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Hey, it's Alan and I just wanted to let you know that you can now listen to the ongoing history of new music. Early and ad free on Amazon Music included with Prime. With Black Friday savings at the Home Depot, you can get up to $1,400 off plus get free delivery on select appliances like LG, America's most reliable line of appliances. Check out the newest LG refrigerator with new mini Craft ice straight from the dispenser shop. Black Friday savings on select LG appliances plus get free delivery now at the Home Dep. Free delivery on appliance purchases of $396 or more offer valid 11.5through12 3 US only. See store or online for details.
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This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Listening to this podcast Smart move Being financially savvy Smart move. Another smart move having State Farm help you create a competitive price when you choose to bundle home and auto bundling. Just another way to save with a personal price plan like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. Prices are based on rating plans that vary by state, coverage opt selected by the customer, availability, amount of discounts and savings and eligibility vary by state.
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A
If you had to name the most influential artists in the history of rock, who would they be? Now? I'm talking about people who changed things, moved things, and otherwise propelled things forward for everyone else. So what's your list? Well, Elvis for sure. He's the guy that brought rock and roll to the masses in the 1950s, and he basically ushered in a whole new era in music. The Elvis epoch waned, but he's still a towering figure in the history of popular music. 2. Gotta be the Beatles it seems silly to have to say that, because how many stories have you heard about people deciding to form a band after seeing the Beatles on ed Sullivan in February 1964? The Beatles changed everything across all genres, and they did it in just seven years. Even though they broke up in 1970, they are still the greatest and most influential rock group of all time and will probably be fore and number three. I will fight you if you don't see anyone other than David Bowie, a guy who coincidentally shares a birthday with Elvis. The more you study the history of rock, the more you realize just how many roads lead back to Bowie in some way or another. And although he's been gone for years, he casts a big shadow. Maybe even bigger than he ever did. In fact, it seems that as more time passes, the more we realize how important Bowie was to, well, everything. If you're still unconvinced, stay with Me. I'll prove it. This is part two of why Bowie Still Matters. This is the ongoing History of New Music podcast with Alan Cross, David bowie from his 1976 album Station to Station, a record that Bowie had no memory of making because by his own admission, he was so coked out during that entire period, from late 1975 through to sometime in late 1976, that he doesn't remember a thing. This song is actually a pretty good representation of his headspace back then. It was inspired by a dream, or more likely a drug induced hallucination with his friend Iggy Pop where an unidentified girlfriend was eaten by a holographic television model TBC 15. It appears too that he was caught up in the doomed spaceman character he played in the movie the man who Fell to Earth. It also hinted where Bowie was headed musically in the latter half of the 70s. Hello again, I'm Alan Cross and welcome to part two of a three part series called why Bowie Still Matters. Some artists come onto the scene, make a splash and then either slowly fade away or disappear completely. But not Bowie. He had a golden period that stretched roughly from 1970 through to 1983. Thirteen albums in those 13 years, and many of them remained not just classics, but milestones in the history of Rock. By 1975, he'd become a favorite among British punks. The music was good, but they also appreciated his fashion sense and the fact that Bowie didn't seem to give a damn about what anybody thought. Bowie's image was very non status quo, something the punks loved. You would have been hard pressed to find anyone in London into punk in 1975 who also wasn't into Bowie. Station to station arrived in January 1976. And even though the record yielded just one major hit, the song Golden Years, which talked about how isolated he felt during that time. Station to Station is now considered to be one of his most important albums. It wasn't at the time, but over the years it's been re evaluated