("Queen Bitch" by David Bowie)
♪ Oh yeah ♪
♪ Oh yeah ♪
- [Host] Near the end of 1971,
an eclectic set of proto
glam rock stompers,
intimate ballads and love letters,
collected under the title Hunky Dory
became David Bowie's first masterpiece.
Musical rebirth is already
a way of life for Bowie,
fronting teenage blues
bands before a flirtation
with hippie-dom in the late 60s,
he opened his first big
hit, the folk rock classic
Space Oddity.
Neither an obscure striver
nor a world famous rock star,
the ever ambitious Bowie signed with the
notoriously assertive
manager, Tony Defries,
and set down over two dozen demos
for what would become Hunky Dory.
The resulting album
revealing just how many
aesthetic directions Bowie
was exploring at once.
The album opening Changes
would become a defacto
theme song for Bowie's career.
A piano driven pop rock teen anthem
envisioning an uncertain future
where young weirdos upend
the old social order.
With its harsh warning to rock and rollers
doomed to get older, the song began
as a saxophone laced provocation.
"It's sort of baiting
an audience, isn't it?"
Bowie mused years later.
"It's saying, 'Look, I'm going so fast,
"'you're not gonna be
able to keep up with me.'"
♪ Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes ♪
♪ Turn and face the strange ♪
♪ Ch-Ch-Changes ♪
♪ Oh look out, you rock and rollers ♪
- [Host] With its
melodramatic musical sibling
Oh! You Pretty Things, it set the tone
for a sonically diverse album,
united by cinematic
grandeur and a fascination
with fame, silver screens and
the stars that graced them.
♪ Oh you pretty things ♪
♪ Don't you know you're driving your ♪
♪ Mamas and papas insane ♪
- [Host] Life On Mars is the
record's emotional center
and one of Bowie's greatest recordings.
Written as the space race
captivated kids around the world,
it follows a restless girl,
who escapes her boring life
at the movies, only to
find the film equally dull.
♪ Is there life on Mars ♪
- [Host] Frank Sinatra's out-sized image
looms over the song, which
borrows a chord progression
from his 1969 hit My Way.
This tiny theft was
Bowie's revenge on My Way
lyricist, Paul Anka,
who had adapted the song
from a French hit by Claude Francois,
preventing Bowie from
publishing his own adaptation,
Even A Fool Learns To Love.
Song For Bob Dylan, which takes its title
from Dylan's own Guthrie tribute,
Song To Woody, is the most defusive
of three homages to
Bowie's American idols.
All recorded in the
afterglow of his first visit
to the States in January 1971.
Here, Bowie adopts
Dylan's signature wheeze
and the lines, "We've lost his poems,
"so we're writing on the walls,"
refer to Dylan's retreat from public life
after his quasi-mythical
motorcycle crash in 1966.
Like many Hunky Dory tracks, the song
is a meditation on fame
and its discontents.
♪ Hear this, Robert Zimmerman ♪
♪ I wrote a song for you ♪
♪ About a strange young man called Dylan ♪
♪ With a voice like sand and glue ♪
- [Host] The last of the three
shout outs is Queen Bitch,
a hard rocking, homoerotic,
Velvet Underground pastiche
that foreshadowed Bowie's
publicity courting
declaration, "I'm gay
and always have been,"
in a January 1972 issue of Melody Maker.
During his trip to New
York the previous year,
Bowie saw the Velvet Underground perform
at the Electric Circus,
and met the front man
he assumed was Lou Reed, only to learn
that Reed has recently left the group,
and Bowie had been watching
Doug Yule all along.
♪ It could have been me ♪
♪ Oh yeah, it could have been me ♪
♪ Why didn't I say ♪
♪ Why didn't I say ♪
- [Host] Album closing
track, The Bewlay Brothers,
seems to dramatize Bowie's relationship
with his schizophrenic
half brother, Terry Burns,
with Bowie using Bewlay,
the name of a local
London tobacconist, as a stand in for his
own adopted last name.
"I wouldn't know how
to interpret the lyric
"of this song," he said years later.
"Other than suggesting that there are
"layers of ghosts within it."
♪ Oh, and we were gone ♪
♪ Real cool traders ♪
♪ We were so turned on ♪
♪ You thought we were fakers ♪
- [Host] The same might be said
for any of the new guises Bowie inhabited
on the songs in cover of Hunky Dory,
which featured a simultaneously glamorous
and haunted shot of Bowie,
inspired by a book of
Marlene Dietrich photos.
Hunky Dory was only a
moderate commercial success
on its release in 1971,
despite enthusiastic reviews.
By then, though, Bowie was
too busy to do much promotion,
already in the process
of transforming himself
into an alien messiah,
and assembling a new band
to record Hunky Dory's
follow up, The Rise And Fall
Of Ziggy Stardust And
The Spiders From Mars,
released to great success
and acclaim six months later.
Filled with album cut classics, Hunky Dory
would ride the alien rocker's
powder blue coattails
to immortality, with Life
On Mars resurfacing in 1973,
to hit number three on
the UK Singles chart.
Recorded between Major Tom's launch
and Ziggy's landing, Hunky Dory is like
a hand drawn map to the constellation
of art, fame and apocalypse that Bowie
would navigate as Ziggy, Aladdin Sane,
Halloween Jack, the Thin White Duke,
and other heroes.
(film reel rolls)
