David Bowie playing at Rodney Bingenheimer’s club in Los Angeles, 1970. Courtesy of Getty Images. Buy a print of this photograph at Photos.com.

As—ahem—some of our readers may have noticed over the years, the late David Bowie has always been our patron saint here at Dangerous Minds. You might say he was our spirit animal. Below, three of our writers pay tribute to the Thin White Duke and contemplate a world without David Bowie in it…

***

Christopher Bickel: Let’s be honest. At Dangerous Minds there are certain subjects that we have covered rather extensively. We’ve taken our share of good-natured ribbing over that fact that we jock Bowie hard and often. It goes without saying that the writers here are going to have something to say on this day when we celebrate the career and legacy of one of the true giants of the rock and roll era.

No celebrity death has emotionally affected me to this degree. We haven’t had a musician pass who was so universally loved for their talent and influence since the assassination of John Lennon. Michael Jackson, maybe, but his legacy was so tainted by the time of his death. Bowie’s life and artistic output remained inspiring up until the very end. Last November when the video for “Blackstar” dropped, I remarked that it was a “masterpiece.” Little did I know, then, that it was Bowie’s “parting gift” to us all. Certainly he knew.

I loved Bowie from the first time I heard him—which was “Rebel Rebel” on the radio. But as a kid, I thought the words I was hearing were “Grandma, Grandma—who tore your dress?” I remember at the time thinking “it’s really rude of this singer to call his grandmother a ‘tramp’”—but also kind of cool. I was wrong about the words I was hearing, but I wasn’t wrong about loving the music.  The man never put out a bad record. Sure, there’s varying degrees of quality in his catalog, but I challenge anyone to name a single Bowie record that “flat out sucks.” You can’t.

It’s hard to pin down a favorite. I called it as Low for years, but I’ve eventually settled on Scary Monsters as my top pick. New Wave Bowie is my guy. Bowie knew how to pick a backing band, and Fripp just kills it on that record. Reeves Gabrels later picked up that torch and THIS VIDEO from 2006 of “Scary Monsters” is absolutely scorching—and is as good as any Bowie performance from any point in his career. That’s the thing: Bowie remained relevant and exciting as both a writer and performer all the way until the very end. There will never be another. 

***
 

 
Martin Schneider: What is there to say? One mark of an artist’s power is a general inability on the audience’s part to imagine our world in their absence; we’re all experiencing that weird pang right now, big time. No rock star was more forward-looking or incorporated so many different cultural streams; it shouldn’t be surprising that his influence and resonance have only increased over the years. He was a cultural vampire, in the best sense; he took from everybody and he never aged.

As a teen, I found Bowie incredibly intriguing but also a bit chilly (Pink Floyd was easier); it took me a long time to warm up to him. Of course I did, finally—he’s inescapable, after all. As I get older he strikes me as the very best, the most mature and the most complex, that a rock star can realistically be.

So long, Star Man.

***
 

 
Richard Metzger: I first heard of David Bowie when I very first started listening to pop music. My interest in Bowie was probably what got me interested in music to begin with. I was eight and it was early 1974. A local AM radio station played “Space Oddity” at 11pm one night and I happened to be be up late listening and had my young mind totally blown into a million pieces. That song entered my consciousness and exploded there, rearranging my outlook on the world like nothing had before and like nothing has ever since, I can promise you. It was, for me personally, probably the Ur-epiphany of my entire life. But I didn’t catch the name of the singer or the song. The next night, at the exactly same time, the DJ played it again, and then the following night he spun it again. This time I was ready. I taped it with my $30 Sears cassette recorder, the mic held up to the clock radio’s speaker. Soon afterwards I had the 45rpm record and soon after that—a matter of just days—I had the ultra-heavy single only version of “Rebel, Rebel” (a record cut so loud that it threatened to blow out your speakers, as anyone reading this who owned it can attest to). My parents were okay with buying me a 99 cent single from time to time, but an LP (which might’ve cost about $4.98 then) was out of the question and I needed to have everything David Bowie-related. Immediately if not sooner.

So I did yard work and gardening around the neighborhood—weed-pulling to be exact, I was too young for pushing a lawn mower around—to be able to afford first Diamond Dogs, then in fairly rapid succession Aladdin Sane, Pin-Ups, The Man Who Sold the Word, David Live, Young Americans, etc. (Oddly enough, it would be Ziggy Stardust that I acquired last and it remains my least favorite of the pre-ChangesOneBowie catalog.)

And then I saw that they were repeating “The 1980 Floor Show” on The Midnight Special. I don’t think I was ever the same again after I saw that. It was a powerful and visceral lesson in… well… something. I was too young to know exactly what it all meant, but I did know intrinsically what he—David Bowie as an iconic entity—meant. Bowie-fandom was closer to a religion than a hobby. It was a revelation, you might say.

