David Bowie's Diamond Dogs

Glenn Hendler

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781501336584
• eBook ISBN: 9781501336591
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

After his breakthrough with Ziggy Stardust and before his U.S. pop hits "Fame" and "Golden Years" David Bowie produced a dark and difficult concept album set in a post-apocalyptic "Hunger City" populated by post-human "mutants." Diamond Dogs includes the great glam anthem "Rebel Rebel" and utterly unique songs that combine lush romantic piano and nearly operatic singing with scratching, grungy guitars, creepy, insidious noises, and dark, pessimistic lyrics that reflect the album's origins in a projected Broadway musical version of Orwell's 1984 and Bowie's formative encounter with William S. Burroughs. In this book Glenn Hendler shows that each song on Diamond Dogs shifts the ground under you as you listen, not just by changing in musical style, but by being sung by a different "I" who directly addresses a different "you." Diamond Dogs is the product of a performer at the peak of his powers but uncomfortable with the rock star role he had constructed. All of the album's influences looked to Bowie like ways of escaping not just the Ziggy role, but also the constraints of race, gender, sexuality, and nationality. These are just some of the reasons many Bowie fans rate Diamond Dogs his richest and most important album of the 1970s.

1

This Is Not America

Very early one Saturday morning in the fall of 1974, I was perched on the edge of a sofa in the pickled-cypress-paneled den of my childhood home in New Haven, Connecticut. An enormous freshwater fish tank bubbled on my left, and my father’s old music collection—33 1/3 records, but also 78s—sat on shelves to my right. It was way past a twelve-year-old’s bedtime, but I had crept downstairs to see one of the weirdest and most wonderful things ever to appear on television. Before then, David Bowie had only existed for me in vivid still photos on album covers and in magazines—and, of course, in his music. Now he was to speak, move, sing, dance, on my television screen, on NBC’s Midnight Special concert series.

A year earlier, just days before Bowie went to Trident Studios to start preliminary work on Diamond Dogs, he spent three days being filmed by a crew that NBC had flown over to London. They shot studio footage on October 18, 1973, and then shot the live performances at London’s Marquee Club on October 19 and 20. The resulting ninety-minute television extravaganza was introduced by the raspy-voiced American DJ Wolfman Jack. Nothing I saw that night looked like Midnight Special’s usual fare, a big concert by an established rock act. As opening credits, dancers dressed in spiderweb leotards spelled out, in letters formed by their bodies, Bowie’s name, as well as the words “The 1980 Floor Show.” This was David Bowie’s world; NBC was just visiting.¹

Changing costumes with dizzying frequency, Bowie played four originals that I knew from his previous albums, along with three tracks from his recent covers collection, Pin Ups. Backing Bowie was a trio of singers he introduced as “the Astronettes,” whose dance movements were loosely synchronized. Interspersed were other acts Bowie had chosen. The Troggs played three tunes; Marianne Faithfull sang two. Also appearing, sporting outfits almost as flamboyant as Bowie’s, was a band called Carmen. They did a number mostly in Spanish, with hard-to-follow time signatures. Breaking up the music and unifying the show—sort of—were short introductions of the musical acts by a woman who billed herself as “Dooshenka.” She also engaged in scripted banter with Bowie between songs, all in an obviously affected Russian accent.

I was spellbound, even though much of what I saw went over my head. I did not recognize the singers onstage with Bowie, nor did I know that the black vocalist with striking blonde-dyed hair was Ava Cherry, who was living with Bowie and introducing him to new developments in African American music. I was unfamiliar with the work of Erté, the art-deco designer whose paintings of human bodies forming an alphabet inspired the show’s opening credits. I knew little or nothing about the Troggs’ English garage rock, though I surely recognized their 1965 hit “Wild Thing.” I did not know Marianne Faithfull at all. One of the songs she sang—“As Tears Go By”—might have been familiar from the later rendition by the Rolling Stones, but all I knew about the other—Noël Coward’s 1930 tune “Twentieth Century Blues”—was that it didn’t sound like rock ’n’ roll. I had no idea what to make of Carmen, nor was I aware that their “progressive flamenco rock” emerged from a Los Angeles flamenco scene that had roots in Latin America. I did not know that Amanda Lear—Dooshenka—was a model and singer as well as the companion of the Spanish surrealist painter Salvador Dalí.

