David Bowie's Plastic Soul | 1974-1976

i find that i am a person who um can um take on the guises of of different people that i meet i can switch accents in seconds of meeting somebody and i can adopt their accent i've always found that i collect i'm a collector and i've always just seemed to collect personalities and ideas i have a hodgepodge philosophy which really is very minimal when you study the remarkable career that is david bowie's over an interesting pattern emerges over the years he created many albums or stations that are set firmly in one genre of music however as he evolved certain albums would contain multiple influences indicative of his movement from one genre of music towards another as he traveled from station to station this evolution and cross-pollination of genres is best represented in his work from 1974-1976 which was dominated by his infatuation with american soul music and book ended by his exit from glam rock and his entrance into the experimental art rock that he created during his berlin years join me as we look at diamond dogs young americans and stationed the station to discover the music that bowie called his plastic soul [Music] in 1972 during the american lake of the ziki stardust world tour bowie met a woman named eva cherry while in new york cherry was a singer and at that time a member of stevie wonder's entourage bowie and cherry then began a romance which would last until directly before bowie's moved to berlin in 1973 as bowie was losing interest in the glam rock scene he began to produce an album of soul music for a three-piece vocal group that he created which was headed by cherry and called the astronets once he began work on what would become diamond dogs he abandoned the astronaut album however several elements of that project would eventually find their way to bowie's 1980 album scary monsters the title of the astronet song people from bad homes became a line in the song fashion while i am a laser was reworked and to scream like a [Music] a baby burning through your eyes diamond dogs released in may of 1974 was a transitional album for bowie the last to use the ziggy stardust imagery and the last to contain the glam rock that had made him an international superstar [Music] amongst classic sounding bowie songs like rebel rebel and diamond dogs were others like rock and roll with me and the isaac hayes influenced 1984 both of which leaned heavily into the soul music [Music] some days they won't let you but now you must agree times they are changing and the changing isn't free you've written in your tealies tracks are on tv [Music] in june of 1974 bowie embarked on his north american diamond dogs tour a massive theatrical production which contained drastically reworked versions of songs props choreography and as the centerpiece the hunger city set which took three semi trucks to transport 30 men to erect and cost the modern equivalent of over two million dollars to construct in august the tour broke for one month allowing bowie time to travel to philadelphia and begin the process of recording his next album when bowie told ava cherry of his desire to record an album of soul music she backed him entirely and suggested that they travel to harlem's renowned apollo theater to find musicians for the project carlos alamar then the house guitarist at the apollo was hired by bowie and brought with him drummer dennis davis bassist emir khasan and his close friend and then unknown luther vandross the group assembled at sigma sound studios in philadelphia and began work crafting bowie's rough ideas into legitimate soul music during the sessions luther vandross began to emerge as a man of particular importance as he helped bowie arrange all of the vocals for the project and contributed his song funky music which he and bowie reworked into the song fascination that's that's cool that's cool okay next one got to do it this way to get it one two three four get you when you're done sometime okay that's good right okay last section give me again yeah give me doing it taking you with me loving it do it round [Music] three [Music] also during these sessions the group conducted an interesting experiment they took one of bowie's more obscure glam rock songs the non-album single john i'm only dancing and turned it into a funk driven dance song [Music] she tells me [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] here when bowie returned to the diamond dogs tour in october of 74 he brought a sigma group with him dropped the hunger city set all of the theatrics and dubbed the new performance the soul tour during this leg he debuted the song that would become the title track of his next [Music] album [Music] is [Music] [Applause] [Music] is [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] is [Applause] [Music] in the one damn song that can make me break down [Music] [Applause] [Music] you want you know somewhere someone is writing a learned paper in a university called um something like uh jagger and bowie uh prophets of a pluralistic society and you know this do prophets of doom are saying do you read this stuff and you see critics write very elaborate intellectual analyses of your work and other people does this put you to sleep um the bad ones i always read the good ones yeah do you want to be understood you know what i mean that ziggy started nothing to understand i mean was concerned with uh famine in the world and so on and prophecies of the world running storyteller and a story writer and i decided that i prefer to enact a lot of the material i was writing rather than perform it as myself at this moment i'm performing as myself but i will