Everything’s Alright: David Bowie’s Pin Ups at 50
A look back at the Duke’s little-loved covers album, and the great songs that inspired it
David Bowie was sitting on top of the world in late 1973.
The great Ziggy Stardust experiment had come off – he was now, in real life, an alien rock superstar, proclaiming apocalyptic promises from the biggest stages and millions of turntables. His last five albums spent time in various places up the pop charts on both sides of the Atlantic – especially in his home planet country, where nary a week went by without at least three Bowie LPs in the top 50. Old songs like “Life on Mars?” and “Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide” were new hits. Pop music was in the thick of an androgyny craze kicked off by a sole high heel – his. Every glam act driving the UK crazee owed the Starman something, even if none could quite equal his fashion sense, his band’s chemistry or the scope of his sound and vision. Having gone rapidly mad – via the hedonism his stardom enabled – Bowie announced his retirement onstage July 3rd, possibly deciding seconds before.
As we know now, that was Ziggy, not David, talking – though for all intents and purposes, the lads insane were one and the same. What Ziggy-if-not-David had not done was inform the Spiders from Mars – Mick Ronson (squalling guitarist), Trevor Bolder (stalwart bassist) and Mick Woodmansey (clunky drummer) – before his big announcement. Exhausted and increasingly fried out of his mind, though not to the point where he would blackout over entire recording sessions, Bowie was in no place to ease the tension. But the retirement didn’t take, and he soon found himself and the Spiders ordered back to the studio. RCA, whose pockets he was filling plenty, were greedy for new Christmas product. Unfortunately for them, Bowie was preoccupied with pet projects. Our cracked actor, eager to use his new success for lifelong theatrical ambitions, was in the process of putting together a “rock musical spectacle” called The 1980 Floor Show, and another musical based on 1984, though George Orwell’s widow wasn’t having it (the material would end up on Diamond Dogs). Thus, he did not have an LP’s worth of new songs to spare.
No matter, said manager Tony Defries, who in two years would be on the losing side of an acrimonious split with the artiste. Busy renegotiating a royalty rate with Bowie’s publisher, he told his talent that, in fact, recording new material would be to his disadvantage. So Bowie settled on an act of benevolence – he would record a covers album, in fond tribute to the increasingly obscure bits of proto-punk vinyl that had set his soul alight back before he’d found his sound. Acts would include The Who, The Kinks and The Yardbirds, milestone hard-rock bands who’d each done their part to help develop the art pop on whose apex Bowie was perched. But also the Pretty Things and Pink Floyd, who’d evolved a good distance from their garage-psychedelia origins, and small-timers like the Easybeats, the Merseys and the Mojos. And Them, the rowdy Irish rockers led by Van Morrison, who’d yet to peer into himself and find his true soul. It would be as if Bowie was throwing roses back down to the artists who’d compelled his leap to the top.
Covers albums were in the air – The Band’s Moondog Matinee, John Lennon’s Rock ‘n’ Roll and Bryan Ferry’s These Foolish Things were all underway (though only Ferry’s album achieves its aim, brilliantly recontextualizing rather than feebly reviving). But while these albums covered familiar standards – from the first rock ‘n’ roll era, or venturing into the early ‘60s – Bowie wanted to honor the beautifully niche: “These are all bands I used to go and hear play down [at] the Marquee between 1964 and 1967.” Those were the electrifying years when Beatlemania severed skiffle’s strings, and a new kind of rock was taking over the world from working-class London. Bowie himself played the venue, mewling through the blues with his band the Mannish Boys. Nearly every giant British band of the era did a stint at the Marquee – The Rolling Stones, The Who, Fleetwood Mac, the Jimi Hendrix Experience. But Bowie’s ears were always attuned to the obscurities, and Pin Ups was a literal sample of his own old record collection. Working with the wizardly Ronson and ace drummer Aynsley Dunbar to tighten up the dozen scrappy selections, their arrangements are still fairly faithful to the sources, bridging a gap between Stones punk and Dolls punk.
It was a lovely gesture, and Bowie’s intentions had no potholes. But little is more irritating than someone doing something selfless when they’re clearly not up to it. Pin Ups became the least-loved of the “classic” Bowie albums, in that heavenly run from Space Oddity to Scary Monsters. The destabilizing effect of all that sex and drugs on his rock ‘n’ roll is best summed up by his covers album’s cover. Bowie looks flipped-out and distinctly miserable, the (other) greatest model in the world at the time, Twiggy, lying diffidently on his shoulder. His anxious, antisocial gaze sums up Pin Ups perfectly. Fans and scholars have noted how terrific the album sounds, expert work by Ken Scott, who’d produced the great Hunky-Ziggy-Aladdin trio. But what’s good about that sound is also what’s bad about it – it’s too fucking clean, sporting the same slick scrub that dogs Moondog Matinee. Harder than Aladdin and elevated by Dunbar, its music is oddly tense, dispirited and bitchy. Yet throw together a playlist of the dozen 45s Bowie runs through on the LP and you have the great lost Nuggets volume, twelve scuzzy slabs of searing, groundbreaking rock ‘n’ roll.
