I never knew Earl Slick was such a Keith Richards fan!

Great to have Bowie back, but the new single is dissapointing: musically boring, sketchy lyrics at best (hinting at your past doesn't make it great!). I just read somewhere that the album will be a rock album, so I'll keep my fingers crossed.

Quote
GravityBoy
PS... I forgot "Candidate/Sweet Thing" from Diamond Dogs.

A masterpiece.

My favourite Bowie track(s)

Quote
whitem8
Here is a great interview with Earl Slick, and some Keith Richards comments.

[ultimateclassicrock.com]

Thanks for that one

Maybe jagger will sleep with Bowie once more.

jeroen

Quote
GravityBoy
I never knew Earl Slick was such a Keith Richards fan!

This quote says it all...

"Keith Richards is my hero. In my mind, he's the best guitar player ever."

Nuff said, Earl!

What is the best bootleg from the outside tour?

Quote
Koschi
What is the best bootleg from the outside tour?

St Louis, which was an FM broadcast. That's the best IMO, if you combine quality with performance. Available on lots of bootlegs, for instance "Live Inside"

Earl Slick what a great stage name! Sounds like a gunslinger. His real name is of course Frank Madeloni.

Quote
Max'sKansasCity
I dont listen to music to be depresssed by it

Neither do I, but exceptions will always creep their way in, Townes Van Zandt in my case. I mean that when the songs are good enough, it cancels out the sadness of it, or the lyric or music manages to inject some happiness over it all.

I guess I don't get why people think this song is depressing? I don't find it so. I fine it more haunting and reflective. A singer thinking about his past and asking Where are We Now....and where is he now? Married, with a successful son, a new daughter and what sounds like a beautiful family life. Interestingly how he is portrayed in the video as a "two headed creature" one woman, one man, connected.

This new song is art for real! I hope no one tries to compare this with his earlier songs...10 years has gone...

2 1 2 0

Quote
Come On
This new song is art for real! I hope no one tries to compare this with his earlier songs...10 years has gone...

someone here? on IORR? compare someone's songs to their earlier songs?
Nah... that type of thing never happens here.

He He..

2 1 2 0

Rock legend David Bowie spent two years working in secret on his upcoming album, according to his longtime producer Tony Visconti.

Fans had no idea the reclusive star was making music again until Tuesday, his 66th birthday, when he unveiled new single ‘Where Are We Now?’ - his first release in a decade.

Visconti, Bowie's collaborator over the past four decades, now reveals the singer couldn't stop smiling as they recorded his comeback album The Next Day, although he admits they worked at a slow pace.

Visconti tells the BBC, "He smiles a lot. During the recording he was smiling all the time, he was so happy to be back in the studio. He still has that power in his chest, in his voice. He still has it...

"We never spent more than two to three weeks at a time recording. Then we might take off as much as two months. We usually work on about one or two songs in an afternoon and we'd whip them up to shape where they'd sound like great rock tracks... This is actually the same way I'd been working with him since ‘The Man Who Sold the World’. He hasn't really changed in his approach."

The producer also dismissed rumours that Bowie's absence from the spotlight has been down to ongoing health issues, adding, "David is extremely healthy. He's rosy-cheeked... He's a very healthy man, I can assure you. I couldn't explain why I know that, but I worked with a very healthy David Bowie in the studio and a very happy David Bowie in the studio."

The duo first joined forces in 1969 on ‘Space Oddity’, and together they created classic Bowie albums including Heroes, Lodger and Young Americans.

The Next Day is due to hit shelves in March.

WENN.com

Read more: [www.3news.co.nz]

I can't get this song out of my head.

Could it be a reflective, contemplative love song directed to Iggy Pop?

Slick, who has played with Bowie on and off for the better part of four decades, backs up producer Tony Visconti's comments from yesterday, in which Visconti promised the rest of the album was nothing like the subdued single, "Where Are We Now?"

"I don’t want to give too much away," Slick said, "but it’s really, really, really good. And it’s a bit eclectic, so it’s not all like what you heard."

In an interview with BBC yesterday, Visconti promised the album would be far more rocking than the album's lead single would lead fans to believe.

"It's a very reflective track for David," Visconti said. "Maybe the only track on the album that goes this much inward for him. It's quite a rock album, the rest of the songs, so I thought to myself: 'Why is David coming out with this very slow, albeit beautiful ballad? Why is he doing this? He could come out with a bang.' I think the next thing you hear from him is going to be quite different."

The Next Day is out March 12.

