RIP David Bowie 1947-2016

The Thin White Duke

There is absolutely no dispute about the breadth and depth of David Bowie and his musical legacy. So this entry is not anything to dispute it. It is immense, it is far reaching, and as with Michael Jackson he was a force of culture that constantly exerted this creative influence over so many people and things. In his passing, I am left astounded by the size of the hole he leaves behind, in our collective cultural consciousness.

I didn't come to David Bowie's oeuvre in the way most people seem to have done. There was no Ziggy Stardust or pantomime makeup. If anything those things were a hindrance. When I was a teenager listening to rock music to define my own sense of identity, there was nothing more superfluous than the trappings presented by an English Rock Star who wanted to obfuscate his identity. So while I was listening to the likes of The Who or King Crimson, it was a hard sell to get me to see past the makeup and the wardrobe and my swooning girl classmates. What the hell was that? It was hard to wrap your head around something wound in the opposite direction.

Oddly enough there is a cross over intersecting between Bowie and The Who. In his younger days, Bowie was a mod.



I was suspicious of the image machine he generated and maintained. At the same time I was deeply aware that he kept hiring guitar players I was deeply into. Robert Fripp and Adrian Belew both featured prominently on his late 70s work, and Stevie Ray Vaughn was the featured player on 'Let's Dance'. If nothing else, I could suspect that he had the same kind of ear for guitar that I did, if he was hiring these guys to do their thing on his records; and to that extent I could relate to the sonic space on 'Scary Monsters' and 'Low'.



Dramatically - or perhaps just drastically - sometime in the 1980s David Bowie formed a band called 'Tin Machine'. They recorded their first album in Sydney's 301 Studios, and his band were testing out their material on the Northern Beaches. It featured Reeves Gabrels as the guitar player and the music was unapologetically guitar rock. Suddenly he was a lot proximal than just about any rock star. And that was how I found myself listening to more Bowie. There is always the crowd who say they like the old stuff better than the new stuff, but for my money, the newer stuff was more up my alley. I spent hours trying to figure out Reeves Gabrels' moves on the fretboard.

 He was very productive deep into the 1990s, and even in to the 2000s until he suffered a heart attack. More recently he returned to the studio to produce 'The Next Day' and 'Blackstar'. Given his late battle with cancer, we can probably understand 'Blackstar' as his last testament.

To some, he will be Ziggy Stardust or one of his other characters. He may even be remembered for his movie roles more than his core area of rock music. I remember seeing him talking to Michael Parkinson in an interview and he was asked about his various pursuits, and Bowie responded quite strongly that it all begins and ends with his music, which is rock music. He was surprisingly forthright about that position; no prevarication or pandering to other arts. He was simply a rock star, and he knew it, and he was perfectly comfortable being just that.

Vale David Bowie, you were a glorious modern god.