Hippies vs. Punks: David Bowie's Young Americans (1975)

I've been listening to David Bowie's Young Americans (1975), the album, along with Station to Station (1976), that stands as a tiny island between the land masses of Glam and the Berlin Trilogy in the Bowie oeuvre. Though I am not what I would call a Bowie expert (more an appreciative student), I would say that there is no other Bowie record that is like Young Americans, with its strange combination of Philadelphia Soul and Beatlephilia.

Christgau's review is illuminating:

David Bowie: Young Americans [RCA Victor, 1975]
This is a failure. The tunes make (Lennon-McCartney's) "Across the Universe" sound like a melodic highlight, and although the amalgam of English hard rock and Philly soul is so thin it's interesting, it often overwhelms David's voice, which is even thinner. But after the total alienation of Diamond Dogs and the total ripoff of David Live, I'm pleased with Bowie's renewed generosity of spirit--he takes pains to simulate compassion and risks failure simply by moving on. His reward is two successes: the title tune, in which pain stimulates compassion, and (Bowie-Lennon-Alomar's) "Fame," which rhymes with pain and makes you believe it. B-

Christgau likes the two hit singles, "Young Americans" and "Fame." (Bowie shares a writing credit on "Fame" with John Lennon and Carlos Alomar.) But the entire album is chock full of excellent material. "Fascination" and "Somebody Up There Likes Me," not to mention "Win," are particularly strong.

What has made an impression on me this past week listening to Young Americans is the extent to which the alto saxophone of David Sanborn dominates the album. The guitar is reduced to the high treble fills found in funk, and the resulting sound, with the backing vocals of Ava Cherry, Robin Clark and Luther Vandross, is a slick edgy urban soul, what Bowie called "plastic soul," and what most of us recognize from the Saturday Night Live Band, which debuted in 1975.

So there is a "present at the creation" quality to Young Americans. Commodified urban chic is the product being extruded.  If you want to hear what an aural leap Young Americans represents, listen to Diamond Dogs (1974) or Pin Ups (1973). Bowie was shrewd to abandon Glam when he did. By the middle 1970s Glam, soon to be lampooned in The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), had devolved into the same old arena rock god trap in which prog rockers found themselves.

My feeling is that Bowie has to be studied because he was an amazing synthesizer who had the ability to crystallize and commodify musical vapors swirling in the avant-garde. Basically the guy could do no wrong from 1969 to 1984. He popularized Glam and in so doing drove a stake in the heart of Hippie and his hopes that another world was possible. (After Let's Dance (1983) Bowie loses his mojo. I remember seeing him interviewed on television promoting his Glass Spider Tour. He was attempting one of his countless reinventions, this time as a Steve Jones Sex Pistols Punk rocker. Bowie had once again correctly identified the musical Zeitgeist. But at 40 years old in 1987, and famously androgynous in past personas, he could not pull it off. I remember thinking to myself, "Jesus, is that pathetic.")

Young Americans and its odd matrimony of Beatles and Philadelphia Soul is a one-off. The record strikes me as a conscious effort by Bowie to feed himself some sonic comfort food after starving the Hippies to death with Glam. It is his bon voyage to the 1960s, the best of which, Bowie is saying, are black music and the Beatles. (John Lennon's "Across the Universe" anchors side two of the album.)

Bowie would not tarry on "plastic soul." He would abandon Sigma Sound and Electric Lady for Cherokee Studios in Hollywood and the coked-out brilliance of Station to Station. Does a more bizarre song than "Golden Years" ever receive saturation airplay on AM radio?

Bowie retreats from the United States after Station to Station, relocating to the European continent to help remake popular music with Brian Eno. What we get is New Wave.

If anything, Young Americans and Station to Station, isolated and "islands in the stream"-like as they are in the Bowie oeuvre, buttress the Hippies vs. Punks hypothesis that in 1975 and 1976 something serious and dislocating happens in the West to set us on our current path to destruction. Let's hope the order that began to form back then cracks asunder in 2016.

Hippies vs. Punks: Jefferson Starship's Red Octopus (1975)

Three big names in rock'n'roll died in January. First, David Bowie, followed by Eagles co-founder Glenn Frey, and then Jefferson Airplane's Paul Kantner. So far this month, Earth, Wind & Fire's Maurice White has passed. The new year has been rough on radio stars of the 1970s.

At the job, my coworker likes to listen to the local hipster radio station, KEXP. (Today the station is celebrating International Clash Day.) On his birthday, January 8, KEXP devoted an entire day to Bowie music, which was then repeated on Monday, January 11 in memoriam. The DJs spoke in hushed, awed voices about what Bowie had meant to them and how his death had knocked them breathless.

To mark Paul Kantner's passing, the station played a sprinkling of songs, something off the super-historical After Bathing at Baxter's (1967), as well as cuts from Crown of Creation (1968) and Volunteers (1969). But that was about it. All stuff from the band's psychedilc Hippie heyday and nothing from Kantner's days at the helm of Jefferson Starship in the mid- to late-1970s, a time when Kantner and his mates in Jefferson were just as popular and commercially successful as they were in the 1960s.

