5 years after the discharge of David Bowie’s first masterpiece, Hunky Dory — which changed the notion of Bowie as a one-hit area oddity with the thought Bowie as an ever-ch-ch-changing moon-age messiah — he provided up some attribute mythmaking. In a 1976 Melody Maker interview, Bowie claimed Hunky Dory‘s “Tune for Bob Dylan,” a piss-take extraordinaire that Bowie had shrugged off by saying it was how “some” folks noticed Dylan, actually, “laid out what I wished to do in rock.” “It was at that interval that I stated, ‘OK, when you don’t need to do it, I’ll,’” he continued. “I noticed the management void.”
Divine Symmetry, a brand new field set subtitled The Journey to Hunky Dory, suggests Bowie’s declare was solely partially true. With 5 years of hindsight, he was hiding the panic he had felt whereas making Hunky Dory. The gathering’s treasure trove of 5 discs incorporates uncooked demos, radio periods, a uncommon stay live performance, and different mixes that present how Bowie was determined to determine his subsequent step. He was mired within the quicksand of novelty standing, and after his third album, 1970’s The Man Who Bought the World, bombed, he clammed up. He principally stopped touring, and he bickered along with his backing band. However a visit to the U.S. reinvigorated him, permitting himself to divulge heart’s contents to nuanced pop songs that traded an ethos of inclusiveness for the solitude of his earlier document, giving him the braveness he wanted to determine a path ahead.
After touring throughout the States, he began writing songs for his pals to carry out, à la Andy Warhol’s Manufacturing unit, and wished to tour as a troupe. “Tune for Bob Dylan” was meant for his buddy George Underwood to sing, whereas “Andy Warhol” was for Dana Gillespie, who carried out the tune with a Nico-like drawl on the BBC Peel Session included right here. “Oh! You Fairly Issues” was a success for Herman’s Hermits’ Peter Noone earlier than Bowie launched it. If he couldn’t make it as an artist, he knew he may no less than write good songs. He simply wanted to resolve who he was.
Divine Symmetry’s demo recordings, almost all of which have by no means been formally launched, present all of the methods Bowie tried to determine how you can fill Dylan’s “management void.” All the discarded demos make up a blueprint for the remainder of his profession, as he tried on totally different personae. On the tough model of “Tune for Bob Dylan,” he imitates Dylan’s voice, which he describes as sounding like “sand and glue,” and he performs tinny harmonica all through it (he properly ditched each affectations by the Hunky Dory periods). Equally, on the primordial “Queen Bitch,” his mordant Velvet Underground impression, which he renders somewhat slower right here, he chuckles mid-verse coolly like Lou Reed. (His solo acoustic cowl of “Ready for the Man” sounds equally deferential.) And on “Port of Amsterdam,” an anglicized Jacques Brel cowl (a nod to a different one in every of Bowie’s heroes, Scott Walker), he belts desperately about drunken sailors and sullen prostitutes. (“Amsterdam,” by the way, almost closed out Hunky Dory earlier than Bowie wrote the transcendent “Bewlay Brothers” on the final minute.)
The songs that didn’t make it to Hunky Dory studio variations are much more revealing. Every exhibits Bowie was woodshedding new characters. He auditions Kurt Weill songcraft on “How Fortunate You Are (aka Miss Peculiar)” with oompah bass and “li-li-li” refrains. He tried convincing Tom Jones to document it however failed. “On the lookout for a Buddy,” written for his horribly named Arnold Corns aspect challenge, could possibly be the Band’s response to “Tune for Bob Dylan” with its country-funk rhythm and folky refrain. The twangy “King of the Metropolis” could possibly be an early Bee-Gees folks quantity (suppose “I Began a Joke”) however with somewhat extra grit, and Bowie’s basic method to the music’s melody echoes in his later hit, “Ashes to Ashes.” And “Proper On, Mom,” finally lower by Peter Noone, sounds right here a bit like Frankie Valli singing Billy Joel proper right down to its weird lyrics about his mother accepting his option to stay in sin with a lady. The folky, morose “Uninterested in My Life” would change into “It’s No Sport” on Bowie’s Scary Monsters album a decade later, and listening to the model right here, it’s clear the music was too depressive to suit what would change into Hunky Dory.
The remainder of the demos present how Bowie developed his sound and caught to his imaginative and prescient when he bought into the studio. The acoustic “Quicksand,” recorded in a San Francisco lodge room for Rolling Stone’s John Mendelsohn who wrote the journal’s unique overview, incorporates some fumbled lyrics however principally the demos replicate the songs as recorded. They’re simply sparser. He performs “Kooks,” his music for not too long ago born son Zowie, on a 12-string guitar (or 11-string, in line with ex-wife Angie Bowie’s memoir), and his piano taking part in on the early model of “Life on Mars?” sounds plodding as he reappropriates the chords from Frank Sinatra’s “My Manner” in an try to put in writing a greater music than the Chairman’s. (Sure’ Rick Wakeman performed the rumbling, filigreed album model.) “Adjustments,” taken from a scratchy acetate, sounds equally rudimentary, and consists of Bowie sighing like a prepare when he’s not singing. And “Shadow Man” exhibits the promise of a music that would have rivaled something by Elton John, however Bowie didn’t lower it for years, a model finally popping out round his Heathen album.
