David Bowie left this earth on the 10th January 2016. Yes it's taken me this long to find the words to write in response.
It's hard to process what Bowie's loss means to the world. Or even to me. The music he gave us indelibly soundtracked our lives for so long, and it did so with such potency. It felt like the music's charismatic creator would be around forever.
Never mind the fact that David himself was out of the public eye for a decade before the surprise release of "The Next Day" in 2013. Even with the release of the record, he remained reclusive, rarely making public appearances and making almost no attempts to promote the record. He didn't get a chance to promote his latest record "Blackstar", as his untimely passing occurred two days after the album's release.
Bowie always seemed to be masterfully in control of his music, his image and his career. He changed from one thing to another during the 1970s with effortless ease and grace, always ahead of the curve and defining trends rather than following them. It came as shock to me to read an old quote from the NME dating back to 1984:
If he didn't know what he was doing then he was constantly trying on new concepts and ideas to see what fits. He was once described by filmmaker Nik Roeg as being "awkward within society". It appears to be that he was possibly changing the outward look to hide the insecurity within. That insecurity drove his restless creativity to go beyond the norms of what should be expected of him.
Watching the "Reality Tour" live DVD again in the wake of his passing, it appears that on this tour he was finally comfortable with himself, in his own skin. He'd finally reconciled what it meant to be David Bowie. It was a glorious sight.
To the very end, with the "Blackstar" album, he challenged the listener. Challenging them not to rest on their laurels and the assumptions of what David Bowie could be. He gave us what we now can assume were hints of his impending mortality, but the needle was barely off the record from the first playing of the album before that could fully set in. The news hit the world like a collective kick in the head.
Bowie gave the world so much joy with his fantastic and challenging creativity. He inspired and entertained us for close to 50 years and Earth's loss is Heaven's gain. The music will live with us and I'm personally greatful for his fine works.
Vale David. Your life's work will be remembered long after the pain of your sad passing has faded from our memories.
In 1989, after a career languishing in the doldrums through most of the previous decade, Alice Cooper hit paydirt. Aligning himself with the current crop of Big-hair-and-Glam-metal bands, his then current LP "Trash" was a perfect fit for the style at the time. Even the lead single "Poison", with it's lead guitar intro, sounded like a sibling to "Sweet Child O'Mine" by Guns 'n Roses.
Of course, this sudden surge of popularity caused the more curious music fans to dig deeper into Alice's back catalog. Some of the records from the 80s were hard to come by, such as "Dada" or "Zipper Catches Skin", while "Pretties for You" was impossible to find at all.
Slowly but surely, by hanging out with these guys, I absorbed most of Alice's albums by osmosis. Slowly I purchased all the albums myself, but certain ones stick out as favourites.
"Love it to Death" is actually the band's third album and probably still the anomaly in Alice's discography. For many years it was the band's earliest available recorded music (Rhino, having absorbed the non-Zappa releases on his Bizarre and Straight labels, have only, in the last 10 years, reissued the first two LPs) and it features the band in a pivotal time in their development.
The band were trying to find their look and sound on this record. They knew they wanted to create shock and outrage and, looking at the front cover, they were about 20 years ahead of their time. Like David Bowie (on the cover of "The Man Who Sold The World") they were wearing women's clothing. In 1971, this was guaranteed to upset the moral majority in America and elsewhere. They then changed the image to be a more macabre image, with gore and blood on stage, as this would in fact pay greater dividends. As Jayne County said in an interview for the BBC program "Dancing in the Street", they were on the right track but "Americans understand horror", not transgender-ism and androgyny.
Musically they had hit upon a nice mix of melody, heavy metal crunch, prog-rock structure and experimentation. The proto-metal the band would be famous for gets its first run here. The hit from the LP "I'm Eighteen" still strikes a chord with disaffected kids, even those two generations removed from the kids listening to this on first release. Ironic then, that when the band recorded this, the average age of the members was 22.
The first three tracks leap out of the gate like a bat out of hell, solid rockers, all of them. Track 4 is "Black Juju", a Doors-esque post-psychedelic freakout. It shows hints of the calculated weirdness from their first two albums, but it is buffed with a palatable sheen that makes it easier to listen to.
The jewel in the album's crown is the 1-2 punch of "Second Coming" and "The Ballad of Dwight Fry". "Second Coming" plays like the overture for the main feature, but it is a sombre rumination on mortality and madness before segueing into "Dwight Fry", which is a full-on examination of an institutionalised mental patient. This is clearly the precursor to tracks on mental illness that have turned up on later record like "From The Inside".
After 6-and-a-half minutes of "Dwight Fry", track 9 follows on straight away with no space. It is a version of (wait for it) "Sun Arise" by Rolf Harris. In a sense it is the dawn after the darkness of the previous two tracks, and makes perfect sense...at least it did 42 years before the ugliness of the accusations that have since surfaced about Mr Harris...
Alice Cooper had hit on their future direction here and, on successive records until the band imploded in 1974 (on successive records, lead singer Vincent Furnier took the name for himself as a stage moniker) they further refined the blueprint.
For my money it's the best record they ever made, with the first follow-up "Killer" a close second. Even if these albums (both released in 1971) were 20 years old when I got into them, they were still fresh and timeless, even then.
How a awkward kid from an Australian semi-rural cultural back-water became all musically literate and edificated... ... or some crap like that...
