My Month of Bowie, day 3: 'The Man Who Sold the World' (1970)

By 1970, David Bowie was eager to be the man who sold some records.

The album: The Man Who Sold the World (Mercury, 1970)

Is success in the cards for Bowie?

My thoughts: This Bowie kid's got potential, huh? He might really be going places! David Bowie's spooky hit single "Space Oddity" had gotten the music world's attention in 1969, but what would he do for an encore? The answer was a third album, The Man Who Sold the World, that built on the guitar-heavy, rock-oriented sound of his second album. I'd say this was his best effort yet. It's really remarkable how much he developed as an artist in such a short amount of time.

As I've said before in this series, I am mostly unschooled in Mr. Jones' recorded output, so The Man Who Sold the World was almost entirely unfamiliar to me. (Except for the title track, which I knew through Nirvana's iconic and surprisingly reverential cover version.) Therefore, I don't have any preconceived expectations for what these albums are going to sound like, and Bowie keeps surprising me. If I were to describe the sound of this LP, I'd say that it's like Led Zeppelin if that band were fronted by a fancy Victorian ghost. Snarly, swaggering tracks like "The Width of a Circle" and "Black Country Rock" could have come from any early Zeppelin album. Bowie's voice, especially in its upper register, has a keening quality not unlike that of Robert Plant's.

One question I've been pondering lately is: should I delve into the details of David Bowie's life as I explore his albums? My instinct was to stay away from this biographical material; I want to discuss the music, not the man. Besides, the inspiration for this whole series was an article Chuck Klosterman wrote for The AV Club back in 2009 in which he pretended The Beatles were an obscure band whose albums were being heard for the first time in decades. I wanted to do something similar to that, only for Bowie, since Klosterman managed to find a fresh angle on some very familiar material.

But I've found that it is impossible to separate the art from the artist in this case. The singer's personal life and family problems very much factored into the songs he wrote. David's father, Haywood Stenton Jones, died of pneumonia at the age of 56 during the making of the Space Oddity album in 1969. Surely, that major life event must have had an effect on Bowie, who seems troubled but unable to clearly voice his frustrations on that collection of songs. The Man Who Sold the World, meanwhile, contains "All the Madmen," which is very explicitly about mental illness and institutionalization. Bowie's own half-brother, Terry Burns, was schizophrenic, and he seems to be haunting this track... and perhaps other songs on the album, too.

Another problem: my original plan was to listen to each of these albums only once before writing my reviews. I wanted to record my immediate thoughts about these songs while they were still fresh in my mind. But I've broken my own rule three times in a row, mainly because it takes me at least two listens of any David Bowie album to get my bearings. The first time through, The Man Who Sold the World overwhelmed me with its dense, layered sound and cryptic, deliberately obscure lyrics. But a second listen brought the album into sharper focus, and I was able to appreciate some hidden gems like the mesmerizing "After All" with its curiously haunting "oh by jingo!" refrain.

So this project is already leading me in directions I had not expected to go. Who knows where it will take me in the days to come?

Next: Hunky Dory (1971)