazda, which means Wise Lord. From Ahura Mazda emanated several other divine beings called Amesha Spentas, which help him run the universe. If you’re more familiar with the Abrahamic faiths, as most of my listeners are likely to be, you can think of these as like angels, although a better comparison for those familiar with the Kaballah might be the Sefirot (and those of you more familiar with Tolkien than with real-world religion might think of these as like the Ainur created by Iluvatur).

There is also a being called angra mainyu or Ahriman. Where Ahura Mazda represents goodness, truth and order, Ahriman represents evil, falsehood, and chaos. He creates evil equivalents of the Amesha Spentas, known as devas. Ahura Mazda is engaged in a war with Ahriman, who is the source of all badness in the world, and enlists humans on his side in this great cosmic battle. At the end of time, a saviour known as the Saoshyant, born to a virgin, will raise the dead. Ahura Mazda will win the battle with Ahriman, and evil will be defeated. All resurrected humans will wade through a river of molten metal which will not hurt the good but will burn away the sin of the evil, leaving everyone pure and immortal.

There is debate as to how to interpret the texts, and whether Ahriman was created by Ahura Mazda at the same time as the Amesha Spentas were created, or whether they have always coexisted. Likewise there is debate as to whether they should be considered equal in strength and importance, or whether Ahura Mazda is the superior in power as well as morality. I believe that the current consensus among Zoroastrians is that Ahura Mazda preexisted Ahriman and is more powerful, but I could be misunderstanding what I’ve read.

But crucially, in the nineteenth century the consensus among religious scholars in the West was that Zoroastrians believed that Ahura Mazda and Ahriman are equal and opposite, and that while Zoroastrianism had influenced most of the great monotheistic religions it was actually a dualistic religion in which good and evil are personified and equal.

[Excerpt: Dr Rashin Jahangiri, “Ahunavaiti Gatha”]

And so the reason that Nietzsche chose to use Zarathustra as his character is not because he thought the historical Zarathustra held the beliefs he attributed to his character, but in fact it was the opposite. He explained in his final book Ecce Homo:

“Zarathustra was the first to see in the struggle between good and evil the essential wheel in the working of things. The translation of morality into the realm of metaphysics, as force, cause, end-in-itself, is his work. But the very question suggests its own answer. Zarathustra created this most portentous of all errors,—morality; therefore he must be the first to expose it. Not only because he has had longer and greater experience of the subject than any other thinker,—all history is indeed the experimental refutation of the theory of the so-called moral order of things,—but because of the more important fact that Zarathustra was the most truthful of thinkers. In his teaching alone is truthfulness upheld as the highest virtue—that is to say, as the reverse of the cowardice of the “idealist” who takes to his heels at the sight of reality. Zarathustra has more pluck in his body than all other thinkers put together.”

So precisely because Zarathustra was, by Nietzsche’s estimation, someone who valued honesty, and because he was the first person (according to Nietzsche, remember that there’s no first anything) to posit an ontological morality to the universe, he would also be the first person to realise that he’d got it wrong and to proclaim Nietzsche’s teaching that the superman should be beyond concepts of good and evil. The founder of an eschatological religion which sees history as progressing towards an end goal would teach the idea of an eternal recurrence.

So the legendary founder of what is generally considered the oldest surviving organised religion in the world, one with hundreds of thousands of living adherents, is now mostly known in popular Western culture for being the protagonist of a book which has him stating the opposite of every opinion he ever held.

At least, he’s mostly known that way under what was apparently his actual name. Zarathustra is, roughly, what the prophet himself would actually have been called assuming he existed (or possibly something like Zaranthustra — something along those lines, anyway), and the name probably meant something like “camel herder” (depending on exactly what the name was it might have meant “he who likes camels” or possibly “he who has angry camels”). However, when the Greeks, who regarded him as one of the founders of their own philosophical lineage, transliterated that name to their language, it became Zōroastrēs, from which we get the English name Zoroaster, which is how he’s usually referred to in English writing. And under that name, rather than Zarathustra, he’s still thought of, to the extent he’s thought of at all, as the founder of the ancient Persian religion which bears his name, Zoroastrianism. And in the Western world, outside scholars of comparative religion we get much of our impression of Zoroaster from what filtered into the culture through the writings of people like Plato, who made assumptions about what he actually taught based, among other things, on his name.

Zōroastrēs, while it sounds enough like Zarathustra that you can see how the Greeks got there, has very different etymological roots. In particular, the “aster” part means “star” — it’s where we get modern words like “astronomy”, “astrology” and “asteroid”. And the beginning part could mean “undiluted” or “living”. So Zoroaster was believed to have been a great teacher of astrology, because his name meant “living star”. Or, if we want to stretch a point very slightly, “star man”:

[Excerpt: Richard Strauss, “Also Sprach Zarathustra”]

There are innumerable cliches about David Bowie that almost everyone writing about him seems to feel obliged to say — that he was a shapeshifting chameleon who went through ch-ch-ch-changes and kept reinventing himself — but those cliches tend to obscure rather than clarify Bowie’s work. So, as far as possible, and despite what I said at the beginning of this episode about the start of the 1970s, I’m going to attempt to tell the story of David Bowie up to the end of 1970 as it happened, rather than in the light of later events.

Maybe the single biggest influence on the early years of David Jones, the boy who would grow up to be David Bowie, was his elder half-brother Terry. Bowie would later say “Terry probably gave me the greatest, serviceable education that I ever could have had. He just introduced me to the outside things. The first real major event for me was when he passed Jack Kerouac’s On the Road on to me, which really changed my life. He also introduced me to people like John Coltrane, which was way above my head, but I saw the magic and I caught the enthusiasm for it because of his enthusiasm for it. And I kinda wanted to be like him.”

Like much of Bowie’s story, though, the influence of Terry — the cool older brother who knew about jazz and the Beats, but who also suffered from the schizophrenia that plagued Bowie’s mother’s side of the family — has been somewhat exaggerated in retrospect when compared to other influences in his early life. Rather than a life dominated from a young age by Coltrane and Kerouac, much of Bowie’s early influence came from the mainstream entertainment that everyone else of his generation — he was born in 1947 — was exposed to. Some of his family later pointed out that his father — who worked as the head of public relations for a major charity, Dr. Barnardo’s — not only encouraged him to become an entertainer, but used his connections to get young David to meet people like Tommy Steele, Britain’s first rock and roll star, and Alma Cogan, the “girl with the giggle in her voice” who would later have an affair with John Lennon:

[Excerpt: Alma Cogan, “Why Do Fools Fall In Love?”]

Growing up with a PR man as a father, young David Jones became very aware from a very early age that he had to look after his image if he was going to be the successful entertainer his dad was sure he was going to be. David’s father was, by the accounts of Bowie’s childhood friends, a man with a lot of showbiz connections who doted on his son and would get him any records he wanted. His favourites in his preteen years included “I’ve Put A Spell On You” by Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, though apparently his mother wouldn’t let him play that one in the house as it was “the Devil’s music”, and the rather more acceptable “I’m Not a Juvenile Delinquent”, by Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers:

[Excerpt: Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, “I’m Not a Juvenile Delinquent”]

All the recollections from Bowie’s childhood friends and family suggest that when he was growing up he was from an affluent, well-connected, family, even though some biographers make a big deal of an imagined poverty. However, while they were well-off, they were an unusual family in many ways. Haywood Jones, Bowie’s father, had inherited a great deal of money for the time at a young age, and had spent most of it first trying to create a showbiz career for his first wife Hilda, a nightclub singer. When that hadn’t worked, he’d spent the rest of it on the two of them running their own nightclub in Soho, and when the money ran out he’d finally got a proper job, working for Dr Barnardo’s.