A facsimile of Bowie’s notebooks from the interval, included within the field set, suggests he had dozens of different songs, too, and it’s rumored he’d already written most of Ziggy Stardust throughout this era. One curiosity is Bowie’s discarded lyrics to “Life on Mars?” with the road “Simply kiss the face of a subhuman race,” a number of cases of the music title “Andy Warhole” [sic] (which explains why he corrects producer Ken Scott to say “gap” on the music intro), and a reference to a monitor titled “Charles Manson,” probably discarded in 1971 when Bowie realized Manson wasn’t just a few hippie railroaded by the Man however actually a harmful felony. On one web page, Bowie, nonetheless in his early 20s, scrawled, “I imagine my psychological situation is extraordinarily unlawful.” On the pocket book’s cowl, Bowie misspelled Hunky Dory as Hunky-Dorrey? and Hunky-Dorey, even sketching a document crate on the again sandwiched by a “Dorey” brand. Inside are a number of sketches of Bowie’s costumes, displaying simply how he discovered who he was.
The three stay recordings additionally present Bowie’s maturation. On the Peel Session, recorded a number of days after Zowie’s start, he performs an early model of Hunky Dory’s “Kooks” (or “Cukes” as Bowie mispronounces it), and the Sounds of the 70s: Bob Harris recording, Bowie sounds diffident as he readjusts himself to rock stardom after months away from the highlight. On the latter efficiency, he sings a surprising “Oh! You Fairly Issues” by himself on the piano; the “mamas and papas” a part of the refrain comes by clearly this time, since there aren’t any backup singers obscuring it. And on “Andy Warhol,” he and Mick Ronson thatch their acoustic guitars collectively for somewhat extra depth.
On the gathering’s third live performance, a virtually full recording of a gig in Aylesbury on Sept. 25, 1971 (nonetheless months earlier than Hunky Dory’s launch), you may hear Bowie settle into his confidence. He begins shyly, asking Ronson to “get a bit nearer” then laughing as he jokingly provides “to the mic,” since Ronson in all probability simply moved nearer to Bowie. He nervously shrugs off “House Oddity” (“That is one in every of my very own that we recover from with as quickly as doable,” he says) and eventually sounds comfy when his backing band joins him for “The Supermen” and “Fairly Issues.”
Though a few of the songs sound tough (he admits he doesn’t know how you can play “Adjustments” and guitars feed again on “Andy Warhol,” or “Andy Wuh-huh,” as he calls it), the viewers cheers louder and louder proper as much as the covers of Chuck Berry’s “Spherical and Spherical” and the Velvet Underground’s “Ready for the Man,” which ends the set. “We actually haven’t bought any extra numbers,” he tells the gang of about 500 chanting for extra. “We solely rehearsed for right now and I killed myself singing.” The present’s promoter, saying good night time on the finish, calls the efficiency “one of many biggest evenings of my life.” You possibly can hear how that is the second when David Bowie realized he may fill the void and lived as much as his menace in “Adjustments”: “Be careful, you rock & rollers.”
A disc of alternate variations of Hunky Dory songs additionally incorporates revelations. The complete recording of “Life on Mars?” doesn’t fade out on the finish, so you may absolutely hear Ronson cursing the ringing cellphone that ruined the proper take. And a number of other remixes exhibit totally different sides of Hunky Dory mainstays; one of the best are the Biff Rose cowl “Fill Your Coronary heart” — which was a Xerox of Rose’s recording on the document (even Tiny Tim performed with the association when he lined it) — however now it feels much less claustrophobic with solely a piano association, and a sparser “Bewlay Brothers” with a wider array of weirdo vocals on the finish. (The ultimate disc, a Blu-ray, incorporates high-def variations of tracks from the remainder of the set.)
As a complete, Divine Symmetry extends the canvas of Hunky Dory. He was prepared to strive something to shake the one-hit surprise stigma and finally targeted the album into a pleasant and welcoming immediate traditional. In a 1971 NME interview, he requested, “How can anybody be a severe pop artist at 24?” however by the top of the yr, when Hunky Dory, was launched, he answered his personal query. Inside months, he’d be redefining himself once more, telling Melody Maker he was homosexual and dying his hair crimson to change into Ziggy Stardust and document lots of the remainder of the leftover tracks he’d written concurrently Hunky Dory. It was solely then that he crammed rock’s “management void” — and adopted the rock-star pomp to again it up.