My Month of Bowie, day 29: Iggy Pop's 'Lust for Life' (1977)

What, him worry? Iggy Pop lusted for life in 1977.

The album: Lust for Life (RCA, 1977)

Smile for the birdie, Iggy!

My thoughts: I distinctly remember learning that singer Dean Martin and comedian Jerry Lewis had once been a very successful duo in the 1950s. This was very confusing to me as a kid. The tan, tuxedoed guy who sang "That's Amore" and the twitchy, adenoidal comedian from the annual Labor Day telethon? How would that possibly work? And yet... somehow... it's true. There they are on TCM, yukking it up in hit films like The Caddy (1953) and The Stooge (1951). They were rock stars before rock stars existed, and their 1956 breakup was as bitter and well-publicized as that of The Beatles. In the minds of an entire generation, these two very different men—crooner and clown—are eternally linked.

You've probably already guessed that I'm using Martin and Lewis as a metaphor to describe the equally unlikely pairing of David Bowie and Iggy Pop in the late 1970s, with David as Dean and Iggy as Jerry. Only this pairing did not end in a contentious divorce. In fact, Iggy has been quite gracious over the years in acknowledging that Bowie not only resurrected his career but saved his life when the two moved to Europe and started writing and recording together while they kicked their respective drug habits. This fertile period led to three albums for Bowie and two more for Pop, all considered classics to one extent or another.

Iggy's second solo LP Lust for Life came out just half a year after The Idiot but does not follow the template of that record, at least musically. Experimentation and change were the keynotes of that era, so it would not have interested Bowie or Pop to imitate an album they'd just done. While The Idiot has been called an honorary Bowie album, since David's control over it was so great, Lust for Life sounds like Iggy Pop forging the identity he would use for his decades-long solo career. And what is that identity? Put simply, Iggy Pop is the man who's been through it all so you don't have to. He's done enough drinking, drugging, and screwing for any ten people. Lust for Life is the sound of a man who's been in his share of fistfights and hasn't necessarily won all of them. 

This album contains two of Iggy Pop's most justly-famous songs, the thundering title track (written with Bowie) and the haunting "The Passenger," and it's instructive to hear these familiar tunes in their original context. It reenergizes them. "Lust for Life" has been used in so many TV shows, movies, and commercials that we've forgotten or ignored the song's harrowing, William S. Burroughs-inspired lyrics about the junkie life. Which reminds me: there's an entire episode of This American Life about Burroughs from 2015, narrated by Iggy Pop. If you're still reading this article, you'll want to hear it. Naturally, the title track from this very album is a key part of that episode.

Lust for Life also contains a couple of songs that Bowie later revisited in 1984: "Tonight" and "Neighborhood Threat." In both cases, I'd have recommended leaving well enough alone, especially with "Tonight." Even though David's solo rendition adds a guest vocal by the always-welcome Tina Turner, the song loses almost all of the punch and immediacy it had in 1977. After hearing this Iggy Pop album, I'm starting to understand what people meant when they said David's creativity was running low in the '80s. Why take songs you'd already nailed and remake them unless you have something really vital to add to them? 

I said earlier that Lust for Life departs from the template established by The Idiot. Which, musically speaking, is true. Lust ditches the Kraftwerk-inspired sound of the previous record in favor of scrappy, Nuggets-style garage rock. Lyrically, though, I think Iggy Pop was working through a lot of the same issues on this LP as he was on the earlier one. Namely, Iggy is a man who's been at the banquet of life too long and has seen the underside of the table where all the chewed-up gum has solidified. You hear that theme coming through on tracks like "Some Weird Sin" and "Success." Sex, drugs, and rock & roll ought to come with a warning label, telling you they're contraindicated for anyone who wants to live to see retirement age.

P.S. I noticed that brothers Hunt and Tony Sales, sons of comedian Soupy Sales, worked on this album as musicians and songwriters on the closing track, "Fall in Love with Me." The Sales brothers would later join Bowie in Tin Machine about a decade later. Is this where the Tin Machine saga begins? I may have to check out that band after all.

Next: Toy (2021)

My Month of Bowie, day 28: Iggy Pop's 'The Idiot' (1977)

David Bowie made some weird friends along the way. Iggy Pop was one of them.

The album: The Idiot (RCA, 1977)

Everybody do the Iggy!

My thoughts: Hooked on drugs and losing what was left of his brilliant mind, David Bowie decamped to Europe in the late 1970s. His life in Los Angeles had gotten too out-of-control even for an androgynous alien rock star. Luckily for us, he took a boisterous traveling companion with him: ex-Stooges frontman and garage rock icon Iggy Pop. Bowie made his famed Berlin trilogy during this very productive era (1977-1979), drawing musical influence from such experimental German bands as Kraftwerk and collaborating with the always-enigmatic Brian Eno. But even while crafting three of his boldest and best-regarded LPs, Bowie still had time to serve as a producer, songwriter, vocalist, and multi-instrumentalist on Iggy Pop's first two solo albums.

Simultaneously goofy and menacing, Iggy Pop is such a major character in rock history—I think of him as the Bugs Bunny of proto-punk—that it's difficult to imagine there was ever a time when his solo career was brand new. But that's how it was in 1977. The Stooges were on a 30-year break, and Iggy needed to do something with himself to bridge that gap. The result was his debut record, The Idiot. David Bowie's influence on this LP is so great that some critics and fans feel The Idiot belongs to Bowie more than it belongs to Iggy. So it definitely qualifies for this project.

To me, The Idiot sounds like David Bowie and Iggy Pop sequestered themselves in an underground bunker somewhere and tried to figure out what music was, based only on their vague memories of it, while they lived on K-rations. Most of the songs on this album lock into a repetitive, thudding groove and stay there for several minutes while Iggy sings the same note over and over. Imagine an ornery robot trudging through a river of mud. Occasionally, David or Iggy will recall something of life on the surface world. To my ears, for instance, "Sister Midnight," has a lot in common with Stevie Wonder's "Superstition" (1972). And the intro to "Baby" is reminiscent of "Happy Together" (1967) by The Turtles. Just listen to it and think: "Imagine me and you, I do..."

