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| Posted by: Fusive |
Monday, October 31, 2005 |
1974 saw the release of Diamond Dogs, another ambitious album with a spoken word passage and a song-cycle ('Sweet Thing/Candidate'). Diamond Dogs was the product of two distinct ideas - a musical based on a wild future in a post-apocalyptic city, and setting George Orwell's 1984 to music ('1984', 'Big Brother', 'We Are The Dead').
Bowie had planned on actually writing a musical to 1984, but his interest waned after encountering difficulties in licensing the novel, and he used the songs he had written for Diamond Dogs. The album — and an NBC television special, the 1980 Floor Show, broadcast at around the same time — demonstrates Bowie headed toward the genre of soul/disco music, the track 1984 being a prime example.
With the album came tremendous success, and Bowie launched a new world tour that lasted from 1974 to 1975, the Diamond Dogs tour.
Wildly overproduced and filled with theatrical special effects, Bowie performed no encores in this extremely high-budget stage production, which has been noted as extremely memorable. (Bowie himself, however, has commented that the resulting live album David Live ought really to be called David Bowie Is Alive And Well And Living Only In Theory.)
Although still slowly morphing out of his Ziggy Stardust glamour, in 1975 Bowie made a sudden and very jolting step in a new direction, having taken the genderless-alien-cum-rock-star to (and possibly beyond) its limit, culminating in the lead role in Nicolas Roeg's film The Man Who Fell to Earth. He shed the glam rock trappings and, with Young Americans, explored Philadelphia soul with backing from a young Luther Vandross. (The Diamond Dogs tour had been renamed the Philly Dogs tour in its later stages.) Young Americans also contained his first number one hit in the U.S. Fame", co-written with John Lennon (who also contributed backing vocals) and one of Bowie's favourite guitarists and band members, Carlos Alomar, and based on a version of James Brown's Footstompin' which Bowie's band had taken to playing live during the Philly Dogs period.
1976's Station to Station featured a bleaker version of this soul persona, called The Thin White Duke. By then Bowie was heavily dependent on drugs, especially cocaine (it is rumoured that Bowie was in such a cocaine-induced haze that he actually does not remember the production of this album). Many have attributed the chopped rhythms and emotional detachment of the record to the influence of the drug, and often Bowie has blamed his addiction on a lack of judgement while being introduced to the substances in America. Nonetheless, there was another large tour in 1976, the Station to Station World Tour, which featured Bowie's soul hits. However, Station to Station presented an interesting new direction in Bowie's music, with interesting use of synthesizer and electronic sounds and a lean towards German pop music.
At around this time, Bowie became embroiled in a controversy caused by his comments to Playboy magazine apparently praising Hitler, and his statement to the effect that "Britain could benefit from a fascist leader". This was accompanied by some theatrics involving an open-top vintage Mercedes and what some claimed was a Nazi salute staged outside Victoria Station. Bowie would later angrily deny that "even I" would do something so "foolish" as raise a Nazi salute, although the open-top car ride perhaps offered much scope for misinterpretation. This incident, along with similarly controversial racist remarks by Eric Clapton around the same time, were catalysts for the formation of the Rock Against Racism movement. Later, Bowie retracted his comments, excusing himself by claiming his judgement had been affected by substance abuse.
Source Wikipedia.org
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