Page 40 - Jeffersonville Journal Visitors Guide

Ray Wilcox. Ultimately I got the gig and got bit badly by the intoxicating effects; soon after I was singing the same song at a high school dance in front of designer jean-clad girls and my world turned upside down. Even when I started writing and performing my own material, Bowie’s songs found their way into my set on many a tour; heck, I even waxed quite a few of them in the studio. After years of touring and recording the day came when the “life” just lost its luster so I put the microphone in a drawer and returned home to New York.
Yet my Bowie road didn’t quite end there. Nearly a decade passed when a peer talked me into shaking off the dust and front his longtime band. An album and a couple of tours ended with an encore at the opera house in Leipzig, Germany with me crooning Bowie’s “Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide”. Soon after back in New York, I took part in a Bowie birthday tribute event where I sang his epic “Space Oddity” with a full orchestra.
There’s another Catskills connection to this story. You see, while I still enjoy making music, my most active years are behind me. Yet even during my longest tours of the past, I began to yearn for simpler, more peaceful days, so these mountains often came to mind. That, along with a need to escape the fraternity party the city becomes each weekend, led me to seek out a house in the Catskills. A few years ago, after the funeral of a relative here in Sullivan County, I traveled a bit further west where an uncle had once taken my cousins and me in his new ’72 Buick to see the Delaware near Callicoon. It was exactly as I remembered it, and soon after the wife and I bought an old farmhouse nearby. It was only after that I discovered that David Bowie too had found peace in the Catskills. Not far away, somewhere near Woodstock or Olive, he built his cherished mountain retreat. Some say Bowie spent his final days there and his remains were later scattered in his beloved woods. That’s how I like to think of it- David Bowie at the end of his mortal road, forever part of the landscape of the Catskills.
I met him once- well, “met” is a stretch. Some years ago, a friend had gotten me into the taping of a live English TV show where Bowie and his band performed for a tiny crowd. Afterwards, Bowie was kind enough to sign autographs, so I grabbed a paper setlist from the stage, introduced myself and handed it to him to sign. He smiled, then said, “Hi, I’m David.”
38 Jeffersonville Journal • 2016-2017