I don't really buy that this is more of a David Bowie album than an Iggy Pop album because the central unifying sound of The Idiot is Iggy's deep, groggy voice. He's very much front and center. At various times he reminded me of Jim Morrison, Eric Burdon, and somebody's dad singing in the shower. There are even times when he sounds a lot like Bowie. (Bowie does contribute some backing vocals.) I wonder if David and Iggy were trying to Single White Female (1992) each other back then.

Lyrically, The Idiot is largely about jaded people who spend their nights partying, clubbing, carousing, drinking, and drugging into the wee small hours. It's fun at first, but it soon becomes empty and ultimately miserable. Iggy Pop sounds like a man who signed a contract with Satan centuries ago and has been mired in an endless loop of debauchery ever since. Did you ever see "A Nice Place to Visit," a 1960 episode of The Twilight Zone with Larry Blyden and Sebastian Cabot? It's about a small-time hoodlum who dies and goes to hell, only he doesn't realize it's hell right away because it sure seems like a gangster's paradise when he arrives. The Idiot reminded me of that.

P.S. Before I go, I should point out that this album contains the original version of "China Girl," which David Bowie famously rerecorded for Let's Dance (1983). I'm so accustomed to the Bowie version that the original somehow seems like a cover. But Iggy Pop's low-fi rendition is worth hearing on its own. Iggy sounds like his vocals were recorded on a Dictaphone, and there's this strange clattering sound that I think comes from a toy piano. "China Girl" is also noticeably faster than most of the other tracks on this album. In fact, The Idiot ends with three (!) consecutive dirges ("Dum Dum Boys," "Tiny Girls," and "Mass Production"), two of which break the seven-minute mark.

Next: Lust for Life (1977)

My Month of Bowie, day 27: So what did I learn from all this?

This month, David took me from crayons to perfume and then back to crayons again.

I've had a lot of jobs over the years: middle school Spanish teacher, customer service representative, freelance writer, etc., etc. Some of these I've liked better than others, but they all eventually ended for one reason or another. I've quit a few of them and have been fired or laid off from a few more. One thing they all had in common, though, is that I didn't really understand them until they were over. Every time I've walked away from a job (or been kicked out of one), I've thought, "If I were just starting now, I'd know better what to do."

Does this thing count?

And so it is with this foolish David Bowie project of mine. I decided to do this series of articles at the end of August, pretty much on a whim. My "research" was looking up David's name on Wikipedia and scrolling down to the list of studio albums at the bottom of his page. If you're wondering why I covered certain albums and not others, it's because I was following that list. That helped keep the project to a manageable size. (I'm still deciding whether or not to cover the posthumously released album Toy from 2021. This month isn't quite over yet.)

Apart from knowing a few of his more popular songs (like "Life on Mars?" and "Ashes to Ashes"), I was largely unfamiliar with Bowie's vast and varied career before embarking on this monthlong journey. As a result, I didn't really know what to pay attention to or what to focus on when I reviewed his albums. Having now listened to 26 of them in a row, I think (or hope) I have a clearer idea of what David Robert Jones was capable of.

What, then, are my main takeaways from this strange month? What did I learn from all this? Well, above all, I've learned that the cult surrounding Bowie is more than justified. He was an enormously talented, complicated, and endlessly odd and inscrutable man. He made albums you could get lost in. Not all of his ideas were to my liking, at least not on first listening, but I appreciate that his mind and his music went in many different directions. It is very difficult to categorize or summarize David Bowie because he didn't stay in any one place long enough for you to pin a label on him. If someone asks if you like Bowie, the only sensible response is: "Which Bowie do you mean?"

The 26 studio albums David made between 1967 and 2016 cannot be adequately appreciated in a rapid-fire series like this one. All I can really do is get a general sense of what each LP is like and then move on. Before I started writing these articles, I toyed with the idea of giving each of David's albums a letter grade. But there was no way to summarize my feelings in a single letter, so I gave up on that idea almost instantaneously. And I can't really give you a list of my "favorite" Bowie albums either, since I haven't lived with them long enough to develop that kind of relationship with them. What I can do is divide these 26 albums into some broad categories. Think of this as musical triage.

Albums to listen to first: Hunky Dory (1971), The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust (1972), Aladdin Sane (1973), Young Americans (1975), Let's Dance (1983), Blackstar (2016)

Here's your Bowie starter pack. Six albums. That's not too many. Why these six? Well, I wanted to include four of the albums from the period (early-to-mid-1970s) that I feel was David's pinnacle of creativity and innovation. This was the music that I enjoyed most while exploring his discography. After that, I'm including Let's Dance because I think it's a good indicator of how Bowie's career and image evolved after the '70s were over. And I'm ending the list with Blackstar because, if you've come this far, you'll want to know how the story ends.

Albums to listen to next : David Bowie (1967), The Man Who Sold the World (1970), Pin Ups (1973), Station to Station (1976), Low (1977), "Heroes" (1977), Lodger (1979), Scary Monsters (1980), Earthling (1997), Heathen (2002), Reality (2003), The Next Day (2013)

Ready to continue along the path? Honestly, it was difficult to avoid putting several of these albums in the previous category. The entire Berlin trilogy (1977-1979), for instance, should really be up there. But I feel that those albums would be best appreciated by listeners who had already become acclimated to Bowie's music, so I put them here. Then, there's Pin Ups, an album I really liked but one that is generally dismissed by Bowie experts and rock critics as a footnote at best. What do I do with that one? I put it here. My advice remains the same: forget it's a covers album and just enjoy it as a half hour of (great-sounding) music.

Albums I didn't really get: Space Oddity (1969), Diamond Dogs (1974), The Buddha of Suburbia (1993), Outside (1995)

All this month, I've felt a bit like an old-timey detective in a movie. My assignment was to follow this David Bowie guy around for four weeks and see where he went and what he did. A few times along the way, I lost the trail. These were those times. I do not say that these are bad or unsatisfying albums, just that I'd have to spend more time getting used to them before I could say anything intelligent about them. Outside, especially, would benefit from further study. I never even figured out who killed Baby Grace.

Albums that didn't really affect me one way or the other: Tonight (1984), Never Let Me Down (1987), Black Tie White Noise (1993), Hours (1999)

There were no albums that I out-and-out hated this month. There were, however, a few that I listened to and just said, "Meh. What else you got, Bowie?" Is it a coincidence that these records are all from the '80s and '90s? No, it is not. You might be surprised to see the well-regarded Black Tie White Noise in this category. That album did very little for me, I'm sorry to say. 