I would scour the TV Guide hoping for a Bowie-sighting and—in lieu of a VCR—I’d tape the audio on my cassette recorder whenever he appeared on things like Soul Train, Dinah!, Cher and the Grammy Awards telecast. I listened to them so many times that 35 years later I would see them again on YouTube and I’d know each and every word. On Dinah! he invited Dr. Thelma Moss on as one of his hand-picked guests, a UCLA professor who was known for investigating the science of Kirlian photography. This was in 1976 and I would have been, at that point ten and in the 5th grade. My Bowie-fanaticism was so ingrained in me by then that I built a rudimentary Kirlian photography device after finding plans for it on microfilm in the local library!
 

 
I wrote about this in 2010, on the occasion of the publication of the coffee table book Bowie: Object.

To give you a personal (and very small) example of the multitude of ways David Bowie has influenced little old me, when I was ten years old and Bowie was the guest on Dinah Shore’s afternoon talk/variety show, he was able to invite Dr. Moss on as a guest as well. Moss demonstrated the ability of the Kirlian device—a high voltage electric field “camera”—to basically take snapshots of plant and human “auras.” Because Bowie was fascinated by this wild new science of Kirlian photography, then, hey, so was I and—this is true—I built a homemade version of the Kirlian Photographic device for a grade-school science fair.

It was made with a battery, a wood base, some wire, a metal plate and used 2” by 2” film, which was placed under the plate, and sent a jolt via the battery to expose the film. Now, granted, at that age, I wasn’t testing the “before and after” side-effects of snorting cocaine on my aura (see above) like Bowie was—-I used leaves and my thumbprint—but still, you can see clearly in this stupid example of how I, a little kid at the time, saw David Bowie as this like, larger than life cultural avatar of the newest and coolest things around.

Beyond influencing my 5th grade science fair entry, I’m pretty sure that it was David Bowie that led me directly to my interests in Andy Warhol, Iggy, Lou Reed, the Velvets, George Orwell, and even William Burroughs. My interest in most things artistic and countercultural probably began with David Bowie when I was a kid and simply fanned out from there. I honestly don’t think I would be the same person today, or would have lived the life that I have or that I would even be doing what I do professionally without his influence on not only what I was thinking or feeding my head with when I was very young, but also on the way his life and art demonstrated what was possible to aspire to.

Twelve years ago, when someone working the register at St. Mark’s Books told me that David Bowie had purchased my Disinformation book and DVD—David Bowie knew who I was???—it was one of the proudest moments of my entire life. I simply can’t believe he’s gone.

Below, David Bowie and the Spiders from Mars on the ‘Ziggy’ tour in Dunstable, June 21, 1972 doing “Song for Bob Dylan”:

 
Nearly two years ago, we brought our readers news from a strange colony in northwestern England called Scarfolk, where it’s 1972 every day and the slogan of the local “Public Information Bureau” is, at once reassuringly and not even slightly reassuringly, “WE WATCH YOU WHILE YOU SLEEP.” (That message invariably is accompanied by a huge Orwellian eyeball.) In Scarfolk rabies is such a public danger that it’s probably best to kill your child (after all, you never know) and the first Sunday of the month is reserved for “clown exhumation.”

Richard Littler has been delighting us for several years with his painstakingly executed, devilishly creepy PSAs and informational posters in which the ostensible tone of public concern is consistently drowned out by the overtly terrifying text. (“Whatever you do, DON’T,” pictured below, is fairly typical.)
 

 
It’s a bit like what would happen if Robert Popper and Peter Serafinowicz’s Look Around You became infested by termites. It’s also a lot like the podcast Welcome to Night Vale, which has since spawned a book. In 2014 Littler came out with a book called Discovering Scarfolk with a suitably Penguin-esque cover design, but it’s only available in England, I am pretty sure (you might get lucky here, however).

Over the weekend a video with the innocuous title of “Teaser A” popped up on Scarfolk’s YouTube channel. Consisting of scarcely more than a black blob on a blue field announcing the existence of “Scarfolk TV,” the video has certainly whetted my appetite for any television fare that the stalwart (and imaginary) citizens of Scarfolk would be forced to contend with. Littler has stated that Scarfolk was principally inspired by viscerally disturbing public information films from the 1970s as well as curiosities like Children of the Stones, so I’m delighted to see his Scarfolk project move into the arena of video in a more sustained way.

The teaser blandly (hilariously) asserts that the programming will resemble such outwardly harmless but stupefyingly dated fare as “The Benny Hill Show, George & Mildred, Bless This House, Morecambe & Wise, Love Thy Neighbor,” with the distinctively Scarfolkian addition of “Dismember Thy Neighbor.” Of course, we also have a good idea of what Scarfolk TV will resemble from Scarfolk’s own YouTube channel.

I simply cannot wait to hear more about this…..
 

 
via {feuilleton}
 

 
Like everyone out there, I’m at a loss for words upon hearing of David Bowie’s passing. As Bowie’s brilliant 25th album, Blackstar is a letter of sorts to all of us, I thought sharing some of Bowie’s letters to his fans and friends, as well as a few letters from Bowie’s youngest fans would be a way of helping to celebrate the life of the great man.
 

