Ground Control To Colonel Tom

Happy Birthday Elvis! Happy Birthday, David Bowie!

Big Twitter trendings this morning, noting birthdays for Elvis Presley and David Bowie. What a two-fer!

Did you know that there is a "new" David Bowie album called Toy? I've had a download for a few weeks, but haven't written about it because I could not verify an official release date. But it seems to be the right time, as the Bowie 75 project tells us that Toy's official release date as a standalone album was January 7.

The album was recorded in 2000 after Bowie's live show at Glastonbury. The idea was to go back to Bowie's oldest songs (1964-1971) and renovate, rearrange, and revive them with some fresh material in a new studio album. Instead, it was held, Heathens was released in 2002, and most of it remained unreleased. According to the Bowie Bible website, which has detailed information about each song, Bowie told his fans in a June 4, 2001, webchat on BowieNet:

I’m finding EMI/Virgin seem to have a lot of scheduling conflicts this year, which has put an awful lot on the back burner. Toy is finished and ready to go, and I will make an announcement as soon as I get a very real date. Meantime, I’m already started writing and recording for another album  . . . it’s back to experimental. . . I shall be writing and recording throughout the summer, but daddyfying is really my priority at the moment.

Toy was released as part of a ginormous box set David Bowie 5: Brilliant Adventure  November 26, 2021, before its release as a standalone disc. How big is "ginormous"? Brilliant Adventure 1992-2001 is 11 CDs, 18 vinyl LPs, including Toy now in three CD/six 10-inch vinyl versions. Retail price around $400. It includes a big hardcover book, a contract for the Dutch auction bidding rights for the paperback version, cigarette butts, laundry tickets, makeup cases, a Poloraid set of David miming the entire 18-hour Andy Warhol film Empire State Building, used chewing gum certified to have been chomped by Bowie, his address book with names and phone numbers from 1964, a taped telephone conversation from a fan looking for Davy Jones who mistook Bowie (original name: David Jones) for her favorite Monkees member, a tube of K-Y cream, and a wooden potato masher modeled on the one Joan Didion's ancestors in the 19th century brought to California. Stuff sort of like that.

This is excessive. I mean, the three-CDs and vinyl versions of Toy are an absurd misuse of natural and unnatural resources. But Toy, in the 12-song mp3 I have, is good, some of it very good.

I consider the modern Bowie era to have begun with Changes, in which his songwriting ability surged even as he continued to search for a singular sound, which became irrelevant ones he realized that a singular sound would be boring, especially in the time of ch-ch-changes that the 1970s would bring to everything. Somewhere at home I have a copy of the British version of his first David Bowie album on the Deram label, which had the odd fortune to be released June 1, 1967, the same day as Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. My songwriting partner at the time, Frank Carillo, had a copy, we listened to it, thought that the pageboy haircut on the cover was cute, and the music was cute too. There was potential, but it was dormant, and he gave it to me for further investigation. For the first time in memory, Wikipedia's entry about this album's genres is totally accurate: "Baroque pop, music hall, psychedelic pop." Only one song here, "Silly Boy Blue," appears on Toys, but three of the best songs: "London Boys," "Karma Man," and "Let Me Sleep Beside You," were offered to Deram as singles, but none were released. Fitting for his birthday doppleganger, Bowie was alert to his unformed identity in 1967; Andy Neill wrote in the 2007 MOJO special 60 Years of David Bowie, "I didn't know if I was [vaudevillian] Max Miller or Elvis Presley."

Listening to the remake of "Let Me Sleep Beside You," you can't help but remember such a tune was turned down as too sexual. It was influenced by the Rolling Stones' "Let's Spend the Night Together," (b/w "Ruby Tuesday," Janaury 1967) which was banned, bleeped, and edited by prissy broadcasters all over. Ed Sullivan famously insisted the Stones' change the lyrics to "Let's Spend Some Time Together" when they performed on his show. Since Bowie's Deram and the Stones' London Records were both part of Decca UK, the angst over Bowie's song came from the same squares upstairs.

Back to Toy. The 2000 recording was produced by Bowie and Mark Plati, and featured that Glastonbury band, including guitarist Earl Slick, Sterling Campbell (drums), Gail Ann Dorsey (bass and vocal), longtime Bowie associate Mike Garson, and singers Holly Palmer and Emm Gryner, as well as overdubs.

The uptempo power rock guitar songs featuring Slick are the best: "I Dig Everything" is elevated by the hard rock riff running through it, and the mod-throwback "London Boys" would sound great if the Smiths ever got back together, made-for-Morrissey lyrics, and plenty of guitar space for Johnny Marr to roam around. "You've Got the Habit" seems influenced by the Easybeats' "Friday on my Mind," a song Bowie would later cover on Pin-Ups. "Can't Help Thinking" has a bite that anticipates Bowie's "Diamond Dogs" era; in other words, as long as the band is rocking, Toy sounds just fine.

But again, there is the unsettled issue of identity for Bowie as a very young songwriter. "Karma Man" is a nod to the Beatles, if the Fab Four had never met George Martin. And "Shadow Man" and "Conversation Piece" show Bowie in a larval stage, a caterpillar mutating, not yet a butterfly. Then again, some of the songs are more than 55 years old, and we already know Bowie discovered not just a sound and a style, but a multitude of them. It's an interesting listen, to hear where he came from.

=======

I'm a big fan of Elvis Presley theories, and for those who believe there has to be an affinity between those who share birthdays, the Elvis/David duality is irresistible. The online UK magazine, aptly titled Far Out, has some compelling if indeed far out ideas about their connection.

The story is “The Intrinsic Link Between David Bowie and Elvis Presley,” published today and written by Pubali Dasgupta. The salient points are:

1. Bowie was such a big Elvis fan that in 1972, he stepped off a plane in his own full stage gear, went to Madison Square Garden where Presley was performing, where the dress code was somewhat less flamboyant. David felt stupid.

2. Dwight Yoakam, in an interview with the Orange County Register, said that Elvis Presley, six months before his death, had called Bowie to ask him to produce a new album. "That was based on Elvis having heard Bowie's 'Golden Years,'" Yoakam was said to have told the OCR about the plan, which quotes Yoakam, saying, "It has to be one of the greatest tragedies in pop music history that it didn't happen." I have my doubts. Elvis couldn't get along with, had nothing to say to the Beatles when they met at one of Elvis' Southern California homes. I don't know: In 1977, Bowie had come out with Low. They did both record for RCA Records, so there's that.

3. Bowie had written "Golden Years" circa 1975, hoping Elvis would record it. Angela Bowie was supposed to have gotten the song to Presley, but she was too shy to call.

4. There was also the supposedly eerie factoid that Elvis had cut a song called "Black Star," recorded in 1960 but unreleased for decades. Those craving connection see a tie between Presley's "Black Star," Bowie's deep knowledge of the Presley catalog, and the decision to call his farewell album Blackstar.

All of this from Far Out was originally published by the Guardian on January 21, 2016, shortly after Bowie's death.

I'm undecided. All I know is that Bob Dylan's "Went to See the Gypsy" is definitely about Elvis. If Elvis was going to record a Bowie song, I would have put my money on "Life On Mars." Or "Five Years." Or "Space Oddity," with the lyrics changed slightly from "Ground control to Major Tom" to "Colonel Tom," Elvis' manager. Colonel Parker would have never allowed any of this to happen unless he was cut in for at least half of the music publishing.