The two Pretty Things covers, the snarling “Rosalyn” and the bristling “Don’t Bring Me Down,” are Pin Ups at its punkiest. The Pretty Things were formed out of the ashes of the original Rolling Stones lineup. On their madcap rush out of the gate, their aim seemed to be a sound as far from their name as possible. Lacking a good songwriter, they proved too malleable for definition, turning to psychedelia quick enough to gift rock music one of its first rock operas, S.F Sorrow. They then died a slow and painfully derivative death through the ‘70s. But at their 1964 inception, the band was all hellion energy and zero originality, and this made for some marvelously messy rock ‘n’ roll. The two Pin Ups songs were half of their total top 40 hits, and like so much other British chart action in ‘64, they sound nothing like a million dollars. They sound like something to protect your children from, with Phil May grinding his lust out his larynx as the band flails behind, pitching out fireballs with every beat.
AUDIO: The Pretty Things “Don’t Bring Me Down”
Bowie clearly loved May’s vocal approach, which diverged sharply from the warblier, “theatrical” style he often favored. Never did the eventual “Cat People” crooner sound more like a feral cat than on “Rosalyn” – which, along with the “Here Comes the Night” it tumbles into, sounds like it may be partly responsible for the vocal decline which began around this time. It’s little noted, but following Diamond Dogs, Bowie started hewing to the richer, but less convincing, lower end of his range – listen to him bellowing through favorite songs he could once shriek into life on the 1978 live double-album Stage. “Who else could sing like a raving queen and make it sound so right?” Greil Marcus once wrote about “Here Comes the Night”, and that’s the whole trick of it – through Hunky Dory and Ziggy Stardust, Bowie sounded thin, untrained, femme, and utterly captivating. But he took such poor care of his voice that that addictive upper range, the aural essence of his androgynous appeal, would be shredded beyond his reach by the end of 1974.
For this reason in part, “Here Comes the Night” is one of Pin Ups’ two true triumphs. Van Morrison, so perpetually perturbed he’d perform with his back to the audience, was once one of rock’s most vital and inventive vocalists. But for all the bonfires he could start with one bullseye of a declamatory syllable, Morrison never sounded harder and more threatening than leading a Northern Irish pop band called Them – in ’64 and ’65 (the years all pop bands sounded like sonic arsonists). Their most famous song is probably “Gloria,” the libidinous chant Patti Smith borrowed to perfectly open her punky debut. Yet though Van melts the vinyl heating up the choruses on “Here Comes the Night,” producer/writer Bert Berns’ agitated verses sound quaint somehow. The lion inside of Bowie was more like a rabid leopard – a gay rabid leopard – but his aching wails summon all the desperate passion Morrison misses. It completely compensates for his “Let’s Spend the Night Together”, the breathlessly horny Stones song he ruined on Aladdin Sane by brutally stripping it of its vulnerability.
AUDIO: Them “Here Comes The Night”
The guitarist on that Them session was Jimmy Page, one of three lead guitarists whose temporary tenure would make the Yardbirds one of the most notable British Invasion bands. It’s hard sometimes to name a Yardbirds song, unless you’re a white man of an advanced age, in part because songs weren’t really what they were about. Nobody in the band wrote good ones, and their catchiest hits (“For Your Love,” “You’re a Better Man Than I”) were donated by outsiders (Graham Gouldman, Mike Hugg) who’d yet to hit their strides. Even their half-demented alcoholic vocalist, Keith Relf – dead at 33 from an electric guitar shock sustained at home in 1976, though not in the bathtub as is commonly reported – wasn’t a titanic talent. It was Eric Clapton’s genius licks, and his successor Jeff Beck’s more dazzlingly proficient ones, that made the Yardbirds a beloved band – plus their chronic urge to “rave up” in double time. Beck had some kind of evil going on, and much of The Yardbirds’ discography is deepened by an elusive sense of darkness.
Bowie’s Yardbirds covers (one a Billy Boy Arnold song) are excellent examples of Pin Ups’ problems. The Yardbirds didn’t really swing, their rattling rhythms more akin to a shaky old train. But Pin Ups is machine-tight, and any trace of soul, even dingy, ersatz white soul, has been wiped away. The vocal issues are also driven home on these cuts – the performances are silly. “Shapes of Things,” in particular, is weakened by flashes of Eliza Doolittle imitation. “Camp” is one of the more apt ways to describe Pin Ups, but in an ideal world, camp is joyous. Yet Bowie sounds bitter and arbitrary tumbling through these two songs. “I Wish You Would” is pinched where “Rosalyn” is pointed, and uptight where “Here Comes the Night” is undone. And while “Shapes of Things” has a ridiculous lyric – “just teach me to despise/will time make men more wise?” – it’s antiwar, always potentially poignant in wartime. But Bowie, who’d never be a soldier, runs the gamut from apathy to contempt. Only Ronson’s supersonic solos make these tracks worth it.
