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A lyrical interpretation
by Jonathan Greatorex
Aladdin Sane
RCA RS1001
April 12, 1973
Ziggy Stardust earned deserved acclaim from both critics and public alike on both sides of the Atlantic. Bowie's ambition to be 'a man of the media' was happily being fulfilled. His image, as the character he proclaimed, was being expounded in England to the limit. He toured with the 'Spiders', performing outrageous antics on a stage bombarded with every conceivable lighting facility. De Fries was determined that this was not to pass unobserved by the wealthy and powerful American media. In consequence, he chose 24 US music representatives and flew them over to see Bowie perform at The Friars where six months prior to the release of the album Bowie had first introduced Ziggy. Needless to say, by the end of the concert Bowie could be assured of a good exchange rate against the dollar.
In September, following assistance to both Mott The Hoople, Lou Reed and Iggy Pop, with their respective albums; 'All the Young Dudes', 'Transformer' and 'Raw Power', he released the single 'John I'm only Dancing'.
Two months later it was "The Jean Genie', and in April 1973, 'Drive in Saturday' The latter two were taken from Aladdin Sane which sold over 100,000 copies in advanced sales - equalling a record previously established by the Beatles.
Aladdin Sane, released in April 1973 is a recollection of thoughts Bowie had assessed during the Autumn of 1972 when he had toured the States.
Ziggy Stardust had been an immediate success upon it's release in America, and the follow-up album was a compendium of thoughts relating to this enormous triumph.
'It was Ziggy meeting fame...a subjective Ziggy talking about America, my interpretation of what America means to me.'
'Love Aladdin Vein', 'A Lad (Land) in Vein' were the working titles, but Bowie dropped these because of their rather obvious drug associations. 'A Land Insane' through repetition, eventually became Aladdin Sane.
Bowie's increasing preoccupation with decadence and it's associations with both the media and his own growing following, is reflected heavily upon throughout much of Aladdin Sane. Furthermore, in combination with the decadence, is the pleasurable world enjoyed by any person in Bowie's shoes, a member of the few rock n' roll elitists propelled to hedonistic heights by stardom.
The underlying traits of this vice-woven society are underlined in `Watch That Man'. His own personal impressions of the global deterioration are viewed with both confusion and attraction. The setting is a party thrown by 'Shaky'. We are tempted to envisage a glossy magazine farce of tequila and cocaine with pseudo-activities undertaken at a New York/Frisco shindig.
The troupe consists of "an old-fashioned band of married men" seeking any excuse to act as juveniles. The "Ladies looked bad" and the music, disappointing. A general synopsis was that the party was, "so-so" The event had in fact taken place in a literal sense. `Watch That Man' was written on the morning of September 29th, 1972. The previous evening, he had performed 'Ziggy' to an ecstatic Carnegie Hall audience,
After the show a celebration was held in his, and the record company's honour. In the song he pinpoints and exaggerates small incidents that occurred.
"No one took their eyes off Lorraine", who shimmied and strolled, was a reference to Cyrida Foxe. The general orgy-fired atmosphere is vocalised loudly in "The Pundits were Joking the manholes were smoking and every bottle battled with the reason why" The party is fused with abhorrence, confusion and fascination. Even as he muses he is presented by a groupie who lingers after his alter-ego Ziggy. "The girl on the phone wouldn't leave me alone, a throw-back to someone's LP"
Bowie begins "shaking like a leaf" at the decadence and general waste of society. Instead of falling from the tree onto the plate of 'That Man' who eats his little cakes with forks and spoons, Bowie, clearly nauseated, heads for the streets "looking for information"
Astute readers may probably realise that this little track was written on board the liner Ellinis, sailing to the States during the autumn of 1972.
It is essentially an examination of historical preludes to this century's Great Wars, hence the brackets after the title.
Bowie attempts to preface the song slightly with the feeling of an imminent catastrophe: `Which, at the point in America when I was writing, I felt. It was the next jumping-off point for disaster. I suppose I've felt like that since 1940-whatever it was.'