most positively. By this time, Bowie had moved beyond his glam stage, exemplified by his Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane years. Over a period of about three years, Bowie had released six albums. He'd made a series of daring image changes, all of which captured the public's imagination. Station to Station was the era of his thin white Duke phase. This hollow, amoral, emotionless and damaged creature dressed elegantly in a white shirt and waistcoat. His concert tours were among the most theatrical and ambitious things ever taken on the road. It didn't look like he was capable of doing anything wrong. At least that's the way it looked to the general public. But the truth was that Bowie was drinking very heavily and using tremendous amounts of cocaine while eating little more than milk and peppers. At one point his weight was down to less than 90 pounds. The Cracked actor was really cracking up. He did crazy things like store urine in the fridge because he was afraid unspecified witches would were out to steal his vital essence. And he toured with a telescope because he was positive that aliens in an orbiting mothership were coming to get him. And he was deeply interested in what was happening in Germany with groups such as Kraftwerk, Ken New and the rising sound of synthesizers. So his music evolved again. It was funky, it was soulful, but there was something else going on. He began to think that these electronic methods of producing music. We're the future. And what better way to follow this muse than to move to where it all seemed to be happening. Germany. And not just any part of Germany, but West Berlin. And he'd take Iggy with them. They'd submerge themselves in the Berlin scene while simultaneously cleaning up and getting healthy. They knew that if they stayed in LA any longer, they'd just die. It was time to go. So they did. They found a very modest place at Hauptstrasser 155 in the Schonenberg area of the city. Right below was a gay bar where they used to drink. And it's not far from the Kreuzberg area. A good place for bars, clubs and funky shops. Berlin also had a very good recording studio called hansa, all of 100 ish meters from where the Berlin Wall ran through the city. It was in Studio 2 where Bowie and Iggy got back to the business of making music. And they were very serious about it. Bowie produced Gigi's the Idiot there and he also recorded two of his own albums. The first was Low, an experimental and often very electronic album that was part man who Fell to Earth, part Station to Station, and part whatever was happening in Berlin at the time. It was a colder sounding record for Bowie, even colder than Station to Station. But then again, he was trying desperately to kick his cocaine addiction and was often in a lot of physical and psychic pain. Side one could be characterized as a collection of short song fragments with nothing running longer than three and a half minutes. Side two was all instrumental, very art rock, and featured some very important contributions from Brian Eno, who had left Roxy Music and was really starting to come into his own as a producer. At first, fans were confused, including his record company. In fact, they didn't know what to do with the album, so they sat on it for three months before releasing it, even though they knew it was going to be a disastrous commercial failure. But as the years passed, Low has come to be recognized as a bold piece of work that further spread the idea of synthesizer music beyond just what the Germans were doing. Let me play you an example from side two. This is an instrumental track called Warzawa. At the time, this was viewed as something, I don't know, out beyond the orbit of Neptune. Now, though, we can look back at it and say, wow, Bowie was right again. Low became very important to a new generation of kids in the post punk era who wanted to do something different than just play guitars. Take Joy Division, for example. When they got together with producer Martin Hannah to record the classic album Unknown Pleasures, they wanted it to sound like what Bowie was doing. And think how many people that record influenced over the years. Depeche Mode, Gary Newman, omd, the Human League, Phil Collins, Nine Inch Nails, Radiohead, Arcade Fire. And many, many, many others have said that without Low, they just wouldn't exist. Ten months later came another Berlin album. Heroes was also recorded at Hansa. Bowie continued to follow his Kraut rock muse. In fact, the title of the album is a tribute to a song called Hero that appears on an album by the German band New. There's also a song on the record called V2 