The Pink Floyd cover is even more offensive. Syd Barrett was a full-on acid casualty by 1973, a little over a year away from shambling into the studio, out of shape and sorts, where his former bandmates were finishing up a glorious tribute to his memory, “Shine On You Crazy Diamond.” But back in ’67, he was the original psych-rock fairy, the whimsical manifestation of a cup of earl grey laced with LSD. The original “See Emily Play,” spruced up by Barrett’s moonshot guitar scrapes and Richard Wright’s winding organ work, is a headphone delight, a Technicolor production sparkling through a cheap transistor. The juxtaposition is heavenly, but that doesn’t mean it’d die in hi-fi; Dark Side of the Moon proved Pink Floyd were designed for hi-fi. So it isn’t the crystal-clarity that spoils Bowie’s “Emily.” It’s that the sense of wry yet innocent wonder is transformed into an ugly burlesque, with his beloved “Bewlay Brothers” vocal filters dumbly destroying a great melody while the band plays their asses off.
VIDEO: Pink Floyd “See Emily Play”
The best writer to date on the subject of Bowie, Chris O’Leary, surmises in his typically astute Pin Ups analysis that the motives behind the selections may have been more cynical than advertised. “These songs weren’t, for the most part, by Bowie’s primary musical influences – there’s no Jacques Brel, Lou Reed, John Lennon, Scott Walker, Anthony Newley, Bob Dylan… [he] mainly covered his jobbing contemporaries – the bands who beat him out on the charts, who had outperformed him on stage, and who he had outlived.” This makes it easier to understand, if not accept, what Bowie is after with, say, his cover of the Mojos’ “Everything’s Alright” (don’t know the Mojos? You’re not alone). Not only isn’t it reverent, it’s barely even respectful. The original is a raucous tear down pop’s freeway: exuberantly clashing voices, broken-glass piano, and shambolic drums barely holding it all together. Play Bowie’s right after. The band sounds coked-up and worn out, and the overdubbed vocals are a bad joke.
The great exception to O’Leary’s theory is Pete Townshend, The Who’s neurotic mastermind. Like Bowie, he was an art-rocker who didn’t quite fit in with the most popular art-rock (Jethro Tull, Yes). A blockbuster hard-rock album like Who’s Next boasted a certain grandeur, but Townshend always found ways to ground his pretensions – writing an “opera” for guitars bass and drums (Tommy), a psychedelic fantasia about pirate radio (The Who Sell Out), and his artiest LP (Quadrophenia) about the mental health struggles of a street punk. Bowie was in some ways diametrically divergent. Non-rock styles spoke harder to his soul, and not only did the kids he was singing to (on “Starman”, say) sound middle-class, he couldn’t write a socially conscious lyric to save his life. None of this really answers why he bunts his Who covers. He slows the cherry-bomb “I Can’t Explain” to a weird, spacey crawl, and sucks all the rebellion out of “Anyway Anyhow Anywhere”, grazing past its autobiographic potential (like George Harrison doing “Everybody’s Trying to Be My Baby”, he could sing it and know it was true). Ronson merely recreates the latter’s earth-shattering feedback.
Bowie does a lot better by perpetual underdogs The Kinks, stealing a metallic slab of deep-cut protest from 1965’s transitional The Kink Kontroversy. Ray Davies made a career out of bemoaning the passage of bygone days; in this way, he’s sort of the British Robbie Robertson. But he underwent a brisk stylistic softening in the high ‘60s, telling his band (its rowdy lead guitarist his little brother Dave) to quiet down, to match the sweet fragility of his improving melodies. But on the earlier “Where Have All the Good Times Gone,” Davies still sounds as if he wants to burn the whole village green down. “Daddy didn’t have no toys,” he sneers, “mommy didn’t need no boys,” laying out a slew of indictments in a single easy rhyme. On his version, Bowie again nestles into a bizarre vocal placement, a self-pitying baritone quite unlike the acid-smeared blade of Davies’ impetuous whine. But the chorus is fortified by backup voices, and Ronson’s guitar is all flying scrapmetal. Points earned here for rescuing a terrific song.
AUDIO: The McCoys “Sorrow”
Pin Ups’ second true coup is “Sorrow,” shrewdly released as a single the previous September. The plaintive, garage-folk original by The McCoys (of “Hang on Sloopy” fame) was hidden on the flipside of their cover of “Fever,” a modest hit in the UK and United States. It was turned into a showbizzy smash half a year later, by a Liverpool group cocky enough to name themselves after the scene their betters the Beatles started: the Merseybeats. They’d shortened it to the Merseys by ’66, and a few years later, one of those Beatles paid ambiguous tribute to that hit by singing a snatch of it at the end of a song. But Bowie was the first to capture the essence of the song’s title on record. With its sweetly sawing strings, it’s one of the most gorgeous tracks from his seventies output, an outlier among Pin Ups’ off-puttingly robotic hard-rock. Hard-rock like “Friday On My Mind,” Bowie’s’ stiff rendition of the cry of freedom from Australia’s Easybeats. Robert Christgau dissed it best: “His screaming sounds arch. And that ain’t rock ‘n’ roll. Yet.”
I’m sorry I’ve been so unkind to Pin Ups – it’s my right as a critic. And look, on the right night, at the right volume, it’ll feed a certain jones. Though not quite like its source material will. Baby, that is rock ‘n’ roll.
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