He’d also got a kid — not by his wife. He’d had an affair and when the woman got pregnant he and Hilda agreed to raise the child, Annette, together — but shortly after that World War II started and Jones was off to fight, leaving his wife to raise another woman’s daughter.

And then shortly after he got back to the UK, he fell in love with another woman, Peggy Burns. Peggy Burns had already had two children by two different fathers — a daughter who she had given up for adoption, and a son, Terry. Bowie would apparently later tell one of his friends, horrified, that he’d read some old letters of his mother’s and discovered that she had been a sex worker, but this should be taken with a grain of salt, as Bowie always had an incredibly strained relationship with his mother. By all accounts she was a cold, distant, judgemental woman (and she had apparently briefly been a supporter of the British Union of Fascists in the 1930s) and very few people had a good word to say about her, so Bowie’s horror should be seen through that lens.

(This is not to suggest that there is anything wrong with being a sex worker. Rather it’s to suggest that Bowie as a young man may well have thought there was.)

When Peggy got pregnant with Haywood’s son, David, there was a slight problem in that Haywood was still married to Hilda. So they did the only sensible thing. Haywood moved his pregnant girlfriend in with his wife and his kid by another woman. Then, once the baby was born, he and Hilda divorced, Hilda and Annette moved out, with Hilda still bringing up the daughter to whom she had no biological relation, and Haywood and Peggy married and brought Peggy’s son Terry to live with them (apparently much to Haywood’s annoyance).

This unconventional start to the family seems to have made Peggy, now she was finally married, take a turn to the very conventional and proper, and by all accounts she was very distant with young David. His father, though, seems to have still had some of the bohemianism and artistic aspirations that had made him throw all his money into a showbiz career for his first wife, and encouraged young David with his musical aspirations.

Another of David’s early musical loves was Fats Domino, and especially the song “Blueberry Hill”:

[Excerpt: Fats Domino, “Blueberry Hill”]

Two aspects of that record stood out for him. The first was the incomprehensibility (to British ears) of Domino’s thick New Orleans accent — something that Mick Jagger also always cited about the record. He said later “What I liked about it was that I couldn’t understand the lyrics and that really made an impression on me – there was some secret information there that I didn’t have. I think that’s been something that’s been important to me ever since.”

But the other thing he mentioned was the horn section, saying of it “It was [the] sax lineup he had behind him that impressed me more than anything else, because I’d only heard the saxophone through my brother’s records as being a jazz thing and that was too complicated for me.”

He became even more excited after seeing Little Richard in The Girl Can’t Help It, and by his early teens his father had bought him a plastic alto sax and he’d taken a few lessons from a professional saxophonist who lived nearby. His friend George Underwood talks about him being asked at school what he wanted to be when he left school and him saying “I want to be the saxophone player in a modern jazz group” — by this point, a few years after his exposure to rock and roll, he had clearly decided that jazz wasn’t too complicated for him after all.

He would never get especially good at the instrument, but he was clearly intent on a musical career of some sort, something which was encouraged by at least some of the staff at his school. While he’d passed the eleven-plus exams which would have allowed him to go to grammar school and be channeled into an academic career, he had decided instead, and persuaded his reluctant parents, to go to Bromley Technical High School, which he’d chosen because of its status as a feeder school for the nearby art college, and which rather than academic subjects specialised more in arts and creative work.

One teacher in particular gets mentioned a lot in biographies of Bowie as being particularly important, though this may not entirely be to do with his support of the young Bowie, and more to do with his son, a friend of Bowie’s who was three years younger and went to the same school. Owen Frampton’s son Peter was interested in making music, and had asked his father who in the school was interested in playing rock and roll music, and his father had said “Well, I think that Jones and Underwood are pretty much into that.”

Jones and Underwood were into that, and soon the three of them were regularly playing together in the school hallways, on guitars that Owen Frampton kept in the office for them until break time. In these jam sessions, Bowie was a bit of a mentor figure for the younger boy, teaching him songs like Eddie Cochran’s “C’mon Everybody”:

[Excerpt: Eddie Cochran, “C’mon Everybody”]

However, while Bowie and Underwood were close friends and both very interested in music, by all accounts Underwood was the more impressive personality at school and the one who people have stronger memories of, and he was the first one to publicly perform rock and roll music. At a school talent contest organised by Owen Frampton in April 1962, Peter’s band The Little Ravens played the first half, and George’s band George and the Dragons played the second half.

Normally Bowie would have been involved in George’s band, but the two had fallen out after a serious incident. George had asked a girl out who Bowie fancied, and Bowie had decided to tell George that the girl had changed her mind. She’d turned up to their date to find George wasn’t there, and Bowie’s idea was that he would comfort her after she thought she’d been stood up. But George found out what had happened, and punched Bowie.

While he only meant to just give Bowie a normal schoolyard fight punch, he badly damaged Bowie’s left eye. Bowie was hospitalised and for a while it seemed like he might lose the sight in that eye. As it is, the muscles in his eye were partially paralysed, so the iris wouldn’t contract properly, making it look like he had eyes of two different colours, and meaning he only had limited depth perception from that point on.

As you can imagine, the two didn’t talk again for quite a while, and George’s stage debut took place in that period. The two eventually made up though.

It was George who invited Bowie into what would be his first band, the Kon-Rads, which he joined as saxophone player and only occasional lead vocalist — George made it very clear to his friend that he was the lead singer. The young David Jones only got to sing lead on a couple of songs — one that gets repeatedly mentioned is Joe Brown’s “A Picture of You”:

[Excerpt: Joe Brown, “A Picture of You”]

The Kon-Rads were a band who wanted to think of themselves as very professional and going places — apparently they got their name when, before Bowie joined the band, they had a gig backing the minor pop star Jess Conrad, and he referred to them onstage as “my Conrads”, though they changed the C to a K, and sometimes had a hyphen in the name.

Within a short time, though, that professionalism led to Underwood being out of the band. The group had seen an advert from an “ex-Cliff Richard drummer” looking for a band to join, so obviously they ditched their own drummer (who had founded the band) and brought in this older experienced professional, Dave Hadfield.

In truth, while Hadfield had apparently known Cliff at school, if he’d ever played drums with him at all it must have been at one of a handful of local talent shows he’d performed at in 1956, before he’d even joined his first skiffle group, and Hadfield had joined the Merchant Navy before Cliff’s first even semi-professional gig. He’d just quit that after five years, and was looking to become a full-time musician. To the young Kon-Rads, though, this older man looked like a seasoned professional who knew the business, and he became the group’s de facto leader.

Hadfield didn’t like Underwood, and so Underwood was soon out of the band — though apparently they kept his amp. But Bowie remained in the band as the sax player, and he and Hadfield became the group’s brains trust. At this point Bowie started playing around with different hairstyles and stage names — for a time he was David Jay, a shortening of his birth surname Jones inspired by Peter Jay of Peter Jay and the Jaywalkers, and he also apparently briefly took on the name Jim Bowie after seeing Richard Widmark play the historical figure of that name in John Wayne’s film The Alamo. He and Underwood worked on the group’s stage presentation, and Bowie did things like design Christmas cards with pictures of the band on to send out to local venues to get gigs. He also pushed for the group to start performing original material, though the rest of the group pushed back — they didn’t want to put audiences off by playing something they didn’t know, rather than Shadows and Elvis covers.

