“I take on the guises of different people I meet. I can switch accents in seconds of meeting someone. I’ve always found that I collect – I’m a collector. I’ve just always seemed to collect personalities" - David Bowie, speaking to Russell Harty, 1973.
Bowie - in '85, messin' about, having a giggle, during studio down time - by impersonating a series of archetypal Amuuurcan singers / non-singers, complete with some hokey lyrics I assume are of his own devising
Have a guess who they are ... Answers to be revealed (or if you want to peek, go to the blog link immediately below). One of the artists I think gets two attempts, so that could be confusing.
(via Ethan Hein who in above-mentioned blogpost is currently doing ongoing musicological analysis of various DB songs - after "Absolute Beginners", I'd like to see him have a go with "That's Motivation")
I think this lark-about is also expressive of
a/ Bowie's core conviction that all performance modes and personae are masks, theatrical contrivances, fake through and through
b/ his admiration for those who successfully perform realness, convincingly put across the illusion of naturalistic.
Springsteen (??) / Bolan / Waits (??) / Reed / Bowie himself (??) / Iggy / Neil Young (??)
ReplyDeleteThe Lou Reed and Iggy Pop are particularly good, as you might expect.
Ah, or is #1 also a go at Iggy? Not really chesty enough for Bruce. The second time round captures the Pop tones better.
DeleteAnd is #5 actually Antony Newley?
Good guesses, you got some right
ReplyDeleteThe second one is an attempt to do someone else but I also thought it sounded much more like Bolan than the target.
It's not Iggy so that is kind of funny that you felt he'd nailed it - means he missed his target by a long way!
2: Dylan? Maybe Elvis Costello?
ReplyDelete6: I thought he said it was Iggy at the start.
Oh yes you are right he does say 'Iggy'. i was going by the list Ethan Hein makes which doesn't mention Iggy. I'm not sure what his list based on - some authoritative source? - or whether it's just his own guesses.
Delete1 is Springsteen, very good job I think (and the lyrics sound quite springsteeny)
Dylan, Lou Reed, and Tom Waits are in there. The Waits is pretty good and he nails a particular inflection of Reed's.
According to Hein, Tom Petty is in that list somewhere but that seems a bit small fry for Bowie somehow - not a first rank icon like the others.
I thought the last one, which I and others identified as Neil Young, could actually be Tom Petty. He might seem like relatively small fry compared to the other icons Bowie chose, but in 1985 Petty was a bigger commercial draw than Young. His Southern Ways album got to #7 in the US Billboard chart that year, while Young's Old Ways peaked at #75.
DeleteNot sure I agree that the Springsteen impersonation is particularly good. Bowie doesn't quite catch what I always think of as Springsteen's most distinctive vocal tic: that sort of throat-straining chest voice he uses for "we went down to the courthouse" in The River, or "'cept for roll down the window and let the wind blow back your hair" in Thunder Road. Or for the whole song in Born In The USA.
DeleteI might have posted it before, I can't remember - but there's a clip where Bowie does an Anthony Newley imitation. As some wag noted, it just sounds like Bowie doing a Bowie imitation.
ReplyDeleteI have been reminded by a correspondent that Bowie could sometimes be ungracious and unsettled when people imitated him - according to Gary Numan, early in his career he and DB, his hero, were on the 1980 Kenny Everett Christmas show and DB had him kicked off the line-up he felt that Gary was a copycat.
ReplyDelete1) In the Dylan Jones oral history book, there's a story by a friend from his teenage years chancing upon him at a party in the early 70s - he strode imperiously into the room, but upon seeing the friend, immediately switched back into David Jones - after a 'Christ, what are you doing here?' and some catch-up, he said his goodbye and switched back into Bowie like turning on a light.
ReplyDelete2) Waits I'm unsure of his connection to - the only other point of interest is his backing vocals on that weird Scarlett Johannsen album covering the Waits/Brennan catalog - but Neil Young was actually a fairly strong influence; After the Gold Rush is all over Hunky Dory (he was apparently listening to it when he got the news that his son was born - hence 'Kooks').
Interesting note - Bryan Ferry has also been vocal about his love for Young (the Avalon-era 'Like A Hurricane', his being quoted in the McDonough bio as saying he liked him 'very, very, very much'), and I just realized that A Man Needs A Maid - that mixture of privileged disconnection, consciously guilty disaffect towards women, and black-hole melancholy - must have made a huge impression on him.
3) I think his resentment towards Numan et al. was that he wasn't taking his imitation in a sufficiently original direction (If he could combine Anthony Newley and Orwell, what was stopping him?), but it was still kind of hypocritical
I'll tell you what the closest thing to David Bowie is - it's Edward Fox in The Day Of The Jackal.
ReplyDeleteI like the idea of David Bowie being an international assassin.
DeleteSINISTER FOREIGN DUDE: It is imperative that you blend in the crowd. No one must notice you.
BOWIE/JACKAL: Right you are, squire!
EXT. DE GALLE RALLY - DAY
The Jackal moves through the crows. He is wearing a pink PVC toga with 18" platform heels and a head dress featuring a pair of live ocelots.
The Jackal is a relentlessly determined bisexual chameleon whose true identity is never revealed, and who has a totally professional approach to the tools and techniques of his trade.
