Bowie

If this is your first time visiting this website, check out the What and the Why.

 Ok like I said in the first post ("Why"),  I made a Spotify playlist for my friend.

Here is is. You can put it on while you read this.  It's called "A very Bowie New Years".

All right here's the deal on where to start with Bowie.

I think of Bowie records as 3 kind of major categories.

1.  The Mick Ronson guitar centric stuff, Ziggy era

2.  The arty Eno-ish sounding stuff, this is like the Berlin era stuff

3.  The funky shit

These categories overlap.  I think.  Check the liner notes you lazy fuckers.  Don't expect me to do everything.  I am hungover and I am lazy too.

Bowie brought androgony into the mainstream of rock music.  Without Bowie, I would argue, subjectively, you get no David Byrne.  I believe he was a saxophone player.  I am not sure what else he could play, most live stuff I know about has him on vocals only.  

You can slot Bowie in a few different groupings..  You could put him with Roxy Music.  You could put him with Nile Rogers and 70s funk.  He wrote All the Young Dudes, so you can put him with Mott the Hoople, who had a hit with it, and thats the version you probably know.   You can go listen to that if you don't know it.  Do that.  More overlap with Mott comes into play because Mick Ronson, who was Bowie's guitar player on the essential shit, also produced and I think played with Ian Hunter.  Look it up.

ok,  let me get it out of the way that Mick Ronson is one of my favorite guitar players ever.  A recent documentary about him implied without really coming out and saying that Mick is under-credited as the creative force behind all that stuff,   I have no idea if this is true.  But there is another flick about the Ziggy tour which you can see Mick on stage, he was a real badass man.

For this stuff, the guitar stuff, check out Panic in Detroit, check out Moonage Daydream.  Les Paul heaven.

Ok the arty stuff, this is where you get a line to Roxy Music, Talking heads, in my opinion.  Probably you get a line to the Bad Seeds too.  Bowie made a couple records in Berlin.  This stuff has a more electronic flavor and is more ambient than the ziggy straight ahead guitar rockers.

Im talking about Heroes, Sound and Vision.  The records are Low and Lodger.  I think you can throw Scary Monsters in this pile too - that record has another guitar master, Robert Fripp.  Check out Its no Game on that record.  (By the way you can draw another line to Talking Heads here, because Adrian Belew played with the heads, and of course with Fripp in King Crimson).

Allright Funk.  Golden Years.  Fashion.  These tunes came out around the disco era but the funk in them is more rooted in soul music.  That shit is awesome.  This thread also goes through to the Let's Dance era stuff which was more disco-ish in my opinion, and poppy.  But - like so much music from the 80s, I can enjoy it now from a nostalgia standpoint more than I did at the time.  I actually have this feeling about a lot of the synth music from that time.  

Two more points about Let's Dance.  1.  Thats Stevie Ray Vaughn on the title track guitar solo.  2.  There is a fucking great cover of  the title track by M.Ward.  he slows it down and does it on accoustic.  Its killer.

And I gotta give a shout to Hunky Dory, which is in my top 10 all time favorite albums.  Maybe top 5 but we'll have to sort that out later.

Well-known shit / hits I didn't talk about.

Young Americans

Changes

Space Oddity