Thanks, Starman: Why David Bowie Was the Greatest Rock Star Ever
Planet Earth is a lot bluer today without David Bowie, the greatest rock star who ever fell to this or any other world. He was the hottest tramp, the slinkiest vagabond, the prettiest star who ever shouted “You’re not alone!” to an arena full of the world’s loneliest kids. He was the most human and most alien of rock artists, turning to face the strange, speaking to the freak in everyone. He stared into your twitchy teenage eyes to assure you that you’ve torn your dress and your face is a mess, yet that’s precisely why you’re a juvenile success. Whichever Bowie you loved best — the glam starman, the wispy balladeer, the Berlin archduke — he made you feel braver and freer, which is why the world felt different after you heard Bowie. This man’s spaceship always knew which way to go.
That’s why he always inspired such fierce devotion. As a teenager in the Eighties, at home glued to my radio on Saturday because I couldn’t get a ticket to the Bowie show in Boston, I listened as a group of WBCN DJs arrived at the studio fresh from the show, with a cigarette butt they’d swiped from an ashtray backstage. And I listened with goosebumps as they ceremonially smoked it on the air. Bowie fanatics are like that. Which is why so many different people have heard themselves in his music, whether it’s Barbra Streisand covering “Life On Mars?” in 1974 or D’Angelo covering “Space Oddity” in 2012, George Clinton namechecking him on Mothership Connection or Public Enemy sampling him in “Night of the Living Baseheads.” Somehow I really thought he’d outlive us all. After all, he’d outlived so many David Bowies before.
The weekend he died, I was listening to nothing but Bowie. On Friday night, his birthday, I went to see the tribute band Holy Holy play The Man Who Sold the World in New York, with producer Tony Visconti on bass, original Spiders drummer Woody Woodmansey and Heaven 17 singer Glenn Gregory. After finishing the album, they did another solid hour of early Seventies Bowie classics from “Five Years” to “Watch That Man.” Visconti had the crowd sing “Happy Birthday” into his phone and texted it to Bowie. “David’s at his birthday party,” he told us. “This isn’t it.” (Were we all secretly hoping maybe the Dame would show up? Of course we were.) I got weepy when Visconti’s daughter sang “Lady Stardust,” a song that has always made me verklempt because it’s reminded me Bowie was going to die someday, though Friday night, that still seemed far away. I spent the rest of the weekend listening to Station to Station and Low — an ordinary weekend, since those are easily the two most-played albums in my apartment — along with the 1974 outtake “Candidate (Demo),” and of course the new Blackstar, an album which sounded very different 24 hours ago.