DeleteIf he had had to dress as a harlequin to evade detection he would have done. He had an admittedly far more low-key trade than Bowie, but his approach seems to me to have been very much the same.
Phil - You mount a strong case.
DeleteHowever
1. Bowie craved the limelight in a manner ill-befitting an assassin. While the travel would suit him, the obscurity would be worse than death itself.
2. The Jackal worked alone. Bowie worked extensively with collaborators. Part of his skill was his exquisite taste in other musicians.
Rather than The Jackal, he seems more like the mastermind of a heist - like Danny Ocean.
I was thinking of De Niro's character in Heat - altho he is also too anonymous. (Just imaging the cafe scene from Heat but it's Bowie and Jagger just before they shoot the video to Dancing in the Street. "We're sitting here like a couple of regular fellows. You do what you do. I do what I've got to do.")
Well The Jackal did have collaborators -- it's just that he tended to break their necks after they ceased being useful to him.
DeleteAlso, The Jackal may not have had fame, but he did have renown, which was why he was hired for the big job, the Shea Stadium of hits.
Also - killer point - both The Jackal and Bowie had great hair.
Just did a Google search, and it turns out I'm not the first to make this observation:
Deletehttps://www.goodreads.com/Review/359969401/comments?subject=359969401
Based on the comments for the YouTube video, I don't think there is a list of right answers - but he explicitly says "Lou Reed" and "Iggy" and those two impressions are pretty clear who they are.
ReplyDelete1 is Springsteen. 3 is Tom Waits. I thought 2 was Bob Dylan and 7 Neil Young. But who really knows.
This is the session where Bowie was doing Absolute Beginners and Dancin in the Streets - so he's pretty much in nostalgia mode anyway. Incidentally Mick Jagger was also famous notorious for copying the accents of those around him. A lot of British rockers were inveterate copyists and mimics - which shouldn't be surprising. Bowie was just one of the more fluent, competent, and shameless.
I'd agree that Bowie does have a respect and admiration for the performance of realness. Or perhaps a commitment to performing a single identity that he lacks. I think that's what he sees (and hears) in Iggy.
Also:
https://www.ilikeyouroldstuff.com/news/bowie-and-the-boss
https://22ndrow.home.blog/2018/07/30/david-bowie-and-bruce-springsteen-the-history-of-an-unlikely-friendship/
Bowie himself mocked the idea that he was a chameleon, pointing out that the chameleon blends into the background - hardly DB's MO or objective.
ReplyDeleteNeil Young is definitely in there - the last one I think.
ReplyDeleteIt's interesting that every performer mimicked is American - probably because "American" = the real thing, whereas British performers can only be slightly distanced, the not quite real thing. But equally DB would be interested in the element of theatre within the American real.
ReplyDeleteChiming with my continued interest in anti-theatricality, I was just reading something about the Pre-Raphaelites. Apparently they disliked what had happened to painting since Raphael, with paintings becoming increasing theatrical - posed and conventionalized. They wanted to make painting closer to Nature. But of course if you look at a picture now like the Millais one of Ophelia floating down the stream, it looks just as posed and artificial as the stuff preceding the Pre-Raphaelites. At the time though they were considered naturalistic and gritty - and upset a lot of people. Dickens railed against them as barbaric! To modern eyes they look poncy and airy fairy. So another example of the "each new push to realism eventually comes to be seen as stylized and mannered" syndrome c.f. Method Acting, or Rebel Without A Cause nowadays seeming camp, no realer or rawer than a Douglas Sirk melodrama.
ReplyDeleteThat chimes in with something I've long been fascinated with - how films age. I remember as a kid in the Seventies being unable to watch almost any pre-late 1960's films, even classic ones, because they seemed so stagey - e.g. that thing when they are supposed to be driving a car, but they are obviously in a prop car with a film reel of a road being projected behind them. That must have fooled people once upon a time.
DeleteBut now I'm old enough to see how films that felt absolutely contemporary to me now have that dated look. I saw a bit of The Devil's Brigade recently and that has now entered that past-is-another-country twilight zone, where it is more interesting as a historical document than as a piece of entertainment.
This is a good look at "The Method" (surprise, surprise, there is not one method) and its impact on 20th century acting: https://www.bloomsbury.com/au/method-9781635574784/
DeleteOddly, I didn't find old movie performances grating as a kid. There was a bunch of stuff happening on screen that was completely unrelatable so I just kinda went with the flow. To an 8 year old, perhaps this is how the black and white people in 1940s America actually spoke and moved? And anyway, such historiographic questions are less interesting than watching Bogart and Bacall flirt with each other or Claude Rains decry the presence of gambling.
"Naturalism" is not an absolute category but rather a contrast to what is the current state of the art. The naturalism of the New Hollywood of the 70s is different to the naturalism of Dogme 95.
And the skill of an actor is to understand what kind of film they are in and therefore what kind of performance will work.
As for people being "fooled" by old special effects, I'm not sure that's the right word. It's more that the scene in a car is more about the actors talking than it is about the back projection. And if that's what characters having a conversation in a car looks like on screen then you go with it. There's nothing like Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning to compare it to.
Ah, quite a few people think # 5 is Anthony Newley, so probably that is the thing I heard before.
ReplyDeleteIt does sound like Bowie taking the piss out of himself.