Sounding more Heathen than Heroes with its sleek guitar-and-drum synergy, David Bowie's new single, "The Stars (Are Out Tonight)," made its premiere Monday night. As the latest-to-be-released track from the rock legend's forthcoming LP, The Next Day (due March 12), it presents a marked contrast from the album's baleful and nostalgic first-to-be-released track, "Where Are We Now?," although both songs (visually, at least) seem to evoke veiled references and personas of Bowie's fabled past.
She first honed her craft as a folk musician, but with such infectious pop hits as “Suddenly I See” and “Black Horse and The Cherry Tree,” KT Tunstall is certainly no stranger to rhythm.
On her third and latest release, Tiger Suit, the Scottish singer/songwriter shifts from the more organic sound of her previous efforts, Eye to the Telescope and Drastic Fantastic, to delve into dance music, exploring the rich sonic textures of techno and electronica beats.
Recorded at Hansa Studios in Berlin — where tracks for such innovative works as David Bowie’s Heroes, Iggy Pop’s The Idiot, and U2’s Achtung Baby were laid down — Tiger Suit is a reflection of Tunstall’s ambitious, experimental curiosity. What inspired the dance-oriented songs on the album?
When I was coming to make this album I felt like I had a bit of a mountain to climb. It was partly to turn myself on with what I was doing, because I’d been touring solidly for six or seven years. We finished up in South America with this really great, explosive tour, which I loved, but it did feel like the end of a chapter. I knew I was going to have to come up with something fresh to get me back out on the road again. So I just had to dig deep and work out what was really pushing my buttons at the moment, in terms of what I wanted to make and what I was hearing. It just kind of sparked off this re-ignition of my passion for dance music. I’d been very into Left Field and the Ninja Tune label and a band called Lamb. I’d really enjoyed all that electronic kind of stuff. I’ve always been a huge fan of Beck... I just never really allowed myself the kind of platform to try this stuff out. In comparison to your first two albums, was this new direction at all a jolt for you insomuch as the songwriting was concerned?
There’d been a slight sea change, very subtle. I think the structure of the writing and the arrangement of the writing is actually pretty similar on this record, but there was definitely a sea change in terms of what I felt I was able to do. I didn’t feel like I had to stay the same. I would only stick to the same formula of songwriting if it was exciting me. One of the early songs I wrote for this record was “Push That Knot Away,” which is really quite different from anything I’ve done before, where there basically isn’t a chorus. You’ve just got this big riff in the middle of it, and it’s more of a puzzle, really, than a structured song. And [with] songs like “Lost” and “Difficulty” — “Difficulty” is actually my favorite track on the album — we could have very easily gone down a road with them of just being very run-of-the-mill ballads, but it just wasn’t exciting to do that. It wasn’t the natural impulse to do that. Another part of that, too, is that the new songs would hold up with just you playing them on a guitar.
When we were making the record I was very worried about that, actually, because I’d decided to play a bunch of pubs solo to start it all off. I was thinking to myself, Shit, there’s so much stuff on these tunes; is this going to work? And I was really relieved when it did. “Lost” feels a bit reminiscent of “Heal Over” from your first album.
Yeah, there’s a real spirit of the songwriting that was behind “Heal Over” on this record where I think that I really embraced more of a feminine… There’s a femininity in it that maybe is not what I would’ve branded “femininity” a couple years ago, because I would always think a female album would be quite whimsical and gentle. In a kind of ironic way this is the fiercest, most empowered record I’ve made, but it also feels more female for some reason. I certainly haven’t shied away from allowing my voice have a beauty to it. It’s not all about attitude and rawness.
In the same way, I love Tarantino and the fact that you’ll be watching this scene that’s got a complete juxtaposition, musically, in the soundtrack. It really confuses you, how you’re meant to feel, but I think it makes you question how you’re feeling more than if you were to watch a sad scene in a movie and it had a sad song. The way that he does it, where he’ll surprise you with his choice, I think that can happen within a song itself where your subject matter is at odds with how it sounds. It’s playing with people’s impulses, and you can end up being a lot more open feeling stuff when you’re challenged like that. What was it like recording in Hansa Studios?