Though I missed all these cultural references, I was familiar with the televisual genre Bowie was playing with. The 1980 Floor Show was a hilariously demented parody of a variety show. Still popular in the 1970s, variety shows typically featured multiple acts, filmed in a studio in front of a live audience. As if to underscore that Bowie was satirizing this genre, he and Marianne Faithfull ended with “I Got You Babe,” the duet that closed every episode of the faux-hip Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour. But Bowie and Faithfull were not Sonny and Cher Bono. She sang Cher’s parts clad in a nun’s habit that had glitter on the headpiece and was completely backless. Not to be outdone, Bowie belted out his lines dressed in stiletto-heeled thigh-high boots, feathered wristbands, and a red vinyl bodice with black and red sequins and feathers that moved independently of his body, as if he had a winged creature on his chest. Bowie alternated between chuckling affectionately and visibly cringing as a strung-out Faithfull flubbed some notes, but he sang his own parts nearly perfectly.

The 1980 Floor Show also unveiled, for the first time, music that would appear on Bowie’s next album. Playing under the dance credit sequence was an instrumental fragment of a new song titled “1984,” which Bowie and his band played in full later in the show. He didn’t explain this tune to his television viewers, but he told his studio audience that it was the theme song for a musical he was writing based on George Orwell’s 1984. He had not yet acquired the rights, Bowie told them; hence the coy name he gave the performance and TV broadcast.

Bowie never got those rights; he never wrote that musical. Instead, “1984” (and 1984) would become crucial elements of the fascinating, rich, and strange album Bowie would soon start recording: Diamond Dogs.

* * *

At the Marquee, Bowie was playing most immediately for the studio audience, made up of members of his international fan club along with parts of his entourage and management team, Warholian figures such as Jayne County, Leee Black Childers, and Cherry Vanilla. They sat patiently through multiple takes of each song, cheering on cue. But, in a larger sense, Bowie was playing for American television viewers like me. In fact, The 1980 Floor Show was never shown publicly in the UK. It was broadcast twice in the United States, first a few weeks after it was shot and then again in the fall of 1974, when I saw it. It has remained unavailable since.²

Diamond Dogs, too, was an effort to reach US listeners. Bowie was already hugely popular in the UK, Europe, and to some extent Japan in late 1973 and through 1974 thanks to his breakthrough album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, but he had not yet reached a mass American audience. He had started wooing American listeners even before he attained success at home. In 1970 he dumped his longtime manager Ken Pitt in favor of an American lawyer and divorce consultant named Tony Defries, who made Bowie the central cog in a New York City–based financial machine called the MainMan Group of Companies. Defries sent him on a radio station and print media tour across the United States in support of the album The Man Who Sold the World, released in the United States five months before it appeared in the United Kingdom. Two years later, two Ziggy-related tours failed to fill even medium-sized venues in some North American cities. Between those two tours, Bowie released an album of songs inspired by his American travels, Aladdin Sane, which he described as “Ziggy goes to Washington.” Despite these efforts, the US singles charts resisted Bowie’s charms. Only one of Bowie’s songs reached the Top 40 before 1975: a rerelease of 1969’s “Space Oddity” that peaked at #15 in spring 1973. His performance in the US album charts had been a bit better, but not stellar.

By contrast, Bowie and his “Ziggy Stardust” persona had conquered the UK, filling large venues and dominating the singles and album charts like no one since the Beatles. At least six of his songs broke into the UK Top 10 in just over a year, and he won an award for being the first British solo artist to have six albums in the UK charts simultaneously. Bowie knew that the path to global success led through America; he just couldn’t figure out how to get more than a toehold there. The 1980 Floor Show didn’t help. Indeed, it is a mystery why he and Defries ever thought the way to reach a US mass audience was to produce a cabaret-like parody of a variety show that would be shown at 1:00 a.m. Unsurprisingly, aside from diehard fans like me, few people saw it.

