David Bowie's Long Goodbye And The ForeverNextDays

Whether you liked the concept of my David Bowie Mixtapes/Megamixes or not, by the end I was quite 'mixed out'. I finished Babel because I had put all foreign language songs specifically aside, but yeah, the time of the mix has come and gone, at least for the time being. So instead you get a good old fashioned compilation, an One Buck recods exclusice of course, that ends up covering Bowie's autumnal period and the last roars  of the lion in winter. There wre no specific guiding principles, other than the songs going together. One principle, that the title already hints at, was to do something with the bonus tracks from The Next Day, as well as those of Lazarus. So you get a lot of old man Bowie staring age and death in the eye, and doing it with a defiant rock stance. Because while at least during the production of Lazarus, Bowie knew the end was coming for him, there is surprisingly little larmoyance and outright melanncholy on Lazarus. Instead, on the set of outtakes from The Next Day and Lazarus, Bowie regularly puts the pedal to the medal and delivers a bunch of freewheeling rock songs. David Bowie would not go gently, or quietly, into that good night. 

Personal highlights for me are the retro-rocking "Atomica", the wondeful "God Bless The Girl" (part of The Next Day's line-up until practically the last second), the inscrutable "The Informer" and and the very fitting space odyssey in two parts that is "Born In A UFO" and "Like A Rocket Man", the latter a cheekily jaunty acount of Bowie's cocaine years. Speaking of cheeky: I can't deny it: sequencing these two titles back to back was at least partly for my own amusement, as was the "Plan/"No Pan" combo. SPeaking of the latter: What a beautiful song and performance, Bowie for once allowing himself the sentiment of a 'last song', (with the fitting working title of "Wsitful"), a man who knows he will die soon in a netherworld or limbo  appearance as a ghost from the beyond in his last months of living: "Here, am I nowhere now? / No plan / Wherever I may go / Just where / Just there / I am" and finally "All the things that are my life / my moods, my beliefs, my desires, me alone / nothing to regret / This is no place/ But here I am / This is not quite yet". Hold on there, folks, I think I got some dust speckles in my eyes there...

"Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them"

The other trigger to launch this was that I read somewhere a short mention of the Loner Mix of "Bring Me The Disco King", which has always been a favorite of mine and was actually for a good while the only version of the song I knew, so when I heard the original, I was a little disappointed, obviouly going against the grain once more. For a lot of folks, "Bring Me The Disco King" was the highlight of Reality, but I largely prefer this version by Steve Lohner (geddit?) from Nine Inch Nails. Originally, the song was written and recorded for Black Tie, White Noise, where Bowie intended it as a real cheesy disco numbr, but the joke fell flat and the number was scrapped. He retried in the mi-90s to no better result, then stripped the song down to just him and a drum loop, with the idea of building gradually a full band version around it, then decided that the stark, lonely sound of just him and Mick Garson on piano was enough. Lohner completely rethought the track with a fuller (an rockier) arrangement for strings, guitar and keyboard. lead guitar wasn't done by Lohner himself, but red Hot Chili Peppers' John Frusciante, while Lisa Germano mans (womans?) the keys. Most controversial, for sure, was Lohner's decision to have Tool-vocalist Maynard James Keenan re-sing some of Bowie's lines in a sort of ghostly echo. Sue me, that's probably my favorite part of this version. 

Considering the fact that half of the line-up was made up of the last years of his life plus "Disco King", whose opening lines serve as a sort of prelude  to the compilations occupation with, and ultimate gestures of defiance towards one's own mortality: "You promised me the ending would be clear / You'd let me know when the time was now". So I picked songs that in one way or another woud fit - thematically and sonically- and since a lot of the The Next Day/Lazarus tracks took care of the more boisterous side of Bowie, I chose a number of more melancholy numbers to redress and balance the sound: His re-reading of "Quicksand", from ChangesNowBowie, the wistful "Thursday's Child" (albeit in its 'rock mix'), the stately remake of "Conversation Piece" with Bowie's young foolish writer now replaced by an old fool drowned in his unfinished work and loneliness, the acoustic reading of Tin Machine's "I Can't Read" (very similar to, but not the same as the ChangesNowBowie version I used on the Where Are We Now? Mixtape), the bright and beautiful "Strangers When We Meet" that was the Coda to 1. Outside and finally my own mash up of "Where Are We Now," and "The Mysteries", saved from that same-titled mixtape as the closing track here. 

The oldest track here is from 1995, and that is neither surprise nor coincidence. In the mid-90s Bowie was closing in on fifty, a little like the author of these lines is right now, and he was both starting to take stock of his life, his past, his possible futures. That's why the autumn songs really start around thes etime period, because Bowie started to realize that he - the Ziggy of yesteryear, a generation's Major Tom, a thin white duke that defied white lady - was now probably closer to the end of his life than to the beginning of it. So his thoughts turned autumnal sometimes, not often, but regularly, while the rocker in him still strolled out, raging, raging against the dying of the light. 

And that closing track, a mash-up I did to really sustain the melancholy of its lyrics? A closing prayer, really. "My prayer flies like a word on a wing" he sang in 1976, but the real Bowie prayer that counts is at the end of "Where Are We Now?":

As long as there's sun...

as long as there's rain...

as long as there's fire...

as long as there's me...

as long as there's you...

...there will be forevernextdays...