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A lyrical interpretation
by Jonathan Greatorex
Lodger
RCA BOW LP1
May 1979
Following "Heroes" release, Bowie moved back to England for a short visit, speaking to members of his public through a couple of candid radio interviews. It wasn't long before he was out travelling again, squeezing in trips to Africa and Israel,(on the programme of `Isolar 2' he can be seen lounging with the royal family in Kenya).
Two months later, in December 1977, he was back in America, intentionally with an interest to promote Devo. Over the New Year he had returned to Berlin, where he began work on his second major film, `Just A Gigolo'
In it he played Paul, a penniless Prussian soldier returning home following an unfortunate injury received during the last days of WW1. He was cast alongside a retiring Marlene Dietrich and Kim Novak.(He never actually met Dietrich as their scene was shot in two different locations and badly spliced together.) It was during the filming that the 1978 World Tour was planned. It was decided that the back-up band was to be the old faithful, Raw Moon, (Murray/Alomar/Davis), with extra support from Roger Powell on Synthesiser, Sean Mayes on piano, Simon House on violin, and Adrian Belew on lead guitar.
The set was very similar to the expressionist style found on the Station To Station tour, with large banks of piercing neon lights that did all but expose the audiences bones. In May, RCA issued Bowies narration of Prokofiev's `Peter And The Wolf', ostensibly recorded for Zowie, (Jo).
The world tour arrived in Britain in June, Containing both the recent material along with a selection from the early days. He introduced into the repertoire, the Brecht/Weill song, in keeping with the expressionist `feel', `Moon of Alabama'.
While in England, he declared to the national press: `I don't think that there is a real life for a rock artist. It is a shallow means for a livelihood. I wouldn't give that position to anybody if it were in my power.'
The `78 tour was caught for eternity with the eventual release of `Stage' in October. Although it was generally claimed to have been far superior than the earlier `David Live', there were, however, many complaints and rumours surrounding it's issue. The initial Controversy sprang from a delay in production. A spokesman from RCA inferred that Bowie wanted the album to be counted as a `double' for contractual reasons. RCA refused, which came as a blow to Bowie who had only three albums left with his RCA obligations.(It was thought that he wished to move to Warner Bros. who naturally had more to tempt in the way of film studios etc.)
Bowie was also disappointed by the cover photograph, and the fact that songs such as `Stay' and `Be My Wife' were omitted. There was also no indication as to where and when the tracks were recorded, and the continuity of `Stage' was broken by seconds of silence separating each track.
While RCA were being temporarily placated by promising sales from `Stage', Bowie travelled to Vienna to participate in a film about the life of the expressionist painter, Egon Schiele, which never actually took off. And to Switzerland to begin work on the third album in the `Low'/"Heroes" trilogy, `Lodger'.
By November Bowie was back on the road again, touring Australia and the Far East. Both Sydney and Melbourne were sold out in hours despite the heavy downpours - it was Bowie's first visit to the country. He ended the tour at The Budokan in Tokyo.
Back to Switzerland to add touches to `Lodger', and on to Berlin to promote `Just A Gigolo'.
The reviews were so dire that the reels were taken out of general release, re-edited, and re-dubbed. It arrived in London in February 1979, and Bowie, now with a full mousy/ginger beard, attended the premiere accompanied by Princess Margaret,
The British critics were in full agreement with their German counterparts. Bowie's final words on the film; `It was my 32 Elvis Presley movies in one.'
He had also much to say, in a constructive manner, on the actual process of film making.
`It taught me that you can be a character and stop being him when they finish the movie. As a rock star I couldn't stop, I went on playing the bizarre people I'd invented on stage. I honestly believe that what you see now is myself. I'm learning to be happy, to go to bed at night instead of 5am, and get up in the morning instead of halfway through the day. I'm painting pictures that nobody wants to buy, but I love it.'
When questioned on the title of the new album, he was his usual evasive self - `Despite straight Lines', `Dog Hairs', and perhaps more appropriately, `Planned Accidents'.
In March 1979, he was back in Berlin adding the final touches to `Lodger', only to return to London and more controversy when he and Lou Reed exchanged more than mere words in a Kensington restaurant.
RCA released `Boys Keep Swinging' in April, to be followed a month later by `Lodger', trying desperately to please by allocating the artist his own monogrammed record catalogue number.
The centre-gatefold of `Lodger' contains six still photographs, five of which are of the human body. They are presented against a backdrop of clinical violence. Bowies intention of the taps being turned full-on was possibly an intentional metaphor for the violent personal change he was undergoing.
The watches represent not only time, but the symbolic location of the recording. The dead Che Guevara is representative of his break with the idealism that prompted his early writings, the child being both the directive of his message and the newly-born altruistic tendencies. Bowie himself is undergoing a fractured re-assessment in need of patching up, yet still will not disassociate himself from the other prostrate figure in the bottom right-hand corner.
