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. But like Punxsutawney Phil, he reemerged. What on earth would a David Bowie album sound like in a post-Nevermind (1991) world? We're about to investigate that very question.

P.S. I am led to understand there are multiple mixes of this album in circulation. With a project of this nature, I really only have time to listen to one version of each album and move on. Perhaps Bowie had second thoughts about the production of Never Let Me Down and stripped away some of the most egregious elements. One can only hope. Don't drown your food, David.

Next: Black Tie White Noise (1993)