Forgive me for taking this long to fully absorb the recent David Bowie box set, the 12-CD (or 13-LP) Who Can I Be Now? (1974-1976), which came out at the end of September. The box documents the discursive middle years of Bowie’s legendary decade—that decade being 1970 to 1980, where virtually everything he set to studio tape is indispensable. The new deluxe package is also a sequel to Five Years (1969-1973), another 12-disc box set that documented Bowie’s first steps toward magnificence (1970’s The Man Who Sold the World and 1971’s Hunky Dory) before reinventing himself as glam astro-star Ziggy Stardust, then committing career seppuku by “retiring” onstage in 1973.
Who Can I Be Now? is a big but puzzling package—it only covers three of Bowie’s essential albums, 1974’s Diamond Dogs, 1975’s Young Americans, and 1976’s Station to Station, while the remaining nine discs are padded out with live sets, alternate mixes, a rejected rough draft for Young Americans, and various and sundry single edits. Despite the same number of discs, it contains a noticeably smaller scope than the previous Five Years box, and the amplified scrutiny on this short period only serves to emphasize that it was indeed the weakest point in that superlative Bowie decade—the Young Americans album, specifically, is the only studio album he made from 1970 to 1980 that has anything resembling a flaw on it.
Finished with glam rock and still a couple of years away from his Berlin avant-garde breakthroughs—which encompass the justly admired if speciously named “Berlin” trilogy and Bowie’s two excellent collaborative albums with Iggy Pop—our ex-Ziggy flailed a little, and began to dabble in American R&B, albeit more as an imitator rather than an innovator (Bowie’s uneasy earliest singles, from 1964 onward, were the first blueprint for this affinity). It’s surprising to realize that this dabbling resulted in his biggest American hit: 1975’s “Fame," whose success on the charts wouldn’t be equaled until he dabbled again with American-style R&B on 1983’s Let’s Dance.
But this is jumping ahead.
In 1974, with the Spiders from Mars in his rearview mirror, Bowie wrote glam rock’s epitaph with Diamond Dogs. It’s a brilliant, misunderstood, magisterial swan song for not only the genre but Bowie’s British identity—Dogs was to be the last album he recorded any major portion of in his native homeland, and it’s the sound of Bowie looking for an escape hatch in the Ziggy-fueled spaceship he’d built for himself. As such, it (like 1972’s Ziggy) is a “concept” album, this time centered on a story made out of the shards from an abandoned project based on George Orwell’s 1984. As a narrative, it’s fine if fractured; as a rock ’n’ roll album, it’s dark and glittery and exquisite and rotting and scary and great. In this way, Diamond Dogs also served as a farewell to Bowie’s teenybopper fans, as this was a dark, degenerate story full of drugs and dystopia.
It also contains some of Bowie’s best tracks. “Rebel Rebel” is undeniable, maybe the best pure riff and melody Bowie’s ever written—or at least the simplest and catchiest. The “Sweet Thing”/“Candidate” medley is the sound of purest mounting dread, and the coffin-opening drone and varispeed-vocals of “We Are the Dead” make for the eeriest thing he’d concocted since “The Bewlay Brothers.” Before it degenerates into a repetitive chant that closes the album, the mellotron-laden “Big Brother” is requiem-mass-as-pop-song, a chilling slice of proggy, groggy weirdness that I never tire of. The album hints at the oblivion that Bowie examines later on Station to Station, but the chilly detachment of that album hadn’t fully taken hold, and as a result Diamond Dogs is wonderfully bloody and alive.
It was the album’s most conventional song, however—the piano-driven ballad “Rock ’n’ Roll with Me"—that pointed the way forward to Bowie's "plastic soul" period, but first he dropped a double live album from the Diamond Dogs tour. David Live is presented here in two versions: in the original mix and track listing from 1974, and a remixed version from 2005 with four extra tracks. Neither mix is particularly great (nor is the later one substantially better than the decidedly murky early mix), but this is where the exhaustiveness of the box-set project bites its own tail. A small and anal-retentive part of me is glad for the thoroughness of this type of survey, but I can’t imagine anyone but trainspotters will want four whole discs (five in the vinyl version) taken up with a so-so live album, as it's a pretty spotty document to begin with. Considering that there are excellent outtakes from all three studio albums that are not included in this set, the inclusion of this complete historical document of David Live is frustrating. (Actually, there's also a surround-sound remix of it that isn't here, an omission for truly obsessive completists to gnash their teeth over.)