This was a further experiment on Bowie's behalf-even the packaging was to be considered a piece of art in that as a portrait, it gave indications and clues to the direction he was now pursuing.
Bowie defended his calculated risk of not using a conventional song-writing technique on `Low' and "Heroes", as follows:
`I'm not creating narrative form albums at the moment, It started off as an experiment, but I can see it continuing as long as the initial spark of excitement continues, and when it leaves, I'll move on.'
Through working with Eno, Bowie had become increasingly pre-occupied with `ambient' music, i.e. influences being accommodated from the environment as opposed to other artists. The ambiguity of `Lodger' as being a finale to the projected trio, can be derived from it's profusion of words and varying tempo's, which render it difficult to associate with the previous two albums.
However, although the narrative had to a degree re-asserted itself, the Bowie/Eno pair continued to experiment with the actual construction of the music, in many respects a deeply self-indulgent pursuit.
As a rather broad Characterisation, side one of the album lends itself to a travelogue of various ethnic societies, while side two becomes more philosophising over western culture, a favourite political pastime of Bowie's . `Fantastic voyage' was first released as the B side of `Boys', later to have an equal, if mono status, on the rear of `Peace on Earth/Little Drummer Boy.
There is a most poignant contrast between the lyrical content and the four-chord-sequence undulating melody, performed with two pianos and then mandolins. Bowie considers human existence to be the `fantastic voyage', yet speculates the abrupt termination possibilities of the journey at the hands of warmongers who sadly believe in nuclear extinction as an honourable state over human lives: "In the event that this fantastic voyage should turn to erosion and we never get old. Remember it's true, dignity is valuable, but our lives are valuable too."
As these elder statesmen pontificate the worth of being ennoble and marked by self-respecting dignity, Bowie admits the value of possessing these traits, but holds in equal esteem the value of life.
After all, depression occurs in all people, resulting in a lowering of vitality, often prompting us to act irrationally. And what if a chief of some nuclear nation were to become maniacally depressed ?
We would all be then under his/her cheerless whim. "we're learning to live with someone's depression, and I don't want to live with somebody's depression...Nobody's perfect...but that's no reason to shoot some of those missiles."
Bowie said of the song; `I wanted to put some point of view forward that was in the narrative fashion. One feels constantly that so many things are out of our control, and it's this infuriating feeling that you don't want their depression ruling your life or dictating how you will wake up each morning.'
Bowie lingers for responsibility of the self, because, "the wrong words make you listen in this criminal world." He again emphasises the fact that being faithful in allegiance to the government is only half of the obligation:- "Remember it's true, loyalty is valuable, but our lives are valuable too." He then alludes to the nervousness over "any sudden movement." and how complete races of people are effectively `wiped out'.
As a narrator, he's "got to write it down, and it won't be forgotten." With all the confusion and compassion he feels,could he ever write anything 'nice' again?
On `African Night Flight', Eno is credited as playing `prepared piano and cricket menace', the prepared piano being pairs of scissors and other found metal objects being placed on the pianos strings. (Listen to `Help Me Somebody', `Moonlight In Glory' and `Come with us' on the Eno/Byrne collaboration; 'My Life In The Bush of Ghosts')
The song had it's genesis while Bowie was out in Kenya. During his stay there he went out on safari, meeting the Masai tribe. However, the people he became utterly fascinated with were the German ex-pilots who he found hanging around the Indian Ocean coast of Kenya, `who live strange lives flying about in their little Cessna's over the bushland doing all kinds of strange things. They're very strange characters, permanently plastered, and always talking about when they're going to leave.'
The song transpired due to Bowie's intrigue as to what these men were and what they were actually doing flying around Mombassa. The music is based around a reversal of `Suzie Q.'
The song is narrated at a break-neck pace in the second-person. This serves to offer some form of speed at which the German pilots rampage through life. Bowie displays his ample wit, as the raucous men enter. "More men fall in Hullabaloo men. I slide to the nearest bar, under-mine chair-man, I went too far.. ..Gotta get a word to Elizabeth's father. Hey ho he wished me well."
A few thousand miles North East and into the land of Zen. "Seemed..I Could fly into the eye of God on high."
The German pilot's philosophy appears to parallel that of the Zen thinkers. Nothing about the song is static, new directions are constantly being attempted. "Gotta get a word through one of these days, Asanti, habari,(hello),habari, habari. Asanti, nabana,(goodbye), nabana. nabana."
During Bowie's recent travels to the orient, he had visited Thailand and South Cambodia to `search for the light', and his fascination with the German pilots deviates onto a spiritual plane,(sic). "Drowned by the props all steely sunshine...Lust for the free life quashed and maimed. like a valuable lover one left unnamed."