Schneider, which is a nod to Florian Schneider, one of the founders of Kraftwerk. This record caught the earliest bits of what would end up being called New Wave. Once again, Bowie was ahead of the curve and Heroes has gone down in history as one of Bowie's all time best records. The title track was allegedly inspired by something Bowie saw from the studio window one day. The young couple meeting by the Berlin Wall for a kiss. This was possibly producer Tony Visconti and his girlfriend Antonia Moss. Another story says that Bowie had just been to an art gallery and saw a painting from 1916 called Lovers Between Garden Walls by Otto Mueller. Another is that Bowie had just read a book called A Grave for a Dolphin, which told the story of a doomed love affair between a girl from Somalia and an Italian soldier. Or it may have had something to do with a woman named Claire Shenstone, with whom he spent some time during those recording sessions. So, you know, take your pick. Not only was the song recorded in English, but Bowie also did it in German. He was in Berlin, after all. And he also did it in French for good measure. The third album in Bowie's so called Berlin Trilogy actually wasn't made in Berlin at all. It was recorded in Switzerland, in New York, but its style and feel still had trappings of his German experience. And for the third time in a row, Brian Eno was there to make some important contributions. He didn't produce. That was still Tony Visconti's job, but he did help Bowie explore what he was trying to do. Lodger was the least commercially successful of these three albums when it arrived in the spring of 1979, two years after Heroes. Critics and fans didn't know what to make of it at first, but like a lot of Bowie material, it simply needed to age a bit. If you've never tried the record, spend some time with it. Bowie aficionados will tell you that it's perhaps his most underrated album. It is artsy, it is experimental. Side one is all about travel. Side two is Bowie's critique of what was happening to Western civilization at the time. And taken as a whole, it again encompasses what was about to happen with new wave and post punk music. And as time passed, appreciation for this album grew. If you want to fast forward ahead, this is the kind of music groups like Talking Heads would be making in a few years. Ask Moby and Blur and even Oasis what they think of this record and you'll get some very different answers from what people were saying about it in 1979. Lodger would be Bowie's last album of the 1970s, his most successful decades. But he wasn't finished yet. We'll look at Bowie's incredible early 80s phase next.
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After the experimentation Of Low Heroes and Lodger. Bowie knew it was time to move on yet again. Berlin had been good, but it was time to find another location to make his music. He changed his base of operations to London and New York and it was time for exploring new ways. Post punk, art, rock, pop and electronics could fit all together. Scary Monsters and Super Creeps was a great record, perhaps the perfect way to end the 70s and welcome the 1980s. It was also deliberately commercial, partly because that's where his head was at and partly because Bowie was having money problems. You see, in the early 70s he entered a terrible arrangement with manager Tony Defries. And even with all the platinum albums and chart topping singles, he was close to skint. He had nothing. He was still with RCA Records, but he'd left Defries behind in 1975. However, the contract with Defries meant that Bowie was making far less money than you'd think. It would take years to sort things out. Defries collected royalties on Bowie's records until 1996. The centerpiece of Scary Monsters was Ashes to Ashes, a song that not only picked up the story of Major Tom from Space Oddity, a character that Bowie had introduced 10 years earlier, but was also made into a hideously expensive music video. It cost £250,000, so well over half a million dollars in today's money. You have to remember that MTV did not exist back then. Music videos were still in their infancy. Their main purpose was to send them to TV shows like Top of the Pops, so that the artist didn't have to go in person. It was also a way for an artist to more carefully control their public image. A prepared video offered much more control than a TV appearance where something could go terribly wrong. But £250,000, that's a hell of a lot of money. The most expensive video ever made to that point. Today it looks primitive, but it was state of the art technology back then. And like I said, it's not like