This series is called My Month of Bowie, and the last time I checked, September hath thirty days. That means I have three days left to tie up some loose ends. So that's just what I'll do. I hope you'll stick with me for the last three bonus articles. Otherwise, see ya 'round like a record.

Next: Iggy Pop's The Idiot (1977)

My Month of Bowie, day 26: 'Blackstar' (2016)

Blackstar is part of this nutritious breakfast.

The album: Blackstar (ISO, 2016)

This is the end, my friends.

My thoughts: Charles Foster Kane left us with one mysterious word: "Rosebud." David Robert Jones left us with an entire farewell album. Is the latter more revealing than the former? That's debatable. After listening to Blackstar at least three times, I'm still honestly not sure what message (if any) David Bowie was trying to convey with his final batch of songs. Perhaps he was merely signaling to the people on his homeworld that he was ready to be beamed up. Or maybe he had a sled called "Blackstar" when he was a child.

David Bowie's 26th and final album was released on his 69th birthday on January 8, 2016. The man himself died just two days later. What could be more final than that? It reminds me of how cartoonist Charles Schulz (1922-2000) died the day before the final installment of Peanuts appeared in newspapers. 

Sometimes, an artist's final work—the last album, the last movie, the last novel—takes on an added significance because the creator's death was unforeseen. Take John Lennon's Double Fantasy (1980) as an example. Songs like "Just Like Starting Over" and "Watching the Wheels" meant something different to us when Lennon was shot. But Blackstar was consciously conceived as a finale. David knew he was dying when he made this. While Bowie's lyrics are often inscrutable, especially on the LP's elaborate, ten-minute title track, the overall mood of this record is one of calm, resolute acceptance. He doesn't sound sad or frightened but simply like a man who has reached the end of a long, somewhat wearying journey.

And, one last time, Bowie managed to defy my expectations. I genuinely thought Blackstar would be an album of dirges and that the instrumentation would be very sparse, leaving Bowie's voice exposed and vulnerable. (I guess I was thinking of Johnny Cash's late-career recordings.) In retrospect, my  assumptions about Blackstar were way off. Bowie never made that kind of album in his life. Why would he do that on the last one? It would have been out of character. So the only thing stark about this album is its minimalist cover art. And, while there's a ballad or two on this LP, it's not a mope-fest by any means.

As with their previous collaborations, David Bowie and producer Tony Visconti give this album a rich, fulfilling, multilayered sound. The biggest surprise here, at least to me, is the drumming. There is some absolutely furious percussion on Blackstar, as if the singer's pall bearers were attending a rave later that same day. Another surprise was a track called "'Tis a Pity She Was a Whore." The title is inspired by a play from the 1620s, but the lyrics reminded me a lot of "She's Crafty" by The Beastie Boys. It's like the Beasties went to the finest finishing school in Europe and came out talking like proper English gentlemen.

Naturally, this album had me thinking about death, always a fun topic to ponder in the autumn as the leaves die all around us. Do you want your death to come as a complete surprise, so you don't spend weeks or months worrying about it in advance? Or do you want some time to prepare for it? I don't know. There's something to be said for both. 

Next: So what did I learn from all this?

My Month of Bowie, day 25: 'The Next Day' (2013)

Surprise! Bowie's back! It took him a decade, but he's back!

The album: The Next Day (ISO, 2013)

Welcome back... again.

My thoughts: After a decade away from the limelight following his heart attack, David Bowie returned to the studio and reteamed with longtime producer Tony Visconti for 2013's The Next Day. And we'll talk all about that in a moment, I promise. But there's something else on my mind right now.

All month long, I've been doing my level best to avoid biographical information about Bowie and his often-messy personal life. I figured, what this guy did when he was out of the recording studio (or offstage) was none of my business. Occasionally, just for the purposes of clarity, I've had to delve into the reasons why David made certain albums at various points in his life, e.g. the so-called Berlin trilogy (1977-1979) or Let's Dance (1983). But even then, I've tried to keep the focus on the music, not the man. This series is not meant to be a history of Bowie but rather a journal of my reactions to his albums.

Very recently, though, I watched an eye-opening 48-minute video by YouTuber and historian Jenny Draper entitled "How We Beat the Fascists Last Time," part of her ongoing series, The London History Show. It details how England was seized by anti-immigrant hysteria in the 1970s and how this led to a surge of quasi-Nazi hate groups, some of which started making political inroads and gaining surprisingly broad support. Draper even singles out a few celebrities who voiced disturbing, racist opinions back then, including David Bowie. 

This wasn't totally out of left field. I'd heard that David made some "controversial" political statements in the mid-to-late-1970s, but I figured this had been done purely for shock value and to generate some press. Also, he was way into cocaine at that point and was slipping into Howard Hughes-level paranoia. But none of that really excuses his comments, certainly not his seeming endorsement of Hitler as "the first rock star." Besides, David's hateful statements sound eerily sincere, not the kind of thing you'd say casually in an attempt to be "provocative."

My Month of Bowie, day 24: 'Reality' (2003)

Reality was Bowie's last album for a looooooooooong time.

The album: Reality (ISO, 2003)

Savor this one, Bowie fans!

My thoughts: When I read Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964) as a kid, I was fascinated by the idea that master chocolatier Willy Wonka suddenly withdrew from public life and shut himself away in his dark, lonely factory for years due to paranoia over industrial spies. David Bowie, the ageless genderless Willy Wonka of rock, did something similar in the 2000s, except his sudden retreat from stardom was caused by a backstage heart attack in 2004. And, while Wonka kept making marvelous confections even during his years of isolation, Bowie ceased touring altogether and kept out of the recording studio for a full decade. His only releases from 2004 to 2013 were reissues of archival material. 

Before this prolonged work stoppage, though, David put out one more LP, the one I'm reviewing today. How eerily appropriate that it was an album called Reality that nearly killed him. (He was touring in support of this record when he had his heart attack.) Could there be any clearer sign from the universe that it was time to retire or at least take an extended break? I suppose that being David Bowie takes a toll on a person's body after a few decades.

Bowie may have been on the precipice of disaster in 2003, but I'm not sure I would have guessed that from listening to Reality. It was Bowie's second album of new material following his reunion with longtime producer Tony Visconti, and it builds on the epic sound of their previous disc, Heathen (2002). This time, I'd say the songs are (mostly) hookier and catchier than the previous batch. This seems like the kind of album you might make if you knew you were heading out on the road and wanted some fun songs to play every night while your fans wait patiently to hear the classics.

