occasional dream, five

The version of Queen Bitch I’ve posted this evening is not nearly as good as what you get on Hunky Dory, but the Ziggy-era footage of Bowie, with Ronno slashing away at his Les Paul in the background, is incredible. One of the things you’ll notice from the first few Bowie albums, all the way up to Ziggy, is that the rhythm guitar is almost always a 12-string acoustic. And it sounds absolutely magnificent. Even Hunky Dory, which is largely a piano album (with Rick Wakeman elevating the music into the realm of the sublime), features some of the richest acoustic rhythm guitar playing you’ll ever hear. Our crack research staff here at PLU has also discovered that the 12-string on Hunky Dory is often double, triple and even quadruple tracked. This new Wall of Sound, if you will, is a huge part of why the album sounds so amazing. The songs just leap out of the speakers, fill the room, and give you…aural pleasure. Sorry. …Tonight’s live performance doesn’t afford any of Bowie’s studio based inventiveness and ingenuity, but his sexually ambiguous charisma is on full display. At this time in California, hippie singer songwriters were gazing into their navels, whining and moaning about their confusion and unrealized dreams. Bowie, on the other hand, welcomes the confusion and, perhaps more than any other artist, moves the transition farther along. What makes him so distinctive is that, with the exception of Pin Ups, an album I never reach for anyway, he refuses to look backwards or stand still. He chooses instead to sharpen the leading edge, creating a new cultural currency in which alienation, ambivalence, and perpetual transition come together to fuel aesthetic creativity of the highest order…