Bowie was the one that always stuck with me, even when I had eventually moved on to Ian Curtis of Joy Division, Peter Murphy of Bauhaus and Morrissey of The Smiths as major influences, especially when I had pretensions of fronting teenage bands.Īnd I confess, my fandom did eventually slip. In a sense, Bowie was my first idea of what a musical performer was: androgyny, theatricality and all, even before MTV offered a certain range of those personas. Similar to the robotic and mannequin-like images of the members of Kraftwerk on their albums, or the otherworldly look of Gary Numan on “Replicas,” my other favorite “sci-fi” album of the time, Bowie’s look spoke to me of mysterious alien power, the ability to create worlds, and the confidence to perform that persona to an audience, and further, to navigate those worlds. I heard the other albums up until that point, but those two for some reason were quintessential Bowie to me, where I could imagine the worlds that the albums created and escape there in my young mind, despite being utterly oblivious to all the references to sex, drugs, and well, the occult.Īnd while I didn’t see much of Bowie on television at that point, the pictures on the records and the inner sleeves captivated me. Of the Bowie albums I had access to, the two that I listened to the most were Bowie’s classic “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars” (1972) and “Station to Station” (1976). David Bowie as Ziggy Stardust in a striped balloon jumpsuit by Kansai Yamamoto. And Bowie was at the forefront of my world. I constantly snuck into my older brother’s room while he was still at football practice, to listen to those albums and live in that world that spoke to my alienation, that sense that I wasn’t like the other young boys in Northeast Ohio where I grew up, obsessed with sports and testosterone filled classic rock. Kraftwerk, DEVO, Gary Numan, then later in the early 80s, Thomas Dolby, Depeche Mode, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark.Īnd while it’s odd to think that a 7 year old would be knowledgeable about the early wave of electronic music, that was the air I breathed. But the music that captured my imagination the most was the electronic music. We reveled in (mostly) British and German music, early ska and what would later be called post-punk. When I locate my music fandom as a child and later pre-teen, I was surrounded by the influences of a family friend and neighbor who would bring over import records. My older brother had a copy of the “Changes One” singles compilation, so that was the start. At that point, I was certainly familiar with the famous singles, such as “Changes” and “Fame,” from radio play, and “Space Oddity” certainly was an obsession of mine, as were all things space and science fiction (just a year or two prior to “Star Wars”). When I look back to my own childhood encounters with Bowie, it is this same time period (roughly 1976-78) that holds my imagination the most. But it also solidified that Bowie, as a persona, as a mysterious force, is eternal. Perhaps not unintentionally so, these unexplained time jumps reminded me of the final scenes of Dave Bowman in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” a film that inspired Bowie to pen his first major hit. Of course, I was struck by how utterly weird the film is, even by today’s standards, but also by the way the film constantly jumps ahead in time with no warning and suddenly, supporting actors like Buck Henry, Rip Torn and Candy Clark are visibly much older, while Bowie’s earthbound Thomas Jerome Newton remains ageless and unchanged. I had watched it once long ago in college in the early 90s, but I basically had forgotten the whole thing. Over the weekend, I paid tribute to Bowie by re-watching his bizarre, confusing 1976 film debut, Nicholas Roeg’s “The Man Who Fell to Earth,” based on the 1963 novel by Walter Tevis. “The Man Who Fell to Earth.” British Lion Films, 1976. Yet, I can’t think of a better representation of both the fascinating power and the tense anxieties behind the alchemical mixture of music, performance and the occult. The fact that he would have such an impact on the culture of Western music and stardom, seems so unlikely, given how he didn’t conform to most trends and maintained his iconoclastic place in cultural (and occultural) history across his roughly 55 year career. For me, as a musician, occultist, and performance scholar, who had grown up with Bowie’s music, whose formative years were immeasurably influenced by the Bowie persona itself, the loss was devastating.įive years later, much of Bowie’s life as a musician, artist, and erstwhile occultist, remains a mystery to me.
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