Like many Bowie albums, Reality starts with dessert. The LP's first track and lead single, "New Killer Star," has the same basic cadence as Little Peggy March's "I Will Follow Him" (1963). You know: "I love him! I love him! I love him! And where he goes, I'll follow! I'll follow! I'll follow!" Up next is the semi-novelty number "Pablo Picasso," which could almost be an Offspring song. But then, in the grand Bowie tradition, heavier themes start seeping in through the cracks in the foundation. Tracks like "Never Get Old" and "Days" seem to show the singer grappling with mortality. And it all ends with a chilled-out, seven-minute saga called "Bring Me the Disco King," which is not disco at all but more reminiscent of Sade.

All in all, this was an enjoyable, ear-friendly disc to listen to on a warm, sunny, early autumn day. I'm guessing that Bowie was thinking back to the music that had inspired him in his youth and was trying to evoke it without being too obvious. But, as usual, who knows what was going on in the man's head?

Next: The Next Day (2013)

Ed Wood Extra: What exactly is a "bad" movie, anyway?

Ed Wood faced two clear options in the 1950s.

NOTE: I had intended to continue my coverage of The Erotic World of A.C. Stephen (1999) this week, but I was so bogged down with other projects that I found I did not have sufficient time to do justice to this remarkable compilation video. And so, Part 2 of my series about that film will have to wait until a later date. In the meantime, rather than post nothing at all this week, here's a brief, extemporaneous (read: no research) essay about Ed Wood.

"So bad, it's good!"

Even now, that four-word phrase defines the Ed Wood cult. It's the reason you're here. It's the reason I'm here. It's the reason Eddie's movies are remembered at all. As a society, we have determined that his films, especially the sci-fi/horror ones he made in the 1950s, have attained such a level of technical incompetence that we find them entertaining. Paradoxically, their "badness" makes them "good." So we still watch them and obsess over them, all these decades later. 

Meanwhile, many so-called "good" movies that won awards and received critical praise when they were new have fallen by the wayside. We may still respect them, but we rarely watch them outside of college classrooms. Is this fair? Many critics have argued that it is not. In his book Cult Movies 3 (1988), author Danny Peary begins his essay about Ed Wood's Glen or Glenda (1953) with this observation;

There are so many good, poorly distributed films waiting for discovery that it's somewhat regrettable so much attention has been devoted in recent years to celebrating cinema's clinkers. Particularly annoying are the Medved-spawned "Worst Film Festivals" that are geared to smug "hip" viewers (the equivalent of self-pleasing sports fans who do "the Wave") who think that a mediocre, average, or decent film is awful simply because the sponsors say it's awful, and respond accordingly.

I can remember that, when Tim Burton's Ed Wood (1994) was first released, several critics groused that a lavish biopic had been made about a man who made such disposable, drive-in junk as Bride of the Monster (1955) and Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957). Shouldn't we be praising the makers of "good" movies instead? 

My Month of Bowie, day 23: 'Heathen' (2002)

Bowie predicts you're going to love this album.

The album: Heathen (ISO, 2002)

Bowie in the new millennium.

My thoughts: This album marked David Bowie's reunion with longtime collaborator Tony Visconti, who produced most of Bowie's work from 1969 to 1980. And sure enough, Heathen is the first album since Scary Monsters (1980) that sounds like it could have been made during David's classic period. I enjoyed this 23rd album so much the first time I heard it, I almost didn't trust my own reaction. Could it really be so good or were my ears and my brain playing tricks on me?

In the course of doing this project, I basically sleepwalked through seven consecutive Bowie albums from Tonight (1984) through Hours (1999). I casually shrugged off 15 years' worth of content, including some wild stylistic experiments and ambitious concept albums. I perked up for the punchy, hyperkinetic Earthling (1997), but, for the most part, I couldn't really get too excited about the other albums from this era. Heathen was the first record since Let's Dance (1983) that made me want to pay attention.

Keep in mind, nothing on Heathen made me forget about "Life on Mars?" or "Changes" or "Space Oddity." Nothing here is quite as catchy or memorable as those classics. While this album generated a few singles ("Slow Burn," "Everybody Says Hi," "I've Been Waiting for You"), even these tracks are probably best enjoyed in their original context. Heathen is somehow more than the sum of its parts. Over the course of twelve songs, Bowie frets about the state of the world, casts an anxious eye toward the future, and looks back on his own life and his own relationships with a mixture of longing and regret. Bowie probably had a lot on his mind in 2002. This was his first album of the new millennium, his first since 9/11, and his first since the death of George Harrison. 

The Chemical X that makes this record work (at least for me) is Tony Visconti. Bowie collaborated with many musicians and producers over the course of his career, but none understood him better than Visconti. In particular, Visconti knew how to use strings effectively on a Bowie LP, which is to say sparingly. There is something magical about the sound of Bowie's '70s albums that is largely missing from his '80s and '90s albums. Heathen brings it back.

I have the oddest thoughts when I listen to David Bowie's albums. Today, while listening to Heathen, I began to imagine David Bowie forming a Traveling Wilburys-type supergroup with Lou Reed, Morrissey, Leonard Cohen, and Robert Smith. Together, they could make the gloomiest, doomiest record ever. The Glowering Wilburys.

POSTSCRIPT. I normally don't dip into the Bowie marginalia or apocrypha. In fact, I had a rather sour experience with the Black Tie White Noise (1993) bonus tracks last Thursday. But the version of Heathen that I found contained some extra songs at the end, so I gave these a listen with the understanding that they would not affect my overall rating of the album. Ultimately, while the remixes (by Moby and Air) were too timid for my taste, some of the other ancillary tracks from the Heathen sessions were strong enough to have made the main album. Bowie might have released them as a standalone EP, but I guess that wasn't his style.

Next: Reality (2003)

My Month of Bowie, day 22: 'Hours' (1999)

Physician, heal thyself! David Bowie closes out the '90s with Hours.

The album: Hours (Virgin 1999)

An album for the VH-1 crowd.

My thoughts: "What the hell is this?!"