Bowie could really afford it. He was still emerging from that long and ugly legal battle with Tony De Vries. So this was a really major gamble. Yet Bowie guessed right again. Not only was the song sonically brilliant, it still sounds perfectly contemporary today, but it tapped into a new scene coming out of Britain. The New Romantics, A stylish and futuristic form of post punk electronic pop coming out of London clubs, especially a place called the Blitz Club. In fact, several of the kids from that scene are in the video with Bowie. And they would go on to form their own bands. You probably heard of some of them. Too. And then there were all the young musicians who heard and saw material from Scary Monsters. They formed bands with names like Duran Duran, Spando Ballet, Depeche Mode and dozens more. In case you're running the video in your mind as you're listening, that elderly woman at the end is not Bowie's mother. That was the rumor, but it's not true. Again, highly influential album, especially on a young kid named Stephen Patrick Morrissey and his soon to be mate, Johnny Marr. No Bowie, no Smiths. And think about where modern music would be without them. As the 80s began, it was only natural for people to wonder how much more great music Bowie had in him. After all, if we take Hunky Dory as the first album where Bowie got his groove, he'd released 11 studio albums in just over eight and a half years, plus two live albums. Plus, he had found time to collaborate with other people, like his buddy Iggy Pop. Plus he had survived deep alcohol and cocaine addiction. So how long could Bowie keep guessing, right and staying ahead of the curve? The answer was a few more times. But it wasn't always about music. The gap following the release of Bowie's Scary Monsters was the longest gap between albums in his career, a little more than two and a half years. But he kept busy. He had been in two movies at that time and was just embarking on his role as John Merrick in the stage production of the Elephant man, which took him to Broadway. And the scripts were piling up daily. These were projects that regular rock stars just did not take on. The acting thing would continue for the rest of the 80s. Christine F, a TV film called Ball, Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, Yellowbeard and the Hunger, all in 1983. He played a vampire in the Hunger, something that endeared him to goth fans. Plus, into the Night, Labyrinth, for which he did the soundtrack. Absolute Beginners. All of Those came in 1985. And the Last Temptation of Christ in 1988. No other artist, not even Elvis, could claim this kind of versatility. And then there was the new $17.5 million record deal with EMI Records, one of the biggest deals in the industry to that time. Bowie chose to make a more commercially sounding album in exchange for that cash. And he and his new band of session players tore through the recording sessions in just 17 days. And that includes mixing. The final product was a huge success, something that came as a surprise to everyone, including Bowie. In 1983, the idea of doing a hybrid rock dance funk album was crazy. It had sold more than 6 million copies, making it. Bowie's best selling album of all time, Let's Dance, was a massive success for bowie and drew 2.6 million people to the serious moonlight tour as it wound its way through 16 countries. But it also caused some major problems for him. It messed with his head. Here's what he told one I remember looking out over these waves of people who were coming to hear this record played live and thinking, I wonder how many Velvet Underground albums these people have in their record collections. I suddenly felt very apart from my audience and it was depressing because I didn't know what they wanted. That confused headspace was the beginning of something of a spiral for Bowie that continued for the rest of the 1980s. Everything that he did was subsequently judged in relation to let's Dance and everything that came before it. And when he rushed out a follow up to capitalize on this new audience, it sort of didn't work. Bowie with Blue Jean from the Tonight album in 1984. The Big Knock against that record was that it wasn't anything more than let's Dance Part 2. Where was the burst of innovation that everyone had come to expect from Bowie from album to album? It didn't get better with Never Let Me down again in 1987, which wasn't helped by the ill conceived Glass Spiders tour. This wasn't the old Bowie. Words like tired and phrases like fake enthusiasm were thrown around. So what could possibly turn things around? Flush it all away, all of it, and start again again.
