A few people have asked me over the past few weeks why I stopped blogging. I guess the short answer is that there aren’t enough hours in the day for me to do everything I want to do. The spare time I’ve had over the past six months have been devoted mostly to learning how to play guitar. It’s what I should’ve been doing when I was 10 or 11, and it’s hard work, but it’s really helped me heal in the aftermath of a setback last fall, to say nothing of the thrill I get when I have a breakthrough and can play things I’ve always dreamed of being able to play. Which brings me – as so many things in my life seem to do these days – back to Bowie. A student of the guitar can do a lot worse than making a careful study of Bowie’s first few albums, basically everything up to and including Diamond Dogs. But that’s not really what I want to talk about, though I do want to talk about Bowie. I always want to talk about Bowie. He’s pretty much the only thing I wanna talk about these days. The trouble for me starts when I try (and fail) to find people who actually want to hear what I have to say. It’s not as easy as you’d think…
A few months ago, when I started having these occasional dreams, I mentioned that Bowie’s particular take on melodic structure was in place from the very beginning. You can hear it, obliquely, in the early recordings he made when he was still Davy Jones, and you continue to hear it all the way through post-millennial albums like Heathen. Trying to pin down the essence of the approach to music that unifies Bowie’s career is a bit tricky since he’s always been given re-invention as an end in itself. But there’s a unifying element that connects his various incarnations. I’m not sure how to characterize it verbally. It’s one of those ‘I know it when I hear it’ types of things. I guess I’d say that it’s an aesthetic of pathos and alienation, or simply aestheticised pathos and alienation. Bowie’s music stands as a form of sublimation. I might be a masochist on some level, but I connect most deeply with music, and art more generally, that goes to dark and painful places and transforms them into things of beauty. Like an image of a lost soul going round and round a hotel garage, touching close to 94, but in place of screeching tires you get to hear a flanged-out Ricky Gardner guitar solo. …Even when Bowie’s songs are celebratory and life affirming, which is the case for much of Ziggy Stardust, there’s a kind of sublime tragedy built into the music. And the reverse is true as well. His most tragic songs also manage to be life affirming. I’m not sure how he pulls this off. Is it something technical like the chord progressions? He uses a ton of major sevenths where most songwriters would just opt for the root chord. It can’t be that, though, can it? He’s not afraid to step outside the key a song is in. Rock ‘n Roll Suicide in particular is all over the map in this respect. This kind of bold risk taking definitely injects added drama and melancholia just as the song is making its emotional ascent. Or maybe it’s his choice of collaborators. It’s no accident, for example, that he’s always worked with fantastic guitarists, whether it’s Keith Christmas, Ronno, Earl Slick, Carlos Alomar, Ricky Gardner, Robert Fripp, Adrian Belew, Nigel Rogers, Stevie Ray Vaugh, Peter Frampton…Or maybe the answer is much simpler. Maybe it’s just that Bowie is a genius (a word I use reluctantly), one of the major artists of the second half of the 20th century, and he simply has the ability to do things that most of us could never imagine doing , like using enduringly pleasing melodies as the avenue through which to create complex moods, synthesize contradictory impulses, and get at the essence of a particular time and place in history, often all at the same time. It’s all in a day’s work for David Bowie. The man lives in a Moonage Daydream. It’s a space that ordinary people can observe and enjoy passively, but only a very few can inhabit…
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