That's a question I've asked at the start of several David Bowie albums, and I asked it again when listening to Hours for the first time. I know that Bowie loves to switch things up and make each LP sound like the opposite of the one that immediately preceded it, but he still caught me off-guard with his 22nd record, his last major release of the '90s. What shocked me this time around was the opening track and first single, "Thursday's Child." Namely, I couldn't believe the erstwhile Ziggy Stardust would start an album with a track this, well, wussy and anemic. This is some background-y, VH-1 adult contemporary stuff. Bowie used to throw darts in lovers' eyes; now he's throwing cotton balls at lovers' feet. 

Worse yet, "Thursday's Child" is the first track I've heard this month in which Bowie's vocal seems noticeably off, like milk that has just started to go bad. As Randy Jackson used to say: "A little pitchy, dawg." My advice to Bowie and his producer, ex-Tin Machine bandmate Reeves Gabrels, would have been to rethink this entire track, using 1970s Memphis soul as the template. I'd want David to do his best Al Green impression, and I'd want Reeves to give me a nice, warm, Willie Mitchell-style arrangement. I don't want any synths within a hundred miles of this thing. (Frankly, I'm done with synths altogether on Bowie's records.) The song itself is otherwise perfectly acceptable in terms of its lyrics and melody.

In fact, the saving grace of Hours is David Bowie himself. Even on an off day—and I wouldn't count Hours among his best records—he's still an interesting guy to spend time with. Every once in a while, he'll hit you with a lyric or even just a chord change that you didn't see coming. I'd say that, on this album, David was thinking about old age, death, and what comes after that. He still had another 17 years to live after this, but 17 years isn't eternity. I think he was planning ahead when he made this LP. Call it estate planning. You can really hear this on "Seven" with its refrain: "I got seven days to live my life or seven ways to die."

Musically, Hours stays mired in that midtempo, middle-aged malaise that came to dominate Bowie's '90s output. Fortunately, from time to time, the guitars will come swooping in like Valkyries. The seven-minute opus "If I'm Dreaming My Life" even has a little bit of '70s Pink Floyd grandeur to it. But my favorite track on this disc was probably "The Pretty Things Are Going to Hell," largely because it made me want to write a "Weird Al"-style parody called "The Brady Kids Are Going to Hell."

Come to think of it, it's strange that "Weird Al" Yankovic never did a Bowie song parody or even a style parody. And I'm not the only one who's noticed this. Certainly, there are Bowie tracks that would have lent themselves to the "Weird Al" treatment. Nothing on Hours, but maybe "Rebel Rebel" from Diamond Dogs (1974) or "Modern Love" from Let's Dance (1983). For the former, I'm thinking "Robble Robble" (about the Hamburgler) or "Barney Rubble." For the latter, I'd suggest "Modern Lunch." Failing that, he could have done a polka medley of Bowie songs, like he did with The Rolling Stones on "The Hot Rocks Polka" (1989). "Polka from Mars," anyone?

Next: Heathen (2002)

My Month of Bowie, day 21: 'Earthling' (1997)

And David Bowie surveyed his kingdom. And he was pleased.

The album: Earthling (Virgin, 1997)

Don't turn around!

My thoughts: Boom-BAP-ba-doom-a-doom-BAP! Boom-BAP-ba-doom-a-doom-BAP! Remember when that sound was everywhere? For a while in the 1990s, it seemed like every other song you heard on the radio or on MTV began with those same overcaffeinated drums. Jungle music, they called it. Or drum and bass. Were those the same thing? I forget. Whatever you call it, David Bowie was certainly paying attention in 1997, because the boom-bap-a-doom drums are all over his twenty-first studio album, Earthling. The whole thing sounds like an episode of The Powerpuff Girls. (That show debuted the very next year.)

You could accuse Bowie of merely following some late '90s musical fads on Earthling, and you wouldn't be wrong, necessarily. But I think you'd also be missing out on one of the most fun records he'd done since Let's Dance (1983). Goddamn, even that was 14 years old by the time Earthling came out. How time does fly. This is another one of those albums where I think it actually pays to be a Bowie novice rather than a Bowie expert. Uncultured dumdum that I am, I can appreciate the sci-fi sugar rush of these nine songs. Lyrically, Bowie is pouty and pessimistic as usual—always a rain cloud, this guy—but the music isn't lugubrious or morose in the slightest. It's propulsive.

The one song I already knew from Earthling was the album's penultimate track: "I'm Afraid of Americans." Bowie cowrote this doomy, paranoid ditty with Brian Eno, and it might be one of his very last songs to have a life outside of the album it originally came on. Part of the reason for that is because the single version was remixed by Bowie acolyte Trent Reznor. But I think "I'm Afraid of Americans" stands on its own as one of David's catchiest and most purposeful songs of the entire decade. It's one of the rare times in the '90s that David Bowie sounded like a man on a mission, the way he did in the '70s.

But I was entertained by Earthling all the way through, even if those aforementioned drums do tend to become repetitive over the course of nine songs. I'd never describe this LP as "pretty," but there are some exquisite barbershop harmonies on "Looking for Satellites" that my ears appreciated. Elsewhere, on Outside's final song, "Law (Earthlings on Fire)," there's a repeated, spoken refrain: "I don't want knowledge, I want certainty." A reasonable conclusion, I'd say. The first time I heard this song, however, I thought he was saying, "I don't want knowledge, I want succotash." I think I like my line better.

Next: Hours (1999)

My Month of Bowie, day 20: 'Outside' (1995)

David Bowie's Outside is a record that'll really get under your skin.

The album: Outside (Virgin Records, 1995)

Fire walked with him.

My thoughts: Normally, when I review these David Bowie albums, my strategy is to do no research whatsoever. I just press play and hit the road. I generally listen to these albums while I go for a nice, long walk in the park. I've gotten a lot of steps in because of David this month.

But today, as I listened to his twentieth studio album, Outside, I realized something was definitely amiss. First of all, the album didn't end after 45 minutes or so, like David's albums usually do. None of the individual songs were really sticking in my head but just sort of blurring together. Also, there were more spoken interludes than ever, seemingly all of them done in funny voices. And when I glanced down at the track list, I noticed there were at least five tracks designated "Segue." All these horrible realities began to dawn on me. Oh, jesus, is this another concept album? With characters and a story and all that crap?