This is born out even further when the reverse of the lyric sheet reveals a Buddhist temple. "Wise like Orang-utan-that was me. His burning eye will see me through."
During an interview with the New York radio station, `WPLJ', Bowie explained:
`I have to pick a city with friction in it. It has to be a city that I don't know how it works. I have to be at odds with it. As soon as I feel comfortable I can't write anymore. You can look back at my L.P.s and find out what city I was in by just listening to them.
Also on radio, back in London, he told Capital Radio's Nicky Horne that `Lodger' could quite easily have been called `Travel Along With Bowie.'
The track elaborates upon Bowie's rootless stance. He is almost jocular in parodying his behaviour. "Sometimes I feel the need to move on, so I pack a bag and move on. Well I might take a train, or sail at dawn, might take a girl when I move on."
However, there are certain elements of egotistical self-glorification in his attitude, delivered particularly in his style of intonation. "Somewhere someone's calling me, and when the chips are down. I'm just a travelling man...Somewhere there's a morning sky, bluer than her eyes, somewhere there's an ocean, innocent and wild."
Slightly over the top perhaps, but as Bowie redeemed himself, `the song is blatantly romantic'.
The mid-section occupies itself with various glimpses into the various generalisations a public expects from the tourist aspect of each land. Countries as massive as Africa and Russia have their respective "sleepy people" and "horsemen". Japan, positively seeped in Culture, has the odd quirk of people, "sleeping on the matted around". Good old romantic green Cyprus is the place to be however, "when the goings tough." And that's it. Finis. Four Civilisations in five short lines. Certainly the element of self-parody does lighten the piece, but the song remains rather ambiguous in it's self-privileged proclamation of a mere `Ramblin' Guy'.
Trivia: If the track is played anti-clockwise, on a pre-c.d. turntable, the refrain from `All The Young Dudes' can be vaguely heard.
Bowie had previously confided in Michael Watts, that he had no real affection for reggae music in that he had been bombarded with it when a teenager, and it no longer `moved him.' However, on Yassassin, (A slogan he had read on a wall in the Turkish quarter of Berlin during his stay there), he manages to blend a Jamaican back-beat against a parallel Turkish flavour.
The song is descriptive of the model Turkish man who moved out from his farmlands to become part of the Berlin `scene'.
`Red Sails' is an enlivened piece of music, beginning somewhere off the Shanghai coast, on a junk full of German new-wave musicians, bound for Portobello Town in the Indies. The Jolly Roger is at full-mast and momentarily the red- boxes of responsibility have turned into sails of triangles. (The Youth Hostel motif, construed as a metaphor for travel ?)
The song portrays all these cross-cultural musical themes against a backdrop of Douglas Fairbanks-cum-Errol Flynn. "Thunder ocean . Red sails. take me, make me sail alone." There follows a reference to the Turkish preceding track, and an attentive acknowledgement to the Ethiopian roots: "Do you remember, we, another person, green and black and red and so scared. Graffiti on the wall keeps us all in tune."
In interview, when asked whether the `Neue' (sic), influence was intentional, Bowie replied; `Yes, definitely...the moments of difference though, they came from Adrian (Belew), not being played Neue, he'd never heard of them, so I told him the atmosphere I wanted and he came up with the same conclusions...which was fine by me.' And so the crew wail from the deck; "The hinterland, the hinterland, we're gonna sail to the hinterland."
Throughout his musical career, Bowie remained conscious of what was to be accepted as commercially viable as `music to dance to'. Very seldom there occurs a chart record which doesn't have the punching beat to raise people out of their seats and out onto the dancefloor.
The successful ones that do tend to be slow, smooching tunes. The most prolific of Bowie's foot-tappers before `Lodger' would have to have been `The Jean Genie', and the most difficult, `Space Oddity'. (Alabama Song had yet to be released). Perhaps his greatest later triumph over the `disco-scene', was the beautiful, yet musically disjointed collaboration with Queen, 'Under Pressure'.
It must have been an uncomfortable situation for him when `Lodger' was released, that "Heroes", arguably the most simple track to dance to since `Fame', only reached number 24 in the British charts.
Thus, `D J' is very much a rejection to RCA's desires for another `Young Americans/Golden Years'. `It's a somewhat cynical song, but it's my natural response to disco.' There is little doubt that the title is therefore a metaphoric pun on his own real name. "I am a D.J., I am what I play."
And if the disc jockey is what he plays, then he constantly must have the music going, for if he doesn't, then he's nothing at all; an ex-D.J.
In the songs musical introduction, Bowie plays four notes on a viola, the only four notes he could play, following a performance with John Cale at New York's Carnegie Hall where he was a guest.