The Next Day Track Listing:

Standard Version:

01. The Next Day 3:51
02. Dirty Boys 2:58
03. The Stars (Are Out Tonight) 3:56
04. Love Is Lost 3:57
05. Where Are We Now? 4:08
06. Valentine's Day 3:01
07. If You Can See Me 3:16
08. I'd Rather Be High 3:53
09. Boss Of Me 4:09
10. Dancing Out In Space 3:24
11. How Does The Grass Grow 4:33
12. (You Will) Set The World On Fire 3:30
13. You Feel So Lonely You Could Die 4:41
14. Heat 4:25

Total (Approximately) 53:14

Deluxe Version

same as above, plus:

Bonus tracks:
15. So She 2:31
16. I'll Take You There 2:44
17. Plan 2:34

Total (Approximately): 61: 03

read more: guitarworld



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2013-01-11 17:58 by winter.

Ten years after his last album, fans are expecting a lot from David Bowie's upcoming "The Next Day." But longtime Bowie producer Tony Visconti, who helmed "The Next Day," told us one thing they shouldn't expect is to hear him playing the songs live -- or talking about them, for that matter:

"He said no, absolutely not. He just wants to make records...He said to me, 'I've played live for 30-odd years and given interviews and I don't want to do either of them anymore'...They kind of fall into the same bag, the way he thinks. He just wants to make records. He feels like that's what he's entitled to do now."

A tour doesn't feel right anymore and I actually have no desire to see him again. I guess with this ten year break we have long ago accepted the fact that we wouldn't see him live again. For me the Reality tour was all we could have wished for and I don't know if he could equal that again. The reason the Stones can still get away with it is that they don't look any different to 10 years ago and the playing is no worse either. (In 2012, not 2007.)

I also like this attitude of contempt for the industry machine and just putting stuff out with no promotion or explanation. If we had a tour with Ticketmaster, VIP experiences and all the rest of it then he'd be back on the industry treadmill.

From Consequence of Sound : David Bowie is “fairly adamant he’s never gonna perform live again”

[consequenceofsound.net]

Quote
kowalski
From Consequence of Sound : David Bowie is “fairly adamant he’s never gonna perform live again”

[consequenceofsound.net]

Yeah.. I wouldn't encourage it.

He's lucky to be alive.

Studio output will do just fine.

Quote
winter
Slick, who has played with Bowie on and off for the better part of four decades, backs up producer Tony Visconti's comments from yesterday, in which Visconti promised the rest of the album was nothing like the subdued single, "Where Are We Now?"

"I don’t want to give too much away," Slick said, "but it’s really, really, really good. And it’s a bit eclectic, so it’s not all like what you heard."

In an interview with BBC yesterday, Visconti promised the album would be far more rocking than the album's lead single would lead fans to believe.

"It's a very reflective track for David," Visconti said. "Maybe the only track on the album that goes this much inward for him. It's quite a rock album, the rest of the songs, so I thought to myself: 'Why is David coming out with this very slow, albeit beautiful ballad? Why is he doing this? He could come out with a bang.' I think the next thing you hear from him is going to be quite different."

The Next Day is out March 12.

The Next Day Track Listing:

Standard Version:

01. The Next Day 3:51
02. Dirty Boys 2:58
03. The Stars (Are Out Tonight) 3:56
04. Love Is Lost 3:57
05. Where Are We Now? 4:08
06. Valentine's Day 3:01
07. If You Can See Me 3:16
08. I'd Rather Be High 3:53
09. Boss Of Me 4:09
10. Dancing Out In Space 3:24
11. How Does The Grass Grow 4:33
12. (You Will) Set The World On Fire 3:30
13. You Feel So Lonely You Could Die 4:41
14. Heat 4:25

Total (Approximately) 53:14

Deluxe Version

same as above, plus:

Bonus tracks:
15. So She 2:31
16. I'll Take You There 2:44
17. Plan 2:34

Total (Approximately): 61: 03

read more: guitarworld

This is better news...I didn't mind the first cut, but it didn't 'move me' in the way it seems to have most other people. I thought it was ok.

Certainly wouldn't want a whole album of that. I already own enough Joy Division.

From Spinner.com:

David Bowie (AKA Davy Jones) in 1965 -- Throwback Thursday Photo



"Whoa. That's Davy Jones in 1965, before he changed his name to David Bowie (there was some other guy from a band called the Monkees who had the same moniker). Check out that flow! Hard to believe that in seven years, he'd be Ziggy Stardust"

Interesting article that links Bowie's new video to William Burroughs.

---

On (New) Bowie, Burroughs and Spotify
Posted: 01/11/2013 5:06 pm

When faced with unlimited choice, do we choose what we know?

I've been experiencing this mild dilemma in miniature with my membership to Spotify Premium. Yes, I've been enticed by the promised of the celestial jukebox, and increasingly chagrined to consider my boxes of old CDs sitting idle in the basement. Who has time, with small children, and jobs, and everything else, to dig through drawers to find a single Ella Fitzgerald song?

