Some old friends will roll their eyes when I write I harboured a long-term fascination with the words, music, and iconography of David Bowie.
It will also be no surprise to many that over the years he peppered more than a few of his songs with references to drug usage and habituation.
I myself used to have what I now understand is an adolescent, voyeuristic, fascination with the same. Adolescent in the sense that, in my early 50s, I’m beginning to grow up. Partly voyeuristic because as a youngster, drugs ( including alcohol over-use ) had a verboten kind of attraction. Thus I partook more than is medically recommended, let’s say. Like many, I’ve come to understand through experience that that caper ultimately ends not in glamour, but in death, jail, or sad sordid squalor. I finished up on the squalor route, fyi.
In that light, here are a few of Bowie’s more and less obvious references;
In Space Oddity, 1969, Major Tom floats off into space, his last communication with Ground Control “tell my wife I love her very much she knows”. The next time he speaks it is to himself – “… planet Earth is blue and there’s nothing I can do..”.
In 1980’s revisit to the Major, Ashes to Ashes, we have Bowie commenting “… we know Major Tom’s a junky, strung out in Heaven’s high, hitting an all time low..”
Opening that same album Scary Monsters,the brillant It’s No Game ( Part I ), starts with a Japanese woman laying down a challenge. Bowie replies in three lines ending with a magnificent scream I don’t remember since Five Years ( Ziggy Stardust album) “silhouettes and shadows / watch the revolution / no more / free-steps to Heaven”. Wink, nudge.
Earlier we hear the blatantly obvious “You’ve got your transmission and your live wire / You got your cue line and a handful of [qua]’ludes” ( a 70s drug from before my time ).
All this, and many more, is nothing new from the stable Bowie liked to pretend that he was part of. That stable includes The Velvet Underground’s Lou Reed, and the Ig-ster, the man who by all rights should be dead, Iggy Pop.
Whether or not Bowie was a pretender is one of those questions that followed him throughout. ( cf Keith Richards re Bowie “it’s all a pose” ). It didn’t help that Bowie was renowned for telling the Press whatever suited him at the time.
I don’t wish to make light of very sad early demise. I do infer from that though, that the man thrashed his body very hard at least though most of the period when he was at his peak, 1969 – 1980.
Maybe I looked like an adult waif, a figure who commands pity sooner than anything else.