From the excellent opening; "I'm home, lost my gob and incurably ill. You think this is easy realism." To the final realisation of "He used to be my boss and now he is a puppet dancer. "; perhaps this is how Bowie was viewing his relationship with RCA.
Bowie claimed that on the `single' track, the organisation was to `have everybody play the instruments they didn't usually play'. However, the only notable switch on the seven-piece set was Dennis Davis standing down for Carlos Alomar on drums, while the former picked up George Murray's bass,(with a little encouragement from Visconti)
Musically, the other notable footnote to the track is that the song contains exactly the same chord structure as `Fantastic Voyage'.
`Boys' re-opened the sexually ambiguous case made redundant following the departure of Ziggy. There pervades an underlying `macho' feel. "Heaven loves ya. The clouds part for ya. Nothing stands in your way when you're a boy." However, the lyrics of the song are too effete to anger any feminists. Rather, it plays upon the trite responsibilities, and gains incurred from being blessed as a member of the male gender. "Clothes always fit ya...you can wear a uniform..other boys check you out...You get a girl." All desperately required necessities! Bowie was therefore treading rather delicate waters if the song was not intended as a grievance to women, and it certainly was rendered tongue-in-cheek. Who was being made the object of parody ?
It could have possibly have been the Village People, a pop group of the time, made entirely of camp hunks of muscle extolling the virtues of being `servicemen' and the dubious merits of the Young Men's Christian Association.
No, Bowie was offering the song from a woman's point of view, the debasement being fired directly at `boys', who were being made ridiculous by impersonation. "They'll never clone ya, You're always first on the line...You can buy a home of your own...learn to drive and everything."
Bowie was promoting a far more penetrating attack on gender- stereotypes than he had done with Ziggy. The glamour gone, (as acted out on the promotional video for the single), we see the sex-role status of any individual, male or female, as being worthless if they are not sympathetically in one accord. "Boys keep swinging, boys always work it out."
Bowie's humour, for no one could deny the satirical aspect of the song, is one of directness, raising a smile as the knife bites deeper.
Repetition
`This is about wife-beating - something you are faced with in the American newspapers all the time.'
`Repetition' is a song in the third-person narrative, in which we discover Johnny, a large male creature whose, "overheads are high, and he looks straight through you when you ask him how the kids are."
Throughout the song, Bowie, singing in a very detached manner, tries to explain some of the causes underlying wife-beating.
In both rendition and content it is several light-years away from the previous track. George Murray's slurred opening bass presents an ominous foreboding that something is decidedly not right. "He gets home around seven `cause the chevy's real old. And he could have had a Cadillac if the school had taught him right."
Johnny has an enormous chip on his shoulder, the only way he can compensate for his own failures and inadequacies is to hurt his wife.
Bowie offers the cause and the result; "I guess the bruises won't show if she wears long sleeves." Securing the right of the feminist stance, (even humanist), "The space in her eyes" is the only mark she cannot disguise.
`Lodger' is an album of 10 songs, lifted from an initial tape of 22 recorded tracks. The last song, `Red Money', ties the knot in a full circle, which began with the accountability for al] in `Fantastic Voyage'. Curiously, Bowie decided to utilise the music he and Carlos Alomar penned for Iggy Pop's `Sister Midnight' as being the base for his song `about responsibility'.
The little red boxes which Bowie claimed to invade not only his dreams, but also his art-work, would doubtless give psychologists and psychoanalysts a field day. He had already received consultation regarding their meaning, and opted for a sense of responsibility.
From the lyrics it world appear that the claims of conscience are not to be incumbent to simply the artist.
The responsibility, echoed on `Up The Hill Backwards', on the following album, is universal. A Catastrophe of enormous proportions is envisaged:
"A man is not a man...the landscape is too high." The projectiles above that will "`Tumble from the sky" are not, as would be assumed, a recent development.
The onus is upon the obligation of mankind to compensate for it's errors, accept them and redeem the pledge. The best preparation is to be forward, and Bowie raises the impunity from off all men. "Can you hear it fall. can you hear it well. can you hear it at all."
The latter request is aimed to those of most earnest need. On a personal level, Bowie discusses the appearances of his `red boxes', and his inability to act, as the box was not of a physical form.
" I got the small red box and I didn't know what to do, `cause my fingers could not grope."
What he does realise however, is that he cannot simply push his moral and ethical responsibilities to one side in the hope that they would go away.
`I don't think it's up to one single person. It becomes a collective responsibility. Because like it or not, whatever I do or say is going to be interpreted in a fair or unfair manner by disparate elements of the media'.
By gradually slaughtering ourselves, accepting the rewards, (red/blood money), we are passing the little red boxes on with lies such as `It'll never happen' or `It's nothing to do with me'. But as Bowie perceives; "Such responsibility is up to you and me." And how fiercely he demonstrates this in the following album `Scary Monsters'.
