English Evergreens

"One of these nights I may just jump down that rainbow way, be with my baby..."  TVC15

I used to keep a picture of David Bowie beneath my bed.  What?, it's true.  Sort of.  My "bed" was the two benches and a table that folded down in the front of a little camper trailer.  The picture was actually a scratchy vinyl copy of Station to Station that my cousin had acquired somehow & couldn't sell.  This was in the mountains North of San Bernardino.  I'd been uprooted & displaced.  I was West Coast without a compass.  Alien.

I used to think David Bowie was my mom's music.  Except, in the radio Eighties he became my music, in a way that the other "classic rock" guys who were still going couldn't manage.  I wasn't a fan of the high-waisted pastel Serious Moonlight look, but it's a miracle I never got a tear tattooed next to my eye.  Such is the power.  He has always been there, the cool Uncle who knows what you're into before you do.  You want to grow up to be just like him.  And marry him, too, somehow.  Marry your cool Uncle twin.

I could never listen to that record, but I still have it.  I wouldn't have been able to appreciate the melodrama & depth of it back then, anyway.  Later years would find me driving dizzy, trying to sing along on lonely trips to Joplin & back.  The road only existing as far as my headlights.  If an asteroid were going to hit the Earth, I wanted to go out listening to this album.  So perhaps it is inevitable that I would link Station to Station to [Blackstar].  Maybe nothing more than my own emotional connection, but they seem similarly structured, "difficult", and then there's David Bowie miming at the end of the "Lazarus" video, wearing the same diagonally-chalkstriped outfit his younger self is wearing on the back of my cd.  Just part of the mystery he has left us.

Speaking of leaving us--I am amazed at how he pulled off such a grand exit.  I can't even manage to scare up the skeleton of a will.  The more I think about it, the more at a loss for words I become.  It's a record I knew he could make, without my being able to imagine what it would sound like.  There is no pop-connection, no effort for one last hit.  It has the surreal energy of later Scott Walker without sounding like a rip off.  Sometimes the music & vocals could be two different songs.  The music just goes.  There's a little pattern the saxophone repeats about three & a half minutes into "’Tis a Pity She Was a Whore", getting a little higher pitched each time, until it breaks free & takes me with it.  Scrutinizing the lyrics, though, can be overwhelming.  In their own way, they end up being as wild as the jazz behind them.  Seriously, an entire song sung in Polari & Nadsat.  I'll still be deciphering it next year.  Anyway, there are numerous reviews & articles that say this better than I can.

A couple days ago, when I had [Blackstar] on repeat & had no idea what news Monday would bring, I kept asking "what is human?", and a lyric that jumped out at me was "endless faith in hopeless deeds".  That answer works for me.  Maybe it's that suspension of disbelief that allows love & art to thrive.