So I looked into it and, yeah, this is another one of those. David the theater kid strikes again. Outside has a subtitle, The Nathan Adler Diaries, and a sub-subtitle, A Hypercycle. Oh, good Christ! I just want some goddamned tunes; I don't want to go looking for clues. And if that's not bad enough, this thing goes on for 75 minutes! But this is the album that reunited David Bowie with Brian Eno, so there must be something valuable about it, right? Right?!

David went through many phases in his career, but this was one I forgot about: his Twin Peaks phase. I guess he was really into that show. He was even in the movie Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992). It's now time for a confession. Although I consider myself a David Lynch fan and have seen pretty much all of his feature films, I've never gotten through even a single episode of Twin Peaks. I keep meaning to, but there's just too much of it. I don't have room in my life. I feel weirdly guilty about that.

Outside is not actually part of the Twin Peaks universe, but the album centers around a very Dale Cooper-sounding detective named Nathan Adler investigating the murder of a teenage girl named Baby Grace in a strange, fictional place called Oxford Town. Those spoken interludes I mentioned are monologues by eccentric townsfolk. Does all of this sound familiar? The album's cover, a smeary self-portrait of David Bowie, even looks like the iconic image of Laura Palmer's corpse. 

Wrapped in plastic: a side-by-side comparison of Twin Peaks and Outside.

Musically, Outside reminds me a lot of Nine Inch Nails' noise-rock epic The Downward Spiral (1994), except with weaker songs. And there are certain tracks (like the single "Hallo Spaceboy") that sound like they'd be on Tyler Durden's workout playlist. Which is remarkable because The Dust Brothers' landmark Fight Club soundtrack didn't come out until 1999. I guess what I'm driving at is that this album is very much of its time. You should listen to it on a Discman while drinking Surge outside a Blockbuster.

There's something paradoxical about David Bowie's career that I'm just realizing now, twenty albums into this project. He was so prone to experimentation, provocation, and self-indulgent oddness throughout his entire career that weirdness was his normalcy. What would be an anomaly in another artist's career—imagine if Bruce Springsteen had made this LP—is just another average Tuesday for David Bowie. After a while, the extraordinary becomes workaday. Do you suppose the Addams Family ever got bored of being the Addams Family?

You know what would have been a real experiment for David Bowie at this point in his career? An album of romantic ballads. Or a country album. That would have been daring.

Next: Earthling (1997)

My Month of Bowie, day 19: 'The Buddha of Suburbia' (1993)

David Bowie released two albums in 1993. This was the second.

The album: The Buddha of Suburbia (Arista, 1993)

An obscure Bowie LP.

My thoughts: Okay, here's a weird one, a little glitch in the matrix. When David Bowie was promoting his big comeback album Black Tie White Noise (1993), he sat down for a chat with British novelist Hanif Kureishi for an article in Andy Warhol's Interview magazine. Kureishi had written a novel called The Buddha of Suburbia (1990), set in the 1970s and at least partially influenced by Bowie. When Kureishi's novel was adapted as a four-part miniseries on the BBC in 1993, guess who ended up doing the music? That's right: our man, David Robert Jones.

So the album I'm reviewing today is the soundtrack to a miniseries I haven't seen based on a book I haven't read. Maybe Kureishi's novel was more popular over there than it was over here. It must've been, since the miniseries didn't even make it to American TV in 1993. Honestly, I was almost tempted to skip this one. After all, I didn't review David's soundtracks for Christiane F. (1981) or Labyrinth (1986) either. (Those LPs both exist.) But Wikipedia counted The Buddha of Suburbia as one of David's 26 canonical studio albums. And besides, David himself has said it's his favorite of his own records. What the hell? Let's do this.

You might figure that, since it's meant to accompany a TV miniseries, The Buddha of Suburbia would be mostly instrumentals. And, yeah, there are a handful of those on the album, including a curiously quiet, six-and-a-half-minute piece called "Ian Fish, U.K. Heir." As for the other instrumentals on this album, "South Horizon" and "The Mysteries," I'd describe them as a combination of jazz and techno influences. Both of them go on a bit too long for my taste, unfortunately. You could think of these tracks as updated versions of the ambient music Bowie made with Brian Eno in the late 1970s. But they also sound like they could work in the context of a fashion show, with models in expensive, uncomfortable clothes strutting up and down the catwalk on impractically high heels.

What really distinguishes The Buddha of Suburbia, though, are its vocal numbers. These are as strong as anything on Black Tie White Noise, for my money, though I'm not 100% sure we needed to reprise the title song in its entirety at the end of the album. Supposedly, the second iteration of the song features Lenny Kravitz, but I was hard-pressed to tell the difference between the two versions. There are also some interesting ideas, musically and lyrically, on the track "Sex and the Church," but this one drones on for six-and-a-half minutes as well and doesn't have much new to say in its last couple of minutes.

Was The Buddha of Suburbia worth investigating? Sure, but it's probably not one I'll be returning to once this project is over. At least not for a while. Frankly, if I'd been Bowie's manager in 1993, I might have suggested he ditch the instrumentals altogether, pare the vocal numbers down a little, and release the whole thing as a scrappy little EP instead of a rather bloated LP. Bowie is often cited as a forerunner of punk, but punk tends to get to the bloody point.

Next: Outside (1995) 

My Month of Bowie, day 18: 'Black Tie White Noise' (1993)

In 1993, David Bowie released his first solo album in six years.

The album: Black Tie White Noise (Savage, 1993)

Guess who's back, back again?

My thoughts: After a couple of critical duds in a row, namely Tonight (1984) and Never Let Me Down (1987), David Bowie evidently thought it was time for a change. Had he gotten soft in middle age? Lost his edge? Lost his way? Audiences and critics were wondering if the Thin White Duke still had anything left to say to us, so many years after that first communique from Major Tom.

Before he'd been marketed (successfully) as a solo artist, David Bowie was a member of numerous, short-lived rock groups: The Kon-Rads, The King Bees, The Mannish Boys, etc., etc. Maybe getting back to his roots would do the trick. So his next major endeavor was forming a noisy new four-piece ensemble, Tin Machine, and recording two albums with them, as well as touring. I'm somewhat curious about this material, but I'm skipping it for now. After all, this series is called My Month of Bowie, and if I included absolutely everything in the man's discography, it would take significantly longer than a month. Hell, David's live albums alone number in the double digits, including at least one he made with Tin Machine!

