‘HUNKY DORY’ (David Bowie) 1971

LP 1971: ‘HUNKY DORY’ (David Bowie)

On December 17, 1971, David Bowie”s fourth album, “Hunky Dory”, was released in London, the first of those released under the RCA label. When everyone thought that “Space Oddity” had been an isolated success, David Bowie appeared on the cover of “Hunky Dory” as a decadent diva of cinema (the photo and the posture are inspired by one of Marlene Dietrich) unfolding inside a series of magnificent songs that would mark her future career.

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As an accompaniment he already had all the members of what would be on the next album, the Spiders from Mars from “Ziggy Stardust”. With the departure of Tony Visconti, until then, bassist, producer, and Bowie”s right-hand man, Trevor Bolder would take over the bass and Ken Scott would take over the production. Mick Ronson on guitar and Mick Woodmansey on drums completed the line-up. The back cover of the album bore the accreditation “Produced by Ken Scott (assisted by the actor)”. The “actor” was Bowie himself, whose “concept of himself”, in the words of NME critics Roy Carr and Charles Shaar Murray, was “to think of himself as an actor”.

While his previous album, “The Man Who Sold the World”, was being released, Bowie travelled to the US in 1971 to promote his work. Although he does not act, he makes direct contact with Warhol”s world. Skyscrapers, the New York underground, drugs, violence, and beings cornered against the wall – common images in Lou Reed”s songs – confirm the dimensions of an abyss by which the singer feels trapped. The ambiguity and decadence he encountered fascinated and inspired David, whose artistic personality was in an unstoppable growth. That same year, at the end of May, his son Zowie was born, the result of his marriage to the American model Mary Angela Barnett and Peter Noone (ex-Herman” Hermits) reached number 12 in the British charts with one of Bowie”s songs, “Oh you pretty thing”, not yet recorded by the author.

When David returns from the U.S. In the US, he broke up with his manager, Kent Pitt, who was leading him to a financial disaster. On the advice of Visconti and Marc Bolan, he hired a Jewish lawyer, Tony de Fries, a character seasoned in the management of the pop world. Under his tutelage and with the experiences gathered in the USA, both of them develop the new facet of Bowie. The singer then said: “I’m going to become more theatrical, more unbridled, much more than Iggy Pop and the Stooges have been”.

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His image becomes increasingly affected, provocative and exhibitionist, even in the sexually ambiguous context of the new “glam” trend, led by his colleague Marc Bolan. Her long shoulder-length hair and her face hallucinated by Ingmar Bergman”s heroine will receive other cultural contributions. De Bolan, sequins and makeup; of Mick Jagger, the half-open mouth and the provocation, sometimes obscene, and of Lou Reed, the androgynous sordidness, which Bowie transmutes into space.

On top of all this, Bowie (in a publicity stunt that, in the singer’s words years later, “worked very well in Europe, but closed doors for me in the US”. He began to publicly manifest his bisexuality, a fact that resulted in homosexuals, who in the early seventies were beginning to free themselves from their guilt complex, to take him as a champion. This made Bowie the living symbol of a new sexual morality. It took on a new importance, more sociological than musical, as had happened with the Beatles ten years earlier.

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While DeFries manages to sign a contract with RCA, Bowie tours Holland, Belgium, and France with his group. On their return they lock themselves up to record their first album with the new label, “Hunky Dory”.

The disc opens with ‘Changes’ , Bowie’s vision of how things change more than a decade after Dylan said so, and of his own artistic reinvention. (“Strange fascination, fascinating me / Changes are taking the pace I’m going through”)

“Still don’t know what I was waiting for
And my time was running wild
A million dead-end streets and
Every time I thought I’d got it made
It seemed the taste was not so sweet
So I turned myself to face me
But I’ve never caught a glimpse
Of how the others must see the faker
I’m much too fast to take that test”

With a piano intro by Wakeman that is very reminiscent of that of the Beatles’ ‘Martha My Dear’, Bowie sings his own version of ‘Oh you pretty things’, que which Peter Noone had already published (with Bowie at the piano) a few weeks earlier. It has a pop melody that hides lyrics based on Nietzsche’s thoughts when he anticipates the arrival of ‘homo superior’, a precursor of ‘Starman’ (which will appear on his next album). In ‘Hunky Dory’, David sings the original lyrics with the phrase ‘The earth is a bitch’, which Noone, in an excess of self-censorship, had changed to ‘The earth is a beast’. ‘Eight line poem’, flows immediately without separating silence. As the title suggests, David sings only eight lines.

With one of the strangest lyrics ever written, and with a commanding chorus, ‘Life on Mars?’, the album”s star track, it sounds like a cross between a Broadway musical and a Dalí painting. In fact, the BBC described its lyrics as “a succession of surrealist visions as if it were a painting by Salvador Dalí”. The song bears a very strong resemblance to Sinatra”s “My way” (the chords are identical), for good reasons. In 1968, Bowie wrote the lyrics to a French song titled “Comme, d”habitude”, calling his version “Even a fool learns to love”. It was never published, but some time later, Canadian singer-songwriter Paul Anka heard the original version, bought its rights, and rewrote it titled “My Way”.