The song concerns itself with the plight of the pretty things of today, who, like their predecessors in the early nineteen hundreds and nineteen thirties, went about at ease. The characters are certainly 'Waughesque' and much of Aladdin Sane could have been influenced by Evelyn Waugh's 'Vile Bodies'.
"Watching him dash away. stringing an old bouquet-dead roses. Passionate bright young things, takes him away to war."
Quite rightly, as the title indicates, this could well be 1913, 1938, or perhaps less conceivably, but equally poignant, today's society. As Waugh commented upon the younger generation:
'When they should have been whipped and taught Greek paradigny, they were set arguing about birth control and nationalisation. Their crude little opinions were treated with respect. Preachers in school chapels week after week entrusted the future into their hands. It is hardly surprising that they were Bolshevik at eighteen and bored by twenty. There was nothing left for the younger generation to rebel against except the widest conceptions of mere decency. Accordingly, it was against these that they turned'
Waugh's words echo Bowie's sentiments. Who will love Aladdin Sane, wishing "battle-cries and champagne" on the eve of war ? Decadence may prove suffice for the moment, but following the passion of velvet-lawn nights, many would "weep a fountain' with uncertainty of what the new dawn/new age may provide.
The basic concept underlying this song is carried through into the next track, `Panic in Detroit'. `Drive-in Saturday' was begotten during an evening train journey through the Arizona desert en route to Seattle. Through his compartment window, Bowie observed odd-looking dome shaped clouds on the horizon. It infused in his mind a vision of post-Armageddon future. The stage is one of barren loneliness.
For the American youth of the fifties and sixties, the drive-in was a place where couples could be alone, the pretext was to watch a film, the actuality being "Making love". Now, in some future time when physical/emotional sex has faded into dying memory, people have to be re-educated to it's art by laborious screenings of crude videos and pornographic films at the new style drive-in. "Lets go to bed, don't forget to turn off the light...Perhaps the strange ones in the dome can lend us a book we can read up alone and try to get it on like once before...like the video films we saw."
The unhappy couple, Buddy and his girlfriend, (who resembles Twiggy), are products of the sterile landscape, not knowing if their mechanical attempts in perusing a step-by-step-guide-to-having-sex go correct. She has uncertainty over her sexual desires, yet feels that her instinctive love for Buddy ought to manifest itself. Consequently, there is a "crash course for the ravers"
Carl G Jung, the psychoanalyst, is referred to as an instructive "foreman" Jung, was ironically one of a large number of analysts who consciously rejected the scientific methodology in favour of the subjectively intuitive and unconsciousness of 'understanding'. Sadly, his philosophy is proven in the failure of the couple to achieve success in their venture. For as Buddy discovers "with snorting head he razes to the shore, which once had raised a sea which raged no more like the video films he saw." Being able to perform sex as exemplified by chronicled film, was about as possible as filling the empty oceans with new water.
`Panic in Detroit' is perhaps the only track on the album where Bowie divorces himself sufficiently from his own state, to view the underlying cause of his attraction to decadence. It becomes apparent that by surrendering himself to the decay is a result of his disenchantment and general pessimistic disillusionment concerning previous ideology over the prospects for revolution, so vehemently a force behind his earlier albums.
Iggy had told Bowie about a pack of young Michigan revolutionaries, (The White Panther Party), who had planned to take over the world. The National People's Gang was born. Detroit, home of Tamla Motown, is probably THE city which personifies the machine-time-and-motion rat-race of the modern world. Bowie adapted a Bo Diddley beat to emphasise the panic of a frenzied way of life. The result is a heavy industrial sound. The opening lyric; "He looked a lot like Che Guevara, drove a diesel van. Kept his gun in quiet seclusion, such a humble man. The only survivor of the National People's Gang" is an oblique reference to John Sinclair the former MC5 manager and leader of the 'White Panther Party'. Sinclair had been given a ten-year prison sentence for the possession marijuana. John Lennon dedicated a song to him on his album 'Sometime in New York City', opening: "It aint fair John Sinclair, In the stir for breathing air. Won't you care for John Sinclair ?"
