← Behind The Song: Classic Rock Chronicles
Behind The Song: Classic Rock Chronicles
When Bowie turned to face the strange with “Changes”
00:11:27
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- [00:00]
Janda
97.1Fm the drive presents the behind the Song podcast, taking you deeper into classic rock's most timeless tunes. Here's your host, Janda.
- [00:16]
David Bowie
It took David Bowie until his fourth album to find his footing as an artist. Hunky Dory is a collection of songs written after he realized that he wasn't really one thing or another when it came to musical styles. Certainly not a folk musician, which is what he was pigeonholed as up to that point. In many ways, this is where rock's greatest chameleon began to evolve. It took his first trip to America to change the way he approached his songwriting, and when he returned home to England after that US tour, he sat down at the piano to give a voice to the musical styles colliding within him. And at just 24 years old, he wrote the song that would foreshadow the rest of his life and career changes. Let's get into the story in this episode of the behind the Song podcast, and if you like it, give it a thumbs up and hit. Subscribe and let us know in the comments. By 1971, Bowie was almost seven years into his career. While he had established himself with Space Oddity, he had stalled out on the charts. Otherwise, when he was booked on an American tour early that year, he was still very much an artist who was looking to break ground and make a mark, which he certainly did with the press by wearing a dress to interviews, shaking up gender roles, and in general, making sure that he was unforgettable to the critics. That was also the tour where he met Andy Warhol, who inspired Bowie to write a song named after him on Hunky Dory, and Lou Reed, who inspired Queen Bitch on the same album. These two characters, along with Bowie's new friend Iggy Pop, would have a profound impact on how he approached his art in the immediate years to come. By the summer of 1971, when he was back home in England, he also became a father for the first time. When his son Duncan Zoe Heywood Jones, shortened to Zoe, Bowie was born to him and his first wife, the wildly chaotic Angie that May. The song Kooks on Hunky Dory is for Duncan, which is the name he goes by now, with Bowie writing for Small Z beside it on the track listing on the back cover. So 1971 was really a momentous year for him, both personally and professionally. That trip to America really opened his eyes up to switching things around musically. In his words, what would it sound like if he took the theatrical and the cabaret and mixed it up With Little Richard and the Velvet Underground, the world was about to find out. He also ditched writing on his acoustic guitar on this album, which he had previously done, opting to write by ear on an old grand piano instead. Because Bowie played by ear and the piano wasn't his first instrument, when it came time to record the collection of songs he'd written, he brought in a ringer to play the piano part. Rick Wakeman, who had provided piano on Bowie's previous only hit, Space Oddity, and was a sought after session musician who of course, ultimately joined the band. Yes, Wakeman told Classic Rock magazine that Bowie knew what he wanted and would pick musicians he felt could achieve it. That would be true of picking Wakeman and later Luther Vandross and Stevie Ray Vaughan, all musicians at the top of their game who Bowie recognized as real talent and brought onto his musical projects before they were widely known. Because the piano is central to Hunky Dory, Rick Wakeman's expertise behind the keys is one of the reasons it sounds so perfect. Wakeman remembers telling Bowie while they were recording it that this particular record will still be around and important long after you and I are gone. The other personnel on the album will be familiar to Bowie fans too. The three who would form the nucleus of the Spiders From Mars band appear on Hunky Dory. The late Mick Ronson, who played guitar and also skillfully arranged the strings on Changes on Life on Mars and on other songs on the album. Woody Woodmansee on drums and the late Trevor Boulder on bass and trumpet. Bowie himself played saxophone, which was his first instrument, along with some guitar and as he noted in the liner notes, the less complicated piano parts followed by the word inability in parentheses. He had Wakeman for that. Recorded at Trident Studios in London in the summer of 1971, Woodmansee recalled that Bowie didn't like doing more than three takes of a song so the energy wouldn't be compromised. Ken Scott was brought back as the co producer for Hunky Dory, having engineered two of Bowie's earlier albums and with years of Abbey Road experience with the Beatles under his belt. So with this group, you have the production talents and musicians that would evolve with Bowie and on his Next Chapter, the Star making Ziggy Stardust. Everything about Hunky Dory was pivotal. It's the album that bridged the gap between Bowie as an artist struggling to find his ground to becoming