It was a great choice and it was a very deliberate choice with the direction that I wanted to go in, because it’s a fantastic nucleus of electronic music in Berlin, a real hub. And the city itself was just so unselfconscious and so progressive-feeling. The studio really hasn’t changed much since. The main control room where all that Bowie and Iggy Pop stuff was recorded is pretty much the same. It’s a total trip to see those pictures and then you’re in that room recording. It’s very, very cool. And I felt personally that the legacy of the place definitely made me up my game. I think I played better from the energy, [like with] a kind of teenage competitiveness where you really want to be as good— You wanted to be Iggy Pop, nothing wrong with that.
I wanted to be Iggy Pop, exactly. [Laughs] So I just got in there, stabbed myself in the chest with the mic stand, topless. I think it worked.
When music journalist Robert Palmer died on November 20, 1997 at the age of 52, he’d long since cemented his reputation as one of the most astute experts in his field. A fixture at Rolling Stone for over two decades, the first person designated as chief pop-music critic for The New York Times, and an author of six books, Palmer examined and chronicled music with feral acuity while, at the same time, appreciating the best of it with unadulterated joy.
“In a style that blended elegance and hipster enthusiasm, he would travel deeper and deeper into his subject, bringing his readers along with him in the interest of turning them on to something he loved,” Anthony DeCurtis writes of Palmer in the preface to the recently published anthology, Blues & Chaos: The Music Writing of Robert Palmer, which he edited.
DeCurtis, a longtime contributing editor at Rolling Stone and himself the author of two retrospective anthologies—Rocking My Life Away: Writing About Music And Other Matters and In Other Words: Artists Talk About Life And Work—has been a preeminent voice in music criticism and cultural commentary for nearly thirty years. In addition to his written submissions to the magazine, in the '90s DeCurtis served as the editor of Rolling Stone's record-review section, which led him to work directly with Palmer, the experience undoubtedly informing some of his recollections on him now. Presently, DeCurtis teaches in the writing program at the University of Pennsylvania.
In this extensive interview with Donald Gibson, Anthony DeCurtis discusses Blues & Chaos and the late Robert Palmer before generously yielding insight to his own career and craft. Along the way he reflects on music's immeasurable capacity to spark creative minds, the pros and cons of artist interviews, and how one such interview with a certain childhood idol resonates with him today.
How did editing someone else’s work compare to editing your own two anthologies?
You’re kind of willing to make mistakes on your own behalf. The two collections of my own that I did, I had fairly specific ideas for what I wanted them to be like. And once I got some momentum going on pulling it all together, I didn’t really question that too much. With the Palmer book, I found myself thinking a lot about how he would want to be represented…and about whether or not my own vision of what this book should be would match his. Finally, I just decided, this is what it means to be an editor. I was his editor. So it’s going to reflect his voice and who he was as I understood him.
I was interviewing Patti Smith, who knew Palmer and really liked him. I gave her a copy of the book—we had just gotten copies—and I brought one down to the interview and I handed it to her. We were being filmed for PBS and, because it was a film thing, there were endless periods of just sitting around, not really having to work. So we had a chance to discuss it, too. I was telling her some of the anxieties I’d went through about representing him. Patti Smith just held the book up. She just held the book up in her hand in front of me and said, “Look what you did for him. Look what you did for him. He has this now.”
She’s good with symbolism, isn’t she?
Yeah, exactly. [Laughs] And her holding it, it just gave me a certain distance of it. I thought, 'You know, it’s actually turned out pretty well.' Just for a moment like this and for her to say that, it was gratifying.
In working with Palmer at Rolling Stone as his editor in the ‘90s, was there anything about his style at that point that had some effect or informed the way you appreciated rock criticism?
