(#477: 17 April 1993, 1 week)
Track
listing: The Wedding/You’ve Been Around/I Feel Free/Black Tie White Noise/Jump
They Say/Nite Flights/Pallas Athena/Miracle Goodnight/Don’t Let Me Down & Down/Looking
For Lester/I Know It’s Gonna Happen Someday/The Wedding Song
(Author’s
Note: The original CD issue of this album includes three bonus tracks – an “alternate
mix” of “Jump They Say,” a Meat Beat Manifesto remix of “Pallas Athena” and the
album outtake – many still protest that it should have been the lead single – “Lucy
Can’t Dance,” essentially an extended jibe at Madonna, which may explain why it
was not.)
Just as
the synthesised train effects at the beginning of the song “Station To Station”
were oddly reassuring, so are the tubular bells which introduce “The Wedding”
and therefore this album. The bells are played by Michael Riesman, normally
musical director of the Philip Glass Ensemble – and that is far from this
record’s only reference to an illustrious predecessor.
The bells
yield to an engaging, midtempo study in semi-static funk, with a bassline which
may stem from “White Lines” – but wouldn’t it be nice if he had gone directly
to “Cavern” for his inspiration? – and which acts as an informal leitmotif
throughout the album (it resurfaces on “Nite Flights”).
Then
emerges a very familiar, and formerly quite desolate, sound – that saxophone which
its player seems intent on treating like a synthesiser, or at least a mellotron;
a sound source which is experienced rather than performed. We recall its doleful
coda to “Subterraneans,” a piece of music which seemed literally hope-less (though
for keenly attentive listeners it turned out not to be the case)…and it is as
if this spirit, this casualty, has risen, become reborn, has returned to the visible
surface of things.
Did I
mention that, despite its frequently desperate lyrical nature, this generally comes
across as such a happy album?
It is as
if the ghost of that jazz club has materialised in tandem with the falling of
the Wall. The annexation of Eastern sensibilities – which recurs as late in his
day as “blackstar” – remind us that she is Somalian. The woman who married the
artist, who probably saved him. There are some wordless falsettos – not made-up
words, but no words at all – possibly filtered through a Fairlight but heavily
reminiscent of…well, do I need to say which Scotsman? An abrupt backwards vocal
loop, like a genially gnarled signature, concludes the opening. The speed of
life, indeed.
I
think it was very good of Bowie to come back with an Associates record.
Once past
its drone introduction, “You’ve Been Around” – a song from Tin Machine days – settles
into sharp but amenable art-funk underlined by an amicably jogging bass, again reminding
us of what The Glamour Chase by the Associates could have been
like. Again he remodels the song as an effective tribute to his wife, with some
self-fourth-walling (“But you’ve changed me/Ch-Ch-Ch-Changed!”). The album’s
co-producer Nile Rodgers, finally able to make the avant-pop album he’d expected
to have been asked to make a decade previously, is deep but audible in the mix;
in contrast, Reeves Gabrels’ guitar contributions are scarcely detectable (his
own lead lines provided a significant difference in the song’s original
version) – my understanding was that this was intentional on Bowie’s part.
Nonetheless,
his new sparring partner now comes bounding into the arena; that other Bowie,
from St Louis, possibly the outstanding (and almost certainly the most
recognisable) musician in post-Coleman jazz, his instantly identifiable trumpet
boldly skittering into the picture as surely as it had done on “Theme De Yoyo” over
twenty years earlier. Apparently one of the Bowies had long been keen to work with
the other one, and throughout the record Lester proves a marvellous foil.
“I Feel
Free,” the Cream original of which is the first record I can clearly remember
hearing in my infancy, is from Bowie’s core era of the mid-sixties, and his
reading here effortlessly outshines everything on Pinups (on which the
song had nearly appeared) – he seems to take Low’s “What In The World”
(which itself referenced the Yardbirds’ “For Your Love”) as a template and his
at times comical baritone suggests that he is trolling Iggy (who also appeared
on “What In The World”).