The point is, David needed some time to recharge his batteries. Tin Machine allowed him to do that. In 1993, six long years after Never Let Me Down, he felt it was time to come back with a new solo album on a new label. And he even reunited with Nile Rodgers, the producer of Let's Dance (1983), i.e. the last Bowie album people had actually enjoyed. I keep seeing the 1980s described as a period of "low creativity" for Bowie. I don't find that to be true. He was still creating things, but his ideas were getting buried in cheesy '80s production. It happened to plenty of artists back then.

So does Black Tie White Noise right the ship? Yes and no. In the main, I suppose it's more pleasing to the ears than Tonight and Never Let Me Down, but I still sense a lack of purpose on much of this LP, especially the back half. Black Tie sounds extremely optional to me, while Bowie's very best music sounded mandatory. It just so happened that I listened to this album the same day I saw Spinal Tap II: The End Continues (2025). There's a scene in that film in which David St. Hubbins (Michael McKean) proudly declares that he won a "Holdie" award for recording the best on-hold music. Well, I think a few of the tracks on Black Tie White Noise would have put David Bowie in contention for a "Holdie" of his very own.

What's there to talk about here? Black Tie is Bowie's first solo album of the grunge era, but you'd hardly guess it. Instead of digging Soundgarden and Nirvana, it sounds like Bowie had been listening to a lot of Lisa Stansfield before recording his eighteenth album. Remember that Stansfield made her name with a Barry White-style song called "All Around the World." She took Barry's signature soulful sound of the '70s and updated it with new jack swing production elements. It's conceivable to me that David Bowie heard that song and thought, "Yes, that's what I'd like for my album." You can especially hear this on the title track of Black Tie White Noise, featuring the silky smooth vocals of R&B loverman Al B. Sure.

Look, there's nothing exceptionally wrong with Black Tie White Noise. It's just that there's nothing exceptionally right with it either. It's an hour of competent pop. If George Michael had put out this exact same album in 1993, no one would have batted an eye. To me, a new Bowie album should be an occasion for copious eye-batting. But it's all so goddamned tasteful and well-mannered. In retrospect, Bowie was giving us some clues with the album's title. "Black tie" is what a wealthy man would wear to a formal event, and "white noise" is that pleasant drone people use to fall asleep. Put those together and you have this album.

P.S. I had a rare technical problem in putting together this review. When I originally went looking for this album, I inadvertently found a disc of Black Tie outtakes and remixes and somehow thought that was the actual record! So I listened to it and thought, "This was Bowie's comeback album?!" I didn't see how that could be possible. So I dug a little deeper and found the real LP. Whoops! (By the way, unless you're a completist superfan, don't bother with the extras for this album. They're not worth much.) This setback may have soured me somewhat on the album, so keep that in mind as you read my review.

Next: The Buddha of Suburbia (1993)

My Month of Bowie, day 17: 'Never Let Me Down' (1987)

David Bowie may, in fact, have let some people down with this album.

The album: Never Let Me Down (EMI America, 1987)

Even the album cover is busy.

My take: Never Let Me Down is the first David Bowie album I was acutely aware of. All of his LPs from Station to Station (1976) to Tonight (1984) were released during my lifetime, but I would have been too young to take notice of them when they were new. By 1987, however, I was an adolescent whose family had basic cable. MTV was my life. I was probably even reading Rolling Stone (or at least skimming through it at the newsstand) by that point. So, yeah, when one of the biggest rock stars in the world put out a brand new, heavily-hyped album, I heard all about it.

I even knew that Never Let Me Down, while a commercial success, was not a critically well-received album. (The same could be said of Tonight.) Nevertheless, for the purposes of this project, I approached it with an open mind and no expectations. Or at least I tried to. It's becoming more and more difficult to remain unbiased as this project goes along, especially now that I have sixteen previous albums to compare this one to.

Never Let Me Down finds Bowie still firmly ensconced in his "mall pop" era. Like other legacy acts of his generation, he was obviously struggling to update his sound for the '80s while still remaining true to himself. You can hear that same struggle in the Reagan-era music of Paul McCartney, The Rolling Stones, and other rock veterans. After two listens to Never Let Me Down, I'd say that David Bowie hadn't totally lost the knack as a songwriter or even as a singer, but he'd sure lost the knack as a record-maker. This guy released some of the most sonically-satisfying LPs of the 1970s, but Never is drowning in all of the worst musical ideas of the 1980s. At least he sounds more awake on this one than he did on Tonight.

To be fair, I cannot listen to the album the way it was intended in 1987. If you want to fully appreciate Never Let Me Down, you have to buy it on cassette from a Sam Goody, Record Town, or Tape World, then play it on a hot pink boombox with crappy speakers while applying copious amounts of hairspray and eye makeup. Under those circumstances, songs like "Beat of Your Drum" and "New York's in Love" would probably make a lot more sense. Most of the tracks on Never would also blend in perfectly on the soundtrack for a Steve Guttenberg action-comedy.

When you call an album Never Let Me Down, you're all but inviting critics to take potshots at you. Which they did. And I'm sure a few reviewers noted that, on this album, Bowie literally went from singing about "Heroes" to singing about "Zeroes." But "Zeroes" is a textbook example of a song that would have been much more engaging if Bowie had just recorded it in the early-to-mid-1970s. Only the cheeseball '80s arrangement lets it down (pardon the expression). Throughout this entire album, there are frequent guitar solos by David's longtime friend, Peter Frampton. I was ambivalent toward them. I could appreciate Frampton's skill as a musician, but these solos make a lot of the tracks on Never sound alike. Imagine the Miami Vice theme playing on an endless loop.

So what's salvageable here? Well, the album's first two tracks ("Day-In Day-Out" and "Time Will Crawl") are energetic and catchy, even if they both slightly outstay their welcome. The album's title track has a wistful, Lennon-esque quality, again nearly snuffed out by the overproduction. And then there's "Glass Spider," which starts with wonderfully pretentious spoken narration about some kind of giant spiderlike creature that goes stomping around China, devouring victims and turning their skeletons into keepsakes. Lord only knows what this all means, but we haven't had anything like it on a Bowie record since Diamond Dogs (1974). It's entertaining enough, but I couldn't help but think of Nigel Tufnel introducing "Stonehenge." ("In ancient times, hundreds of years before the dawn of history...")