a superstar. He said that it was the first album that provided what he felt was an actual audience for his songs, and it's the cornerstone for everything that would come next. So it's fitting that the first track is Changes. The lyrics basically form the arc of everything that Bowie would do from this point on. And they go like, 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 how the others must see the faker I'm much too fast to take that test Changes Turn and face the strange don't want to be a richer man there's gonna have to be a different man Time may change me But I can't trace time Three albums and, as he put it, a million dead end streets behind him, Bowie embraced the very thing that would define him for the rest of his totally iconic career change. It takes courage to do that, the ability to take risks, which he would do over and over again with each new character that he introduced, unlike any other artist at any other time in rock history. Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, Halloween Jack, the Thin White Duke, and on and on. By turning to face the strange, he met himself. By calling out the faker, he opened the door to what would later become the cracked actor on the Aladdin Sane album, recognizing that he was a kind of character acrobat, giving each new version of himself a new story to tell as he invented them. And when he sings, Time may change me But I can't trace time. It seems like a funny way to put saying that time changes everyone, but there's just no way to reverse it, to trace it backward. Time just keeps moving forward and the next part goes like this. I watch the ripples change their size but never leave the stream of warm impermanence and so the days float through my eyes but still the days seem the same and these children that you spit on as they try to change their world are immune to your consultations they're quite aware of what they're going through Changes Turn and face the strange don't tell them to grow up and out of it Changes where's your shame? You've left us up to our necks in it Time may change me but you can't trace time this is the part of the song that gave young people a rallying hero, a voice that understood them. John Hughes even included part of these lyrics on screen as a sort of mission statement for the movie the Breakfast Club. So perfectly did they sum up the weirdness about being a teenager ripples in the stream, getting bigger, coming into their own. I'll also offer that the sentiment behind Bowie's singing, these children that you spit on are immune to your consultations. In Changes made way for Kurt Cobain to write, I got a new complaint, forever in debt to your priceless advice. In Nirvana's heart shaped box, two ways of saying no thanks, I got this. And the song winds down with our narrator giving in to metamorphosis. Strange fascinations fascinate me. Changes are taking the pace I'm going through. The pace I'm going through, not the place. And that's important because the space he's in isn't relevant. It's the time the journey takes to get to the next destination. At the end of Changes, Bowie asks us again to turn and face the strange. He says, look out, you rock and rollers. Pretty soon now you're gonna get older, as if to say, get on with it, to his audience and to himself at the ripe old age of 24 when he wrote this and the song ends, time may change me, but I can't trace time. No going backward, only forward for David Bowie. And with this, the Starman had liftoff. While Hunky Dory didn't chart, and in fact, RCA Records didn't really put in a lot of effort to promote Changes as a single, this body of work really clicked with David Bowie's true audience and helped to pave the way for him to go. From an artist who had his first surprise hit, Space Oddity, a weird song about space travel lining up historically with when man first walked on the moon, to becoming a worldwide supernova rock star, a cult figure with his next album, the Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars. David Bowie said that the Hunky Dory album gave him the sense that he could do anything. And with Changes, he literally wrote the mission statement for the rest of his career, artistic reinvention and not being afraid to outpace the mainstream, as he did many times over the decades that followed. It's an anthem of freedom, about not going backwards, only forwards in whatever form that takes, as he would later reference in the lyrics of Golden Years when he wrote the line, never look back, walk tall, act fine. When Bowie turned to face the strange on the song Changes, he became the artist he wanted to be and remained that artist until his last day on earth, ever changing. So what other songs about changing strike a chord like this? Something to think about. Until next time, I'm Janda and this has been behind the song. If you like this episode, give it a like and subscribe to the channel. Special thanks as always to Christian Lane for the music you hear on these podcast episodes. You can find me on the air at 97.1fm the drive in Chicago and at wdrv.com on the way. Much more classic rock and roll.