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Some long, rambling, completely unedited thoughts on the first album:
I actually hadn’t heard this album until maybe a year and a half ago. I think it is usually treated, much like the Space Oddity album, as primarily interesting as a curiosity and predecessor to what Bowie would soon become. In many respects that’s fair: on its surface, this stuff feels miles away even from the Man Who Sold the World, let alone something like the Berlin Trilogy. This is mostly jangly, British-folk-oriented material, a lot of it more obviously humorous than what would come later (although humor is always a mainstay of Bowie). It is also a bit of a hodgepodge, showing less of Bowie’s soon-to-be-discovered penchant for making albums that work as full-fledged albums, perhaps more so than most of his contemporaries. In this sense it is reminiscent of a lot of first albums of the time: it’s no coincidence that he and Elton John shared studio musicians as both started out, and like John’s Empty Sky, it’s hard to know what to do with this record. Its cheekiness and sometimes straight-up weirdness also makes me think of Harry Nilsson, who is also getting his start around this period.
But there’s a lot here that really does hint at Bowie’s future. The lyrics, for one thing, are far more eccentric than any parallel I can think of at the time, and it is often a dark eccentricity. (Bowie persists as one of the more literary pop musicians to date, and it already suggests itself here.) Much of it reads well on the page, by itself, but the music often complements it smartly. “Uncle Arthur” is a good example: a strange character sketch of a man who can’t escape the comfort of home, it's properly one of the more jangly tunes on the record, angular and almost befuddled in feel, like Arthur himself.
I sort of adore “Rubber Band.” I think we hear Bowie’s unique vocals here possibly more than anywhere else on this first record, and the bigness of the tune, its overwroughtness, it’s bordering on camp (complete with tuba) is curiously thrilling. The outro at the end, where Bowie lets out a muffled melodic scream and shouts “I hope you break your baton” over a trudging tuba — might be my favorite moment on the album. (It’s also quite musically smart, with a rather insistent climb up the scale and very slight key changes along the way, which serves to ratchet up the tension alongside the lyric.)
“Love You Til Tuesday” — was this the single? Sounds like it. Perfectly fine pop fare with a creepy twist (it *is* about a stalker) but, like a number of tunes here, it has that strangely stilted, slightly rigid feeling that a lot of music in the mid-60s suffered from (the drugs hadn’t kicked in completely yet? — or at least a lot of rock-oriented popular music still was figuring out how to loosen up). Similarly, “There is a Happy Land” never comes together as one would like it to, which is a shame: strong idea that just seems to ramble. (Love Bowie’s wordless babble at the outro, sung in unison with the bass…)
As much of a musical grab-bag as this album is, it clearly suggests someone with a broad musical curiosity and a strong talent for unlikely combinations. There are flashes of Bowie’s art-oriented interests: “We Are Hungry Men” has a fuzzy, dissonant middle portion that almost reminds me of something out of Charles Ives or Stravinsky, and opens with a sort of off-key reveille; the longer melodic lines on a lot of tunes, their ambling feel, strike me as more related to classical musics than anything in pop at the time; even Bowie’s bits of genre-mashup and unexpected interludes feel as much like early Zappa as anything (“Join the Gang” — one of the best lines on the album, “Johnny plays the sitar, he’s an existentialist” over a beautiful sitar mess, plus the kazoo and fart-noise outro). Similarly, Bowie the studio freak is already here: it’s full of instruments bursting into a tune for a few measures and then disappearing and other slight bits of studio trickery.
It’s probably easiest to appreciate the album as a preface to a career that will soon begin to take shape - as both an effort to find a voice but also a sign of his genre restlessness - but I actually think the album may be a bit underrated on its own merits. It’s not an everyday listen, but there’s an exuberance to it that is hard to pin-down. Its experimental sensibility, its “I’m going to grab everything in the musical refrigerator and blend it up and see what happens” sensibility — yeah, it hints at future Bowie, but it’s also just a lot of fun — again, I think of Nilsson, Zappa, other eccentrics getting their start at this time.
But it’s also a very mature experimentation. Bowie and his musical partners wrote the album with a guide to orchestration in hand — it shows, in a good way. You get the sense that they wrote and recorded the album with no limits in mind: I want a tuba here, so I’m going to put a fucking tuba here… I want to record four measures of hand claps for the end of this song, no one will probably notice, but I’m going to do it because I can… that sort of thing. And I don’t think I’m reading too much into it to see it as one more artifact (certainly not the only one) of mid-century classical/art musics trickling into the realm of pop. (It was released the same day as Sgt Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band, I think, and shares a lot in common with that album.)
Anyhow, it’s a record to spend time with — it grows on you. Favorite tracks: “Rubber Band,” “We Are Hungry Men,” “Join the Gang,” “Maid of Bond Street.”
-thebigfunk
~ i could still snort you under the table ~
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