As with The Police’s Synchronicity and Michael Jackson’s Thriller, it’s impossible to talk about 1983 without talking about David Bowie’s multi-platinum LP, Let’s Dance.
At once both Bowie’s biggest-seller and his least-inspired album (at least until 1999’s somnolent Hours), Let’s Dance also marked both a commercial peak and the start of a very long and excruciating creative drought for the rock legend.
But that’s all to be expected since Let’s Dance was all a cynical calculation from the jump.
The seeds were planted in 1981 when Bowie collaborated with Queen on “Under Pressure” at a recording studio in Switzerland. Both the singer and the band were riding high, with Queen having scored a series of hits off their 1980 LP The Game and Bowie riding the crest of his 1980 classic, Scary Monsters (and Super-Creeps).
Both were also branching out into other media, with Queen soundtracking the camp-classic Flash Gordon film and Bowie earning high praise for his starring role in The Elephant Man stage-play.
Bowie got to talking to Queen, who had grown fantastically rich thanks to a renegotiated deal with EMI. Bowie had had the same money and manager problems Queen did in the 1970s, and with his RCA contract about to expire, he wanted a taste of Queen’s kind of cash.
The music industry was scaling up, and The Game and Scary Monsters became prototypes for hit-machine blockbusters, with four and five of their tracks being culled for singles respectively, when one or two had been the norm before. Journey and The Rolling Stones were then blazing the trail for stadium rock, a path which both Bowie and Queen would follow.
Bowie's last RCA release
So Bowie rode out his contract with the fading RCA and signed a huge deal with EMI, one that would greatly crank up the pressure to produce hits.
That was his first mistake.
Looking to break with the past, Bowie cut his longtime producer Tony Visconti, his longtime musical director Carlos Alomar, and his longtime rhythm section (drummer Dennis Davis and bassist George Murray) loose.
That was his second mistake.
His third mistake — replacing Visconti with Chic impresario Nile Rodgers— seemed like anything but at the time. Rodgers had both ferocious musical chops (he’s one of the most-influential rhythm guitarists in pop history) and a track record of hits to his name, and was plugged into the rock vanguard as well as to disco and R&B worlds. He was/is well-regarded and well-liked by nearly everyone in the business.
But the problem with Rodgers wasn’t his talent, it was that a growing drug dependency and a quick string of commercial disappointments following his hit collaboration with Diana Ross in 1980 seemed to have made him fatally overly-cautious. As a result, Let’s Dance is technically impressive at the same time it’s antiseptic and airless to the point of actually becoming oppressive.
The agile, loose-limbed funk-rock you’d expect of such a collaboration gave way to a clinical, quasi-Teutonic sound and feel that reeks more of rubbing alcohol and stainless steel than it does of sweat, pot smoke and pheromones.
But it’s not as if Bowie gave Rodgers a lot to work with. Three of Let’s Dance’s eight songs are remakes: ‘China Girl’, which Bowie had written with Iggy Pop in the 70s, ‘Criminal World’, an obscurity from proto-new Wave band Metro, and a wildly-inferior remake of ‘Cat People,’ which Bowie had recorded with Georgio Moroder the year before. And aside from those, ‘Modern Love’, and the title track, the rest of the tracks are filler so weak and forgettable, they wouldn’t have made the cut as Spandau Ballet B-sides.
But the 1-2-3 punch of the big singles front-loaded on the first side was enough to make Let’s Dance a monster. Bowie had given himself a makeover, striving to come across as an 80s alpha-het and not the trisexual alien freakazoid persona that originally made him a star. Of course, looking back on it today it all comes across as total and utter camp but these were the glory days of the New British Invasion, remember. Masculinity was judged on a sliding scale.
Perhaps looking to shore up his butch credentials, Bowie enlisted southern rock up-and-comer Stevie Ray Vaughn to play lead guitar. Rodgers wasn’t at all impressed with Vaughn’s retro-trad licks, but got overruled. Subsequently, Vaughn’s playing is competent but overly-minimal and beer commercial-tier familiar, and did little to showcase his estimable chops. It was also a huge comedown after the caustic, non-Euclidean licks that Robert Fripp had sprayed like an insane flame-thrower all over Scary Monsters.
But EMI had hits to run with and they pushed them hard. Bowie then launched a live revue (The Serious Moonlight Tour) that gave fans every single penny’s worth of their entertainment dollar and MTV rotated the videos into a fine powder.
His coffers now overflowing, Bowie then threw together Tonight, a quickie follow-up in 1984. Although largely dismissed by critics and a relative commercial disappointment (“only” achieving platinum status), I’d much rather listen to that record than to Let’s Dance.
