A Six String Nation story on the death of David Bowie

I almost hate to weigh in with a Bowie thought just because — well, what can you say, really. Bowie either defied clichés or played with them relentlessly in his work and yet somehow anything anyone has to say about him sounds like one.
But I will offer this story nevertheless:

There are three quick, successive epochs in my musical awakening defined by three record players. First was from earliest memory to about age 11 and that was my parents’s Clairetone console in the living room and it was that with which I discovered the rich diversity of their record collection and for which I made my first purchases (“Meet The Monkees” at a yard sale, K-Tel’s “Believe in Music” from Kmart in collaboration with my sister and the full box package “Let It Be” from Sam the Record Man at age 10). The third was my teen-cave Pioneer system with the cassette deck and Technics turntable and Sennheiser headphones and HeathKit speakers my dad helped me build and that’s when I was truly lost to my family in favour of Talking Heads and the Clash and Pylon and Shriekback and Heaven 17 and everything else — about age 17 on.

But in the middle is a kind of oddly golden period with a shitty little portable record player my dear English grandmother bought for me — a Viking from Eaton’s with the fold-down turntable, one built-in speaker and one detachable one. It was absolutely not the system I wanted but it was all mine from the age of 11 until I got the Pioneer. I co-opted the back part of the laundry room and spent all my allowance and Globe and Mail paper route money on records to feed it. The thing that is so odd about that period is that I already felt I needed to go deeper than what was being hyped on the radio and on the covers of Creem, Circus and HitParader magazines — all of which I devoured. It seemed to me then that Led Zep and Bowie had been occupying those pages forever. when really they were just at the beginning of things and were doing so much that hadn’t been done before. So I distinctly remember the posters on downtown hoardings for “Aladdin Sane” in 1973 but I dug all the way back to 1971’s “Hunky Dory” and 1969’s “Space Oddity”. HD appealed partly because it was my first realization that this artist occupied different characters — the wan, effeminate dreamer as opposed to the sharp, glittered alien on the posters downtown. And the music inside shared so much with what I’d learned on the console up in the living room — elements of broadway and singer-songwriter. I remember dad liking that record when he came down to see what I was up to. And yet it was a bit dangerous too — and that’s when I first started to notice the sonic relationship between Bowie, the Beatles (“White Album” especially) and Bolan (I’d just bought the T-Rex album too).

And amazingly, my parents had taken us as a family to see Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” so I was tuned to the levels of cleverness with that earlier album and listened to the title track over and over again. Of course, it’s a very special record that tied into the creative arc Bowie constructed for himself over the decades from “Life on Mars” to Ziggy to the Man Who Fell to Earth to the return of Major Tom in various guises and references album over album. He captured so much in the story of Major Tom floating around out there and it’s such a perfectly constructed song and production that somehow gives you a view out that capsule window and into the heart of this castaway. 
That cool, spare, almost dispassionate but slightly foreboding opening and then you feel like the coolest kid in the world with your new stereo speaker detached and placed on the other side of the laundry room when you notice the countdown voice and the orchestral instruments swirl like rocket launch plumes and the irregular drum fills punch you off the ground and the second section starts when the strings swell marking your exit from the atmosphere. No matter how many times you’ve heard that song that lift-off remains compelling and true.

In 2012, Col. Chris Hadfield had given me one of his Mission Patches to add to Voyageur’s guitar case, along with a lovely note. We met before the mission started and he had a chance to play the guitar and we took a few pictures — one of which is below. He departed December 2012 and would take over command of the International Space Station in March of 2013.
In June of 2012 I began work with the Windsor Symphony Orchestra preparing for our multimedia Six String Nation concert series in February 2013. There would be a number of Windsor area guitarists enlisted to play doing original and cover songs with orchestral accompaniment and we all met to talk about order and repertoire and arrangements and visuals and that kind of thing. And we brought Doug Nicholson to that first preproduction meeting to get portraits with the guest players and various symphony staff. The guy in the picture further down is Ted Lamont. He would end up doing two songs for the concerts — his own “Brand New Day” and, in recognition of Hadfield’s contribution to the guitar case, “Space Oddity”, which I thought would be a nice touch.

I didn’t participate in the arrangement or rehearsals process. I was busy building the visuals and narration that would accompany all of this and just kept in touch with then orchestra operations manager Sarah Boonstra about timings and show order and staging and that kind of thing.

When we finally got to the dress rehearsals and performances in February of 2013, my place on the stage was at a stool downstage right from where I’d speak my narration and drive the multimedia cues from my laptop. I get to the part where I talk about Chris Hadfield’s contribution and show the photos and introduce Ted, who comes out, takes Voyageur from the stand next to me and heads to centre stage where he launches into “Space Oddity” while the orchestra begins their brooding countdown. I’m seated just in front of the percussion section — including the kit drummer and the timpani. Ted is really channelling the Bowie as he sings “Check ignition and may god’s love be with you…” and the orchestra starts to swirl and the drums do their punching through thing to slip the surly bonds of earth and it is sublime.

For all of those years I complained about that little Viking turntable — with its flimsy tonearm and its paltry bottom end. And there I was basically seated in the midst of the orchestra on stage in a beautiful hall with the drums right at my ear and yet in some way the whole moment took me right back to that laundry room and my detachable speaker and my first encounter with a man who fell to earth.
Thank you David and Ted and Chris and Sarah for that experience.

Six String Nation is a project centred around a world-exclusive acoustic guitar literally built from pieces of history and heritage that reveal the stories of different communities, cultures, characters and events from every part of Canada. The guitar is nicknamed Voyageur.

It offers a conception of Canada that is at once historical, contemporary, dynamic, personal, emotional, generous, inclusive and proudly Canadian.

The portrait of Ted, part of a collection of approximately 150,000 images of 15,000 different people taken at events in every province and territory of Canada, is by Doug Nicholson.

The photograph of Jowi and Chris Hadfield is by Paul Mills.

Jowi Taylor is a Peabody Award winning broadcaster, bestselling author and a recipient of Canada’s Meritorious Service Medal for his work on Six String Nation.