Yet that is
not why the song is here, and situated so closely on the record to “Jump They
Say,” since both songs refer to his half-brother Terry Burns – while attending
a Cream concert in Bromley with the younger Bowie in 1966, Burns suffered a
severe mental collapse with lucid hallucinations; in January 1985, by which
time he had been a long-term inpatient at the Cane Hill psychiatric hospital in
Coulsdon due to schizophrenia, he sneaked out of the hospital grounds, walked
to the local railway station and jumped in front of an oncoming express train.
He was killed almost instantly.
Hence there
are swathes of breakdown swirling around Bowie’s “I Feel Free,” and the climactic
guitar solo was performed by a returning Mick Ronson, as though old ghosts were
indeed being summoned up – Ronson had produced Morrissey’s 1992 album Your
Arsenal (of which latter, more anon) and Bowie got back in touch with him.
Already very ill with cancer, Ronson nevertheless turned up for the session,
one of the last sessions that he was to play in his life – so the performance
serves as a partially inadvertent memorial.
Whereas “Jump
They Say,” which again uses “What In The World” as a broad stylistic template, is
a rather clinical study case of a suicide which tends to avoid the issue of personal
commitment; there is little to the unknowing outside observer to suggest that
he is singing about family (which may have been an intentional coping process).
Nevertheless, as a single, it made enough impact (at least in Britain) for
people to regard it as an almost-pop record, “Let’s Dance” put right (but,
paradoxically, never more wrongly, subject-wise); again, Lester Bowie’s
contribution, mirroring the agony of the protagonist’s mind, helped make the song
effective.
The title
song is troubling but intriguingly so – its words refer directly to the 1992
Los Angeles riots, which Bowie and Iman witnessed, albeit from high-up, in the
comfort of their hotel suite. The song also pours scalding scorn on the notion
that “protest” songs can alter anything – he and co-singer, the Bostonian New
Jack Swing operative Al B. Sure!, run through a series of examples, including “What’s
Going On?” (prefaced by some guilty giggling), “We Shall Overcome,” “We Are The
World,” “I Got You Babe” and, perhaps accidentally, “No Doubt About It,” Errol
Brown’s own witness account of a space oddity. The song’s seemingly formulaic
R&B setting is, I think, deliberate, since Bowie (and Sure!) waste no time
in warping and detouring it, harmonically and otherwise. Strangely, the song
fades out to a refrain of "Chick-A-Boom (Don't Ya Jes' Love It)," a
1971 novelty hit for “Daddy Dewdrop” (a pseudonym for the song’s producer and
main performer, Dick Monda) written for the animated television series Groovie
Goolies (“This really far out cat was screaming half crazy”).
In “Nite
Flights,” Bowie finally comes to terms with Scott Walker, and interprets what was
already a very Bowie-esque song precisely as “David Bowie” would have
interpreted it. His reading is a recapturing as well as a salute, and the
presence of Nile Rodgers suggests that Bowie had realised his true vision of
1978, since this version broadly sounds like the Walker Brothers as played by
Chic (I must say, generally, how great it is to have the bass back on
this album, given its effective absence from Bowie’s parched, stolid mid-eighties).
As with “The
Wedding,” “Pallas Athena” was composed by Bowie for his and Iman’s marriage
ceremony, and it was one of the most experimental things he had done for years;
it sounds like a trip-hop variant on “Subterraneans” – he had obviously been
listening to Massive Attack – with a more prominent, if still word-free, one-man
vocal choir which indicates that “Weeping Wall” may have been more in Bowie’s
mind. Added to this are the plaintive trumpets (overdubbed, both open and
muted) of Lester Bowie, which sound like a homage to the then-recently departed
Miles Davis. Over and over, a vocal sample (possibly a processed Bowie)
declaims “God is on top of it all.” But on top of what – a dormant volcano?