But Kantner fared better on hipster KEXP than Glenn Frey. From what I could tell, even in memoriam, not one Eagles tune was played by the station.

Which got me thinking. I listened to a lot of radio as a kid in 1975, a time when all three artists -- Bowie, Kantner and Frey -- filled the airwaves. One of These Nights (1975) was huge and the Eagles were generally well received by the Hippies, and Jefferson Starship's Red Octopus (1975) occupied the #1 position on the Billboard 200 list of top albums for 1975 several different times in the late summer and fall. Bowie's Young Americans (1975) never made it to #1, but two Bowie singles, "Fame" and "Golden Years," were huge at the same time as Jefferson Starship's hit single "Miracles."

"Fame" and "Miracles" both have this murky voodoo quality that sort of terrified and mesmerized me as a sixth grader. Since it is a Hippies vs. Punks thesis that 1975 is an all-important year, I decided to study Red Octopus all week to try to divine what was going on in the national consciousness at a time prior to the first wave of UK Punk and when Disco was just starting to dominate the landscape.

The obvious thing listening to Red Octopus is its corporate sensibility. It sounds like it was pumped out of the PA at a cineplex or mall. Grace Slick's paeans to love sound like ready-made commercial jingles for Jiffy Lube or Holland America Line cruises. To be fair, the two instrumental tracks -- "Git Fiddler" and "Sandalphon" -- are good, as is "There Will Be Love," where there is some interesting multi-vocal Hippie harmonizing going on.

But the power of Red Octopus is in Marty Balin's seven-minute masterpiece, "Miracles," the single version of which was chopped in half to excise a line about cunnilingus: "I had a taste of the real world when I went down on you, girl."

Listening to "Miracles" repeatedly this week I couldn't help imagining myself as some solid American male in 1975, a Teamsters business rep or pool equipment salesman, driving around in a Ford Crown Victoria, pulling into the lounge at a Holiday Inn or a Best Western, ordering a 7 and 7 at the bar and kicking back and listening to Marty Balin sing "If only you believe like I believe, baby," while scanning the trim in the room. Then at the same time across town at some Hippie fern bar a longhair was basically engaged in the same pursuit. That's a cultural commons that we once had in this country. And to think that it was, however briefly, maybe six or seven years in the 1970s, Hippie based is nothing short of a miracle to me.

Hippies vs. Punks: Recalling a Moment from My Youth When a Hippie Went Ballistic While Viewing Video of a Glamorous David Bowie

I wanted to relate a moment from my youth, I was 13 or 14, when some video of Bowie came on a public television documentary I was watching in the fall of -- it must have been 1978, though it could have been 1977. It was of Bowie in his full-on transsexual getup, the Aladdin Sane (1973), Pin Ups (1973), Diamond Dogs (1974) period, which is to say 1973-1974, the Glam Thermidor -- Bowie with the red rooster comb super-skinny supermodel sexual allure.

I was watching the television with my mother's boyfriend who was a blue-collar Hippie. (My mother was an astrologer.) He had worked at the GM assembly plant in Fremont, California, but he was at the time of the Bowie televisual experience a landscaper establishing his own business. He wore his hair long adorned with a leather headband, and he smoked dope every day.

When Bowie came on -- I can't remember which song he performed; I remember he was on stage in a diaphanous gown and thigh-high high-heeled boots; and the audience was going apeshit -- my mother's boyfriend, the Hippie, became apoplectic with rage. He got red in the face and started frothing at the mouth and spitting obscenities at the television. "Fuckin' freak!" or something along those lines. The epithets spilled forth for a while. I think finally my mother entered the room and calmed him down.

I couldn't figure it out. I mean, my older sisters listened to Bowie; they loved "Suffragette City," and that seemed pretty run-of-the-mill to me. Thinking back on the episode what strikes me is that androgynous cock-rockers like Robert Plant or Mick Jagger wouldn't've bothered my mother's boyfriend (his Christian name was Bob; his Hippie name, Joshua), neither would the New York Dolls (from the same period as Diamond Dogs) -- maybe he would have sneered at the Dolls, but that is it.

So what is it about Bowie's androgyny that drove a working-class Hippie mad with rage? The public television documentary was about the history of rock'n'roll. Bowie's Glam represented the documentary's end of the line, the Hegelian moment of spirit made manifest. But Joshua, there in front of a television in southern Oregon at a time when the Hippies were flocking back to the rat race -- didn't Jerry Rubin take a job on Wall Street? -- felt the adder at his bosom.

Hippies vs. Punks: David Bowie's Low (1977)

We are approaching the heart of the matter with Hippies vs. Punks. At the heart of the matter -- which you will recall are the years 1975 to 1979, years when Punks appear on the scene to wipe out the last vestiges of the Hippies from the avant-garde -- are David Bowie and Brian Eno.

