My Month of Bowie, day 8: 'Diamond Dogs' (1974)

David Bowie gets in touch with his animal side on Diamond Dogs.

The album: Diamond Dogs (1974)

My thoughts: Okay, so what the hell are "diamond dogs"? They must be awfully important to David Bowie. He named his eighth album after them, after all, and the title track is six minutes long. And before we even get to it, Bowie delivers some portentous spoken narration about a dystopian future in which it's the year of the diamond dogs. There are also "fleas the size of rats" and "rats the size of cats" in this future. (Wonder how big the cats are? The size of Volkswagens?) Oh, and did I mention that Bowie is depicted as a half-man, half-dog on the cover? Well, he is. Personally, I'm at a loss to understand any of this.

Normally, I've tried not to do any research on these albums before I review them. I want these articles to be about the music, not how or why it was made. I haven't even talked about such key collaborators as Mick Ronson and Tony Visconti, even though they loom large in the Bowie legend. But after listening to Diamond Dogs, I was so flummoxed that I had to do a little light Googling. Was this some kind of concept album with a story I was supposed to be following? Eh, sort of. 

What happened was, Bowie was working on a musical adaptation of George Orwell's Nineteen-Eighty-Four (1949), but that project was nixed by Orwell's widow. Bowie took the songs he'd already written for it and combined them with material he was working on for other projects at the time, including an abandoned Ziggy Stardust stage musical. He'd also been experimenting with some songs based on the writings of William S. Burroughs, who was famous for his chaotic "cut-up" technique in which he'd literally chop up a text and rearrange the phrases into something new. And all of that stuff—Orwell, Ziggy, Burroughs—got tossed into the stew that was Diamond Dogs.

The infamous cover art for Diamond Dogs.

God, we're four paragraphs in, and I haven't really talked about how the album sounds. It sounds fine, I guess, verging on pretty darned good. It's what I've come to expect from a mid-1970s Bowie album: some rock star heroics, some theatrical decadence, and a little random weirdness just for good measure. By this point, David definitely knew what he was doing in the studio. The song you know from Diamond Dogs is "Rebel Rebel," and there's a good reason for that. Side 1 of the album is kind of a murky morass, and then all of a sudden, there's this guitar riff that snaps the listener to attention. Maybe that's when the amyl nitrate finally kicked in.

I listened to Diamond Dogs twice yesterday, and I'm struggling to remember most of it now. Maybe I should have written this yesterday. Serves me right for being lazy. Perhaps looking over the track list will jog my memory. The title track works itself into a nice Stones-y groove. It could have been on Sticky Fingers (1971), cheek and jowl with "Brown Sugar." Side 2 starts with "Rock 'n' Roll With Me." That was a good one, too, surprisingly tender and emotional. And "1984" reminded me a bit of Isaac Hayes' "Theme from Shaft" (1971) and The Temptations' "Papa Was a Rollin' Stone" (1972). Not sure if that's what Bowie was going for.

I've heard that Diamond Dogs was pretty much the end of Bowie's "glam rock" phase. Maybe he figured he'd taken it as far as it would go. I'm ready for David to move on, too. Not that I disliked Diamond Dogs, but I feel like he's spinning his wheels a bit, creatively. Before I forget: the "diamond dogs" of the title are rebellious, violent punks in the dystopian future Bowie has envisioned for this record. Maybe they're like Alex and his droogs in A Clockwork Orange (1971). I guess that's why this album is considered a forerunner of punk rock. A generation of dissatisfied British kids took these songs to heart. But I think David meant this LP as a warning, not an instruction manual.

Next: Young Americans (1975)