The group were locally popular and thought they had a real shot at success. At one point the group had an audition with Joe Meek, though biographers differ as to whether this was while Bowie was in the band. A few seconds of the group’s performance of “Mockingbird” for Meek were made public a few years ago as part of an auction of the recordings, and I don’t hear Bowie in there on either sax or vocals:

[Excerpt: The Kon-Rads, “Mockingbird”]

I lean towards believing those who say that recording was after Bowie had left the band, and Bowie himself said that he had never met Meek, but some of the other band members have clear memories of Bowie having been at that audition. Either way that audition was not a success.

There are, sadly a lot of stories about the Kon-Rads told as if Bowie was there when he wasn’t, because the group continued for a couple of years after Bowie left them. For example one biography talks about the group appearing on Ready Steady Win!, a spinoff from Ready, Steady, Go!, and losing to the Trubeats, a band which featured Bowie’s old schoolfriend Peter Frampton. Now, the Kon-Rads may well have appeared on the show — there’s no footage of the show in existence to check — but the show, which was a big deal, with celebrity judges like Lulu for the heats and Bill Haley and Brian Epstein among the judges for the final, ran from June through September 1964, and Bowie was out of the group by the end of 1963.

But the group were trying for that kind of success while Bowie was with them, and they did start to have what looked like big breaks. In particular, the Rolling Stones’ manager was interested in them. Not Andrew Oldham, but his co-manager, Eric Easton. At this point the two men were partners in managing the Stones, who were just about to release their first single, but Easton wanted a similar act he could manage himself. He became involved with the Kon-Rads, and arranged them an audition at Decca, the label the Stones were signed to.

As with the Joe Meek audition, we have a short snatch of one of the songs that was recorded at that session, an original co-written by members of the band including Bowie, “I Never Dreamed”. Eleven seconds of it were released online when Hadfield, who had the only surviving copy of the acetate of the track, auctioned it off in 2018:

[Excerpt: The Kon-Rads, “I Never Dreamed”]

That audition didn’t go well, though, and Decca passed on the group. Bowie was also getting frustrated with playing with them — he wanted to perform originals, which the group were still not happy with, and he also wanted to perform more R&B material. He had been getting more and more involved with the Mod subculture, and listening to blues, soul, and modern jazz. In particular he was pushing for the group to perform songs like Marvin Gaye’s “Can I Get a Witness”, when the group wanted to be more all-round entertainers than an R&B band.

He quit the group after that audition, in late 1963, just over a year after he had joined. The Kon-Rads continued on for another couple of years with various lineups, and did eventually get to release one undistinguished single, which sometimes turns up on bootlegs, along with other recordings of the group from after Bowie left, falsely labelled as featuring Bowie — as far as I can tell the one actual fragment of recording of Bowie with the Kon-Rads that’s anywhere public is those eleven seconds I just played. They even toured on the bottom of the bill on a package tour with the Rolling Stones and the Hollies in early 1965, before finally splitting up.

Bowie, meanwhile, got back with his old friend George Underwood, and the two of them started performing as a duo, sometimes joined by drummer Viv Andrews, under the name The Hooker Brothers, naming themselves after Bowie’s musical obsession of the moment, John Lee Hooker. The two of them soon hooked up with a band that had advertised as needing a singer. At this time, Bowie and Underwood were a package deal, and so Bowie joined as lead vocalist and sax player, while Underwood joined on rhythm guitar. They named the group the King Bees, after the Slim Harpo song “I’m a King Bee”:

[Excerpt: Slim Harpo, “I’m a King Bee”]

The group’s repertoire was mostly the same kind of R&B covers that every other wannabe band was playing at the time — songs by people like Howlin’ Wolf and Elmore James, as well as Hooker. They also, like all groups, tried to discover obscure records to cover which no other bands had picked up on. Bowie had bought Bob Dylan’s debut album, and the group worked up an arrangement of “House of the Rising Sun”, thinking they had hit on something really innovative combining that song with a rock backing. They were quietly devastated when the Animals had the same idea independently and released their single in early 1964.

Bowie was determined that he was going to become a big star, and as 1963 was drawing to an end the music business was changing rapidly and there were more opportunities than ever for an ambitious young man. With the help of his father, who still wanted to encourage his son the entertainer, he drafted a letter to a prominent entrepreneur, John Bloom. Bloom was not in the music business — he ran a company making and selling cut-price washing machines — but he was a rich man who seemed to know both business and publicity, and at the time was constantly in the newspapers for the way his company was taking market share from the major companies.

Bowie wrote him a letter extolling the virtues of the King Bees in rather more hyperbolic terms than were perhaps warranted, and saying to Bloom “Brian Epstein has the Beatles, you should have us!”

Bloom didn’t want to manage the King Bees, but he was impressed enough by the letter to book them for his wedding anniversary party. Unfortunately, he wasn’t impressed by the music, and got them off the stage after just two songs, saying they were ruining the party. They were followed by a duet between Adam Faith and Vera Lynn, to give an idea of both the style of music that was expected and of the amount of money Bloom had at the time. (He would lose most of it in a crash a few months later).

But one person was impressed — Leslie Conn, a friend of Bloom’s, had been in the music business for several years, and had actually checked the band out for Bloom before the show. Most notably at this point, he had produced the first recording by the Five Chesternuts, a band featuring Hank Marvin and Bruce Welch, who later formed the Shadows, Britain’s most successful pre-Beatles band:

[Excerpt: The Five Chesternuts, “Teenage Love”]

Conn signed Bowie to a management contract — he didn’t sign the rest of the King Bees, seeing Bowie as the real talent, though he agreed to manage them without a contract. Up to this point he had primarily worked as a song plugger, and had helped set up the UK branch of Melcher Music, Doris Day’s publishing company. Regular listeners may find that name familiar — Melcher Music was named after Day’s husband, Marty Melcher, but Day’s son Terry Melcher played a massive part in the LA music scene. Indeed, Terry Melcher indirectly played a part in what would become David Bowie’s first single.

Conn was by now working for Dick James Music. James was the publisher of the Beatles’ songs, though he had set up a separate company with them for those songs, but it meant that he was one of the most important men in the music industry. Conn was also at least an occasional freelance songwriter and record producer, though not a prolific one. The only credits he has on Discogs before his involvement with Bowie are for writing a B-side for the minor group The Naturals, co-writing a B-side for the Bachelors with two other writers, and producing this single:

[Excerpt: Wendy Richard and Diana Berry, “We Had a Dream”]

That duo, Wendy Richard and Diana Berry, would release no other records, but Wendy Richard would go on to stardom as an actor, most notably in the sitcom Are You Being Served? and the soap opera East Enders.

That record was released on Decca, and Conn’s connection with Decca as a freelance producer meant that he could get the group signed to Vocalion, a subsidiary of Decca. For their first recording, Conn chose to have the group learn “Louie Go Home”, which had been Paul Revere and the Raiders’ follow-up to their version of “Louie Louie”. Revere and Mark Lindsay had written it, and Terry Melcher had produced their version, and the UK publishing was owned by Dick James Music:

[Excerpt: Paul Revere and the Raiders, “Louie Go Home”]

Slightly retitled as “Louie Louie Go Home” that was pencilled in as the first single by Davie Jones and the King Bees:

[Excerpt: Davie Jones and the King Bees, “Louie Louie Go Home”]

As you can hear, that wasn’t very good, and nobody involved in the recording was very impressed with it, so when it came time to actually release the record, it was decided to flip it and release the other track recorded as the A-side.

