Bowie, David

Category: Musician or composer

Bowie received a serious injury at school in 1962 when he was punched him in
the left eye during a fight over a girl. After a series of operations during a
four-month hospitalisation, his doctors determined that the damage could not
be fully repaired and Bowie was left with faulty depth perception and a
permanently dilated pupil.

David Robert Jones (8 January 1947 – 10 January 2016), known professionally as David Bowie  was a British singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, record producer, arranger and painter. He was a figure in popular music for over four decades, and was considered by critics and other musicians as an innovator. 

Bowie also had a successful, but sporadic film career. His acting roles include the character in The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976), Major Celliers in Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (1983), Jareth, the Goblin King in Labyrinth (1986), Pontius Pilate in Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), and Nikola Tesla in The Prestige (2006), among other film and television appearances and cameos.

Not bad for a lad from Brixton, South London.

Angie, David and Zowie [Duncan] in the Seventies

Bowie and spirituality

with wife Imam and baby Alexandria

David Bowie was an extraordinary man in spiritual terms.  Almost his entire output musically was driven by the spiritual.  He said in an interview with the New York Times that

“Questioning my spiritual life has always been germane to what I was writing. Always.” And “My interior life has always been one of trying to find a spiritual link”.

If he covered a song – such as ‘Wild is the Wind’, it was a spiritual and symbolic one.  He knew a great deal of the symbolism of spirituality and incorporated the symbols in his songs.  So he wrote of theatre, clowns and puppets, as well as the role of the fool:

He knew about destiny and the Great Work

 

Word On A Wing 1976
Lord, I kneel and offer you
my word on a wing
And I'm trying hard to fit
among your scheme of things

My prayer flies
like a word on a wing
Does my prayer fit in
with your scheme of things?

In effect, right from the word go, Bowie saw himself as a messenger, a contributor to the Great Work.  And he was.  He introduced a great number of very key concepts – androgyny being just one of many.  If we look at some examples, we have the idea of the Intelligence hierarchy and the Ultimate Intelligence

Pink and lightning

The album Hours is a reference to the spiritual path – the Four seasons and the Hours.  Here he is referring to ascension [the symbolic planets] which on the spiritual path lead to Annihilation

Then we have the effects of Ecstasy and spiritual experience.  Bowie used space as a metaphor for the spiritual realm – spirit, beyond the body:

The loneliness of the long distance runner

Film director Duncan Jones and his father David Bowie

What perhaps is never appreciated about Bowie is that he was actually lonely.  In an interview made in 2003 after his marriage to Imam,  he said

“Well, one thing that's different is I don't have that sense of loneliness that I had before, which was very, very strong. It became a subtext for a lot of things I wrote”.

A long time elapsed between his break with Angie Bowie and his marriage to Imam during which time he had numerous affairs and casual relationships.  Because he was so interested in the occult he read, but he read people like Aleister Crowley whose knowledge of the spiritual path ended slightly before ‘midnight’. 

Crowley liked to believe he was a master of the occult, but his ego was too big for him ever to proceed that far.  He makes a great entertaining read, he is funny, he has some good ideas and he helped enormously to break down the sexual taboos that were hindering spiritual progress, but he is not one to base your life on.  Crowley embarked on numerous affairs with various women, some of whom were married to people he termed 'friends' – not one might think a very friendly act.  He also caused a considerable amount of pain to a few of these people.

Bowie was nothing like Crowley, he had a heart, a conscience, a soul.  In following Crowley, Bowie probably made a very big mistake:

Bowie and drugs

with Imam, lonely no more

 Bowie’s drug taking is quite well known.  He did not use them to get inspiration, he used them as a prop and it didn’t work.  He hid behind personas – the sure sign of a fairly shy person and drugs appear to have been a prop for his shyness.  In  a sense he used them like some people use alcohol at parties.

 Drugs like LSD, for those with egos the size of a bus, memories the size of a tank and a will like a rhinocerous – ‘I may have my faults but being wrong is not one of them’ – are actually something of a boon.  Quick acting and effective they can – taken once- start the process and prize the door open just enough for you to get your foot in whilst you find better ways [of which there are numerous].  But Bowie had no need of drugs, full stop.

When he took them, his work went downhill rapidly.  We are lucky to have so many good albums where he wrote the songs without the aid of chemicals, even though he may have sullied them slightly by taking chemicals during their making.  Compare the 2003 live performances [off drugs]  of Loving the Alien with his 1984 recording [on drugs].  He would “later reflect that the production on the song undid the power of the lyric, and admitted the demo version had been better” [no drugs].

the mask

On the Reality Tour in 2003, when he performed a stripped down version with only Bowie on vocals and Gerry Leonard on guitar, Bowie remarked that this arrangement was perhaps "the way it should have always been done."[off drugs].