It wasn’t so much that; I just enjoyed reading him. He was certainly a writer that I’d assign things to because I wanted to read that piece. One of the things that probably should be said is how gracious he was. Maybe he was like this with everyone; I don’t know what other people’s experience was. But with me he was very cooperative. If I had a question, he would answer it. Or if I had a suggestion, he would listen to it. There are people who are so difficult.
Like you mention in the book, people with bigger egos than talent.
Exactly. And that really became my measure, in a way. As I sat there with people, I’d be thinking, ‘With Bob Palmer I would’ve been done in five minutes and I’m sitting here arguing with you for half an hour. You couldn’t stand in his shadow.’ So I definitely took a lesson from that, that your confidence actually enabled you to accept ideas and to accept suggestions. The degree of your talent didn’t mean that you then bullied everybody. It meant that you could still be open. And Bob was.
When you say he was open to ideas, was he also open to criticism on a technical scale, if you didn’t like the particular flow of an article or a direction he took?
We were in tune a lot of the time, so it rarely came up. But Bob would occasionally veer off. He had a lot of interests that I would regard as esoteric. So if it’s in the middle of a review of a Megadeth record or something—he would go off on a fairly long stint on some aspect of paganism or something he felt their music represented—I would essentially just get rid of that. I suppose there are places where that stuff plays. It doesn’t play in Rolling Stone. And I think he got that. He’d try things and if they worked, they worked. If they didn’t, they didn’t. In the book, for example, the second Morocco story, which is really wild, called “Into The Mystic”—where he’s essentially having visions and things like this—I think he was pretty struck [that Rolling Stone published it]. He wrote about people saying to him, “You submitted that to Rolling Stone?” That one flew. He got that one by. He would, as all writers do, you attempt certain things. And you think, let’s see how much of this I get. Bob was pretty pragmatic, I suppose, is the bottom line here. He understood what the magazine was and I think he accepted that. He occasionally pushed against the margins of what that could be and sometimes he got away with it and sometimes he didn’t. But he was always cool about it. Let me say this, I never had an argument with him.
So he never held a grudge for, say, you taking away a semi-colon?
Oh, God no. [Laughs] I think he appreciated it. He liked the way his stuff came out. He got it. As wild as Bob was in certain ways, he worked at a daily newspaper for nearly ten years. Anybody in a position like that—writing for Rolling Stone, writing for The New York Times—you’re in a position where you can really have an impact. On the other hand, there are certain things you trade off for that. I think he got that. He liked having an impact. He liked feeling like his stuff was getting read and getting to a big audience of people, not all of whom would know about the things he was writing about. And I think he was willing to do what he needed to do to make that happen.
Do you think rock criticism serves more as encouragement for artists to make better music or as encouragement for listeners to refine their tastes?
It’s more like an interpretation of the entire phenomenon. Like, why does anybody need to understand why they like Britney’s latest single? But I do believe that a good writer can make you hear things in a way that you haven’t heard them before. They can deepen your comprehension of them. And that’s as true for Britney’s latest single as it is the latest Radiohead album. I think that that’s always true. I wouldn’t presume to think that I could lecture artists on what they want to do. I think they’re almost a lot better off when they just kind of do it and don’t worry about it too much… Interviewing someone like David Bowie, for example—who is as interesting as a critic as he is an artist; and he’s very interesting as an artist—he is somebody who is really able to hear music and think about it very critically, or analytically, I suppose. He’s not somebody who’s going to say to you, “Oh, you know, it’s just mystical; it really just comes to me.” He’ll talk about some R&B record from the 1950s that he lifted something from. And so those conversations—if you’re a writer—are the most exciting ones, where they’re doing it, but they’re also speaking your language.
And when Bowie listens analytically, it doesn’t take away his appreciation of the music on a visceral level.
Exactly. He still listens and enjoys stuff. He hears things the way critics hear them. He told me a story one time—I was interviewing him for VH-1 for a series on the ‘70s—he talked about being with Brian Eno, when Eno first heard these Giorgio Moroder productions of Donna Summer. He was imitating Eno’s wild enthusiasm about how fantastic these things sounded. And these are two really smart guys, but they both went on to use all that stuff.