continue in the future after i've done what i wish to do at the moment return back to writing stories and i will enact them again and i don't care what anybody says i like doing it and it's what i shall continue to do and nothing that i do is is on any kind of intellectual slant you get no mission no it's just yeah oh when the tour ended in december bowie holed up in new york city as he delayed the release of the sigma recordings and attempted to get out of his management contract with main man it was during this period that he met john lennon shortly thereafter the two found themselves jamming in a studio accompanied by carlos alamar bowie was around we were talking and that and he'd say come down and i found myself doing that so he's fiddling around he writes him in the studio now he goes in about four words and a few guys and starts laying down this stuff and he has virtually nothing he's making it up in the studio during the sigma sessions the group had worked on a cover of the song foot stomping by the flares ultimately unhappy with the product but we did however like the guitar lick alimar had created for the song [Music] but he didn't like that song so both cut it up into little bits by using little segments of it and then taking the segments and putting them in different order and in doing that he was able to get a regular kind of blues orchestration out of it by altering the arrangement you grab a little piece move it around et cetera et cetera i mean they do that now by just grabbing boom crank and like if we knew how to do that event we would have been on the day bowie lennon and alomar were recording bowie told alamar to start playing the foot stomping lick lennon then began to improvise the word aim over top the riff bowie stopped the proceedings quickly wrote a new batch of lyrics with women's health and aim became fame [Music] where the things [Music] is [Music] so i just contributed whatever i contributed you know like backwards piano and a couple of things like repeat of fame and then we need in the middle eight so we took some stevie wonder middle eight and did it backwards you know and we made a record out of it right so he got his first number one so i felt that was like a karmic thing you know with me and elton i got my first number ones i passed it onto bowie and he got his and i like that track you know i must say admiring vast repertoire of talent the guy has when i asked him what he thought what i was doing glam rock he said yeah it's great it's uh but it's just rock and roll with lipstick on and i was impressed as i was at virtually everything he said he was probably one of the brightest quickest witted earnestly socialist men i've ever met in my life socialist in in true definition not in a fabricated political sense but a real humanist and a really spiteful sense of humor which of course being english i adored uh i just thought we'd be buddies forever and get on better and better and all that you know fantasy i know i know the beetle that i always liked because everybody had their favorite beetle i never really realized that well i did realize that i always knew that but one wouldn't have declared it in the early 70s because that would have been most uncool to actually say that you actually like the beatles in any way shape or form but they made such a great impact on they gave the british the illusion that they meant something again you know and we love hearing that oh boy do we love hearing that suddenly bowie is back but it's bully like never before [Music] released in march of 75 young americans went gold and gave bowie's first u.s number one single fame [Music] in july he traveled to new mexico to film his role on the man who fell to earth the character of thomas jerome newton an extraterrestrial who loses himself in the material excesses of humanity consumed bowie he returned to the hollywood hills home he had been renting and began to subsist on a diet of milk peppers and cocaine he lost himself in the study of the occult and would go upwards of five days without sleep waiting for the deprivation of rest to bring him hallucinatory visions isolated and alone paranoia began to take hold i'm not stopped [Music] there's an underlying unease here definitely you know you can feel it in every avenue i'm it's very calm and it's a kind of a superficial calmness that they've developed to underplay the fact that it's there's a lot of high pressure here as it's a very big entertainment industry area and you get this feeling of funnies with everybody the first time that it really came home to me what a kind of strange fascination it has is that we i i came in on the train on the earthquake and the earthquake was actually taking place when the train came in and the hotel that we were in was was just tremored every few minutes it was just revolting feeling in september he reconvened with alamar and davis at cherokee studios in los angeles joining them were diamond dogs touring guitarist earl slick and bassist george murray alamar davis and murray would form the core of bowie's band for the next five albums with alamar continuing to play with bowie for decades after these sessions fueled by cocaine would result in the album station to station one of bowie's masterpieces unfortunately bowie was so lost in the grip of addiction that he later stated he had next to no memory of these sessions though he was again moving in a new direction musically the sole influence was still there with golden years and stay being two of the standout tracks golden years we started with first of all he comes in and he bangs on the piano and he goes have you ever heard of this song they