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By Athan Maroulis
I All Roads Lead To Bowie
was waiting for a train, reading a newspaper, while flicking and Fritz Lang with large doses of gallows humor, sweat, and an eye above the black and white to maintain balance swagger, all illogically wrapped into a good suit. This, collectively between print and reality. Even in this homogenized new taught me how to make rock ‘n’ roll without the otherwise New York, old New York habits die hard I suppose. requisite facial hair, dirty t-shirt and blue jeans. Further lessons
Suddenly out of the shadows, a figure of a man approached, stressed that rock ‘n’ roll could simultaneously be both art and declaring,” I have a personal relationship with God.” He seemed entertainment, then go from drop-dead serious to sheer camp, to wait for a response, so I gave him the most polite crooked without rules or barriers. And like Sinatra, Bowie’s voice had a smile I could muster before shuffling down the platform stage raw honest vulnerability; both troubadours understood the voice
right. It was the day I had received news that David Bowie had left us, and honestly, I was reeling a bit from it all. This was the first celebrity death since Sinatra that just plain hurt. The difference was that Frank seemed, well, old and ailing--perhaps in the late December of his years--while Bowie seemed vibrant and youthful, with plenty of what the Greeks call “zoí,” which sorta translates to “lust for life.”
is human and by its very nature imperfect.
Later, thinking back on the train platform episode, I realized that in David Bowie, I too had a personal relationship with a kind of deity. I am a fan, and yes, many fans believe their connection to their star of choice is the ultimate. After all, disillusionment and fandom make for great bedfellows. Although my connection was special, it wasn’t particularly unhealthy in that Kathy Bates-in- Misery sort of way. I didn’t, for example, mention it to disconcerted strangers waiting for trains. My youthful fanaticism simply transformed me into a kind of student or apprentice. I learned much from the book of Bowie, which came wrapped in a gatefold jacket filled with candy-colored fantastical imagery, lyrical puzzles and the aural pleasures that only an amplified metal needle vibrating through spinning wax can provide.
Bowie not only showed me the past but the present as well as the future. Without him I would have never discovered Iggy Pop, The Velvet Underground, Roxy Music, Brian Eno, T. Rex, or his countless New Wave and post-Punk disciples. It was there, in the role of actor in The Hunger, where Bowie forced my road to take a sharp turn to the dark; the film featured the band Bauhaus, the best of his disciples (who were later dubbed as Gothic Rock), introducing me to a world where I later made my bones.
Bowie wonderfully and absurdly merged Marlene Dietrich, Al Bowlly, Sinatra, Dali, Duchamp, James Brown, Edith Piaf, Billie Holiday, Wagner, Elvis, Strauss, Dylan, Sam Cooke, Scott Walker, Lovecraft, Schiele, Weill, Brel, Little Richard, Orwell
My Bowie apprenticeship started here in the Catskills, of all places. Each summer since FDR was president, my family fled the boiling city to one of the many small canal towns that dot Sullivan County. I recall many Saturdays of the Seventies spent at Masten Lake, where two bits got you entry to the trucked-in beachfront replete with an aged dancehall that served as an arcade. A thickly-painted siren-like speaker would blast treble-ridden songs towards the beach from the Carpenters, Gordon Lightfoot, Rod Stewart, Chicago, and yes, David Bowie. His unique, wildly addictive voice was warmly low, then histrionically high on songs such as “Fame,” “Golden Years,” “Changes” and “Rebel Rebel,” the song that prompted my first baby steps on the Bowie road. Around 1980, when I was sixteen, “Rebel Rebel” became the first actual song I sang into a microphone when I auditioned for a cover band led by my friend
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