This episode is the first of a two-parter on “Space Oddity”, and the early career of David Bowie. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a two-hour and twenty-minute bonus episode available, on “I Started a Joke” by the Bee Gees. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by editing, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Resources Because of the increasing problems with Mixcloud’s restrictions, I have decided to start sharing streaming playlists of the songs used in episodes instead of Mixcloud ones. This Tunemymusic link will let you listen to the playlist I created on your streaming platform of choice — however please note that not all the songs excerpted are currently available on all streaming platforms. The single best source on Bowie’s early work is Rebel Rebel by Chris O’Leary. This is an adaptation of parts of O’Leary’s great blog Pushing Ahead of the Dame, but expanded and updated significantly. Other books used for this and all other Bowie episodes include Starman by Paul Trynka, David Bowie a Life by Dylan Jones, The Complete David Bowie by Nicholas Pegg, The London Boys by Marc Burrows, and Ziggyology by Simon Goddard. Information on Zoroastrianism came from Zoroastrianism: A Guide For The Perplexed by Jenny Rose. The version of Thus Spake Zarathustra I referenced here is the version translated and with an introduction by RJ Hollingdale. Because Bowie’s early work was scattered among a lot of different labels, there is no comprehensive collection of his juvenalia — each label has released collections of the four or five tracks they own. However, The Shel Talmy Recordings contains a full album worth of recordings and demos. The most comprehensive collection of Bowie’s Deram work is this sadly out-of-print double CD. This single-CD version is cheaper and contains most of the important material. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before we begin, this episode contains discussion of sexually transmitted infection, mental illness, and prejudice against sex workers. Knowledge of what’s to come in the future can have a funny effect on a project like this. Currently, we’re still in 1969, and over the next few episodes we will be looking at a lot of records that could be seen in one way or another as “the end of the sixties”. Depending on which episode you want to consider the true end, we’ll be leaving the sixties somewhere between song 189 and song 192 — by which time we’ll be well into the spring of 1970 — while the next song is in some ways wrapping up some loose ends from the fifties. Maybe those records felt like “the end of the sixties” at the time, though I doubt it, but what I do know is that here, before the end of the sixties, is where the seventies start. (Some might argue we’ve already seen the start of the seventies with Led Zeppelin, and I wouldn’t necessarily disagree with them, but to my mind Led Zeppelin are a continuation of things that had already begun in the sixties, whereas David Bowie, when he finally became big, seemed like something totally new and different.) Realistically, though, absolutely nobody at the time would have thought of Bowie as the future. There were all sorts of new sounds on the charts in 1969 — the swamp rock of Creedence Clearwater Revival or Tony Joe White, the psychedelic soul of the Temptations and Sly and the Family Stone, the horn-driven rock of Blood, Sweat, and Tears — which a listener might have pointed to and said “that’s what music is going to sound like in the seventies” (and to an extent they would have been right — all of those strands of music were popular and influential throughout the decade). But nobody would have guessed that possibly the most consequential record to be released that year would be a novelty track that seemed for a couple of years as if it would be a one-hit wonder, a song by a chancer who had been trying and failing to get any kind of success in the music business for half a decade, written in imitation of the Bee Gees (a band who themselves seemed already to have passed their commercial peak, but who would also have an outsized impact on the decade to come) and featuring a prominent instrumental part played on a toy that had been a brief fad. Yet somehow, that would turn out to be the case. So let’s look at the start of the seventies, before we go forward in time to the end of the sixties… [Excerpt: David Bowie, “Space Oddity”] One of the things people always mention about David Bowie is that he was born twelve years to the day after Elvis Presley, and while he didn’t quite define the seventies in the same way that Elvis had defined the fifties, he’s the only artist who comes close in that much more fragmented decade of media. But of course, Elvis himself was still around for much of that time, and we’ll be looking at what he was doing when we get to the next song. But one thing that’s worth noting is that he made a return to live performance after nearly a decade away from the stage, and for much of the rest of his life, his opening music would be this: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley/TCB Band, “Also Sprach Zarathustra”] That’s the opening to “Also Sprach Zarathustra” by Richard Strauss, one of the most famous compositions of the late nineteenth century. The piece takes its name from a book by the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, usually better known in English under its translated name, Thus Spake Zarathustra, and the piece is in three movements, each divided into three sections, mirroring and titled after the sections of Nietzsche’s work — Sunrise, Of the Backworldsmen, Of the Great Longing, Of Joys and Passions, the Song of the Grave, Of Science and Learning, the Convalescent, the Dance Song, and Song of the Night Wanderer. Thus Spake Zarathustra is the most difficult work by Nietzsche, a writer who is not generally known for being an easy light read even at his simplest, and it comes towards the end of his career. He wrote several books after it (many of them about how he had fallen out with his former friend Richard Wagner, a composer who had greatly influenced Strauss) but within three years of completing it, he stopped writing forever. This is because in 1889 the tertiary syphilis which he had suffered with for much of his adult life caused him to have a breakdown, and he spent the remaining eleven years of his life slowly deteriorating and suffering from dementia. (It should be noted here that medical diagnosis in the nineteenth century was not as advanced as it is today, and that some historians have raised doubts as to the cause of Nietzsche’s illness in recent years. I’m by no means an expert and wouldn’t want to say for sure that it was definitely caused by anything, but from my limited understanding he was diagnosed with syphilis many years before the onset of the dementia that killed him, and it was certainly an extremely common illness then, and most of his symptoms match those of tertiary syphilis.) It has been suggested by many that the illness affected Nietzsche’s philosophy before the breakdown which led to the end of his career, and this seems to me to make a lot of sense. I am not, I think, a particularly unintelligent person or especially impatient with difficult books, but Thus Spake Zarathustra is a very, very difficult book to follow, and not in a way that I find especially rewarding. I spent some years working on a psychiatric ward, and the book does indeed have some similarities to the way several of the patients on the ward used to talk, with leaps of logic and changes of subject based on some internal logic that they believe to be self-evident but which is anything but to the audience. However, something being the work of someone suffering from a mental illness is no reason to dismiss it — mentally ill people are capable of great art and often have important perspectives that we should be more willing to listen to. And certainly while Nietzsche is very, very difficult reading, his work has inspired a great deal of important music. As well as Strauss’ piece, Mahler set a poem from the book as part of his third symphony: [Excerpt: Gustav Mahler, Third Symphony, Fourth Movement] and Delius wrote A Mass of Life, setting text from the book: [Excerpt: Delius, A Mass of Life] So, what does Thus Spake Zarathustra say? Well, people have been arguing for over a century about its meaning, and a music history podcast is not going to definitively answer that question, but here’s what I think it’s saying. Nietzsche has his main character, the prophet Zarathustra, come down from the mountain where he’s been living for a decade, and announce that God is dead and denounce Christian morality. Zarathustra keeps having discussions with allegorical figures (some based on real people like Wagner or Schopenhauer, the philosopher who most influenced Nietzsche), gaining disciples, renouncing the disciples, and going back to his mountaintop. In the course of these discourses he expounds on two main ideas (among many other smaller ones). The first is the Superman — Zarathustra says “Man is a rope, fastened between animal and Superman – a rope over an abyss” and “Behold, I teach you the Superman: he is this lightning, he is this madness!” Nietzsche’s idea of the Superman is of a creature beyond current concepts of good and evil, someone who embodies his concept of the “will to power”. According to Nietzsche speaking through Zarathustra (there are of course arguments about how much of what Zarathustra says is what Nietzsche believed, but I think we can say he agrees with most of it)