There was little sign of an ego that needed busting.  He played tribute to his rock heroes in his songs – Bob Dylan for example, to whom he paid tribute in “Song for Bob Dylan” on his 1971 album, “Hunky Dory.”  When Bowie first came to the United States, he sought out Lou Reed and his mentor, Andy Warhol; he sang about the latter in the tune “Andy Warhol”; he played Warhol in the 1996 film “Basquiat,” and he produced Lou Reed’s solo album, “Transformer.”  Many of the changes in his persona  were influenced by his friends, for example his change to ‘glam-rock’ was influenced by his long time friend Marc Bolan of T. Rex.  He was a friend of John Lennon  ‘I loved John. I remember asking him once what he thought of glam rock and he said. “It’s just fooking rock and roll with lipstick.” Which was very succinct, but not all that accurate. Ha, ha, ha.’

In the late 1980s, Bowie reinvented himself as a member of the band Tin Machine, joining forces with guitarist Reeves Gabrels and the rhythm section of Tony and Hunt Sales, sons of Jewish comedian Soupy Sales. Just a member.

Essentially he was a nice guy

 

Mick Brown - The Telegraph Magazine December 14 1996
Bowie laughs readily. It’s the first thing you notice. That and his immediate warmth. There is no hint of diffidence or reserve, no hint of mystery. Quite the opposite, in fact: the warm handshake, the south London mateyness, the air of breezy candour – all conspire to effect that great social trick of leading you to believe after five minutes acquaintanceship that you’ve known Bowie all your life.

It is one of the saddest aspects of Bowie’s life, that he did not need drugs to write his music, but took them anyway. 

History says he stopped taking drugs in the 80s "To stay alive, as mundane a reason as that. I wasn't getting any joy out of my life, so I changed it. … I was destroying myself very rapidly." 

But it would seem that it wasn’t until he met Imam that he really got out of that hell hole.

Bowie and his personas

 

Bowie’s personas were parts of him.  He took the spiritual statement ‘know thyself’ to a sort of perfection by playing himself on stage. One assumes that since the objective is to both find each part of you and reintegrate them to a whole [the shamanic concept of the lost souls], then he was reintegrating by playing each character out to its final conclusion.

He also used each character to ‘expunge demons’.  In the 1976 Station to Station, there is just the hint that the ‘Personality’ he created to represent the drug taking womanising him, was a way to try to personify and thence remove the attributes that were stymying his spiritual growth:

Making sure white stains………….

Bowie and religion

Imam with Alexandria

There are those who try to claim Bowie was a mystic Christian or a Kabbalist or a Buddhist, in the same vein that one looks for fellow football supporters – are you a  supporter of my club?  And all this shows is that those who claim he was a member of their ‘club’ haven’t got a spiritual bone in their bodies.  There is only one spiritual world.  Spiritually minded people simply take the mystic aspects and the work of mystic people – those who know and those who have seen. 

And Bowie was no supporter of organised religion either

 “I feel more drawn to agnosticism or Buddhism (than Christianity). I'm probably an agnostic troubadour. It's in everything I write. … We are so suspicious of organized religion, both the morality of it and the question of whether the medieval hierarchy of the church actually functions in this era.”

Where did his inspiration come from?

It was not drugs.  In the early days he smoked cannabis, which in the days we are talking about was similar to having a large amount of wine, it appears ‘madness’ was in the family, in other words his talent was inherited:

As it says , thee was a history of schizophrenia in Bowie’s family, and perhaps what should hearten everyone, who is in the same boat, that despite punishing himself he did not become schizophrenic.  He had spiritual experiences and there is a world of difference.

He may also have been left handed from the way his hair is parted in the early days.

Death

 

Bowie stopped touring after his 2003–04 Reality Tour, and last performed live at a charity event in 2006. On 8 January 2016, the date of Bowie's 69th birthday, his final studio album Blackstar was released; he died two days later.

Throughout his career, he sold an estimated 140 million records worldwide. In the UK, he was awarded nine Platinum album certifications, eleven Gold and eight Silver, and in the US, five Platinum and seven Gold certifications. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996.

God speed David.

Observations

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• Bowie, David - 1969 Space Oddity
• Bowie, David - 1971 Life on Mars?
• Bowie, David - 1976 Station to station
• Bowie, David - 1976 Word On A Wing
• Bowie, David - 1980 Ashes to ashes
• Bowie, David - 1982 Wild is the Wind
• Bowie, David - 1984 Loving the Alien
• Bowie, David - 1993 Strangers when we meet
• Bowie, David - 1999 Seven
• Bowie, David - 2002 Heathen
• Bowie, David - 2002 Heathen interview
• Bowie, David - 2003 Interview - I'm Not Quite an Atheist, and It Worries Me
• Bowie, David - 2013 Dancing Out in Space
• Bowie, David - Black Star
• Bowie, David - Quotes from interviews with the NYTimes