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A Rose by any other name: the secret history of Biff and Bowie
One of the lessons learned from a lifetime’s immersion in David Bowie’s work is the certain knowledge – and this is something I happily came to terms with many years ago – that just when you thought you’d got the whole thing nailed, along comes an unexpected discovery which requires you to rethink everything you thought you knew. Sometimes this discovery can be something very obscure. On other occasions – and this is one of them – it can be something which, as the old saying goes, has been hidden in plain view.
I blush to confess that, for the first time in all my years as a David Bowie enthusiast, I’ve just sat down and listened to the entirety of Biff Rose’s 1968 album The Thorn in Mrs Rose’s Side. I say ‘the entirety’ – it’s as short as most albums were in those days, clocking in at a refreshingly concise 35 minutes, but that’s more than enough time to shed new light on a whole stack of David Bowie’s early songs.
Bowiephiles will, of course, know the New Orleans-born Biff Rose as the co-author of ‘Fill Your Heart’, the hippy-dippy anthem to happiness, freedom and gentleness which our man seized, covered and made his own on Hunky Dory. Those whose knowledge goes a little deeper will also be familiar with ‘Buzz the Fuzz’, a rather more whimsical Biff Rose composition which Bowie occasionally included in his live sets at around the same time. Both of these songs originated on The Thorn in Mrs Rose’s Side, so we’ve always known that it was an LP which struck a chord with David. Quite how resounding a chord is something I’m only now beginning to appreciate.
David’s oft-quoted description of Biff Rose as ‘a flower-power Randy Newman’ is entirely apt: the quirky vignettes, eccentric wordplay and piano-and-strings arrangements which are Biff’s stock in trade readily call to mind Newman’s early work. And they’re good songs, too. Biff’s vocal stylings and his instrumental sound evidently made an impact on David at the beginning of the seventies, a time when our man was still finding his own voice as a singer-songwriter. If you’ve heard Biff’s version of ‘Fill Your Heart’, you’ll know that Bowie’s rendition on Hunky Dory is extraordinarily faithful: in particular, the string arrangement and the parping sax breaks are practically identical to those created by Biff’s arranger, Arthur G Wright. A self-acknowledged magpie but never a plagiarist, Bowie freely acknowledges this debt in the handwritten liner notes on the back cover of Hunky Dory: ‘Mick [Ronson] and I agree that the ‘Fill Your Heart’ arrangement owes one hell of a lot to Arthur G Wright and his prototype.’ Nonetheless, Bowie succeeds in lifting the song to a new level. For one thing, there’s the piano: sweet though Biff’s playing is, it’s no match for Rick Wakeman’s dizzying virtuosity on Hunky Dory. For another thing, there’s the vocal: Biff sings most of ‘Fill Your Heart’ straight on the beat, whereas Bowie brings a dextrous swing to the whole affair, loosening up the song and, appropriately enough given the lyric, freeing it wonderfully. It’s fascinating to hear. Bowie’s vocal is unarguably superior, but he’s aping much of what Biff does – for example that last extended ‘Fuh-reeeee!’, lifting into falsetto. Bowie does it better, but Biff did it first.
So much for what you already knew. The really interesting stuff lies elsewhere on Biff’s album. So here we go. And the best is kept until last…
Exhibit A is the opening track, a jaunty number called ‘Mama’s Boy’ in which Biff exhorts the parents of the flower-power generation to chill out about their children. If that’s already sounding a trifle familiar to the Hunky Dory fan in you, allow me to remind you of a line from ‘Oh! You Pretty Things’:
Don’t kid yourself they belong to you
They’re the start of the coming race
With that in mind, just look at what Biff sings in ‘Mama’s Boy’:
But the kids are growing up as fine as can be
Members of a new society
…and, a little later:
So to all you mothers that I love so
Trust your babies, let ’em go!
It has always been in the nature of David Bowie’s magpie, mix-and-match methodology that echoes of a favourite phrase are prone to pop up more than once – so it’s no surprise that the above couplet not only prefigures ‘Oh! You Pretty Things’, but also pokes its head through the wall fifteen years later amid the Muppet mayhem of the Labyrinth number ‘Magic Dance’:
Slap that baby, make him free!