I should mention that, in support of this very album, David Bowie embarked upon the incredibly ambitious and gloriously silly Glass Spider Tour, which featured (among other things) a gigantic spider looming over the stage. Critics huffed, but plenty of tickets were sold. I've looked at some of the footage, and it's mind-boggling. This show deserves an article of its own, but I simply don't have room for it in this project. Maybe somewhere down the line, I'll cover it.

For David Bowie, following this album and the tour, it was time to regroup and refocus. He spent the next few years with his side project, Tin Machine, before reemerging with a new studio album. Bowie went six years between solo records, an unprecedented gap for him. What on earth would a David Bowie album sound like in a post-Nevermind (1991) world? We're about to investigate that very question.

Next: Black Tie White Noise (1993)

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 243: The Erotic World of A.C. Stephen (1999) [PART 1]

Steve Apostolof, aka A.C. Stephen, has his day in the sun.

"Find a penny, pick it up, and all day long you'll have good luck." Remember that one?

Ed Wood on a lucky penny.

Since pennies are worth so little today, you have two choices when you find one lying on the floor or the ground somewhere: pick it up or leave it be. Personally, I'm a penny picker-upper, and I think it's because of that little rhyme we all learned as children. It's somehow comforting to think that these essentially-worthless little coins might be good luck talismans. It redeems them somehow. Ennobles them.

Ed Wood is the lucky penny of directors, except he's a lucky penny that we keep discarding and rediscovering in an endless cycle. Most people look at Eddie and see only a talentless drunk who made cheap, bad movies—a one-cent piece not even worth picking up—but every once in a while, some observant passerby spots him and decides that, yes, it's worth the effort to reach down and retrieve him from the pavement.

Interest in Ed Wood remained high throughout the 1990s, and the spotlight on Ed was wide enough that it shone on some of Eddie's collaborators and contemporaries. Case in point: Stephen C. Apostolof aka A.C. Stephen (1928-2005), the Bulgarian-born softcore director with whom Ed made eight movies between 1965 and 1978. Ed served as a screenwriter, assistant director, and even occasional actor in Steve's movies. While Apostolof was understandably conflicted about being reduced to a supporting player in the Ed Wood saga, it's undeniable that Wood's notoriety brought Steve's movies back into public view for the first time in years.

At least two different companies, both quirky specialty labels, rereleased Apostolof's movies on home video back then. In Los Angeles, Rhino Home Video released its own edition of Orgy of the Dead (1965), plus three volumes called Saturday Night Sleazies (1990-1991). Meanwhile, up in Seattle, Something Weird Video launched its own series of Apostolof reissues. When I was doing my research for the book Dad Made Dirty Movies (2020), I frequently relied on those SWV editions of Steve's films, including Motel Confidential (1969) and The Divorcee (1969).

The tape I wanted.

But one particular item remained elusive: a 1999 compilation tape from Something Weird called The Erotic World of A.C. Stephen. This is a career-spanning compilation of various Apostolof clips from the 1960s and 1970s, including footage from several of the films Steve made with Ed Wood. Somehow, I've never managed to snag a copy of this tape, and it's become a pretty rare collector's item in the quarter-century since its release. After getting sniped at the last second during an Ebay auction, I gave up.

Fortunately, reader and Ed Wood superfan Brendon Sibley was kind enough to digitize his copy of The Erotic World and send it my way. As with the last film Brendon sent me, the faux-Italian pseudo-documentary Mondo Oscenità (1966), there is simply too much here to cover in one article. Instead, I will make this into a two-part series, perhaps three if necessary. I very much thank Brendon for making this material available to me.

The generous, 108-minute compilation begins with a true rarity: the short film Bachelor's Dream aka The Bachelor's Dreams (1967). Steve Apostolof made this 33-minute featurette so that it could be shown in front of his own movies on double feature bills. That way, he could control both halves of the program and get all the box office receipts instead of only half. What's interesting to Ed Wood fans is that Bachelor's Dream is built around some black-and-white test footage that was originally shot by Bob Wilson during pre-production on Orgy of the Dead. Steve merely dusted off this footage, shot some new wraparound footage (some of it in color) to go with it, and added a flimsy storyline to tie it all together. Voila! Instant movie!

Podcast Tuesday: "Legend of the Black Widow"

Joanna Lee lines up a shot in The Other Sister.

When asked about his favorite episodes of Happy Days, producer Garry Marshall mentioned the show's so-called "very special episodes" that dealt with more serious situations. When Garry was a young writer on such lighthearted sitcoms as The Dick Van Dyke Show and The Lucy Show in the 1960s, these topics might have been off-limits to him. But TV changed drastically in the 1970s, especially because of the popularity of Norman Lear's controversial sitcoms like All in the Family, Maude, and Good Times. Those shows were not afraid of tackling uncomfortable topics, and they got good ratings. So the major networks decided to discuss such previously-taboo subjects as disease and mental illness in their prime time comedies. Garry took full advantage, as he explained in a career-spanning archival interview:

With Happy Days, we could do all the pressure group stuff that we couldn't do in some of the other situations, that were not done in the Van Dyke/Lucy days. So it became, you know, philosophically, while you have the audience's attention, you might as well say something. So then we did all our series of pressure groups in a good sense. We did our diabetes show, we did our mentally challenged show, our hard-of-hearing show, whatever that was, the blind challenge. I don't know the politically correct things, but we did all the shows that pointed out to the audience that you could overcome a handicap. You could do all these things.

Did that philosophy carry over into Garry's movies? To an extent, sure. His characters dealt with serious, life-threatening illnesses in Nothing in Common (1986) and Beaches (1988). There was at least one terminally-ill child in Dear God (1996). That film was mostly a feel-good comedy, but it had a preachy side, too, with its message about helping the poor, lonely, and depressed even when you're poor, lonely, and depressed yourself.

However, with his 1999 romantic comedy The Other Sister, Garry really went for it. It's a "very special episode" in movie form, complete with a message about overcoming a handicap. Yet again, he lined up a very impressive cast, including Juliette Lewis, Giovanni Ribisi, Diane Keaton, and Tom Skerritt. This was obviously a project very close to Garry's heart, since he cowrote the screenplay himself with Happy Days scribe Bob Brunner. 

This week on These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast, we talk about that film and our reaction to it. We'd love for you to join us.