“Space Oddity” was the first Bowie song that I heard, it was haunting, beautiful and otherwordly.
I heard it while looking for new stuff for the “radio” that was my responsibility in high school in the early eighties. The'”white thin duke” trend and fad still had to come.
In those years I was a weird, nerdish early teenager living in the city of La Paz, Bolivia. As you can imagine, I was somewhat distant from what was really going on in music and movies everywhere else, maybe by a full year. But as anywhere else in those times, there was an underground market where you could get anything you needed if you knew what you wanted, for a price of course.
Proof of that is that my first record was an imported Blondie vinyl. You could never imagine how difficult it was to even try to explain the virtues of a post punk, early new wave, CBGB based, New York band’s music to parents that considered the Beatles the limit of avant garde they were willing to tolerate.
Later came the classic mid eighty’s , “Let’s Dance”, “Tonight” and “Never Let Me Down”… But they were mainstream.
One day I had the luck to be able to watch a rather disturbing film called “The Man that Fell To Earth”, directed by Nicholas Roeg, where Bowie stole the scene composing one of the most alien E.T. characters of all time, as millionaire Thomas Newton, who really was a lonely alien that had escaped from his native water deprived dying world hoping to save it by finding an alternative source of water elsewhere in the universe. He finds it in our Earth and develops a corporation in order to build a massive spaceship to fulfill his mission. But he gets ill and frail of health due to his long exposure to an alien environment and at the end he sees how his efforts are stolen by corporate greed. Curiously his alien character proves to be more human than his own company’s CEO’s.
A couple years later I discovered “Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars”, I was living in Buenos Aires then, studying engineering. In that record I found something.
I had become an immigrant. An strange in a strange world: Buenos Aires is a city that is absolutely different from what you would think as the typical Latin America one.
Argentinians are mostly first or second generation descendants from Spanish or Italian immigrants. So the city has a very European flavor, with extense parks, ample avenues guarded by old trees and a heavy French influence in its architecture. It has been called the Paris of South America.
Buenos Aires’ cosmopolite nature meant ample space for the underground to grow. I went through University while getting acquainted with stuff like pre-Phil Collins Genesis, post Genesis Peter Gabriel, lots of Velvet Underground and Lou Reed albums, Talking Heads, Laurie Anderson’s weird early records, (you can’t comprehend the meaning of weird until you’ve heard “Sharkey’s Day” performed by Laurie Anderson and William S. Burroughs).
And then, listening to underground FM radio, which was a particularly cool thing to do in those years, I found a radio show of similarly minded guys: they played King Crimson (the heavy mental era with Adrian Belew, Bill Bruford and Tony Levin ), Peter Gabriel’s epic 4 first records, more Lou Reed, jazz like Miles Davies, Keith Jarreth, and really weird stuff like Peter Hammill, David Sylvian and the shocking German post punk industrial rock group Einstürzende Neubauten.
That lead me to spent a short time doing underground radio myself with a group of friends, which I left after discovering their rather too folkish musical taste.
Of course that lead me into the fascinating German trilogy of Bowie.
You can understand where U2’s “Achtung Baby” and “Zooropa” albums came from by listening to those three records: “Low”, “Heroes” and “Lodger”. And there’s that haunting hymn of freedom called “Heroes”, which is basically drone guitars sound before the term drone was invented. Robert Fripp’s guitar performance is amazing.
There was and there is so much Bowie to discover that for a while it will be difficult to accept that he is really no longer with us. You can listen to his soul experiments of “Young Americans” (don’t miss the Beatles tribute at the end) and “Diamond Dogs”. And we even got introduced to Stevie Ray Vaughan’s music by his contribution in “Let’s Dance”: Stevie plays lead guitar in “Modern Love”).
I was lucky to be able to watch David perform live in Buenos Aires in 1990, he played with Adrian Belew as lead guitar, his sense of stage and performance were astounding.
Bowie always looked like an alien, but an alien that had managed to live comfortably adapted to his non alien environment. He refused to get stuck into any style, social, cultural or gender ghetto and that meant that he was chamaleonic, ambiguous, bizarre and controversial.
In his 1967 record “Space Oddity”, Major Tom was a brave astronaut that ventures into space after his spaceship has broken. In his 1980 continuation of the story “Ashes to Ashes”, he warns : “Ashes to ashes, funk to funky
We know Major Tom’s a junkie “.
That was his genius.
Good bye David, give Major Tom my best regards…
Mirko Torrez Contreras is a freelance Process Automation consultant who adapted to new environments after migrating from his country of origin. In the meantime he learned that accepting what’s different in everybody leads us to fully appreciate anybody’s talents.