A cold, quiet Friday night, alone in the modest living room in the house of my childhood. I had returned to live in that place after my divorce, but I only expected to be there a few months. By that time it had been a year. I don’t know where they were but my daughter and girlfriend were elsewhere, so I took advantage of the solitude, got a good buzz on, and turned on VH1 Classic.
I had no notion it was his birthday, but I had to pause to watch The Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars Motion Picture. I liked Bowie and had never seen it so I figured, “Why not?” and decided to end the channel surfing. At the rest of sounding corny, that decision had a massive impact on my emotional life. Of course, I only know that now in retrospect…
The concert was enthralling! Even with the lousy TV audio quality and the seemingly endless commercial breaks, I sat there as if tied to the old, faded and ripped green leather couch that had belonged to my grandmother. I couldn’t get enough. Before the first song, “Hang Onto Yourself,” was over, I went from slightly-more-than-casual Bowie fan to mega-admirer. It was then, and probably always will be, the coolest recorded rock show I’d ever seen.
Mind you, I knew most of those songs well, even liked them. I knew a fair bit about Bowie’s Ziggy period, but I never imagined he’d absolutely owned the stage. You couldn’t take your eyes off Ziggy, nor could you ignore Ronno and the other Spiders. I know I wasn’t just imagining my reaction or buzzing hard. The kids in that crowd in July 1973 swayed and sang and screamed in ecstasy, too.
I’m quite sure VH1 Classic was celebrating both the man himself’s birthday and the release of Blackstar. Those details escaped me then.
But then they hit me – it felt like me anyway – with the video for “Lazarus.” I’ll never forget the “What the fuck did I just see?” feeling I had after the video ended. I’m not a stranger to arty, dark material, but I’m mostly a straight up rock fan at heart. Ziggy has just given me a couple of hours of the kind of stuff I normally live on music-wise, with a lot of theatrics of course…but I digress. “Lazarus” – I simply wasn’t ready for its haunting beauty. It was disturbing much like Picasso’s “Guernica.”
I fell asleep on that couch some hours later and woke up a different person. Again, that sounds really trite, but that’s what happened.
I must’ve been waiting for something new musically to love deeply, to get to know intimately. I tend to obsess over personal interests, especially music. This blog was once one of my obsessions.
Bowie, in response to questions about his sexuality after the wild and crazy 70s, said of himself that he had always been a “closet heterosexual.” I think I’d always been a closet Bowie fan and simply didn’t know it.
Bowie had always been there, like road noise outside your window. When I was little, stuck in otherwise boring department stores, I would beg my mom to let me hang out in the record section. I gravitated to the Bs because I was already very into the Beatles, with a mild like for the Beach Boys. Well, Bowie’s right there. Diamond Dogs freaked me out. This …person… or…thing on these covers has a man’s name but looks like a woman…sort of. The covers to that and Pinups were almost confusing for me as a six year old. I think it was then that I caught the virus, if you will, that laid dormant for much of the next 40 years. More on that later, perhaps.
Today, two years since Blackstar was released and DB turned 69, I can only think about that rocking evening on the old green couch, and how my musical experiences have been otherworldly since.
The Sound of the Pounding 