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John Legend, Sheryl Crow, Elvis Costello and Alanis Morrison star in the MGM original series Words and Music. Iconic artists share intimate performances and the stories behind the songs. New episodes Sundays on MGM Bowie's 90s reinvention was a two stage process. The first was something called the Sound and Vision Tour where Bowie promised to play his old hits one more time and then retire them forever. One more time for Space Oddity, Ziggy, Stardust, Rebel, Rebel, Young Americans, Heroes, even Let's Dance. Bowie felt that once he cleared the decks on all that baggage, he could start fresh. His idea was to form a four piece rock band with him as the lead singer. Inspiration was taken from Jimi Hendrix, Cream and the Pixies. They called themselves Tin Machine and when their first record came out, it definitely could not be mistaken for a David Bowie record. Reaction was muted, but I've argued the Tin Machine presaged grunge. A couple of years later. Bowie's Tin Machine project is another part of his career that's been re evaluated. Critics and fans were cool to the project back then. Now though, it's viewed much more favorably, even visionary, considering what happened with Rockin Alternative and grunge in the 1990s. After a couple of Tin Machine albums, Bowie went back to being, well, Bowie. And as always, he made music on his own terms. The difference now was that he could afford to do it. Remember that bad deal with his old manager Tony de Vries? It expired in 1996 and all royalties from Bowie's music started flowing to Bowie. And something else had begun. The new alt rock stars of the 90s constantly acknowledged Bowie as a major influence. And this introduced his earlier work to a whole new generation. Yet again, if you were a fan of goth, Bowie loomed as a presence. Knowing that Bowie was a fan of the Pixies and Nirvana and the Smashing Pumpkins and Suede and Oasis and Blur and vice versa, you had to give him respect. You could see lots of Bowie influence in Depeche Mode and the Cure and Suede and New Order. And if you loved industrial music, Bowie was very important to you. Especially if you were a fan of Nine Inch Nails. Trenton Reznor was and always will be a die hard Bowie fan. So much so that not only did they tour together, but Bowie also got Trent to appear in the creepy Stalker video for this song from 1997. It's called I'm Afraid of Americans and it looks like something straight out of Taxi Driver. I'm afraid of Americans I'm afraid of the world I'm afraid I can't help it I'm afraid I can't I'm afraid of Americans I'm afraid of the world Bowie in a Nine Inch Nails remix of I'm Afraid of Americans, originally from the 1997 album Earthling. Plenty of positive reviews and lots of love on the world tour that went along with it. But Bowie was starting to slow down, at least in terms of his musical output. He had new priorities and he had some new ideas, many of which had again, nothing to do with music. We're now two thirds of the way through this account of why Bowie still matters. So let's summarize what we've learned so far. Bowie was a chameleon, someone who wasn't afraid to rip it all up and start again. His ability to reinvent himself is unparalleled. When he did invent a new character, it had depth and substance. You could really dive deep into what Bowie was doing during each of his phases. Bowie was a hero of outsiders and weirdos, punks, alternative kids, gay people, and basically anyone who didn't fit into normal society. Bowie showed that being an outsider could be a strength rather than a handicap. For about 15 years from 1970 forward, Bowie's career was a masterclass in cultural synthesis. More than anyone else, he showed how a musician could absorb influences from everywhere, all kinds of music, literature, movies, painting, and so on, and then incorporate all what you learned back into music. And finally, he was a role model in so many ways. He showed that if you were loyal and dedicated to your art, that was more important than commercial success. If Bowie could take risks, why couldn't anyone else? I read this somewhere. Bowie lived life as a work of art in itself. When we reconvene for the third and final show in the series, we'll look at Bowie's final years and how he anticipated things in technology and finance that no one else saw coming. If you missed the first episode in the why Bowie Still Matters series, you can download it as a podcast wherever you get your podcasts. And if you want more programs like this, there are hundreds of ongoing history episodes available. They're available on all the platforms and new shows appear every week. And if you like true crime with your music, there's my other podcast, Crime and Mayhem in the Music Industry. New episodes appear every two weeks. I'm on all the social media platforms. Shouldn't be too hard to find. A good place to start is my website, ajournalofmusicalthings.com, which is updated daily and comes with a free daily newsletter. And should you have any questions, comments, critiques, or corrections, maybe some complaints, use AlanLancross CA Technical Productions by Rob Johnston Talk to you next time. For part three of why Bowie Still Matters, I'm Alan Cross.
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Welcome to the dmv.
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Yeah, I used to be like you, trying to go the extra mile. And then one day I got into the weeds on on a boat registration and worked until closing, which at that time was 4pm the next day we started closing at 5.
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Man, people must have hated you, Greg.
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Yeah, some of the old timers still called me Gregstra.
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Credit Tim Meadows stars in dmv. All new Mondays on global stream on Stack tv.