That track was a song called “Liza Jane”. This was supposedly a Leslie Conn original, but in fact it dated back well over a hundred years at that point. It was a Black American folk song cum game, a chanting rhyme with largely improvised words, and which sometimes overlapped with the “Hambone” game song we talked about in the Bo Diddley episode, but which had also been taken up as a minstrel song, like “Shortenin’ Bread”. The first recording of a variant of the song was in 1898, but it was with a title that contained a racial slur, so I won’t be excerpting that here. Instead here’s a version sung by Arthur Collins, a minstrel performer, from 1903:

[Excerpt: Arthur Collins, “Goodbye Eliza Jane”]

A version of the song was recorded by Huddie Ledbetter at one of his last sessions:

[Excerpt: Huddie Ledbetter: “Liza Jane”]

The song had also been recorded by Nina Simone:

[Excerpt: Nina Simone, “Little Liza Jane”]

and by Bowie’s childhood favourite Fats Domino:

[Excerpt: Fats Domino, “Lil Liza Jane”]

But the version which Bowie and Underwood based their arrangement on was likely the version that inspired Domino’s, the 1956 recording by Huey “Piano” Smith and the Clowns:

[Excerpt: Huey “Piano” Smith and the Clowns, “Liza Jane”]

The arrangement that Bowie and Underwood came up with reworked that in the style of the Yardbirds, particularly their version of “Smokestack Lightnin’”. Compare the Yardbirds track:

[Excerpt: The Yardbirds, “Smokestack Lightnin’”]

With the King Bees:

[Excerpt: Davie Jones and the King Bees, “Little Liza Jane”]

Leslie Conn is the credited producer of the track — though it seems that he did little on it, and that Glyn Johns, the engineer, did much of the production work — and he’s also the sole credited composer, though the song is of course a traditional one reworked by Bowie and Underwood. He always claimed later that he deserved the credit and that he had radically reworked it. Judge for yourself:

[Excerpt: Davie Jones and the King Bees, “Little Liza Jane”]

Underwood said “We didn’t want to rock the boat, and figured if Les wanted a piece of the action, he could have it.”

Of course, the credit theft didn’t matter too much, as “Little Liza Jane” by Davie (spelled on this occasion with an “ie”) Jones and the King Bees was a flop, even though it was promoted with an appearance on Ready, Steady, Go!. And as soon as that became clear, their lead singer ditched the band and his oldest friend.

Instead, he was introduced by Conn to a new band, the Manish Boys, named after the Muddy Waters song. This was a larger band, with a couple of other sax players Bowie could join in with during instrumental breaks, and they were better instrumentalists than the King Bees had been. Conn told them he was going to introduce them to a great R&B singer, and they were very surprised when rather than a Black man as they had been expecting, they met a skinny blonde white teenager. (There’s some suggestion that they may have thought they were meeting the American R&B singer Davy Jones, who was having some success as a club act in Britain). However, they soon became comfortable working together and less than three months after the release of Davie Jones and the King Bees’ only single, Davie Jones and the Manish Boys were touring a strange mix of venues in Southern England, sometimes playing air force bases, other times Eel Pie Island Jazz Club.

Conn used his connections with Decca to get the group a session with Mickie Most, who was at the time one of the hottest producers in the UK, with his huge hits for the Animals and Herman’s Hermits. However, that one session, on the sixth of October 1964, went terribly, with the Manish Boys repeatedly messing up their backing vocals, and the planned single never getting released (and the tapes are now sadly believed lost).

To make matters worse, Bowie’s old friend George Underwood, the one everyone had always found more impressive than him at school and who everyone had thought would be the big star of the two before Leslie Conn had seen potential in Bowie, not only got signed by Most himself as a solo artist, his record with Most — under the stage name Calvin James — did actually get a release, though an unsuccessful one, despite promotion including an appearance on Thank Your Lucky Stars:

[Excerpt: Calvin James, “Some Things You Never Get Used To”]

Incidentally the backing vocalists on that, The Ladybirds, would a few months later sing backing vocals on the debut single by another Leslie Conn act, an acquaintance of Bowie’s who had been born Mark Feld but who after sharing a flat with the actor James Bolam had decided to slightly alter his famous flatmate’s surname and take it for himself.

Bowie was devastated by what he saw as Underwood’s betrayal, and had a huge row with Underwood, complaining that Underwood could always make a living as a visual artist and didn’t need music, but Bowie only had his music. The two didn’t talk for a couple of years, though they later reconciled.

By the time of the “Calvin James” single, though, the Manish Boys had released a single of their own with their own hitmaking producer. The Mickie Most setback had only been temporary, and in November 1964 Bowie had managed to get himself a TV appearance, going on Cliff Michelmore’s show as a representative of the fictional “League for the Protection of Animal Filament”, complaining about prejudice against long-haired men:

[Excerpt: David Bowie on Cliff Michelmore show]

Conn had managed to get the group some good bookings, including as the bottom of the bill on a tour headlined by Gene Pitney and also featuring Gerry & The Pacemakers, Marianne Faithfull and the Kinks, and the Kinks’ producer Shel Talmy had been very interested in signing the group — or at least Bowie, who he saw as a potential star songwriter to add to the small collection of young British songwriting eccentrics he was producing, like Ray Davies and Pete Townshend.

For the first single, though, Talmy wanted the group to perform a proven song, and so he got them to learn Bobby “Blue” Bland’s great R&B hit from a few years earlier, “I Pity the Fool”:

[Excerpt: Bobby, “Blue” Bland, “I Pity The Fool”]

The group had little time to learn the song though — they hadn’t known it, and only had a couple of hours to run through it in a cafe before heading in to record it. Apparently Talmy wrote the horn charts for the Manish Boys’ recording, and wasn’t very experienced at orchestration, and so they’re weaker and simpler than the group would have liked.

Despite that, while the group’s version is nowhere near as effective as Bland’s, it still is a more-than-reasonable example of British R&B of the period, especially because it’s one of the few recordings of this era where session guitarist Jimmy Page, brought in to beef up the band a little, is actually allowed to play some lead — he’s playing simple lines here, but they sound inspired by West Coast blues players like Johnny “Guitar” Watson, Guitar Slim, and T-Bone Walker. It’s not a great record, but it’s a vast improvement over the King Bees’ track:

[Excerpt: Davy Jones and the Manish Boys, “I Pity The Fool”]

The session is notable for two other things though. The first is the B-side, “Take My Tip”, the first David Bowie original to be released. It’s a much more impressive record to my ears than the A-side. At the time there was a minor fashion in British R&B for making records that sounded a lot like Mose Allison tracks, with ex-Animal Alan Price and former Larry Parnes act Georgie Fame both having big hits in this niche style. Bowie’s song is a strong imitation of these records, with some interesting chord changes, though it does stick maybe a little too close to its model, particularly the way that Georgie Fame’s recent number one “Yeh Yeh” had had the saxophone double the vocal melody in the middle eight. Compare Fame:

[Excerpt: Georgie Fame, “Yeh Yeh”]

to the Manish Boys:

[Excerpt: Davy Jones and the Manish Boys, “Take My Tip”]

The other is an anecdote that both Bowie and Page would later tell, and which sounds unlikely for a variety of reasons, but which also doesn’t seem like the kind of lie either would have the motive to tell. During the session Page apparently played Bowie a riff that he’d had lying around and hadn’t figured out a use for, and said Bowie could have it. Bowie kept the riff and didn’t end up using it for five years, when it became the main riff of “The Supermen”, one of the first of several Bowie songs inspired by Nietzsche:

[Excerpt: David Bowie, “The Supermen”]

Les Conn got the group a spot on the TV show Gadzooks! It’s All Happening!, and got some press coverage by collaborating with the producer of the show, a friend of his, to initially pretend they’d been banned because they had long hair, and only got allowed on the show after a staged “protest” at the TV studios. But within a few weeks of that appearance, the Manish Boys had split up — the record had been a flop and they weren’t getting the gigs they’d been getting before.