say the neon lights are right uh no no no well dude you can't play that that sounds just like another song and so and so i said okay okay don't don't worry about it we'll just change just just just keep watching he goes [Music] basically when he comes in they're very very very simple simple uh chords yeah he already had started writing the song but then we needed to get guitar parts that were working for the song and and um i have a vague memory of i know i came up with that riff for it [Music] energy and then i will put [Music] and then this part i was like dude that's way too funky it's like a folk music song peter paul and mary so it ended up being [Music] [Applause] [Music] last night they loved you opening doors pulling some strings [Music] is [Music] stay was uh it was basically a funky groove first it was more like [Music] now he had an idea from before uh and i think that it came from a song called john i'm only dancing and david wanted a a a new opening rift to just change the the flavor of the song um and the riff i came up with is what i'm about to play which ended up soon later just it just turned into stay i turned into an entirely new song but uh and it goes something like [Music] that nine chord was i had to do the nine chord and the nine chord is james brown if anybody knows anything about music [Music] the ninth chord belongs to james brown okay rock and roll is not about a ninth chord okay so funny when i had to show uh uh uh earl slick the nine chord is like no no it's it's this monkey and i have to show him how to be funky [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] but [Music] this we pass by so [Music] there's [Music] that would be crazy tonight that's what i meant to say or do is [Music] i've used this method only on a couple of actual songs what i've used it for more than anything else is igniting anything that might be in my imagination and it can often come out with very interesting attitudes to look into i tried doing it with diaries and things and i was finding out amazing things about me and what i'd done and where i was going and a lot of the things that i'd done it it seemed that it would predict things about the future it will tell me a lot about the past it's really quite astonishing thing i suppose it's a very western tariff i don't know anything let's see what happens the album's title track gave birth to two things the experimental synthesized art rock that he would focus on for his next three albums as well as his newest character the thin white dukes [Music] is [Music] in february of 76 bowie and the band embarked on a 65-date world tour this tour is noted for a number of interviews that bowie gave in character as the thin white duke consumed by his cocaine addiction and lost in the narcissistic immoral character bowie made several pro-fascist statements to the press which would haunt him for several years once the tour ended bowie knew that he had to get clean he left los angeles and after bouncing around europe for a time settled in west berlin where he would kick his addiction to cocaine and begin the next phase of his career though his music would contain elements of thunk and soul for the remainder of his life they would never again be as evident as they had been from 1974-1976 always in a state of constant evolution bowie's career would go on to contain experiments with genres as diverse as industrial metal dance pop and acid jazz admirably bowie would always champion african-american music and art forms even at the height of his fame in the mid-1980s i'm just flawed by the fact that there's so many so few black artists featured on it why is that i think that we're trying to move in that direction we want to play artists that seem to be doing music that fits into what we want to play for mtv there's the company is thinking in terms of narrow casting that's evident um it's evident in the fact that the only few black artists that one does see are on about 2 30 in the morning or to around six very few are featured predominantly predominantly during the day because one sees a lot on the on the there's a one black station on television that i keep picking up i'm not sure which station is on but there's a there seem to be a lot of black artists making very good videos that i'm surprised aren't used on on tv well of course also we have to try and do what we think not only new york and los angeles will appreciate but also poughkeepsie or midwest pick some town in the midwest that will be scared to death by prince which we're playing or a string of other black faces and blurry is interesting isn't that interesting well i'll tell you what it means i tell you what maybe the icy brothers or marvin gaye means to a black 17 year old and surely he's part of america as well no question no question that's why you're seeing those things do you not find that it's a frightening predicament to be in yeah but less so here than in radio and is it not well no don't say well it's not me it's them is it is it is it not possible that it's it's it should be a conviction of the station and of other radio stations to be fair it is it does seem to be rampant through american media is it should it not be a challenge to try and make the media far more integrated in those things especially of anything in musical terms

Channel: CM Films

Views: 424,421

Keywords: david bowie, bowie, young americans, fame, station to station, golden years, the astronettes, soul music, luther vandross, carlos alomar, earl slick, john lennon, diamond dogs, diamond dogs tour

Id: tTpvHzAkMS4

Length: 28min 27sec (1707 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 24 2020