Not me. I long ago learned to settle for calling up a scratchy YouTube version of the song I want.

And if not that one, then another.

When I finally succumbed to the $10 per month Spotify Premium fee, I delighted in the possibilities -- oh, the mad possibilities! -- available to me in the age of cloud-based infinite choice. High quality streaming, near instantaneously, of almost anything I might want.

Where to begin! One Direction? Justin Bieber?

I realized immediately, my brain empty (and yes, I recognize that I can indeed check other people's playlists, etc.), some quintessence of the old adage: the child is the father of the man.

Or maybe the stepfather.

Or at least the midwife.

I am not exactly the prisoner of my musical youth; my last book, Blank, incorporated some fantastic DJ Spooky Bach remixes. I do indeed have a healthy interest in newer music. Cue my wife, rolling her eyes. Yet, with Spotify's endless bounty before me, I found myself unable to think of anything new to listen to, and instead, before I quite knew what was happening, I had pulled up the David Bowie catalog...

Bowie's surprise return this week with a new single, "Where Are We Now?" and the promise of a new album in March, The Next Day, spread quickly over the Internet: It's Bowie's comeback. Bowie is not really sick. Etc.

Most interesting is the imagery that comes with this reemergence. The birthday portrait photograph (by Jimmy King) on the Bowie website is taken in front of a Terry O'Neill photograph of Bowie and William S. Burroughs from 1973 (as part of a Rolling Stone photo shoot).

The linkages between the two figures -- aside from Bowie's use of Burroughs-inspired cut-ups in the songwriting process -- extends to almost every aspect of the rock star's spinning wheel of multiple stage identities.

Burroughs' writing was often predicated on the idea that language was a mechanism of social control, and one of the ways to circumvent such control is through the introduction of random linguistic acts. Yes, this idea coalesces in early form through a mosaic strategy in Naked Lunch (the juxtaposition of unrelated images), but it really gets going with the Nova/Cut-Up trilogy (The Soft Machine [1961, 1966, 1968], The Ticket that Exploded [1962, 1967], and Nova Express [1964], and a series of small-press works that extent and explore these methods. As Burroughs wrote to collaborator Brion Gysin: "Take a life. Divide into Five Year Periods. Write in Pain Signs Word Signs. Cut. Concentrate."

Burroughs' spent many years engaging in word, sound, and image experiments -- in part detailed in the how-to manifesto The Third Mind (first published in 1978, with Gysin). Even upon his "return" to traditional narrative in the 1980s, he used the trope of rotating identity as the legacy of his earlier cut-up works. Kim Carsons, for instance, the protagonist of The Place of Dead Roads (1983), might shift "his identity ten times in the course of a day.''

Bowie, quintessential rock chameleon, deploys his personae in a similar fashion. As much as Burroughs' "voice" may assert itself through his different types of texts, Bowie always sounds like an interesting version of himself, regardless of the number of identity shifts. Whether it's the serious moonlight-crooner of "Let's Dance" or the collapsing urbanite of "Panic in Detroit," this mimicry-that-is-not-mimicry proves to be the most-interesting aspect of Bowie's long career: he is more like the always-himself Tom Cruise, then, say, the character-acting Harry Dean Stanton.

When Cruise stars in a movie, we never forget that we are watching Cruise. That kooky Scientologist may be dancing in his underwear, or sporting an eye patch while plotting to kill @#$%&, but it's clearly the same guy. Sure, he sometimes tries to make you forget, and that's precisely where it all goes wrong. When Cruise jumps on the couch for Oprah, he seems ridiculous. Why? Because we are slightly disappointed to think this couch-jumping Cruise is the real Cruise, or that he at least wants us to think he's real. That guy, we ask?

Bowie approaches this same problem from a different angle. He knows that we always know it's him, and so the costumes and dresses and personae are just that: props. There is no real Bowie, because it's all self-subverting author-function. We know, therefore, that even his "real" self must be part of the costuming. Whereas Cruise tries to project the real through careful spin, and so stave off any reports suggesting that this self might be less-than-his compelling movie persona, Bowie's antics deny the possibility of the real.

The video for "Where Are We Now?," by Tony Oursler, extends this idea, as well as the link with Burroughs. Bowie's face is projected onto one side of a two-headed doll (or stuffed animal?), and the second head is filled by the projection of an unidentified woman. The doll sits on a desk in what had been identified as Bowie's old Berlin flat, while a screen projection behind them takes us through images of Berlin.


There are complications: the scene occasionally fills completely with the screen projections; a shot of an interior foyer that first appears to be separate from the projection is later shown on the projected screen.

