Songstories
Starman to Future Legend
Parlando di David Bowie in Cinque Terre. Capisci?
We landed on Starman, Marco and I. We had unearthed a shared interest in David Bowie’s music while waiting for the rest of the group struggling behind us in the heat. We had walked a quarter mile up an incline along the coast. Dropping away on our right was a gorgeous sandy shore with colorfully striped beach umbrellas and lounge chairs packed tightly in perfect formations to the waterline. We were in Monterosso al Mare, Italy, a tourist haven, and one of the Cinque Terres.
Marco was our tour guide. He met us at Manarola, then we boarded the 13:06 train to Monterosso. He warned us about pickpockets. We spotted none, just tourists everywhere. Marco was about thirty, with an affable personality, perfect to allay the frustrations of herding distracted tourists around crowded places. His white t-shirt hanging over his navy khaki shorts accentuated his tan and dirty blond hair that was starting to recede. With his aviator sunglasses on, he had a Paul Newman look.
Once our pack was whole again, we resumed our march toward the center of town, continuing our conversation about Bowie, interrupted, here and there, by Marco’s calls to those behind us about points of interest sprinkled among the turquoise, pink, and peach dwellings.
We paused our discussion so he could reveal the history behind the magnificence of two churches with striped black and white marble façades facing the tiniest of streets. Mortis et Orationis Confraternitas was stenciled over the door of the smaller and more interesting one — Brotherhood of the Death and Prayer. Their flag had been appropriated by pirates, Marco informed us.
When our eyes adjusted to the darkened space, we caught sight of the skeletons surrounding us overhead. The sculptures were reminiscent of Grateful Dead album covers, but the overall atmosphere of the place, given our Bowie context, was more allusive of “Future Legend”, “We Are the Dead,” and “Chant of the Ever Circling Skeletal Family,” songs from Bowie’s 1974 album, Diamond Dogs. Moments earlier, to establish my bona fides, I had mentioned to Marco that it was the first album I ever bought.
That first acquisition happened at Alexander’s department store in Rego Park, a short drive from where we lived in Astoria, Queens, and a frequent family weekend excursion. I knew the store layout well enough to go off on my own, first to the sports section for a quick browse at their selection of running shoes — usually slim to none — then to the music department. If I needed to find my parents, they would be in one of two places: the girl’s clothing section with my sisters or the toy section with my little brother.
My penchant for rock music was fueled by non-stop listening to WNEW-FM. The deejays were like older friends with time slots, Dave Herman in the mornings, Scott Muni after school, Alison Steele at bedtime, and Vinny Scelsa on weekends. Rock had supplanted sports as the subject of choice for conversations at school.
There were so many albums I desired, the trouble was I had no money. Applying for working papers was looming as a must-do errand. So was getting a job. I asked my father to come to the music section, so I could convince him to let me buy something. I was pleasantly surprised when he agreed, with a limit of two.
Deciding which two records to buy was not easy; there were so many starting points to a collection. I had to decide whether to get something I already knew, like Eat A Peach, the Allman Brothers album that Joey D. from the neighborhood spun for us in the alley on his portable record player or something that would be fresh and daring, weird enough to make me seem cooler than I was.
Eventually, I chose two recent releases, David Bowie’s Diamond Dogs and Elton John’s Caribou. Bowie was the more daring purchase, much more dangerous than even Elton’s “All The Girls Love Alice,” a saucy track from his previous album, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, that had been immensely popular with numerous hits.
Bowie’s latest single, “Rebel Rebel,” was a straight-up rocker, but the lyrics were not: “You’ve got your mother in a whirl/ She’s not sure if you’re a boy or a girl.” But that was okay. My parents had trouble understanding the words of any rock song.
Immediately, I faced another dilemma. The Diamond Dogs LP, according to the attendant, was out of stock, but available on cassette. Instead of going with a different LP, I switched to cassettes. I needed the Bowie coolness factor more.
It was a mistake I regretted the moment I left the store. The only advantage of cassettes was portability. They lacked in every other way. There was no large LP cover to stare at, no direct access to each track by moving the tone arm, no sleeve with lyrics and liner notes. The cassette insert was tiny, almost an afterthought. I never bought another album on cassette during my long and serious addiction to LPs, and then compact disks, the latter sharing some of the size drawbacks of a cassette.
I knew Bowie from the radio, of course, but also from his appearances on late-night television. Staying up late was always a challenge in our small apartment, me yelling back, just a little longer, after my mom’s orders to turn off the TV.
I would keep the sound off until the late news ended, the silent television flickering in the dark. I counted on everyone asleep by the time the rock shows, The Midnight Special, and Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert, came on so I could turn the volume knob a little above zero. If one of my parents got out of bed to turn off the TV, it meant trouble the next morning. Back then, TV was a privilege, not something taken for granted, the way it is now in the age of the internet.
My parents disliked most everything about rock music — the rebelliousness of the sound, “that’s not music; it’s unharmonious noise.” They didn’t like the long-haired rock musicians, either. Only Redbone (“Come And Get Your Love”), dressed in their American Indian garb, would have had acceptable long hair.
When the androgynous, red-haired Bowie was on, he was especially difficult to explain away, always wearing the oddest of costumes. Fortunately, my Catholic parents didn’t get to see his duet on “I Got You Babe” with Marianne Faithful dressed in a nun’s habit. That would have been sacrilegious, and, surely, a loss of TV privileges for me.
Bowie usually shared the stage with Mick Ronson, his standard sidekick. The two were perfect together. Ronson had the pretty-boy-axeman part down, wielding his piercing guitar over his gold lamé jumpsuit. He was there, sharing the microphone with Bowie on “Space Oddity (Major Tom)” and on a live version of “Starman” that Marco mentioned he had seen on YouTube.
After the stop at the striped marble churches, we doubled back under the train overpass and onto Via Fegina fronting the docks. At the busy waterfront, while waiting for the boys in our group who decided to take a cooling dip in the Mediterranean, we mocked the nonsensical line that ends the “Starman” chorus, “let all the children boogie.” Marco double-checked with me the meaning of “boogie.” Despite my non-existent Italian and his English-for-tourists, establishing a linguistic lane from dancing to boogie was fairly easy. Our exegesis came to a sharp stop when we realized we had to boogie to make the ferry departing on the far side of the docks — we were meeting a different guide in Vernazza.
I thought about Marco when I heard “Starman” come on for an ad for Bleu de Chanel perfume. I wondered if he, too, would have been similarly displeased. It’s true that Audi, the car company, had previously used “Starman” in its commercial, but perhaps because it featured rocketships and astronauts, the assault felt muted, less harsh. The perfume spot was one of those couplings of product and song that just felt wrong. Dismay from such ill-fitting couplings hasn’t dulled with repeated transgressions.
David Bowie wasn’t the man who sold out to the world. These two spots aired after his death in 2016. The decision to license them was likely made by his estate. It seems inevitable, given the recent trend of aging artists selling the rights to their catalogs—Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, and Bruce Springsteen come to mind—that more back catalogs will be raided for serviceable music. It has become routine for fans to hear their music trivialized as the soundtrack for a sales pitch, but perhaps it’s one way to give rock music a pulse, to keep it from the brotherhood of the dead.
David Bowie (January 8, 1947–January 10, 2016)
See my collection on Medium at The Ink Never Dries: medium.com/matiz.