They went nuts over “Love To Love You Baby.”
Yes! [Laughs] I find the ability of music to move across those kinds of thresholds really fantastic. They made that single for purely commercial reasons. It’s designed to get people in a disco up and dancing. Period. But really, really smart, creative people can both thrill to that aspect of it and also get fantastic ideas from it. It’s the great thing about music. I was telling my students the other day [of] the way that something like Kraftwerk, which seemed about the whitest stuff ever done, could totally excite these kids in the South Bronx and really help create hip-hop. It’s the great fun and the great power of a creative act that, once you unleash it in the world, it can go anywhere and it can do anything. Whether that’s in The New York Times or that’s on the biggest label in the world or whether you put it up on YouTube or you’re blogging about it, that’s always true. It can find its audience—and not even whom you think its audience would be. It can find an audience that you never would’ve imagined for it.
And inspire other art.
Absolutely—inspire creativity of all kinds, and fun and excitement and new things. It’s just dizzying thinking about all that.
You’ve written about flying to Dublin to interview U2 or traveling to London to talk with Paul McCartney for an hour. What does being in the room with an artist provide you that a phone call wouldn’t?
I prefer to do interviews in person. I think there’s something you can do in that situation where you’re just looking directly at somebody; they’re just sitting there. They’re right in front of you. There are ways of reading them that can affect your line of questioning. It’s also harder for someone to look you in the eye and avoid what it is that you’re trying to ask them about. A resistant subject, say, is just easier to deal with in person. The phone just gives them too much advantage. It really takes kind of a will of steel to sit there in front of somebody and stonewall them. Not that these interviews are especially contentious; most of them aren’t. Still, there is a kind of resistance and people fall into their wraps, and that’s just harder to do when you’re there in front of somebody. Any case where you’ve traveled to do the piece and that kind of stuff, it’s also harder to really limit the time too much.
He can’t all of a sudden get a call, quote unquote.
Exactly. That said, I feel like people underestimate the possibilities of what the phone can be. For the 40th anniversary issue of Rolling Stone, I interviewed Paul McCartney; I did that interview over the phone. The magazine very reluctantly agreed to do that just because it was so late in the cycle. And McCartney, he wanted to do it; he didn’t want to do it. He was going to do it; he didn’t want to do it… Finally he agreed and there was no way to do it in person so we did it over the phone. I think that interview came out fine. There are things that you can do on the phone and for certain type of people it works. The degree of abstraction can work to your advantage. Like, for example, one of my favorite parts of [that] McCartney interview was [because] it was the 40th anniversary of the Summer of Love… I said, “You were in the Beatles. It’s the Summer of Love. Sgt. Pepper’s just came out. What was that like?” In person he might have been a little glib, but over the phone he just kind of disappeared into that moment. He was quiet for a while. And he just said, “It was fantastic.” And he said it in a way that really conveyed it. And he just started going into it. I don’t know that I could’ve gotten that in person. The immediacy of the situation would’ve blocked his ability to do a little bit of time traveling.
I [also] did an interview with Eddie Vedder one time. We did the second half of it over the phone; he was much better over the phone. In person, he’s a little shy…very friendly and very gracious, even a little deferential. [He] was polite but not particularly informative. Over the phone, he was much better able to access his own feelings. He felt less like he was being interviewed and somehow the phone gave him the ability to disappear into himself a little bit and then to speak from that place. And that’s ultimately what you want, whether you’re in the room with the person or you’re interviewing them on the phone. You want them to be able to access something in themselves so that they’re not speaking from their head; they’re speaking from somewhere inside themselves. And you can make that work, depending on the person in either situation.
We’ve come upon the eighth anniversary of George Harrison’s passing. Did your first interview with him, in particular, have any profound effect on your perception of his music?