Talmy though still thought that Bowie had potential, and allowed him to use Talmy’s studio time to cut demos of songs he’d been writing — he was now thinking of himself primarily as a songwriter, even though he’d only had one song released so far. Those demos show him trying out a variety of different styles. On “Today” he’s trying a doomy ballad of the type that the Walker Brothers were just starting to have success with, while also borrowing a line from “Always Something There to Remind Me”, the Bacharach and David song that had been a hit for Sandie Shaw the previous year:

[Excerpt: David Bowie, “Today”]

“I Want My Baby Back” is a very clear imitation of the style of The Ivy League, the British Beach Boys copyists who Talmy had used as backing vocalists on his first single with the Who, and who had a few hits themselves:

[Excerpt: David Bowie, “I Want My Baby Back”]

“That’s Where My Heart Is” is modelled very closely on Gene Pitney:

[Excerpt: David Bowie, “That’s Where My Heart Is”]

and so on. None of it is especially musically fascinating, but it shows a teenager rapidly learning how to write the stuff that was having success in the market. He was able to use his connection to Talmy in other ways as well — with the Manish Boys gone, he needed another band. He went along to audition for yet another group that needed a singer, The Lower Third, along with a friend of his, Steve Marriott, who he’d been vaguely talking about forming a duo with under the name “David and Goliath”, and whose group he’d been singing with a bit. Marriott was the better singer, but Bowie impressed the Lower Third more with his presence — he looked to them exactly like Keith Relf of the Yardbirds, and did a fair impression of Relf vocally when the group ran through their version of “I Wish You Would” — and with his knowledge of the business and connections with Talmy.

They chose Bowie, and Steve Marriott went back to his other group. Bowie split his time between both groups for a while, singing with Marriott’s other band at their first gigs, but they decided he was too into Bob Dylan and dropped him, and within four months the Small Faces had their first top twenty hit, “Whatcha Gonna Do About It?”:

[Excerpt: The Small Faces, “Whatcha Gonna Do About It?”]

The Lower Third weren’t so lucky.

The new group’s first single, “You’ve Got a Habit of Leaving”, was recorded with Talmy again, and is the first Bowie original to be released as the A-side of a single. This time, Bowie seems to have been trying to aim his pastiche at what he knew of Talmy’s tastes specifically — the verse and chorus are written in such a close imitation of Ray Davies, who Bowie also impersonates vocally, that one can imagine Davies hearing the record on the radio and wondering if he’d forgotten making that one:

[Excerpt: Davy Jones and the Lower Third, “You’ve Got a Habit of Leaving”]

While the instrumental break was a Yardbirds-style freakout, reprised at the end, at which point it becomes obvious that the group had been listening possibly too closely to the Who’s “Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere”:

[Excerpt: Davy Jones and the Lower Third, “You’ve Got a Habit of Leaving”]

Supposedly when the Lower Third opened for the Who around the time of the single’s release, Pete Townshend listened curiously and asked who wrote that song, and when he was told “That’s one of David’s” he replied “That’s a shame, sounds like my stuff,” and wandered off.

“You’ve Got a Habit of Leaving” would be the last single that Bowie would record with Talmy though. According to Talmy, he saw that Bowie definitely had potential, but he wasn’t in a position to do much more to nurture him when he was busy working with people like the Who and the Kinks who were already having hits, and EMI said they weren’t interested in releasing any more of his work after the two singles had flopped, so Talmy dropped Bowie with no hard feelings on either side.

The release last month of a compilation of Bowie’s recordings with Talmy certainly tends to suggest that Talmy saw something in Bowie — while only four tracks were released at the time, there are twelve full-band recordings plus several songwriting demos, which implies that Talmy was definitely willing to see what Bowie could come up with.

At the same time as Talmy dropped Bowie, so did Les Conn. Conn had spent a lot of time and money promoting the careers of Bowie, George Underwood, and Bowie’s new friend Marc Bolan (who he allegedly met when the two of them helped paint Conn’s office in May or June 1965). Bowie and Underwood’s singles had repeatedly flopped, and Bolan was just about to sign to Decca records and release his first single which, you guessed it, flopped:

[Excerpt: Marc Bolan, “The Wizard”]

Conn later said “I was going broke looking after them. And I was getting very depressed with the music business – so I had to say goodbye”

Bowie soon found another manager — Ralph Horton, who was a regular at La Gioconda, the coffee bar where Bowie and Bolan used to hang out. Horton had some experience in the music industry — he’d been the booking agent for the Moody Blues early in their career — but he was disliked by the members of the band other than Bowie, partly because he apparently had a bit of a laissez-faire attitude towards paying people what they were owed, but also because of his sexuality. Horton was gay, and there’s quite a bit of suggestion that he and Bowie had an affair, and this didn’t go down well with some of the socially conservative members of the band.

There’s often been dispute about Bowie’s actual sexuality, with Bowie himself saying at different points that he was gay, bisexual, and straight — going so far as to say in the eighties that his claims of bisexuality had been purely for publicity. Certainly all his longstanding romantic relationships, and most of the more casual ones, were with women, but there are enough reports from people in his social circle of him having sexual relationships with men in the sixties and early seventies that it seems likely that he was at least behaviourally bisexual in his teens and early twenties.

(This would normally not be anyone’s business but his own, but so much of his success in his early years was bound up with his playing with gender and sexuality that it’s worth being clear about here, because it’s going to be something we talk about a lot in future episodes on Bowie.)

While Horton had worked with the Moody Blues, he had little other experience in the industry, and so he decided to get in touch with his friend Ken Pitt to see if Pitt would be interested in co-managing his new client.

Pitt was far too busy at the time, because Horton had happened to ask him at the worst possible time. Pitt was a manager and publicist for a variety of acts — for example he had been the publicist for Bob Dylan’s UK tour earlier that year. But his biggest client as a manager was Manfred Mann. Horton called Pitt on September the fifteenth 1965, and on September the thirteenth Mike Vickers, Manfred Mann’s guitarist, had played his last session with the group, quitting the band. This had also prompted Paul Jones, the group’s lead singer, to give his own notice that he was leaving the group as soon as they had found a replacement, though in the event Jones would stay around for several months to fulfil commitments. Pitt’s biggest act were suddenly without a lead singer or guitarist, and so quite reasonably he was too busy to sign up to co-manage someone who kept making flop records with different bands.

(Though this does raise the intriguing alternative possibility of Pitt suggesting Manfred Mann replace one Jones with another, and David Bowie taking the job that eventually went to Mike d’Abo, and now being best known as the bloke who sang lead on “Mighty Quinn”)

Pitt did make one suggestion though — Davy Jones was far too common a name, and he should change it (some have suggested that Pitt may have actually mentioned Davy Jones of the Monkees as a reason to change the name, but this is vastly unlikely — that Davy Jones had spent much of the previous two years as a performer in musical theatre in the US, and was still a year away from becoming a star). It was at this point that Bowie took on the name by which I’ve been referring to him all along. The group’s next single would be released under the name “David Bowie and the Lower Third”:

[Excerpt: David Bowie and the Lower Third, “Can’t Help Thinking About Me”]

That was recorded under Bowie’s latest record contract. Horton, through Denny Laine of the Moody Blues, knew Tony Hatch, a producer at Pye Records. We’ve encountered Hatch before — he was the producer on the Searchers’ hits, and writer of “Sugar and Spice” — but he was mostly known for music that’s slightly outside the remit of this podcast. His biggest and most consistent success at the time was his work with Petula Clark, for whom he wrote or co-wrote a huge string of hits starting with “Downtown”:

[Excerpt: Petula Clark, “Downtown”]

Hatch was most interested in Bowie because he was a writer of his own material. While the popular music world was slowly moving towards self-contained groups and singer-songwriters, Hatch mostly worked with artists who needed outside writers, and Hatch had to either write their material himself or find material for them, and he was pleased at the idea of getting someone who would bring his own songs to the session.