David Bowie wrote “Life on Mars?” as a parody of Frank Sinatra, annoyed by the loss of money that had meant to him, although in the small print of the album he said that it was “inspired by Frankie”. Anyway, it couldn”t have been more different from “My Way”. Plenty of surreal imagery (Mickey Mouse turned into a cow?) combined with Bowie”s operatic quality, Mick Ronson”s guitar arrangements, and Rick Wakeman”s piano, to ensure one of the most particular themes in music history. Released as a single, it reached No. 3 in the British charts, although this would be almost two years later, when “Ziggy Stardust” had already catapulted the singer”s fame. A journalist suggested that the song was written after his short and apparently stormy relationship with actress Hermione Farthingale. Years later, in 1990, at one of Bowie”s concerts, he introduced the song thus: “When you fall in love, you write a love song. This is a love song”

“It’s on America’s tortured brow
That Mickey Mouse has grown up a cow
Now the workers have struck for fame
‘Cause Lennon’s on sale again
See the mice in their million hordes
From Ibiza to the Norfolk Broads
Rule Britannia is out of bounds
To my mother, my dog, and clowns
But the film is a saddening bore
‘Cause I wrote it ten times or more
It’s about to be writ again
As I ask you to focus on…
…Sailors fighting in the dance hall
Oh man! Look at those cavemen go
It’s the freakiest show
Take a look at the Lawman
Beating up the wrong guy
Oh man! Wonder if he’ll ever know
He’s in the best selling show
Is there life on Mars?”

David Bowie – Life On Mars? (Official Video)

His most human side is shown in “Kooks”, a song dedicated to his son Zowie, clearly inspired by Neil Young (whose music David was listening to when he received the news of the birth). Zowie, now called Duncan Jones, is currently a respected British filmmaker known for the science fiction films “Moon” (2009) and “Source Code” (2011).
The end of the first side of the LP is “Quicksand”, whose lyrics are influenced by Buddhism and the occult and abound in the ideas of Nietzsche”s “superman”, with mentions of Aleister Crowley, as well as Himmler, Churchill and Juan Pujol, a double agent of the 2nd World War whose pseudonym was Garbo.

The track was recorded with multiple acoustic guitar overlays, attempting to evoke the powerful effect achieved by producer Ken Scott on one of his previous works, George Harrison”s “All Things Must Pass”, which he had been involved in as a recording engineer. Lyricism dominates the song, despite the fact that Bowie shows himself to be an inveterate romantic who refuses to be one. A grandiose orchestration by Mick Ronson and David”s voice bring a certain Beatle spirit to this sensitive chronicle about the loss of power.

“I’m not a prophet or a stone age man
Just a mortal with the potential of a superman
I’m living on
I’m tethered to the logic of Homo Sapien
Can’t take my eyes from the great salvation
Of bullshit faith
If I don’t explain what you ought to know
You can tell me all about it
On the next Bardo
I’m sinking in the quicksand of my thought
And I ain’t got the power anymore”

‘Fill your heart’, A version of a song composed by Biff Rose and Paul Williams in 1966, it replaced at the last minute the song ‘Bombers’, initially recorded for the album and which was rescued in the 1990 reissue.

In the next three tracks, Bowie pays tribute to his American influences. First, ‘Andy Warhol’, which begins with a conversation in the recording studio, in which Bowie tries to correct Ken Scott for his incorrect pronunciation of ‘Andy Warhol’ in the introduction. When Scott solemnly repeats – this time quite correctly – the intro, Bowie begins to play with a laugh. Its ‘flamenco’ riff with the acoustic guitar stands out, which is maintained throughout the song. It is the rhythm section that dominates, while David’s voice and the choruses no longer play dialogue, adding to the dry, tireless cut that maintains the percussion. The chorus repeats, over and over again:

“Andy Warhol looks a scream
Hang him on my wall
Andy Warhol, Silver Screen
Can’t tell them apart at all”

When Bowie showed the song to Andy Warhol, he was horrified, as he thought the lyrics mocked his physical appearance. When the song ended, Warhol and Bowie looked into each other’s eyes for a moment, until Andy said, ‘I love your shoes.’ The two then engaged in a 45-minute conversation about shoes.

In ‘Song for Bob Dylan’, David, trying to imitate Dylan with his voice, carries the weight of the subject and compares the American’s voice to sand and glue, in a similar way to how author Joyce Carol Oates described it in her first meeting with Bob: ‘When we first heard that raw, young and apparently untrained voice, frankly nasal, as if sandpaper was capable of singing, the effect was dramatic and electrifying’

“Oh, hear this Robert Zimmerman
I wrote a song for you
About a strange young man called Dylan
With a voice like sand and glue
Some words of truthful vengeance
They could pin us to the floor
Brought a few more people on
And put the fear in a whole lot more”

And thirdly, in ‘Queen Bitch’, Bowie pays homage to Lou Reed and his Velvet Underground. The song’s arrangements, a strong drum beat, melodic bass line, powerful distorted guitar chords and Mick Ronson’s guitar riff (similar to that of ‘Sweet Jane’, but more inspired by Eddie Cochran’s ‘Three Steps to Heaven’), plus an underrated vocal performance by Bowie in which he mimics Reed’s style with admiration and perhaps a demystifying irony, would mark one of the guidelines of glam-rock that the singer would display in the following work, ‘The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars’ (1972).

Finally, the song that closes the album,  ‘The Bewley Brothers’, has been described as “Bowie”s densest and most impenetrable track”. He supposedly told Ken Scott that it was a song for the American market, because “Americans always like to read between the lines, even if the lyrics lack all sense”. Others have seen in it references to a half-brother of Bowie, a victim of schizophrenia.

The English music critics put the album through the roof; they wanted to see in Bowie a super-intellectual pop singer, a kind of philosopher-singer. On the other hand, the Bowie-De Fries tandem did nothing more than exploit the discoveries of glam-rock invented by Marc Bolan and give it a nuance of bisexuality that he, in principle, did not have, opening the way to a series of minor groups -The Sweet, Gary Glitter, etc.- that took advantage of all that wardrobe and paraphernalia.

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