The hardest people to interview are the ones who made an impression on you as a kid. It’s difficult. I mean, as much as I admire Bono or Peter Buck [of R.E.M.], I was a grownup by the time I met those people and heard their music; I was kind of formed. I am who I am because of the Beatles. So, meeting [Harrison] was hard. It had a kind of surreality to it. It does to this day… I realized I was going to be in situations where you could just be overwhelmed by the emotions connected with your own experience. Sitting there with him, it was very hard to stay focused and do the work and get the interview done.
What I like about that interview is toward the end where he’s talking about his relationship to John Lennon, about a sense that if you can’t experience the spirit of a great friend who you loved deeply after he’s gone, what hope could you ever have of experiencing Jesus or Buddha or whoever it is that you’re interested in? That’s a kind of simple idea, but it’s really powerful. And it’s one that has stayed with me, that things don’t have to be lost. That moment where he just says—quoting Dylan as he did so often—“‘If your memory serves you well, we’re going to meet again.’ I believe that.” The degree of conviction and the degree to which those things were true to him became much more powerful for me, obviously, after he died. But their importance made an impression on me at the time and has for all these years since.
Blues & Chaos: The Music Writing of Robert Palmer edited by Anthony DeCurtis is published by Scribner, A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
In Other Words: Artists Talk About Life And Work by Anthony DeCurtis is published by Hal Leonard Corporation.
Rocking My Life Away: Writing About Music And Other Matters by Anthony DeCurtis is published by Duke University Press.
In June 1972, David Bowie released The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars, the album that launched his most provocative, mercurial persona into the zeitgeist. When he landed in America later that year for a concert tour — his first-ever in the country — he not only introduced an intriguing realm of showmanship and spectacle, but also a shrewd display of public deception.
While he’d earned critical acclaim and relative success in England, Bowie had yet to break the crucial (and lucrative) American market. Rather than building a fanbase from the ground up, though, he carried on as if he’d already assumed the status of a superstar. Acting out a ploy devised by his then-manager, Tony Defries, Bowie (along with an ever-growing entourage) traveled the States in style, reserving the finest hotel suites, riding in swanky automobiles, and essentially behaving like the crème de la crème.
If he seemed a superstar, so the theory went, the public would thus perceive him as one.
The scheme worked in places like the Northeast (especially New York) where his music and enigma had preceded him, but other regions, namely the South and Midwest, didn’t welcome this strange fascination with the same liberality. Concerts were canceled due to poor ticket sales while, on many an occasion, Bowie played before a few hundred fans rather than anticipated thousands.
And so, when he reached California’s Santa Monica Civic Auditorium for two sold-out concerts on October 20 and 21, Bowie’s generous reception didn’t quite mirror those of the outing overall. Still, the first night’s performance — broadcasted live on Los Angeles radio station KMET with bootlegs circulating for years thereafter — stands as a representative and arguably the best document of the Ziggy Stardust tour.
Officially issued by Virgin/EMI on July 22 in limited edition CD, 180 gram LP, and digital formats, Live Santa Monica ’72 remains an onslaught of rock ‘n’ roll abandon. Backed by the Spiders — Mick Ronson (guitar, vocals), Trevor Bolder (bass), Mick "Woody" Woodmansey (drums), and Mike Garson (piano) — Bowie (as Ziggy) commandeers a staggering set with savage ambition and swagger.
Listening with retrospective insight reveals Bowie not just playing, but working songs — “Hang Onto Yourself,” “Suffragette City,” and “Moonage Daydream” foremost among them — and not out of some obligatory (or, as would happen over time, nostalgic) fulfillment, but because they subsumed his creative desire at that time.
Even on non-Ziggy works, Bowie’s conviction pierces through, instigated in no small measure by Mick Ronson’s ingenious counterpart. The guitarist enriches songs like “Life On Mars?” and “The Supermen” with deft flourishes and footing. As Bowie delivers a cryptic vocal on the Jacques Brel song, “My Death,” Ronson intertwines an acoustic arrangement with feral ebb and flow. And on a ten-minute version of “Width of A Circle,” he suitably hijacks the song with seething distortion and electric fury.