People ask me frequently how I manage to listen to all kinds of varied music. I listen to everything from Renaissance-era Lute music through to hardcore punk, and all points in between. For some people, that's too broad a scope and it is beyond comprehension for them. I guess it all depends on the way it is introduced to you and the way you approach it in the first place.
For most people, and I was no different, they are introduced to this stuff in junior high school music. "This is what classical music is, now sit there and appreciate it." Others learn instruments and learn to play classical-era pieces at the expense of anything modern. This could go part of the way to explaining why we tend to hate it so much - we didn't come to the music on our own terms.
My psych lecturer at university explained a method of learning new information:
take in new information,
how does this new information relate to information I already know?
how can I use this information in the future?
This explains how I managed to get into classical music: some of the bands I knew and loved as a kid were trying out new things that just happened to be classical ideas.
For example:
"Jesus Christ Superstar" and The Who's "Tommy" were operas, albeit with rock instruments.
The Beatles used 19th-century chamber quartet-style arrangements on songs like "Yesterday" and "Eleanor Rigby".
They also cribbed a short burst of melody from one of Bach's "Brandenburg" concertos for the trumpet solo in "Penny Lane".
My dad played a lot of Neil Diamond around the house, so I was unwittingly exposed to Mozart via "Song Sung Blue".
Other initial contacts with classical music include the Warner Brothers classic cartoons where Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd parodied Rossini's "The Barber of Seville", and where they condensed 19 hours of Wagner's "The Ring of the Nebelung" down to just seven minutes.
Of course, some of the musicians I loved also happened to be classically trained: Yngwie Malmsteen and Randy Rhoads (who played on Ozzy Osbourne's first two solo albums) for instance.
It wasn't until I heard a piece of music by a person named Walter Carlos (now Wendy Carlos) entitled "Country Lane" that blew my mind. "Country Lane" was part of the soundtrack of "A Clockwork Orange" and it was a very early synthesizer work. Its ever-changing key signatures, complex chords and brooding dark atmosphere just hit the spot as a precocious 15 year old.
In high school I found a pivotal record among the music resources in the form of Carlos' "Switched On Bach", which contained famous Bach pieces played exclusively on some very embryonic Moog Synthesizers. By the time I'd heard it for the first time (circa 1993), synth technology had advanced considerably, so the sounds were quite archaic. However, the beauty of the music was evident, and I heard enough of it in "Switched On Bach" to know that this was impeccably crafted music, overflowing with melody and supported by a rich tapestry of ornamentation.
The next step was to try some classical guitar albums. As a young guitarist at the time, this caught my imagination. I also listened to the Andre Segovia records that were also in the resource room and they were also fascinating. The musicianship, the complex chords, the lightening fast runs of notes; these players possessed a discipline and dedication to their instrument that far outstripped anything I was capable of.
From there I found John Williams, the Melbourne born classical guitarist, student of Segovia, who was probably the first classical guitarist to risk his career and reputation by picking up that most dreaded instrument in the eyes of classical purists: the electric guitar. Mind you, his band Sky performed a rocked up version of Bach's "Toccata and Fugue in D Minor" that I consider to be the definitive performance of the piece.
For a while it seemed almost everywhere I looked, classical influences were being integrated everywhere. The sportman's favourite theme music "Fanfare for the Common Man" was a trumpet fanfare written by composer Aaron Copeland, rocked up by Emerson Lake and Palmer. Electric Light Orchestra grafted a chamber string quartet onto a traditionally-configured rock band. Frank Zappa idolised Igor Stravinsky and Edgard Varese, and Frank was always incorporating some of the stranger, more avant garde aspects of their work into his own increasingly complex compositions.
I'd purchased Zappa's "We're Only In It For The Money" in the mid 1990s on the recommendation from one of those lists of "Greatest albums of all time". For years I hated it, until I studied 20th century music as part of my degree. Listening to some of the strangest music I'd ever heard in that class, and hearing works by his inspirations suddenly made Zappa's more esoteric work (such as this one) make sense.
Hearing Scheonberg's serialist piano works can be quite painful at times, but after hearing them, I now know why David Bowie was inspired by them. For years I hated the piano solo in "Alladin Sane". However, the song is about his mentally-ill half brother, and by adding a bizarre atonal, arhythmic piano solo of this nature to the song was actually a stroke of genius. After all, the title "Alladin Sane" is a pun on "A Lad Insane"...
20th Century music was the greatest liberating factor for me as a composer, as it meant that one could take the traditional music rule book and torch it with a flame thrower. Rules, syntax, constructs didn't matter anymore. You could write your own rules. That's one of the reasons that some of the most ugly, difficult sounding music (as it sounds to most) is quite a thrilling listen to me, as I find it to be very free and unhinged, unbound by complex rules and traditions that may in fact hold a piece of music down or make it sound like something else.
In all of the cases cited above, all it takes is for a musician to incorporate something unusual or different into their work for one to gain exposure to a number of different styles of music, and as such, I could then go and approach this music as I felt I needed to - on it's own merits, in my own way. I didn't just believe what people told me was "good music". I didn't just assume that "I had to like it" just because someone said I did. Indeed, I probably would not have found the pieces of music that a music teacher would recommend a student should listen to, but that's precisely the point: From the massively green field of classical music, I've managed to cultivate my own, if strangely manicured, patch within it.
Everyone has their own story to tell, and not everybody would follow the same path to discovering music as I have. Tell me about yours in the comments below.
And as much as I love Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody", I still can't stand Romantic-period Opera!