For its own part, David Live—in either version—is interesting but not particularly satisfying. It recasts Bowie’s back catalog in the light of his new “fascination” with American R&B and soul music, particularly of the Philly varietal. As such, it’s the unsettled sound of one foot out the door and the other in, and there aren’t any renditions here that best their studio counterparts.
Young Americans is where Bowie’s new musical interests are fully realized, and revisiting it in this context only emphasizes to me how odd a stunt it was for him. The box set’s money-grab—or invaluable historical document, depending on how you look at it—is the inclusion of a “rough draft” version of the album, here titled The Gouster and featuring three songs that didn’t make it to the finished product, plus another three album tracks presented in significantly alternative mixes. Whether or not Bowie ever thought of The Gouster as a finished work is up for debate—most hardcore fans seem to think he did not—but it’s a slightly purer, less distilled version of Bowie’s vision for the project, and it does do one very important thing: It puts the magnificent “Who Can I Be Now?” back in a place of prominence, housed as a proper album track (and providing this set with its title). This is one of the best “unreleased” tracks in Bowie’s catalog (although it’s been available as a bonus track on earlier CD editions of Young Americans, and actually sounds a tad muddy in this incarnation by comparison), and it confronts Bowie’s existential angst and identity crisis head-on. Perhaps for that reason, Bowie deemed it too personal to keep on the album, because its musical merits are beyond reproach.
The rest of The Gouster is, unsurprisingly, a not-quite-cooked-through version of Young Americans, and it’s missing some of the finished album’s definitive tracks: the gorgeous “Win,” the exploratory “Fascination,” and the chart-topping “Fame.” To Gouster’s credit, it does not include the Bowie/Lennon version of “Across the Universe,” an okay rendition at best or, depending who you ask, the lone blemish on Bowie’s otherwise perfect track record from 1970 to 1980. While I’d agree that it’s probably the worst thing he included on an album during that period, for me it only emphasizes my problem with Young Americans, which would be an exceptional album in anyone else’s discography, but is only a so-so one in Bowie’s. While it's a remarkable about-face to what came before—it sounds radically different from all his previous work—Young Americans is an album of Bowie not wanting to be Bowie anymore, hiding inside Philly-soul tropes and gossamer string arrangements and jazz- and R&B-inflected instrumentation. While it’s not exactly the sound of a thin, white duke in blackface, it’s pretty inauthentic. When Bowie does locate his inner Bowieness within the experiment (“Young Americans,”“Win”), it can be remarkable. But when he’s in imitation mode (“Right,”“Can You Hear Me”), he’s more copycat than chameleon. (To his credit, Bowie did fully anticipate the disco craze, and its johnny-come-lately white practitioners, by a good two years.)
Young Americans and “Fame” broke Bowie in mainstream America in a way that Ziggy never could, and the newly minted superstar, now living in LA, descended into drugs and isolation, a detour that was grim but thankfully only temporary. The document he left of this period, Station to Station, is a strange and difficult album to grapple with. On the one hand, it shows Bowie at a creative nadir of sorts, containing a mere six songs, some of which are decidedly underwritten. Its singles, “Golden Years” and “TVC 15,” are the sound of Bowie trying to capitalize on past glories—his plastic soul and sci-fi troubadour periods, respectively—and the remaining tracks include a very damaged stab at gospel (“Word on a Wing”), the most conventional funk-a-chug tune he’d ever recorded (“Stay”), and a cover of an over-the-top Johnny Mathis ballad, “Wild Is the Wind” (although Bowie took Nina Simone’s rendition as a starting point for his version). That leaves only the title track, a 10-minute overblown epic that takes nearly three minutes to get going, and blatantly echoes the diptych of another established Bowie masterpiece, “The Width of a Circle.”
And yet the album is brilliant. Its shortcomings, when piled together, become strengths. Bowie’s detachment and disorientation, instead of making the album sound hollow and impersonal, lend it an air of sorrow and confusion, drawing the listener in and providing fascinatingly uncharted musical territory to explore. What’s astonishing is how thoroughly he'd abandoned his Philly-soul leanings of less than a year ago. To be sure, Station's still steeped in R&B, particularly “Stay,”“Golden Years,” and “Wild Is the Wind,” but it also incorporates Bowie’s developing interests in German krautrock and the jerkier rhythms that would presage new wave.