That said, Bowie’s first attempt at writing a single for Pye Records, “The London Boys”, a song about Mod culture, was rejected by the label. According to Bowie, they rejected it because of mentions of drug use. According to Tony Hatch it was because “It takes too long to get going. It would never make a single.”

Bowie kept working on songs, and in the meantime the Lower Third had been getting more experience as a live band, playing gigs supporting many of the biggest bands in the country, and adding unusual songs to their repertoire, including a version of “Chim-Chim-Cheree” from Mary Poppins (possibly a forerunner of the Cockney turn Bowie’s vocals were soon going to take) and an arrangement for rock band of “Mars: Bringer of War” from Holst’s Planets Suite:

[Excerpt: Gustav Holst, “Mars: Bringer of War”]

Bowie was apparently first impressed by that piece when he was six, when it was used on the soundtrack of the first episode of The Quatermass Experiment, Britain’s first attempt at intelligent science fiction TV, about a spaceship that gets lost and loses contact with the Earth, and the sole surviving astronaut in it who comes back changed into something very different. Holst’s piece was more inspired by his interest in astrology than in such science-fictional ideas, but Mars would turn up again in Bowie’s later career.

The song that was eventually chosen as the Lower Third’s first Pye single showed Bowie still in Townshend mode — both melodically and lyrically it could easily be a Who song, and the arrangement matches that, with the guitar and piano (the latter played by Hatch) reduced to playing chords for the most part while the bass is the lead instrument. Unfortunately, Graham Rivens, the bass player, rushes, speeding up as he goes along, and the tambourine playing is unutterably shoddy, so the track doesn’t come together with the power of its models.

It’s still, though, far and away the best thing Bowie had done thus far, and Ken Horton thought it had serious hit potential:

[Excerpt: David Bowie and the Lower Third, “Can’t Help Thinking About Me”]

Horton borrowed a large sum of money from a rich acquaintance, Ray Cook, on the promise that it would be repaid once Bowie was making the money he surely soon would, and he tried to buy the single onto the charts. He tried various stunts to promote it, like a celebrity party at which the biggest celebrity seems to have been John Lennon’s father Freddie Lennon, who had just signed to Pye records himself.

Horton’s campaign to get the record onto the charts worked — sort of. It didn’t make the Record Retailer chart, which is the one that’s retroactively been made the “official” chart in the books on the subject, and that’s partly because at the time fewer people paid attention to the Record Retailer chart so it wasn’t manipulated as often. Horton’s manipulations did manage to get the record to number twenty-five on the Radio London chart and thirty-four in the Melody Maker chart, both of which at the time people paid more attention to than the Record Retailer one.

However, this, the closest thing Bowie had come to having a hit, would also mark the end of the Lower Third’s time as his backing band. Horton had, according to the members of the band, been trying for a while to drive a wedge between Bowie and his backing band, and things came to a head when they asked when they were going to get paid for a run of gigs they were about to play. Horton told them that they weren’t, because all the money had gone on his promotion for the record. The band, fairly reasonably in the circumstances, pointed out that Horton was driving an expensive car and living the high life, and they would like to have some money for the work they were doing. Horton held firm, and the group said that they were not going to play the gigs without being paid, and that was the end of David Bowie and the Lower Third.

From that point on the old billing of “Davy Jones and the” or “David Bowie and the” was gone. While Bowie would often have stable bands, and those bands would occasionally have names, the records were just going to be billed to David Bowie, the solo artist.

Horton and Bowie soon found another set of musicians, who became known as The Buzz, three of whom had shortened nicknames — guitarist John “Hutch” Hutchinson, bass player Derek “Dek” Fearnley, keyboard player Derek “Chow” Boyes, and drummer John Eager. Hutchinson and Fearnley would both be important collaborators on the next phase of Bowie’s work, but people who saw the band performing live tend to say that the Buzz were the weakest of Bowie’s bands of this period as a live act.

That certainly seems to be the case on the evidence of the next single, “Do Anything You Say”, which is a definite step backwards from Bowie’s previous two records:

[Excerpt: David Bowie, “Do Anything You Say”]

Though the B-side, “Good Morning Girl”, is more enjoyable — another example of the Mose Allison style soul-jazz that Bowie had tried out with “Take My Tip”:

[Excerpt: David Bowie, “Good Morning Girl”]

The single flopped though, and Horton was starting to run out of Cook’s money to promote Bowie’s career. He decided to turn again to Ken Pitt, to see if Pitt was now, a few months on, more interested in co-managing him.

(I have to mention here, because it turns up in all the books and people will wonder why I don’t mention it otherwise, that Simon Napier-Bell claims that Horton tried to get several other people, including Napier-Bell himself, interested in co-managing Bowie by offering them Bowie’s sexual services as part of the deal. I should point out though, as I have every other time Napier-Bell has come up, that Napier-Bell is an entertaining and witty man with anecdotes about every major pop figure from the sixties through the eighties, and while some of those anecdotes are certainly true, he won’t let that stop him from including them with all the entertaining lies.)

Pitt was significantly less busy at this point. His management of Manfred Mann had ended shortly after the lineup changes, and he was not really interested in managing another rock band, but he was interested in working with solo entertainers, especially in an old-fashioned showbiz tradition, and Bowie was himself starting to think along those lines.

There’s some dispute as to what the song was that Bowie and the Buzz closed their set with the night that Kenneth Pitt saw them, but everyone is agreed that it was an old-fashioned showbiz sort of song, and that the performance was so intense that it made Pitt immediately come round to the idea of managing Bowie. Pitt claimed in his book on his relationship with Bowie that it was “You’ll Never Walk Alone”, the song from the musical Carousel, which Pitt knew best from the version by Judy Garland but which had been a number one hit for Gerry and the Pacemakers a couple of years earlier:

[Excerpt: Gerry and the Pacemakers, “You’ll Never Walk Alone”]

While Pitt’s memory of the night sounds vivid, it also seems unlikely that Bowie would play that particular song at that time — fashions were moving so fast in the mid-sixties that to perform a song that had been a hit for a Merseybeat group in late 1963 in spring 1966 would be considered so outdated you might as well be playing something from 1863.

It seems more likely, counterintuitive as it may seem, that Bowie instead performed the song that Fearnley remembered them performing, which had been a hit in 1962, but for a very different kind of artist than the Pacemakers. “What Kind of a Fool Am I?” had been introduced that year by its co-writer Anthony Newley in the musical Stop the World, I Want to Get Off

[Excerpt: Anthony Newley, “What Kind of a Fool Am I?”]

Newley is a curious figure who it’s very difficult to sum up, but who was astonishingly influential on Bowie. I did a special extra episode on Newley many years back, which you can listen to if you’re curious, but to put it as simply as I can, Newley was an actor, writer, singer, and songwriter who always had one foot in traditional showbusiness and another in truly eccentric personal work which combined satire of the same traditional showbusiness forms with scathing attacks on his own very obvious flaws as a human being.