Exhibit B is the second song on the album, a lilting piece called ‘Angel Tension’ whose lyric carries a momentary but unmistakable pre-echo of a rather more familiar number which Bowie first recorded in 1970: Biff’s ‘Going back in memory’ becomes Bowie’s ‘Staying back in your memory’, while the tempo, phrasing and chord changes would seem to dispel any reasonable doubt that the number was in David’s head when he composed ‘The Prettiest Star’.
Exhibit C is the album’s kookiest track – and yes, it’s even kookier than ‘Buzz the Fuzz’. This time the lyrics aren’t by Biff Rose: ‘Paradise Almost Lost’ is a poem by Joseph Newman, the American humorist, entrepreneur and, fact fans, the uncle of actor Paul Newman. Over a backing of meandering piano, Biff’s spoken recitation of the poem is punctuated by vocal whoops, clicks and beeps, and is every bit as idiosyncratic as you might expect from… well, from a flower-power Randy Newman. As it happens, I knew this poem as a child – in fact, I once memorised it for a poetry-speaking competition at school – but I’d quite forgotten about it until I heard Biff Rose’s recording. Written in the mid-twentieth century, the poem is a tongue-in-cheek account of the creation of life on Earth, packed with tricksy wordplay and jokey rhymes in the Hilaire Belloc / Ogden Nash tradition. But hearing it in this context, one suddenly realises that, via Biff’s rendition, the poem must surely be one of the springboards of Bowie’s 1970 lyric ‘The Supermen’. Here’s the poem’s opening stanza:
I'll tell about those ancient days
Ere history penetrates the haze,
Ere human eyes were there to gaze,
When earth was all primeval:
Worms and germs and rocks and sod
Were ready at the slightest nod
Of quite an inexperienced God
To go into upheaval.
Of course, Bowie’s tone in ‘The Supermen’ is altogether more apocalyptic, his theme more darkly Nietzschean. But the overall sense of the narrative is far too close to be a coincidence, particularly as the metre of the poem is identical. You can sing it along to the melody of ‘The Supermen’:
With lightning flash and thunder roll
An angry God demanded toll,
And so he dug a hellish hole
And thrust them in the chasm.
The spawn of life spread far and wide,
The species grew and multiplied,
For hundreds lived, though thousands died,
God wept within his portals.
…and so it goes on, calling to mind not only ‘The Supermen’ but also the contemporaneous Bowie lyric ‘The Width of a Circle’ (‘He struck the ground, a cavern appeared’)… but let’s move on to Exhibit D. The eighth track on Biff’s album is entitled ‘What’s Gnawing At Me’. It’s a self-absorbed, melancholic little number in which Biff struggles to come to terms with a nagging sense of unhappiness. The opening lines are:
Every night I think about going downtown
And leaving you all alone
I wonder sometimes what’s going through my mind
The reason I can’t stay home
If you haven’t yet made the connection, let me jog your memory about the opening line of ‘Conversation Piece’, a song recorded by David Bowie in 1969:
I took this walk to ease my mind
To find out what’s gnawing at me
…and here’s the chorus of Biff’s song:
So I’m going downtown where it’s always loud
I’m gonna lose myself in the downtown crowd
So I can find what’s gnawing at me
But I promised that the best would be saved until last, so let’s move on to Exhibit E. The final song on The Thorn in Mrs Rose’s Side is one of the album’s most striking tracks: a slow, mournful piano-led ballad called ‘The Man’. The opening bars had barely begun before I started thinking, ‘Hang on a minute…’ By the time Biff was singing ‘His name might be John…’, I knew I was onto something. When he reached ‘See the reflection of where you’ve been before’, I thought I’d better just transcribe the whole thing. Here it is:
Don’t look now, but someone ahead of you
Is standing alone and singing
He’s just a man and he knows who he is
Contented within his own being
His name might be John, his name might be Christ
Some call him Joe Destiny
But listen a little longer to the sound in his soul
And you’ll know he’s really you and me
I tell the lie that a man must learn to kill
To defend what he thinks is right
The murderer shows his face in many forms
I make him live in you and in me
There’s a man learning to be free
From the pressure of all his killing
Please help the man before you, you see
Let him know he’s really you and me