Station to Station’s title track is head-and-shoulders the standout. Essentially two songs pasted together, it becomes a manifesto for Bowie’s newest and most dangerous character, the Thin White Duke. The song’s lyric jumble of occultism, Christianity, Kabbalah, Nietzschism, and Nazi imagery has been thoroughly analyzed elsewhere, but musically it simultaneously sweeps up the detritus from all of Bowie’s past selves and points the way forward to his future incarnations. It’s the sound of escape, depicted quite literally in the form of a train that never stops rolling forward, becoming a prison in itself. And it’s counterbalanced by the album’s two slower tracks: the aforementioned cover of “Wild Is the Wind,” which is almost too gorgeously lush for words; and the Christian-leaning “Word on a Wing,” a painfully miserable song that is more the professing of desperation than of any kind of devotion. "Wing" concludes with a robot choir of angels, further evidence of Bowie’s icily detached hopelessness.
What remains on Who Can I Be Now? is inessential to all but diehard fans. There's a 2010 remix of Station to Station (itself a fold-down of another absent-from-this-box surround-sound remix) that is inferior to the original in every way—down to the processed drum sounds and inclusion of discarded elements, such as unnecessary vocal lines on the already crowded-sounding “TVC 15” and a sustained E chord from the band during Bowie's a cappella refrain in “Wild Is the Wind.” It’ll be interesting to those who want to know every last detail about how the album was constructed, but offers little new musical value.
The other thing is the full tape from a 1976 concert in Long Island (minus a lengthy drum solo during “Panic in Detroit” that has been edited down). This Nassau Coliseum show has been bootlegged and excerpted before, and holds high esteem among Bowie fans, but it sounds clunky and thick to me in this presentation, with every instrument saturated and possessing a high-volume mix that cuts out, among other things, the improvised vocal yelps Bowie did during “Stay.” I was excited to hear this recording in full, as it’s been talked about for years by Bowie aficionados, but I’m pretty disappointed by it. Though there are high points to be sure, the band sounds oddly generic and bombastic, and Bowie sounds uncomfortable with his older legacy songs and not fully in command of the newer material. I would like to spend more time with it, though.
Oh, and there’s a further bonus: Re:Call 2, which collects the single edits from these periods, 13 shortened versions of tracks that appear earlier in the set. None of these is essential except for the original UK single mix of “Rebel Rebel,” which includes a vocal “ooh" that didn’t make it to the familiar album version (the US version, too, has gobs more vocals, but is substantially worse). This is for Bowiephiles only, and they’ll be disappointed that the set doesn’t include outtakes like “Dodo,”“After Today,” and Bowie’s cover of Springsteen’s “It’s Hard to Be a Saint in the City," all of which date from this period.
All told, the set does fulfill one of what I assume its two primary goals to be: It sheds new, and deliberately focused, light on a very specific area of David Bowie’s long and diverse career. I feel like I have a better understanding now of the processes and shifts he undertook to get from 1973’s Pin Ups to 1977’s drastically different Low. Bowie's 1974-76 period is the very definition of transitory, in which his first attempt to reside in America didn’t last particularly long (he tried again later, with better results), but during which he made two troublesome yet unqualified masterpieces. Diamond Dogs and Station to Station acquit themselves with flying colors in this exhaustive presentation.
As for the box set’s other goal? Presuming that it’s to provide a real value to Bowie nuts like myself, I can’t say that it does. All in all, Who Can I Be Now? 1974-1976 is pretty bloated, taking up 12 full-priced discs with iterations of material that could’ve filled half that space. Am I happy to have The Gouster, two versions of David Live, the remix of Station to Station, and a disc of edited-down hits? Sure. But I’m hard-pressed to urge Bowie fans to take a similarly costly plunge, especially as the man's final work has just been released posthumously on the Lazarus cast album. And there’s no shortage of Bowie reissues to come: A new (and totally unnecessary) hits collection is on the way for January, and a box set of the Berlin years—continuing this series—is sure to come out around this time next year. Whether you have enough Bowie-loving pennies for all of it is something only you can decide for yourself.