In the former mode, Newley and his songwriting partner Leslie Bricusse wrote many, many songs which everyone listening to this podcast will undoubtedly know, even if you’re unaware of their authorship. They wrote the songs for Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, including “the Candyman”, which was a big hit for Sammy Davis Jr (who was a big fan of Newley and Bricusse’s work, and also had success with their “I’m Gonna Build a Mountain” — a song which was also performed in Monkees shows by Bowie’s namesake Davy Jones). With John Barry, they wrote the theme to Goldfinger, and they wrote “Feelin’ Good”, best known in the version by Nina Simone:

[Excerpt: Nina Simone, “Feeling Good”]

But Bowie was more of a fan of Newley in his other mode. In particular, Bowie had been one of a very small number of people who had actually watched The Strange World of Gurney Slade, a 1961 sitcom starring Newley. That had been written by Sid Hills and Dick Green, but from an idea by Newley, who was the driving force of the series, and whose later work as a writer often turns to the same themes. Gurney Slade starts with what appears to be a traditional, rather bad, sitcom, but then Newley’s character refuses to say his scripted line, and walks off the set and out of the TV studio. We follow Slade, who narrates several episodes through voiceover, through several increasingly unconventional situations until by episode four he’s on trial, threatened with execution, for the crime of the series so far not being funny. The last episode — and here I’m going to spoil a sixty-five-year-old episode of TV — ends with all the characters from the series being sent off to appear in other TV series or books, apart from Gurney himself, who is left alone in an empty TV studio, to confront his creator, Anthony Newley himself.

In a truly gripping finale, Gurney begs his creator for his life as he slowly turns from a living being into a ventriloquist’s dummy, which Newley picks up and walks out of the studio with:

[Excerpt: The Strange World of Gurney Slade]

The series was an acknowledged major influence on Monty Python, and while Patrick McGoohan never as far as I know mentioned it, it has a lot in common with The Prisoner as well. Bowie had been impressed by it too, and would regularly cite it in future interviews.

But along with all these other things, Newley had also had a career as a pop star in the late fifties and early sixties, a career into which he had more or less accidentally fallen after appearing in a film titled Idol on Parade in which he’d played a rock and roll star who’d been drafted. Obviously he’d had to record some songs for that, and he’d ended up having a string of hits, and the notable thing about them is that he was one of the few pop singers of the era who, rather than singing in a cod-American accent, sang with an English one — specifically a slightly flat-sounding Cockney:

[Excerpt: Anthony Newley, “Pop Goes The Weasel”]

Bowie had recently started to incorporate the influence of Newley into his singing and persona, as well as the influence of a few other people who were similarly English-sounding and eccentric. This was likely at least in part Bowie seeing which way the wind was starting to blow — the Kinks, for example, were starting to make more distinctively English music, and over the next year or two British musical culture would go through one of its occasional phases of reaction against American influence that came roughly once a decade in the twentieth century.

Another artist Bowie was influenced by at this point was Alan Klein — not the American manager (whose name is pronounced the same but spelled differently) this one was a singer and songwriter who by the end of 1966 would be touring as the lead singer of the New Vaudeville Band, but who at this point had released several unsuccessful singles and written songs for Joe Brown, Freddie and the Dreamers, and Marty Wilde among others. He had also released a single unsuccessful album of satirical pop songs, Well At Least Its British, which has later been cited as a major influence by many British songwriters trying to get away from American influence, most notably Damon Albarn:

[Excerpt: Alan Klein, “Twentieth Century Englishman”]

Klein’s manager was Ken Pitt, and several of the other people involved in making Klein’s album would soon become major figures in the next phase of Bowie’s musical evolution.

But for now, Bowie needed to finish off this phase. For his third Pye single, he would be backed by a different set of musicians again. Hutchinson had already decided to quit the band, move back to Yorkshire, and get married and get a real job. Hutchinson would be back in Bowie’s orbit again soon enough, but for now he was replaced with another guitarist, Billy Gray.

Before Hutchinson had left, the group had made an attempt to record Bowie’s “I Dig Everything”, with the addition of a brass section and the backing singers Kiki Dee, Madeline Bell, and Lesley Duncan. Unfortunately the brass section hadn’t gelled well with the Buzz and the session had been a bit of a disaster, so Hatch brought in session musicians to back Bowie on a remade version, with an arrangement by Hatch that sounds like his work for Petula Clark and doesn’t really fit the style of the song at all, though the song is also not one of Bowie’s best:

[Excerpt: David Bowie, “I Dig Everything”]

The B-side, “I’m Not Losing Sleep”, was better, though stylistically a little all over the place — it can’t decide if it wants to be a standard Hatch production or a pop-soul record like those that were starting to come out on Immediate Records that year:

[Excerpt: David Bowie, “I’m Not Losing Sleep”]

After that, Bowie was once again dropped by his record label, once again because a producer who saw he definitely had a lot of potential and would become a big star one day just couldn’t figure out what to do with him, and because he didn’t have the right musicians. Bowie must have felt at this point like he was in the eternal recurrence that Nietzsche wrote about, doomed to keep repeating the same events in the same ways over and over — but like Zarathustra he still seemed, at this point, to find this a source of joy rather than despair.

He kept on working, writing songs, since he’d got signed to a publishing deal at the same time he’d been signed by Talmy. One of those songs, “Over the Wall We Go” was inspired by a spate of prison breakouts that year, and had a chorus that played on the well-known phrase “all coppers are bastards” (and musically quoting the line “ooh, have a banana” from the old music hall song “Let’s All Go Down the Strand”). Bowie was considering it for his putative first album, should he ever get to make one, but it got placed with another singer, a man whose birth name was Paul Beuselinck (and I apologise if I mispronounced that), who had originally performed as Paul Dean, but was now going under the stage name “Oscar” — his middle name, which his manager, Robert Stigwood, approved of because it was reminiscent of Wilde.

Bowie had enjoyed Oscar’s previous single, “Join My Gang”, which had been written by Pete Townshend, and had even stopped Townshend in the street to tell him how much he’d liked it, and he added his own backing vocals on “Over The Wall We Go”, but like Oscar’s previous single, it failed to chart:

[Excerpt: Oscar, “Over The Wall We Go”]

Bowie wasn’t the only one who was getting every chance to become a success and not managing it — it wasn’t just Townshend and Bowie who gave Oscar songs that failed to hit; his next single was written by the Bee Gees and featured them on backing vocals, with a similar utter lack of success. Under that name, Oscar is mostly known in the music business for the publicity stunt that Stigwood tried for “Join My Gang”, sending out plaster busts of his head to prominent music business figures and journalists — supposedly it became a game to drop them out of windows and make them smash on the street below.

Oscar took a year off from the stage, but he would soon return, under yet another stage name, Paul Nicholas, in the cast of a musical Stigwood was producing, Hair. He would go on to lead roles in Stigwood’s West End productions of Jesus Christ Superstar and Grease, as well as in films like Tommy and the Bee Gees version of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, though he’s now best known for his sitcom work in the eighties.

Incidentally, his father, Oscar Beuselinck, was a prominent entertainment lawyer who would for a time be Bowie’s lawyer.

With no record contract of his own, Bowie went into the studio anyway, to record a single financed by Pitt — who by this time was effectively Bowie’s sole manager, though Horton was still technically co-managing him for the moment. Bowie’s new plan was, according to several biographies I’ve read, to combine the Anthony Newley-inspired story lyrics and Cockney vocals with orchestration imitating Pet Sounds, which had just come out and was influencing everybody.