See the reflection of where you’ve been before
I see you in my mirror
Feel the power within your own silence
There you find your saviour
I make the separation real
So I can feel the pain of my opinion
There is no separation in reality
Now I can see through the illusion
The man learning to be free
From the pressure of all isolation
Please help the man before you, you see
Life is celebration
…so, perhaps now we have a slightly better idea of why Bowie’s legendary out-take ‘Shadow Man’ remained in the vaults for so long, and why some sources have listed it as ‘The Man’, an alternative title which David also tried out for size on ‘Lightning Frightening’, another unreleased number from the same period. I don’t think anyone would disagree that, both musically and lyrically, Bowie’s ‘Shadow Man’ is a more complete, more sophisticated, more profound piece of songwriting than Biff’s ‘The Man’ – and, for that matter, one could certainly say the same of ‘Conversation Piece’ and ‘Oh! You Pretty Things’ by comparison with the Biff Rose numbers to which they owe a debt. But we have to bear in mind that Bowie’s borrowings have never been quite that straightforward. As I said at the beginning of this piece, he’s no plagiarist; like T S Eliot, to whom many commentators have likened his lyrics, Bowie is a modernist whose allusions, quotations and juxtapositions are there to be spotted. And he is every bit as likely to recycle his own work as that of others: just as the lyric of ‘Oh! You Pretty Things’ is manifestly indebted to a number of other sources besides ‘Mama’s Boy’ (among them Arthur C Clarke’s Childhood’s End and Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race), so ‘Shadow Man’ is also, inter alia, a down-tempo reboot of David’s own 1968 demo ‘C’est la Vie’.
Meanwhile, Biff’s ‘The Man’ seems also to have prompted a memorable passage from Bowie’s ‘The Wild Eyed Boy From Freecloud’ (‘really you and really me’). But while that’s a fleeting moment, the similarities between ‘The Man’ and ‘Shadow Man’ are so remarkably close that it now seems to me that the latter, for all its unquestionable brilliance, was one of David’s jeux d’esprit, a flexing of his singer-songwriter muscles that was destined to remain in the studio – like other early Bowie curios such as ‘Little Toy Soldier’ and ‘Lightning Frightening’, its roots are showing so nakedly that the idea of releasing it in such close proximity to its source material might have seemed imprudent.
All the same, few would disagree that Bowie’s debt to the flower-power Randy Newman has been repaid with interest. Thanks to David Bowie, ‘Fill Your Heart’ remains Biff’s most celebrated contribution to pop music. But as I’m now discovering, the less familiar byways of his work are also deserving of exploration.
Nicholas Pegg
5 November 2011
A revised version of David Bowie's Space Oddity, recorded by Commander Chris Hadfield on board the International Space Station.
TCM skrev:http://youtu.be/KaOC9danxNoA revised version of David Bowie's Space Oddity, recorded by Commander Chris Hadfield on board the International Space Station.
Jansson skrev:TCM skrev:http://youtu.be/KaOC9danxNoA revised version of David Bowie's Space Oddity, recorded by Commander Chris Hadfield on board the International Space Station.
Hellre än bra?
TCM skrev:Jansson skrev:TCM skrev:http://youtu.be/KaOC9danxNoA revised version of David Bowie's Space Oddity, recorded by Commander Chris Hadfield on board the International Space Station.
Hellre än bra?
Det mest intressanta var väl platsen där videon spelades in
Jansson skrev:Trevligt.
Nu är jag inte quizzmaster som TCM men ändå....här kommer ett miniquizz.
Bara en ledtråd.
Vilken låt?
TCM skrev:Jansson skrev:Trevligt.
Nu är jag inte quizzmaster som TCM men ändå....här kommer ett miniquizz.
Bara en ledtråd.
Vilken låt?
Jag antar att det är en Bowie-låt vi pratar om?
CODY skrev:Vet ej
Men den som har läst Margraves of the Marshes av John Peel garvade nog lite när han berättade om en T-Rex turné strax efter Space Oddity då Bowie var support för T-Rex med ett pantomimnummer. Peel, som satt och pratade med Marc, ropade till David att det var dags att gå på scenen. "That was about the only direct contact I had med "the cameleon of pop" on the tour. - I mean, what's the point of talking to a mime artist?"
Jansson skrev:Det finns referenser till Diamond Dogs och Halloween Jack i låten.
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