With “Miracle
Goodnight,” we are firmly in the land of Prince, with its cheery kids’ TV
synthesiser riff (reminiscent of “Delirious”) which musically is progressively
derailed by Bowie – a troubled, mumbled soliloquy, an elaborate Fairlight interlude
of classical flurries, Rodgers’ Nigerian high-life single-note guitar
meditations - but stands as one of his most open and moving proclamations of
love. At times – “It was only ma-ake be-EE-lieve!” – we find that he is still
emulating the mythical Anthony Newley.
“Don’t
Let Me Down & Down” – so much better than “Never Let Me Down” – was an Anglicisation
of the song “T'Beyby,” originally recorded in 1988 by the Mauritanian singer/songwriter
Tahra Hembara, which came to Bowie’s attention via its inclusion on a mixtape
CD which Iman had put together. Here, Bowie turns it into an R&B lurve
ballad in the partial manner of Luther Vandross – who, eighteen years earlier,
had sung on his earlier “plastic soul” experiment, Young Americans – and
more so in the manner of Jam and Lewis/Alexander O’Neal. Though regarded by
some commentators as an exercise in unforgiveable vulgarity, I find Bowie’s continued
plasticity quite affecting – and there is a direct Newley reference (“What kind
of fool am you and I?”). The piece is topped by a lyrical trumpet solo by
Lester Bowie – broadly Chuck Mangione, with a touch of Harry Beckett – and I
find it as moving a performance as “Can You Hear Me?” Indeed, the presence of
Fonzi Thornton and others among the backing singers, as well as a very
characteristic harmonic modulation which cycles through the song’s fadeout, caused
my penny to drop – this is Bowie doing Scritti Politti!
“Looking
For Lester” is a summery smooth(ish)-jazz-funk workout in the Barney Miller
signature tune sense, or at least initially makes us think that it is. Again,
Lester Bowie’s solo is compelling (like Herb Alpert on pep pills and slide
whistles – though I wish I knew who the other trumpeters on the session were; I
don’t think they are all multitracked Lesters) – but then Bowie’s alto
re-enters the picture and acts, at length, as its own “direct inject anti-jazz ray gun”; it seems to want to dismantle any picture of “jazz.” Technically never
an articulate saxophonist, Bowie nevertheless stayed focused on what he wanted
to communicate via that instrument and how he wished to do it. In the event,
his old pal Mike Garson pops up towards track’s end for a typically zippy piano
feature.
Then, Bowie
does Morrissey. He perhaps does him camply, but I think does him better. “I
Know It’s Gonna Happen Someday” had been the penultimate track on Your Arsenal
(not a number one album) and in that Ronson-produced form could have been judged
a send-up of “Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide”; Bowie presumably decided to return the
homage to its sender and here treats it as a gospel epic, complete with strings,
horns and backing choir - and some storming lead guitar from one Wild T Springer, a Trinidadian who came to Toronto in the eighties and spent some time as a member of the band Rough Trade before forming his own blues band, Wild T and the Spirit - although, once again, he is vocally far closer to
Newley than to Andrae Crouch. His version acts as a friendly rebuke to
Morrissey – hey, Steven, I meant it, you know. Was he simply trying to
make himself matter again, rather than anti-matter, in 1993?
All I do
know is that overall he sounds more contented than he had done on any of his previous
albums – free of the eighties, free of Tin Machine, free in part from
expectations (sales were generally disappointing; in Britain, they barely
exceeded 100,000). Don’t call it a comeback? Perhaps call it coming out of an
eighties coma. Some expected a friendly Stunning Return To Form and they got Fuck-You
Art-Jazz-Rock – and I’m sure that is absolutely what Bowie intended.
But, just
as the turnaround midway through “Station To Station” is the aural equivalent
of a gigantic window finally being allowed to open and permit the sunshine to
penetrate that blue room, Black Tie White Noise bears the hallmarks of liberation.
It concludes, as his previous great album had done, with a bookend parallel
reading of the opening track, now with words, sung, again, in the manner of Billy
MacKenzie. Never did he sound more contented, Bowie, more at peace with
himself. It represents the payback to “Be My Wife,” the single chink of honest
light which he had hitherto allowed in. Reader, she said yes, and married
him.