That may plausibly have been the intention — Bowie was a sponge at this point and would decide roughly every five minutes that he was going to be making records like whatever the last great album he’d heard was — but at least on this initial self-financed single, the orchestration owes far more to the arch comedy trad revivalism of the Bonzo Dog Doodah band (who had released their first two singles, covers of 1920s novelty songs, earlier in 1966) or the New Vaudeville Band, although Bowie’s lyric to the A-side, “Rubber Band”, goes even further back than that, to the Edwardian era, telling a story of a young man who loved to listen to a brass band in the park with his girlfriend before the first world war, but went off to war and came back to find that his girlfriend had married the bandleader:

[Excerpt: David Bowie, “Rubber Band”]

Bowie was clearly in an Edwardian mode at the time — “Let’s All Go Down the Strand”, the song that he’d musically quoted in “Over the Wall We Go”, was originally published in the 19th century, but had its height of popularity in the early part of the twentieth, lasting into the First World War.

The orchestration on “Rubber Band”, and on Bowie’s recordings for the next few months, was by Bowie and Dek Fearnley, the bass player with the Buzz. Neither of them actually knew anything about orchestration, but Fearnley had a very basic understanding of how to write sheet music, so the two of them got hold of a book on orchestration and picked out instruments that sounded appropriate from their descriptions — in the case of “Rubber Band” this was trumpet, tuba, and oboe. Then Bowie would hum and “la” his way through the ideas he had, and Fearnley would transcribe them as best he could, and then these transcriptions would be given to the session players who would do their best to play what Fearnley had written (though apparently at one session, a clarinet player pointed out that there were five crotchets in one bar of common time Fearnley had written when there should be four, and flat-out refused to play the session).

The other track recorded at the session for “Rubber Band”, featuring the same orchestral instruments, was “The London Boys”, the song that Bowie had cut as a potential first single for Pye the previous year. By late 1966 its portrait of a seventeen-year-old runaway who’s come to London to live as a mod and take too many pills was already outdated as the hip crowd in London were moving on from amphetamines to psychedelics, but it’s still one of Bowie’s better early songs. That said, one can see why Tony Hatch passed over it as a possible single — it doesn’t exactly scream hit:

[Excerpt: David Bowie, “The London Boys”]

Pitt took these two tracks to Hugh Mendl, an A&R executive at Decca records. Mendl was a producer with idiosyncratic tastes, but occasionally sound commercial ones. He had been the one who had signed Chris Barber to Decca and produced the Barber session which had included Lonnie Donegan’s “Rock Island Line” and led to the skiffle craze, and he had also signed Tommy Steele, Britain’s first homegrown rock and roll idol. He had also worked on some of Anthony Newley’s records, and had co-produced Alan Klein’s Well At Least Its British. His tastes tended to be slightly away from standard rock and roll, and he had for example put out early records by the folk guitarist Davey Graham, and he also put out albums as varied as Frankie Howerd’s career-redefining standup album At The Establishment, an audio recording of a grand prix race, and a wonderfully-titled album by Paddy Roberts, Songs for Gay Dogs, whose music doesn’t quite live up to its title:

[Excerpt: Paddy Roberts, “Don’t Use the WC”]

Mendl was hugely excited when he heard Bowie’s recordings, saying they were the best thing he’d heard since Anthony Newley, and agreed to sign Bowie to Decca’s new subsidiary, Deram, which had only just been set up but had already had a big hit with its second single, Cat Stevens’ “I Love My Dog”, and over the next year would release important progressive records by the Move, Procol Harum, and the Moody Blues. Deram was set up specifically to release the kind of orchestrated progressive pop that Bowie was now talking about making, and seemed to be the perfect home for him.

As part of the deal, the “Rubber Band” single that had already been recorded was released, but it wasn’t expected to do well, and that wasn’t really the point — Bowie was now going to be an album artist, and he and the three remaining members of the Buzz (who had lost their guitarist when Pitt and Horton had decided that Bowie wasn’t going to play gigs for the forseeable future, and therefore the Buzz weren’t earning any money) went into the studio to start work on what would — finally — be Bowie’s debut album.

Mendl wasn’t going to produce it — he was more of an executive than a hands-on producer at this point in his career — but he left Bowie in good hands, as the producer was going to be Mike Vernon. We’ve mentioned Vernon before — he was the blues producer who had signed the Graham Bond Organization and John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, and who had produced the legendary “Blues Breakers with Eric Clapton” album, and he would go on to produce most of Fleetwood Mac’s early records. But while he was mostly interested in loud electric blues, he had also co-produced Well At Least Its British with Mendl.

And the engineer they brought in was Gus Dudgeon, who would go on to become a producer and make big hits with the Bonzo Dog Band, Elton John, and others, but at this point was only a couple of years into his career, though he had already engineered several important folk records and the Zombies’ big hit “She’s Not There”:

[Excerpt: The Zombies, “She’s Not There”]

So Bowie had in Dek Fearnley someone who was willing to work with him to turn his musical ideas into orchestration, he had a producer who was familiar both with the English archness that Bowie was now interested in and with the blues-rock that was some of the hippest music of the moment. He had one of the hottest young engineers in the country, and he was signed to a new, prestigious, record label as the pet project of an executive who was fully committed to his work. He had a budget big enough to hire the best musicians, and he had studio time with which to experiment.

After several months in the studio working on the album, the first sign of what Bowie could do with these resources came out. It was an experimental single, inspired by Bowie’s love of fantasy and science fiction; a duet which would become a top ten single, and one of Bowie’s most famous recordings, one that’s still regularly discussed today:

[Excerpt: David Bowie, “The Laughing Gnome”]

We’ll talk about that, and the other recordings Bowie did in late 1966 and early 1967, in part two of this two-parter, where we’ll also discover how my rather gnomic pronouncements about Nietzsche at the start tie in with all this. The story of Bowie, and his evolution into a star man, is by gnome means over.

This episode is on “Frownland” by Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band, and is the third part of a trilogy following the episodes on the GTOs and Frank Zappa. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.

Patreon backers also have a twenty-five-minute bonus episode available, on “The Tra-La-La Song (One Banana, Two Banana) by the Banana Splits.

Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by editing, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/

(more…)

This episode follows on from the episode on the GTOs. These two make up two parts of a three-part story, and I’m hoping to have part three, on Captain Beefheart, up before the end of the month.

This episode is on “Peaches En Regalia” by Frank Zappa. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.

Patreon backers also have a fifty-five-minute bonus episode available, on “Song to the Siren” by Tim Buckley.

Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by editing, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/

(more…)

This episode took longer than normal to come up because, as you’ll see from the episode itself, I’m releasing it simultaneously with the next episode, on Frank Zappa. These two make up two parts of a three-part story, and I’m hoping to have part three, on Captain Beefheart, up before the end of the month. There will also be, between this and the next episode on the feed, a trailer for an exciting project I’m a minor part of.

This episode is on “The Captain’s Fat Theresa Shoes” by the GTOs. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.

Patreon backers also have a half-hour bonus episode available, on “My Pal Foot-Foot” by the Shaggs.

Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by editing, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/

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Apologies for the delay in posting this episode — health issues have continued to affect me. They *seem* to be improving, but I should also mention here that some of the guitar demonstrations in this episode are not quite the same part as Pete Townshend is playing on the records, because my arthritis is affecting my hands.

For those who haven’t heard the announcement I posted, songs from this point on will sometimes be split among multiple episodes, so this is the second part of a two-episode look at the song “Pinball Wizard” by The Who. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.

Patreon backers also have an forty-eight-minute bonus episode available, on “Time of the Season” by the Zombies.

Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by editing, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/

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