David Bowie and Brian Eno have more to do with the destruction of the Hippies than the Ramones, Sex Pistols and Patti Smith combined. First, as progenitors of the "Glam/Glitter Thermidor" and then New Wave.

Low (1977) is the first installment of the "Berlin Trilogy" -- followed by "Heroes" (1977) and Lodger (1979) -- hugely influential collaborations between Bowie and Eno which establish a new sonic paradigm as the decade draws to a close.

This week I decided to immerse myself in Low, listening basically non-stop from Monday morning until last night on the train home, after watching a documentary on Brian Eno -- Brian Eno: 1971-1977 - The Man Who Fell to Earth (2012) -- and learning that Eno was really the driving force behind Low and the key track on the album, "Warszawa." It is "Warszawa" that gives Joy Division its first name, Warsaw (which the band changed to Joy Division upon realizing that there was a London Punk group called Warsaw Pakt). Interestingly, the album that Ian Curtis listened to the night of his suicide is Iggy Pop's The Idiot (1977), an album that was released after Low but was actually recorded prior to it and is generally considered the opening salvo of the Berlin Trilogy since David Bowie produced it for his RCA label and has been quoted saying that he used Pop as a guinea pig for the development of a new sound.

So obviously the work that Bowie did at Château d'Hérouville in 1976 looms large in Hippies vs. Punks given that both The Idiot and Low were recorded there and those two albums provide bookends to one of the most important Post-Punk bands, Joy Division. (We'll return to Château d'Hérouville in a future Hippies vs. Punks post. It was there that Elton John produced Goodbye Yellow Brick Road (1973), another hugely devastating album for the Hippies.)

The story of Low is well known. Bowie, trying to rid himself of a cocaine addiction, abandoned Los Angeles, where he had recorded the extremely successful Station to Station (1976) in a drug-induced haze, and retreated to Europe. 

When Bowie hit a brick wall in production he called Brian Eno, whose Discreet Music (1975) was a personal favorite, and Eno arrived on the Continent with his EMS suitcase AKS synthesizer and worked his magic.

Immersed in the album all week there is of course the obvious. The first side is composed of pop songs ("Be My Wife" is the best of the bunch) with a New Wave vibe, something that must have sounded unique in January 1977 but today strikes one as fashionably au courant, and a second side of what Christgau derisively referred to as movie music. "Warszawa" does seem like a futuristic avant-garde musical interlude played during the intermission of Hollywood feature in the heyday of the studio system.

But my favorite track is the final one, "Subterraneans" which Bowie recorded as part of the soundtrack for the Nicolas Roeg film he starred in, The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976), but which Roeg spiked in favor of a score written by "Papa" John Phillips, a Hippie founding father.

Hippies vs. Punks: Velvet Underground's Loaded (1970)

Recently I watched a documentary, The Sacred Triangle: Bowie, Iggy & Lou 1971-1973, about David Bowie's Glam/Glitter zenith during his Ziggy Stardust (1972) period and the influence he had (or lack thereof) on the careers of Lou Reed and Iggy Pop.

Several things struck me in watching the documentary, one of which was how totally Lou Reed had surrendered after leaving the Velvet Underground in August 1970. He had gone back home to live with his parents on Long Island, and he was working as a typist at his father's tax accounting company.

It made me want to go back and listen to the last Velvet's album, Loaded.

Reed leaves the band right after recording Loaded the summer of 1970. The album is released November of that year; by that time I imagine Reed is already sleeping in his boyhood bed.

Loaded was one of the first albums I acquired in college after I purchased a new Marantz stereo system. My friend and musical mentor Oliver no doubt insisted that I have a copy. Oliver was a champion of "Sweet Jane"; he thought it was one of the most perfect rock 'n' roll songs ever recorded. I was in agreement. I turned my buddies onto it. They were still in high school back in Southern Oregon. They became mesmerized; taught themselves how to play guitar by listening to it; and eventually formed their own band while still in high school, going so far as warming up for Shockabilly when they rolled through town.

Velvet Underground had been purged by MGM Records after The Velvet Underground (1969). Atlantic Records signed the band to its Cotillion subsidiary with the directive that the Velvets produce a record "loaded with hits"; hence, the satirical title and album cover. But, based on the impact that Loaded had on me and my friends, I would have to say it is an accurate title.

What I have always felt is amazing about the record is that there are all these powerful, flawlessly constructed songs that make up an album that is shot through with a fin de siècle sadness and failure, the sadness of a consciousness standing outside of and commenting on its own corporeal husk.

Just listen to "I Found a Reason" or "Oh! Sweet Nuthin'." Time has run its course on the Hippies 1960s social revolution. With Loaded's repeated send up of country rock ("Lonesome Cowboy Bill," "Train Round the Bend"), Reed saw the end of the Hippie dream several years before the Hippies began filling stadiums to see Lynyrd Skynyrd. The target might not have been Southern Man rock, more likely the San Francisco Sound of the Grateful Dead. But when you hear Doug Yule beautifully sing "Oh! Sweet Nuthin'/You Ain't Got Nuthin' At All" you know the end has come.