[playing ukulele]
[singing] Ground control to Major Tom...
[speaking] Hey, everybody, it's Jim McGuinn.
First Teenage Kicks of 2019, and you can't
really get through the first couple of weeks
of January without thinking about David Bowie,
because the anniversary of his birth, and
unfortunately, the anniversary of his passing,
are both happening next week.
[singing] Ground control to Major Tom...
Because if you remember, three years ago,
he died just two days after his birthday.
So we're going to pay tribute this week to
Bowie, which we do a lot on Teenage Kicks;
he's kind of the biggest icon, probably, of
our entire existence at The Current and definitely
for the Teenage Kicks era.
And we're going to focus this week on the
couple of records he put out before he was
world famous.
So "Ziggy Stardust" in '72 was really the
record that propelled him to tremendous worldwide
fame, but before that, he was an artist struggling
to find an audience.
He had one novelty hit song in the U.K., or
at least that's what it was thought to be
at the time before he became a huge artist.
That song was "Space Oddity."
We're going to play the demo version of that
this week on Kicks, and also a bunch of songs
from his early records: the "Space Oddity"
album and then "The Man Who Sold the World."
So we'll dig into some early, kind of pre-fame
Bowie this week in tribute to him on Teenage
Kicks on The Current, Saturdays, 8 to 10.
[singing] For here...
[singing] I am sitting on a tin can...
[singing] Far across the world ...