Further, Doll/Bowie's face looks older than 66, and the elegiac and wistful lyric, sung with the text appearing on screen in type font, reinforces this image of fragility. Bowie sings "just walking the dead" and, hmmm, he doesn't look too good...

Wait. Don't order flowers for the funeral just yet. This isn't even The Frail White Duke.

The payoff of the conceit -- and the song's emotional climax -- occurs at approximately 3:05, with the lyric "As long as there's fire," repeated twice. Here, we find a standing-upright Bowie looking comparatively hearty.

Yay! He's alive.

We return to the doll. At 3:30, a pensive seated Bowie looks over the studio. The song ends at 4:08, but the video continues for another 25-plus seconds for the recession of the doll faces. First, the projection of the woman recedes at 4:13, and then Bowie at 4:17. In each case, we can make out additional face and head details of each person as they pull back from the projection space of the doll heads, suggesting that the doll frame is merely that, another shaping mechanism obscuring additional obfuscation. Then, we get a good stretch of seconds where the projection on the screen continues to move over a grey sky, while the doll-face -spaces appear frozen in a similar color.

All of this explicit projection upon projection -- the lyric typeface over and next to the dolls in the studio behind the screen, with "real" Bowie watching, and we, the viewers, watching it all -- is reminiscent, again, of Burroughs' film experiments, particularly with Anthony Balch, and particularly in a short film called "Bill and Tony" (1972).

Burroughs and Balch play with the disjunction between image and sound; they read a Scientology text and a bit of the movie Freaks (1932), with the resulting sound recording superimposed over each person's talking head, and swapped between. The film deliberately manipulates the connection between source and projection.

Further, in a recent retrospective movie, The Beat Hotel (2010), there is a fantastic sequence that describes Burroughs performing a disappearing act using light, projection, beaded curtain, and copious quantities of hashish.

Back to Bowie: the album cover for The Next Day is an erasure of Bowie's cover for Heroes (1977). The title of that record is crossed out, and Bowie's face is replaced by a white square with the album-title text.

2013-01-10-musicdavidbowiethenextdayalbumcover.jpg

This is a type of un-writing, of erasure, that is nothing new for Bowie -- really -- which is precisely what makes it all so damn fun, and so satisfyingly Burroughsian in its levels of distortion, displacement, and juxtaposition.

And the only way Bowie's new work might fail to catch immediate fire is if it were perhaps Tin Machine 2.0; even that, if done with such self-reflective (and projected) cleverness, would still prove delightful, and worthy of continual rotation on Spotify.

Spotify Coda: Yes, I have checked out other music (thank you), but Bowie continues to entice. Here are seven other Bowie songs via YouTube link (in chronological order) worth hearing. And hearing again. These aren't always the deepest of tracks, but they are far from the most obvious. You are free to disagree, and I'm sure you will, but, until then, happy reflecting.

1) "In the Heat of the Morning"
2) "The Bewlay Brothers"
3) "Wild is the Wind" (Nina Simone cover)
4) "Fantastic Voyage"
5) "It's No Game" (Part 1 and 2 are both good; this link is for 2)
6) "Sunday"
7) "Bring Me the Disco King"

I don't know what Bowie's concept is for his new album.

I can guess and say that maybe it's about running out of chameleon changes and reinvention hence the blank cutout on the album cover = no image and in that morbid sounding new song's video he seems to be looking back on some of his past images and not presenting a new image.

It's just playing games really.

Make it all a bit vague and confusing and let people have their own take on it because it's not definite in the first place so everyone can get their own take going on what it is.

Dylan was pretty good at this in the way he wrote vague lyrics and Bowie does it as well and he also does it with his various image changes, which makes a definite pinning down harder to do, like, will the real David Bowie please stand up.

Bowie apparently has used the William Burroughs cut up technique and maybe he still does.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2013-01-12 07:32 by howled.

I heard the song this afternoon in, of all places, a quiet noodle shop here in Tokyo. Just sitting there, listening to it play in the background, it sounded great. For some reason, it sounded much better and more natural and melodic than when I first heard it, listening at my desk over computer speakers (when it sounded dull and a little tuneless). The magic of music.

I love the new song.

I have never ever cared for his personas and I think people are totally missing the point if they think that Bowie is all about being a character singing songs in an acting mode.

The music is what it's all about. Nothing more, nothing less.

Mick admits to a new character every 6 months or so in Crossfire Hurricane, like Bowie wasn't doing the same, yeah right, but whatever.

It's called Show Business btw.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2013-01-12 12:45 by howled.

Bowie is over. New song is terrible (where are we now). Like torture to listen to.
Bowie is finished.