The semi-fictitious character in `Panic in Detroit', is prepared to lay down his life for the revolutionary cause. Unfortunately, as the song states, the cause has waned, leaving only one survivor. The few of equal persuasion have been doctored by the restraint of police harassment. "He laughed at accidental sirens that broke the evening gloom. The police had warned of repercussions, they followed none too soon." Even these had become strangers unto themselves, their freedom being partitioned by the walls between them. "A trickle of strangers were all that were left alive...I wanted to stay home".
The focus of the song then switches to the narrator, we learn of his entire life in a few abrupt lines: He moved from cradle to school. At school his obedience to authority is rocked by rebellion when he discovers that his teacher, merely a tool of higher bureaucracy, cannot recognise human potential and consequently crouches. His anger finds its way to destroying an amusement machine, the symbol of man's obsession and submission to a materialistic society:- "Putting on some clothes I made my way to school and found my teacher crouching in his overalls. I screamed and ran to smash my favourite slot machine"
The leading musical theme reasserts itself and the narrator is rediscovered as part of the system he was rebelling against. In effect, by ascending one material gain he opens the door to another. Revolutions and revolutionaries are therefore doomed to failure from their genesis, for, even when scoring "A trillion dollars" the run has to be made back home where he "ran to the window, looked for a plane or two". The cyclic hypocrisy continues, the only means of escape being by the knife. The Che Guevara figurehead, sought now for his autograph, no longer his ideals, would prefer suicide and nameless obscurity to the wheel of poison. "He left me an autograph, "Let me collect dust"."
Written concerning a common attitude in the Mecca, the land of the Silver Screen. We discover a debauched, ageing actor hustling depravity in. He would like to have been known as "the best of the last, the cleanest star they ever had". His egotistical demeanour gives him a sticky satisfaction. Hell, this is Hollywood ! "Forget that I'm fifty 'cause you just got paid."
There follows an underlined degeneracy of this totally corrupt thespian: "Crack baby crack" he swoons to the pink young flesh beneath him.
Heroin riddles through his subalterns veins; "Smack baby smack in all that you feel"
And the ultimate oral act of submissions "Suck baby suck"
It transpires that the cracking, smacking, sucking wretch is well addicted to heroin following an incident on Sunset and Vine "But since he pinned you baby, you're a porcupine."
Disappointingly for the wretch, all Mr. Actor wants is sex and he has been sold illusion "for a sack full of cheques"
Bowie indicated that Aladdin Sane was a result of his paranoia with America at the time. He hadn't come to terms with it at that stage. Now he has,
"I know the areas I like best in America. In Los Angeles I was with people who indulged my ego who treated me as Ziggy Stardust..never realising that David Jones might be behind it"
It appears that much of the LA elite are turned on by masochistic sex with its sleazy lack of emotion.
'I've written a song on the new album which is called `Time', and I thought it was about time, and the what I felt about time-at times. And I played it back after we'd recorded it, and My God, it was a gay song. And I'd no intention of writing anything at all gay.'
The song was written in New Orleans's French Quarter, and it has been suggested that the cosmopolitan flavour of the town inspired this thoughtful mood. There is certainly a nineteen thirties 'European' feel to the Berlin-esque melody laid down by Mike Garsons clanking piano. As Bowie indicated, there is a heavy emphasis on chronometry. 'Time' prefixes the opening three stanzas. The first of which deals with time's daunting physical presence.
Time is "waiting in the wings" ready to pounce on the stage. He speaks of "senseless things", his effect universal.
The second wallows once again in a physical, yet this time, undisguised sexual context. Time has a pliability to suffocate, "flexing like a whore". It requires payment as a prostitute for life. By falling "wanking to the floor" the base nature of time pumping to a frenzied climax is reflected upon. And who are the victims and what is the currency of the sucking orgasmic appetite? "His trick is me and you boy."
