Darth Pazuzu
Banned
- Joined
- Jul 7, 2012
- Posts
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"The Sixties are definitely not with us anymore…the change into the music of the Seventies is starting to come with people like David Bowie and Lou Reed…they don’t expect to live more than thirty years and they don’t care. And they don’t care. They’re in the Seventies. What I’m tryin’ to say is these people like Lou Reed and Davie Booie or Bowie, however you pronounce it, those folks—I think they got somethin’ there, heh heh. Take a walk on the wild side!"
--Neil Young, 1973.
David Bowie and Neil Young are two of my favorite musical artists. And there are many similarities between the two of them – more than most people might realize on the surface. Understandably, those fans who look upon their favorite rock or pop stars as some sort of representative avatar of some desired ideal – or just whatever they think is cool – may scoff at the comparison. And in many ways, they are opposites, at least in a superficial sense: American/British, grungy/glamorous, organic/synthetic, sincere/ironic, etc., etc.
But for me, both Young and Bowie represent a certain kind of artistic archetype: “He Who Will Not Be Pinned Down” (for lack of any better descriptive!). Both musicians started out in the mid-1960′s, and they both achieved their greatest early success (artistic and commercial) in 1972 (Harvest and The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars). They’ve both gone through a great deal of stylistic metamorphoses (and haircuts) over five decades, confounding those people who would prefer that they stayed in one place. (As such, Young and Bowie can perhaps be considered “sons” of Bob Dylan. And I suppose Van Morrison also deserves mention in this regard, although frankly I'm not as big a fan.) And while this has certainly proved an artistically rewarding path for both individuals, it’s also proved frustrating for many of their fellow musicians and collaborators. There have been many players who have hoped to have long-term professional relationships with both, but ended up left in the lurch when the artists’ mercurial streak rears its head and they go off in a completely different direction.
What I think both Bowie and Young share is the desire not to get sidetracked by the trappings of popular success, and a willingness to destroy their popular image in order to create something new. (The obvious examples of course are Bowie’s retiring of Ziggy Stardust after the Hammersmith Odeon performance in ’73, and Young’s “destroying” his laid-back, sensitive singer-songwriter persona from Harvest with the scorched-earth rage of the live Time Fades Away the same year.)
While Young perhaps possesses a certain “redneck” quality (particularly with regard to his country-music influence) which definitely sets him apart from people like Bowie and Bryan Ferry, neither performer can exactly be described as conventionally “butch” in terms of their singing styles, both voices possessing a strange, otherworldly, androgynous quality. (And speaking of Ferry, have you heard Roxy Music’s live cover version of Like A Hurricane?) And both Young’s and Bowie’s lyrical sensibilities cannot always be described as straightforward or literal, both men capable of an almost offhand surrealism and the occasional flair for the fantastic. (The sci-fi imagery of After The Gold Rush‘s title track is not a million miles removed from the end-times scenario conjured up on the Ziggy album.)
And while Bowie certainly has a deserved representation as one of the most theatrical of rock performers, Young himself has certainly given audiences his share of theatrical conceits over the years – for instance the Rust Never Sleeps tour from 1979, with its roadies (or “road-eyes”) dressed like the Jawas from Star Wars and its oversized props. (Young attempted to do a sequel to the Rust extravaganza in 1986 with Crazy Horse, the Rusted-Out Garage tour, and from what I’ve read described in books, it was kind of the Glass Spider to Rust‘s Diamond Dogs!). And even in a lot of Young’s acoustic performances early in his career, he made a deliberate point of fumbling about with his instruments (tuning the guitar, adjusting his harmonica rack) and chatting and joking with the audience, maintaining the audience’s interest with some contrived bit of “business” that wasn’t exactly “real”!
Also, try listening to After The Gold Rush and Hunky Dory back to back. You can definitely hear the influence of the former on the latter, particularly that of Till The Morning Comes on Kooks (that jaunty French horn in particular!). Add to that the fact that Bowie himself covered one of Young's songs, I've Been Waiting For You (from Young's self-titled 1968 solo debut) on 2002's Heathen.
Interestingly enough, the above quote from Young regarding the passing of the ’60s and the increased relevance of Bowie and Lou Reed in the ’70s comes from 1973, the year in which Neil cut his dark masterpiece Tonight’s The Night (although it wouldn’t actually be released for another two years). In fact, the track Lookout Joe (actually recorded during rehearsals for the Time Fades Away tour), with its imagery of drag queens, junkies and street wheelers, seems almost a salute to the underworld territory of Reed (or writers like Hubert Selby Jr. before him), as well as anticipating the frazzled, dystopian paranoia and sense of mutation in Bowie’s Diamond Dogs (the title track in particular). Neil Young certainly had a more informed sense of zeitgeist than most others in his peer group. Someone like David Crosby certainly had very little use for glam rock, and certainly none for the later punk rock movement. Tonight’s The Night is in fact a requiem for a dream (with apologies to Selby!) – in this case the utopian ’60s dream (“I’m not going back to Woodstock for a while!”), as well as a kind of Irish wake (in the words of Billy Talbot), a raucous elegy for fallen friends Danny Whitten and Bruce Berry (“standing on the sound of some open-hearted people going down”).
