Future Legend: David Bowie’s Diamond Dogs Turns 50
Looking back on a criminally underrated album in his vast catalog
Okay, I need to start this one out by apologizing to my fellow Rock & Roll Globe scribes Kara Tucker and Ryan Maffei.
A couple of years ago, Kara looked back at David Bowie’s massive breakthrough, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. Ryan scored the look back at Aladdin Sane, Bowie’s follow-up to that landmark album, and provided Globe readers with his insights on Bowie’s next effort, the covers album, Pin Ups.
I don’t know how I managed to snarf the Diamond Dogs assignment away from both of them, but I’m glad I get to stroll down musical memory lane with this one. God, the high school me loved this album, even though the critics didn’t think much of it at the time: Rolling Stone called it Bowie’s “worst album in six years.” And many don’t think much of it today, either: When the AV Club ranked Bowie’s top 20 albums in 2023, Diamond Dogs didn’t even crack the top 10 (it came in at #14).
Don’t care. Think about the music scene at the time of the album’s release, on May 24, 1974. We were smack in the golden age of concept albums. Ziggy was part of that, of course, but 1973 was a banner year: We had Jethro Tull exploring the afterlife in A Passion Play (1973), Yes mining Hindu scriptures in Tales from Topographic Oceans (1973), The Who telling the tale of a young mod named Jimmy in Quadrophenia and Rick Wakeman seeking inspiration from The Six Wives of Henry VIII. Oh, yeah, and that little thing called Dark Side of the Moon.
So now comes Bowie sporting his Ziggy Stardust hairdo on the front cover and staring directly at the potential album-buyer, flanked by a pair of – what the hell are those? Are they the Diamond Dogs? And what is up with Bowie? Flip to the back cover, and the bottom half of his body is like a Great Dane! And imagine if you’re looking at one of the copies where RCA Records didn’t airbrush out the genitalia!
Okay, Bowie, I’m buying.
I get home with the album, tear off the cellophane, and open up the gatefold (an experience generations of music-streamers will never get to enjoy) to see some sort of post-apocalyptic hellscape through a dense (poisonous?) fog.
Pulling out the vinyl, I drop the needle on side one and am met with ominous howls of – well, dogs, I assume, but more like mutant werewolves. I follow along to the lyrics of the spoken-word opening track, “Future Legend,” which are printed on the inner gatefold. Rotting corpses. Mutant eyes. Fleas the size of rats and rats the size of cats. It feels like there’s danger everywhere and every second is a battle for survival (why this would resonate with a geeky teenage mind, I have no idea). Then, a rise of crowd cheers and the triumphant exclamation:
“THIS AIN’T ROCK ‘N’ ROLL – THIS IS GENOCIDE!”
I was so hooked. The title track has it all, a rollicking party tune for the outcasts and freaks (there’s even a reference to Tod Browning’s famous flick in the lyrics) released a year before Riff Raff and company did the Time Warp.
AUDIO: David Bowie “Rebel Rebel”
The “Sweet Thing” / “Candidate” / “Sweet Thing (Reprise)” suite is up next, slowing down the tempo as Bowie’s crooning ushers us into a noirish world of dirty and decaying streets, stolen moments filled with seedy sexual encounters, desperate longing for connection. “If you want it, boys, get it here, thing / For hope, boys, is a cheap thing, cheap thing.” It doesn’t feel like three tracks at all; sonically they’re all of a kind.
And then, as the reprise descends into drumbeat and dissonant guitar, there’s the instant segueway into one of rock and roll’s greatest opening riffs of all time: “Rebel Rebel.” The track closes out what is arguably one of the most perfect album sides in all of ‘70s rock and roll.
Side two always struck me as far more uneven. The opener, “Rock ‘n’ Roll With Me,” feels like an Act One closer for a Broadway jukebox musical, while the closer, “Chant of the Ever Circling Skeletal Family,” is just a bizarre, barely two minutes that sound like the mutants of “Future Legend” are dining on some Hunger City roadkill.
The best track on side two is the anthemic “1984,” which is said to have been the centerpiece of a planned adaptation by Bowie of George Orwell’s famous novel. The opening is equal parts “Theme from Shaft” and “Papa Was A Rolling Stone,” while the lyrics are straight out of those dystopian pages: “They’ll split your pretty cranium, and fill it full of air / And tell that you’re eighty, but brother, you won’t care / You’ll be shooting up on anything, tomorrow’s never there / Beware the savage jaw of 1984.”
The tune is sandwiched by “We Are the Dead” and “Big Brother,” both of which carry the Orwell connection further (evidently Bowie was unable to secure the rights to the novel, so a full-on adaptation was scrapped). The former could be sung by protagonist Winston Smith to his love interest, Julia, while the latter feels like it’s giving voice to the collective unconscious of the crowd during the Two Minutes Hate segments detailed in the novel.
It all adds up to a fast-paced album – both sides of the original release add up to a shade under 38 minutes – that mixes its conceptual metaphors, being equal parts post-apocalypse, Orwellian nightmare, and some glam rock thrown in for good measure.
The flaws, though, are minimal. And listening again a half-century later, my adult self enjoys this record as much as my teenage self.
So screw you, AV Club: Diamond Dogs is definitely a top five Bowie album. I suspect Kara and Ryan might even agree, too.
- No Surrender: Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A. Turns 40 - June 4, 2024
- Future Legend: David Bowie’s Diamond Dogs Turns 50 - May 24, 2024
- How Robert Hunter Stepped Out from the Shadows of The Grateful Dead - May 22, 2024
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