The third stanza beckons the various circumstances in which time can prematurely curtail life in others, the most common being attributed to the physical self-abuse of drink and drugs. An example, "Billy Dolls" is used. Billy Murcia, original drummer with the New York Dolls took an overdose in the bathroom of a London hotel while Bowie was touring the States. As an offering to the Grim Reaper he was not alone, as Bowie warns all, "Take your time". A common phrase for the injection of heroin into the blood-system is 'shooting', and Bowie reiterates his previous caution, a needle in the arm becomes "The Sniper in the brain" which, through incestuous addiction regurgitates the cancer. The drug-connection is carried one step further in sardonic fashion, "I look at my watch it says 9.25 and I think oh God I'm still alive, we should be on By now."
Apparently, together we are not victims, we waste so much of our allotted span that we can do nought but "scream with boredom" because we are unable to arrest or evict time. And, as the bell tolls every hour of every day, week, month and year, the ageing process of time continues until the admonishment is re-sighted from youthful misdirected pleasure, to the fragility of old age. "Goddam your looking old, you'll freeze and catch a cold 'cause you've left your coat behind, take your time." The effect that passages of time have upon people and their personal relationships is dwelt with more furtively in the closing lines of the song. Two people, parting following a long engagement find the break difficult, perhaps more so for one party than the other, yet to keep frustration restricted is "hateful. I had so many dreams so many breakthroughs'' But these dreams were stifled, absorbed and eventually neglected by love, until finally "the door to dreams was closed." The affection felt was sincere, yet the sincerity became habitual and barren, hence, "her park was real and greenless."
Time is the eventual master, for as the narrator ponders the emotion of his former lover, it is merely an act of reminiscence as all he can hold to himself now "is guilt for dreaming"
Time remains patiently waiting in the `flys'.
The stage is still empty, and death should be "on" by now.
The Jean Genie was a `first take' track, written in the back of a Greyhound bus taking Bowie and his band from Detroit to New York. `We had an amp on the bus and it was a lot of fun singing the track along the way'.
Some commentators have linked the title of the song with Jean Genet, the French 'Brechtian' author who glossed upon the European market of decadence and homosexuality. However, this appears purely by coincidence, or an obscure pun, as does the postulation concerning the genie of the lamp in the Aladdin pantomime story.
Bowie attributes be song to his friend/contemporary Iggy Pop, who was no stranger to New York's vast drug-orientated circuit. 'The small Jean Genie snuck off to the city, strung out on lasers and slashed-back blazers."
The 'slash-back' is a reference to the physical appearance of the amphetamines, yet Bowie carries the imagery a stage further: "Ate all the razors while pulling the waiters" These 'waiters', not to be confused with gentlemen in white overalls, are the tubular white preludes to an entertaining evening, known to Spaniards and Mexicans as Potaguaya. "Talkin' bout Monroe' the latest sensation to the avant-garde, while "walking on snow-white" i.e. under the influence of cocaine.
To the bright-eyed, chinless wonder, New York resembles a stick of rock, brightly coloured and succulent - a delicate trap!. "Poor little greenie"
The Jean Genie's not-so-hetro traits are brought to the fore, he "Lives on his back, loves chimney stacks." He is also alien in appearance; his stance is human and his facial expressions reptilian. Such characteristics belong to the intrigue, and the Jean Genie loves to deal the underhand. "He says he's a beautician, sells you nutrition" An exclusive range of chemical foodstuffs-Benzedrine, Dexedrine, Methedrine, Durophets, Drinamyl and so on.
Not only infected and affected by amphetamines, the Jean Genie regards barbiturates with equal favour, rendering him so simple-minded that he becomes incapable to drive. "He bites on the neon and sleeps in a capsule." The nightlife is paramount, lived from dusk to dawn in a nocturnal haze. And, as daylight is ushered in, a sleeping pill/capsule provides the Genie with a chemical release.
