Strange Fascination: I used to hate David Bowie. Crazy, right?

I used to hate David Bowie.  I used to hate him more than anything.  My mom was a Bowie nut when she was young.  She got to see him with the Spiders from Mars in 1972.  She was in the Tower Theatre one of the nights that he recorded 1974's "David Live."  She was also in the Spectrum when he recorded 1978's "Stage."  She, like her friends, was completely devoted to David Bowie, glam rock, and the style that went along with it (for those of you who think of Motley Crue and Poison when you hear the word "glam" really need to go out and buy yourselves a T. Rex record.  I suggest "The Slider.")  My mom kept with Bowie through the 80's.  Fell out of touch in the 90's when she was busy raising me.  But the records still got played.  I didn't like them.       It was a far cry from the early Beatles and Elvis records that I was listening to at the time.  Things got even worse when I saw David on TV in 1997 promoting the "Earthling" album.  As a 9 year old I didn't get it. Instead I thought to myself, "man, this guy is really gay."  I kept this opinion through the early 2000's, cringing whenever my mom insisted on playing a Bowie record.  I never really bothered to listen -- I was too busy hating.  I didn't want my friends to know that I was listening to THAT weirdo on the weekends.  Something strange happened to me in the summer of 2002.

I was enrolled in a day summer camp at the local Jr. High.  Once a week we would go to the movies.  One week we had to choose between Mr. Deeds, and some forgettable movie.  Of course, my friend, Ethan and I picked Mr. Deeds.  There's a scene in the film where they are flying in a helicopter and Adam Sandler begins to sing, "This is Ground Control to Major Tom...."  "What was this song"  I thought to myself.  It was stuck in my head and I was singing it at home, when my mom picked up on it.  "That's a Bowie song, John!"  I had to hear it.  I went down into the basement and scoured the backs of my mom's Bowie records looking for "Major Tom."  No luck.  Maybe it was called something else.  My mom assured me that it was on one of those albums so I took the whole stack up to my room.  One by one I listened with no sign of the illustrious Major Tom.  By the time I got to the end, I realized something -- I loved David Bowie.  It was like finding the most beautiful painting in the world and then crawling inside.  A total sensory overload.  It transported me to places that I had never been before (for those that are really interested, my mom and aunt shared a lot of records so the Bowie collection got split up when they moved out of my grandparents' house.  When I listened we had:  David Bowie, The Man Who Sold the World, Hunky Dory, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust, David Live, Aladdin Sane, Young Americans, Station to Station, Low, Lodger, Let's Dance, Tonight, and Never Let Me Down). I just kept listening to them over and over.  I have such crisp memories of those days.  Standing on the bus stop with the frigid wind burning my face while The Saviour Machine flowed from my headphones.  Cleaning my pool in the summertime and listening to Glass Spider, "Gone, gone, the waters all gone."  Riding bicycles through Cape May singing Uncle Arthur with my mom. Great memories. A few months later we got 8th row tickets to see David perform at the Tower Theatre for the first time since 1974.  Absolute magic.  I've seen him three times since.  I've never met him, but he's waved to me from his limo while I was pressed up against the glass.  I'm not a stalker, but I know where he lives (and have hung around outside).  To me Bowie represents perfection in music.  He crafts songs and albums in a way that nobody else does.  Most of the time it's hard to tell what the heck he is singing about, but you never feel distant from them.  They seem so honest.  There are two cases in particular that I would like to talk about in further detail:

To me, Life on Mars? is the greatest song ever written.  No exaggeration here:  I have gotten chills every single time I have heard it.  There's a sense of loneliness in the song, but it isn't sad.  It's like the loneliness that we all feel when we set out to establish ourselves.  A foreign world with images we are not accustomed to.  Bowie captures it dead on.  Mick Ronson's guitar work is superb. It's not fast and it's not slow.  It's just perfect.  I've seen him perform it live twice -- I cried both times.

1972's The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust is perfect.  It's a love story at the end of days.  The world has been given five years to live.  Everything is finite.  It's about an extraterrestrial being that has the potential to be the world's saviour.  The temptations of our world are too much for him.  From the first drum beats of Five Years to the final string hit in Rock and Roll Suicide, the listener is taken on a journey which will make them think, make them laugh, make them sing, make them cry.  Like a lot of Bowie's early work there is a vulnerability that the listener can relate to.  I hold this album very dear to me. On a trip to London in 2009 to see Mott the Hoople's first show in 35 years, we journey to E Heddon Street where the famous album cover photo was taken:

I'm afraid of tainting the album.  I already have a lot of strong memories attached to it.  None bad, just strong.  When I listen to it I can feel and smell where I was many years ago.  It was the album that I listened to heavily when I was finally beginning to develop my identity as a young adult.  I was still very naive, but at the time I didn't think I was.  Anyway, I don't want to lose touch with that.  For that reason, I am VERY selective with who I will allow to be a Ziggy listening companion.  I can't bear the though of having some negative memory come to mind when I hear the first strum of the guitar in Suffragette City.  Maybe that's weird;  maybe I'm selfish.  I don't
care. I'm a David Bowie fan. We are weird. We like it that way. Remember:


"Who knows? Not me. We never lost control. You're face to face,with the Man who Sold the World"