occasional dream, four

Somebody famous, I can’t remember who, once said that if you want to know about the 60s you should listen to the Beatles. I think there’s a lot of truth to this. I also think it’s true that if you want to know about the 70s you should listen to David Bowie. Both the Beatles and Bowie, each in their own time and place, created works characterized by repeated leaps that redefined the era. I’m thinking about this right now in connection with Hunky Dory, which is a huge advance beyond The Man Who Sold the World, one in which Bowie plants an initial stake in the heady and strange moral landscape of the early 70s. Hunky Dory also readies the terrain for what comes next with Ziggy Stardust, though the two records are very different. It’s not too much of a stretch to say that, in more than just chronological terms, Hunky Dory is to Ziggy Stardust what Revolver is to Sgt. Pepper’s. Starting with Changes as the opening track, Bowie offers one of the first real attempts in music to define the 70s as being post 60s. If I had to pick the one moment on the album that most perfectly crystallizes the transition, it’s in Bewlay Brothers when Bowie sings,

And we were gone
Hanging out with your dwarf men
We were so turned on
By your lack of conclusions

Something about the double tracked vocals makes things sound so spacey and weird, and the lines seem to invoke a new era of ambiguity and deconstructed meaning. ‘Weird’ is actually a good word to describe all of Hunky Dory. It is one of the weirdest albums you’ll ever hear. It’s a good weird, to be sure, possibly the greatest, most brilliant weird ever, but it’s also the kind of weird that tends to emerge out of transformative periods when the shape of things to come can only be viewed through a glass darkly…