* * *

The period around The 1980 Floor Show and Diamond Dogs was for Bowie a time of uncertainty and transition for other reasons. The Marquee shows in October were Bowie’s final performances as the glam icon Ziggy Stardust, whom he had officially “retired” at the Hammersmith Odeon in July of that year. They were also his final 1970s appearances with Trevor Bolder and Mick Ronson, both of whom had toured with Bowie throughout the Ziggy period as members of the Spiders from Mars band.

And, again, The 1980 Floor Show introduced for the first time music from Diamond Dogs, an album that is itself transitional. The album marked a transition from work with a band to more ad hoc collaborations, and from youth-oriented glam rock to more mature styles. The period also saw the beginnings of other shifts: from the controlled ascent of the early 1970s to the cocaine-fueled chaos of the mid-1970s; from working under the umbrella (or the thumb) of Tony Defries and MainMan productions to financial and artistic independence; from traditional rock and pop to more experimental musical forms.

These two years were a time of transition, but of course all David Bowie did in the 1970s was change. The hard rock of 1970’s Man Who Sold the World does not sound much like the mix of softer pop styles on 1971’s Hunky Dory, which differs widely from the crisp rock and confident pop of 1972’s Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. Even if the title persona of 1973’s Aladdin Sane is not radically different from Ziggy, Mike Garson’s wildly various piano styles make it sound quite unlike the previous album. Aladdin Sane’s simultaneously nostalgic and futuristic glam sound informs Pin Ups, which came out later in 1973, but it has very different effects when applied to that album’s affectionate covers of songs Bowie had heard in London in the mid-1960s.

Then after 1974’s Diamond Dogs and David Live came Bowie’s most drastic transition in sound yet, to the Philly soul of 1975’s Young Americans. The sound of that album—which finally resulted in his first US hit, “Fame”—prepared no one for the krautrock crunch and cool crooning of Station to Station in 1976. And the albums that close out the decade, conventionally grouped together as the “Berlin trilogy”—1977’s Low and “Heroes” and 1979’s Lodger—are not just very different from what came before; they don’t sound much like one another. Nor did the writing, production, and instrumental contributions Bowie made to songs and albums by other artists in this period—including Lou Reed, Lulu, Mott the Hoople, and Iggy Pop—result in music that had a single “David Bowie sound.” All were recognizably products of David Bowie without much resembling one another.

Even in this decade of constant change, Diamond Dogs stands out in ways that I will draw out in this book. I’ll write about its visceral, emotional extremes (listen to the way Bowie sings “will you see / that I’m scared, and I’m lonely” during “Sweet Thing,” or the intense duet of guitar and saxophone in “Candidate”), and also about its intellectual puzzles. (How does Bowie reconcile narrative elements of Orwell’s 1984 with a setting drawn from Burroughs’s The Wild Boys?) I’ll discuss its wide range of musical styles, from straight-ahead rock to piano ballads, from Moog-based prog rock to the high-hat and waka-waka guitar of disco. I’ll think about how the album juxtaposes “Rebel Rebel,” one of Bowie’s glam classics, with drastically different experiments in sound. Why, for instance, does the album end with a strange repeating sample that can fool you into thinking your record is skipping (even if you’re listening to it on a CD or in streaming form)?

For all its eclectic variety, there can be no doubt that Diamond Dogs is an essential, quintessential David Bowie album. As a Pitchfork critic recently noted, Bowie plays more of the instruments on Diamond Dogs ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series
• Title
• Contents
• Track Listing
• Acknowledgments
• 1 This Is Not America
• 2 Who Can You Be Now?
• 3 1984 in 1974
• 4 Mr. Burroughs Goes to Hunger City
• 5 Boys and Things
• 6 Rough Trade
• 7 Futures
• 8 This Ain’t Rock ’n’ Roll
• 9 Repetition I
• 10 Repetition II
• 11 Wild Mutations
• 12 Everybody Wants to Be a Fascist
• 13 After the Human
• 14 It’s No Game
• Copyright