In the end, though, the stage belongs to Bowie has he careens through “Rock ‘N’ Roll Suicide” with his last shreds of temerity and composure, his voice trembling as if on the verge of collapse.
As it is a bootleg, the recording has certain sonic flaws — the volume fluctuates and the mix is often muddled — yet the integrity of the performance is preserved and revelatory. Live Santa Monica ’72 captures David Bowie going for the jugular with singular vision and drive, signaling his arrival as an emergent, innovative artist and, yes, a superstar.
For a few years in the mid-eighties, it almost seemed like Mick Jagger’s primary objective in releasing solo albums was to tick Keith Richards off.
Once the Glimmer Twins reconciled and the Stones got rolling again with Steel Wheels in 1989, though, Jagger’s subsequent solo ventures assumed their own distinctiveness and purpose. What’s more, they ceased to threaten a permanent derailment of the World’s Greatest Rock & Roll Band.
Newly released by Rhino Records, seventeen tracks, three of which had remained in the vaults until now, comprise The Very Best of Mick Jagger.
Skeptics will instinctively dismiss or diminish much of the music on this retrospective by drawing lopsided comparisons to the Rolling Stones’ superlative catalog. Yet, if listeners will consider this compilation for what it represents (rather than what it doesn’t), they’ll encounter, for the most part, some fine songs.
Out of Jagger’s four proper solo albums, 1992’s Wandering Spirit stands as the definitive high point, appropriately yielding the most tracks on this collection. Cuts like the radio singles, “Don’t Tear Me Up” and “Sweet Thing,” radiate with insatiable swagger and irreverence. As well, the understated country lament, “Evening Gown,” illustrates Jagger’s versatility in delivering a stirring vocal performance.
Some of the tracks stemming from Jagger’s other solo efforts offer sufficient, albeit sporadic, moments worth praising. A rousing duet with Bono, “Joy,” soars with a gospel optimism and energy that the U2 frontman imparts as if it’s second nature. “God Gave Me Everything,” co-written with Lenny Kravitz, forges through a guitar bombardment while Jagger growls each lyric like a man possessed. And dated though it sounds with its drum machines, “Just Another Night” brandishes a boyish spunk that remains hard to resist.
Alas, certain songs have not held up as well over time (if they ever did to begin with). For instance, “Lucky In Love” drowns in a flood of ‘80s music clichés, with far too many synthesized instruments and not nearly enough authenticity. And, worst of all, “Let’s Work,” sounds like a caffeinated Jagger instructing an (all-female) aerobics class.
Sounding anomalous yet utterly striking among this collection’s more lustrous material are two tracks dating back to 1968 and 1973, respectively. Jagger’s very first solo recording, “Memo From Turner,” originally tapped for the film, Performance, finds the rocker in his inimitable salacious form. Likewise, on the previously unreleased nugget, “Too Many Cooks (Spoil The Soup)”, which John Lennon produced, Jagger sounds downright raw and malicious.
Ironically (and perhaps much to Keith Richards’ chagrin), Jagger’s most successful solo efforts, to be precise, have consisted of collaborations. “Old Habits Die Hard,” the theme from the 2004 remake of the film, Alfie, saw Jagger writing with Dave Stewart of the Eurythmics. Their composition ultimately won a Golden Globe award. Contrasting with such critical acclaim, “Dancing In The Streets,” the 1985 duet with David Bowie, ranks as the most successful song of Jagger's solo career.
The Very Best of Mick Jagger certainly isn’t the best music Mick Jagger has ever made. However, some of the better music Mick Jagger has made without the Rolling Stones, much of it included here, still makes for a great listen. So, have a bit of sympathy for the old devil and give this album a chance.
Another part of that, too, is that the new songs would hold up with just you playing them on a guitar.
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