In fact, I really don’t think I ever need to hear anything off Let’s Dance ever again. I’d actually got it on vinyl during one of my old Columbia House windfalls, but I don’t think I ever even cracked its shrink-wrap.
Bowie fell from Olympus thereafter, and fell hard. He released some underwhelming soundtrack singles before attempting to recreate Let’s Dance with the hideously-overproduced Never Let Me Down in 1987, whose title is itself a hideous irony. He then tried to recreate the stadium-rocking magic of the Serious Moonlight Tour with the campy cringe-fest of The Glass Spider Tour, which made his Diamond Dogs Tour look like a Fugazi show.
Worse, both the album and the live shows featured Peter Frampton on lead guitar. A very capable player to be sure, but dragging around a guy then widely regarded as a 70s has-been was yet another sign that Bowie had completely lost the plot, as well as losing touch with what distinguished him from the pack in the first place.
Bowie and Rodgers would reunite in 1993 for Black Tie, White Noise, which went for a much funkier vibe than Let’s Dance. But Bowie’s reputation had been utterly shattered by a solid decade of bad records and bad artistic decisions, and the album ultimately went nowhere. I think the record company it was released on went bust shortly after its release, but I’ll have to double-check that.
Rodgers would later claim that Let’s Dance was a major game-changer for 80s rock, and unfortunately, he’s right. Its sterile, arid, pounding sound and faux-sophistication would "inspire" a lot of truly-terrible 80s acts like Go West, The Blow Monkeys and Belouis Some, and more established acts as diverse as Duran Duran (and especially their spinoff The Power Station) and John Cougar Mellancamp would print money using its overly-sparse arrangements and overly-loud, gated snare drums.
As a guy who’d been a fan of Bowie’s since ‘Fame,’ these were dark times. I thought Tin Machine was the most embarrassing midlife crisis of a fake band in musical history, and the Sound and Vision tour was a total snooze. It wouldn’t be until he reunited with Brian Eno in 1995 for the terminally art-damaged Outside that I’d reconnect with the man. And aside from a couple minor missteps, I’d follow Bowie’s career until his untimely death five years back.
Taking it back to the beginning of our story, Queen would squeeze out the sulphurous mud-snake men call Hot Space in 1982, an unlistenable amalgam of insanely-inept fake-funk and half-baked “rockers” redeemed solely by its inclusion of ‘Under Pressure.’ The waft of that stinker would outright slaughter Queen’s reputation in the US for the next decade, even though Brian May would later disingenuously blame their reversal of American fortune on the 1984 video for ‘I Want to Break Free,’ in which the band dressed in drag.
As if a houseplant couldn’t tell Freddie Mercury were gay, or that Boy George wasn’t taking big bundles of Yankee dollars to the offshore bank at the very same time. Not to mention Monty Python raking in cash from drag as well.
Billy Squier, Queen’s opening act on their 1982 US tour, similarly blamed his collapse of commerciality on his ill-advised choreography in the 1984 ‘Rock Me Tonite’ video, forgetting that his next few singles all got major airplay on rock radio. In reality, the problem in both Queen and Squier’s cases was the boring, tepid, generic synthpop they were trying to foist off on audiences too young to remember their glory days.
Interesting case study of musical incestuousness: the echoey riff on the verses for ‘Let’s Dance’ was lifted from ‘Radio Clash II,’ a song which The Clash had outright plagiarized from Queen’s ‘Another One Bite’s the Dust.’ In turn, ‘Dust’ was pirated from Chic’s ‘Good Times,’ which Queen bassist John Deacon had watched Rodgers record.
In closing, I recommend the wildly-underrated flick The Hunger if you're looking for a blast of genuine 1983 Bowieness. Also, a young and extremely-pert Anne Magnuson. Also, Peter Murphy, one of Bowie's most talented apostles.
Shame about this album.
ReplyDeleteSRV is a phenom, but the lead work is rather tepid (I do like the overall quality that his tone gives to the rhythm sound).
Was it around this time that Bowie tried recruiting Adrian Belew? Maybe that was a few years prior. I wonder how he might have affected the product. Whoever was in the studio with Bowie usually seemed to have a greater-than-expected influence on the output.
Also, LOL holy fuck, there has never been a more fitting music video to get the Silent Music Video treatment.
DeleteBelew played with Bowie in the late 70s and then on the S/V tour. The SRV stuff is really tame. I was wondering what the big deal everyone was making over him and then I heard his Voodoo Chile and figured it out.
DeleteThat video is priceless.