--Neil Young, 1973.
David Bowie and Neil Young are two of my favorite musical artists. And there are many similarities between the two of them – more than most people might realize on the surface. Understandably, those fans who look upon their favorite rock or pop stars as some sort of representative avatar of some desired ideal – or just whatever they think is cool – may scoff at the comparison. And in many ways, they are opposites, at least in a superficial sense: American/British, grungy/glamorous, organic/synthetic, sincere/ironic, etc., etc.
But for me, both Young and Bowie represent a certain kind of artistic archetype: “He Who Will Not Be Pinned Down” (for lack of any better descriptive!). Both musicians started out in the mid-1960′s, and they both achieved their greatest early success (artistic and commercial) in 1972 (Harvest and The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars). They’ve both gone through a great deal of stylistic metamorphoses (and haircuts) over five decades, confounding those people who would prefer that they stayed in one place. (As such, Young and Bowie can perhaps be considered “sons” of Bob Dylan. And I suppose Van Morrison also deserves mention in this regard, although frankly I'm not as big a fan.) And while this has certainly proved an artistically rewarding path for both individuals, it’s also proved frustrating for many of their fellow musicians and collaborators. There have been many players who have hoped to have long-term professional relationships with both, but ended up left in the lurch when the artists’ mercurial streak rears its head and they go off in a completely different direction.
What I think both Bowie and Young share is the desire not to get sidetracked by the trappings of popular success, and a willingness to destroy their popular image in order to create something new. (The obvious examples of course are Bowie’s retiring of Ziggy Stardust after the Hammersmith Odeon performance in ’73, and Young’s “destroying” his laid-back, sensitive singer-songwriter persona from Harvest with the scorched-earth rage of the live Time Fades Away the same year.)
While Young perhaps possesses a certain “redneck” quality (particularly with regard to his country-music influence) which definitely sets him apart from people like Bowie and Bryan Ferry, neither performer can exactly be described as conventionally “butch” in terms of their singing styles, both voices possessing a strange, otherworldly, androgynous quality. (And speaking of Ferry, have you heard Roxy Music’s live cover version of Like A Hurricane?) And both Young’s and Bowie’s lyrical sensibilities cannot always be described as straightforward or literal, both men capable of an almost offhand surrealism and the occasional flair for the fantastic. (The sci-fi imagery of After The Gold Rush‘s title track is not a million miles removed from the end-times scenario conjured up on the Ziggy album.)
And while Bowie certainly has a deserved representation as one of the most theatrical of rock performers, Young himself has certainly given audiences his share of theatrical conceits over the years – for instance the Rust Never Sleeps tour from 1979, with its roadies (or “road-eyes”) dressed like the Jawas from Star Wars and its oversized props. (Young attempted to do a sequel to the Rust extravaganza in 1986 with Crazy Horse, the Rusted-Out Garage tour, and from what I’ve read described in books, it was kind of the Glass Spider to Rust‘s Diamond Dogs!). And even in a lot of Young’s acoustic performances early in his career, he made a deliberate point of fumbling about with his instruments (tuning the guitar, adjusting his harmonica rack) and chatting and joking with the audience, maintaining the audience’s interest with some contrived bit of “business” that wasn’t exactly “real”!
Also, try listening to After The Gold Rush and Hunky Dory back to back. You can definitely hear the influence of the former on the latter, particularly that of Till The Morning Comes on Kooks (that jaunty French horn in particular!). Add to that the fact that Bowie himself covered one of Young's songs, I've Been Waiting For You (from Young's self-titled 1968 solo debut) on 2002's Heathen.
Interestingly enough, the above quote from Young regarding the passing of the ’60s and the increased relevance of Bowie and Lou Reed in the ’70s comes from 1973, the year in which Neil cut his dark masterpiece Tonight’s The Night (although it wouldn’t actually be released for another two years). In fact, the track Lookout Joe (actually recorded during rehearsals for the Time Fades Away tour), with its imagery of drag queens, junkies and street wheelers, seems almost a salute to the underworld territory of Reed (or writers like Hubert Selby Jr. before him), as well as anticipating the frazzled, dystopian paranoia and sense of mutation in Bowie’s Diamond Dogs (the title track in particular). Neil Young certainly had a more informed sense of zeitgeist than most others in his peer group. Someone like David Crosby certainly had very little use for glam rock, and certainly none for the later punk rock movement. Tonight’s The Night is in fact a requiem for a dream (with apologies to Selby!) – in this case the utopian ’60s dream (“I’m not going back to Woodstock for a while!”), as well as a kind of Irish wake (in the words of Billy Talbot), a raucous elegy for fallen friends Danny Whitten and Bruce Berry (“standing on the sound of some open-hearted people going down”).
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