David Bowie’s beautiful post-Ziggy letter to his fan Susie Maguire, April of 1974
 

David Bowie’s handwritten letter to his friend, designer Natasha Korniloff, 1979. It reads: “Love me, say you do. Let me fly away with you, for my love is like the wind; and wild is the wind.”
 

A higher resolution image of the letter can be seen here
 

Davie Bowie’s letter from 1970 to Bob Grace of Chrysalis Music, the man who signed the then 24-year-old to a five-year record contract
 
Some fun fan letters, after the jump…

Daddy Shark, 1986
 
A native of Toronto, photographer Beth Lesser encountered reggae in the late 1970s and fell for the music so hard that she simply had to go to Jamaica and document the vibrant goings-on for herself. In 1980 she and her partner David Kingston started a fanzine named “Live Good Today” (after a song by Prince Jazzbo) for Augustus Pablo’s organization Rockers International. When Pablo generously suggested they include other artists, Beth and Dave published the first edition of Reggae Quarterly, which also soon began to cover the budding dancehall scene.

In 1986 she married Kingston at “a Youth Promotion dance at Sugar Minott’s house.” Lesser’s fabulous documents of this invigorating era have also been collected in her 2008 book Dancehall: The Story of Jamaican Dancehall Culture.

You can see these pictures and many more at London’s KK Outlet until January 30.
 

Outside King Jammy’s studio in Kingston
 

Papa Screw, who was the selector for Black Scorpio sound
 

Artists and crew members hang around by a sign instructing people not to idle, outside Jammy’s studio
 
Many more great pics after the jump…

 
Several drawings attributed to The Satanic Bible’s notorious author Anton LaVey, dating from the late ‘60s and early 1970s, have turned up on eBay. As provenance goes, they’re purportedly from the collection of the late iconoclast’s namesake grandson, Stanton LaVey, a controversial figure himself—but none of the works are signed. That, or the perhaps high-ish opening bid requests could be why they’ve not attracted any action thus far—$666 is a fittingly cheeky asking price, but arguably a bit much for a 3.5” doodle, even one by so infamous a figure. And that’s the lowest price point for any of these items.

None of the works offered are what you’d call finished drawings, which is fair enough, art isn’t what the man was known for. Some are simply doodle pages, but the most interesting pieces are the more fully realized:
 

 

 

 

 
The best piece of all, though, is LaVey’s annotated caricature of the typical ‘70s male, a witty sketch that sums up LaVey’s famous contempt for normalcy and trend-obeisance.
 

 

 

 

 
After the jump, incredible footage of LaVey from—I shit you not—an ACTUAL CHILDREN’S TV SHOW in the 1960s…

 
It had to come, it always does and usually when we least expect it. So, it was this morning when news broke of David Bowie’s untimely demise. Even the presenters on television seemed stunned, slightly disbelieving at the words they mouthed off teleprompters. It was unreal—sitting eating breakfast around seven in the morning, still in dressing gown, the world dark outside, when suddenly I heard the news that someone who had been a constant in my life—like a parent or a friend—was gone.

Odd how someone I never met, never knew, only listened to and watched could cause such a sense of inestimable loss.

The release of his albums The Next Day in 2013 and Blackstar ★ last week was further proof that Bowie was beyond mortal and would somehow continue onwards creating his magical works of brilliance. But perhaps, we should have listened more closely to the words he sang:

Look up here, I’m in heaven.
I’ve got scars that can’t be seen.
I’ve got drama, can’t be stolen,
Everybody knows me now…

Oh I’ll be free.
Just like that bluebird.
Oh I’ll be free.
Ain’t that just like me.

 

 
Though he had just celebrated his 69th birthday, “David Bowie” was really born fifty years ago when he changed his surname from Jones to Bowie. The name change allowed the young 20-year-old to become someone else—something far more interesting than just another aspiring singer and musician hungry for fame. He became whatever ever he wanted to be—a kind of “Everyman” as he later described himself:

I’m Pierrot. I’m Everyman. What I’m doing is theatre, and only theatre. What you see on stage isn’t sinister. It’s pure clown. I’m using myself as a canvas and trying to paint the truth of our time

Theater was always important to Bowie. In December his drama Lazarus co-authored with Enda Walsh “a two-hour meditation on grief and lost hope” was being hailed as a “wild, fantastical, eye-popping” masterpiece. This wasn’t Bowie’s first venture into theater and writing a musical score—his first came in 1967, when Bowie collaborated with the maverick performer, choreographer and director Lindsay Kemp.

It was on 28 December 1967 that David Bowie made his theatrical debut at the Oxford New Theater. He was appearing as Cloud in Lindsay Kemp’s mime Pierrot in Turquoise (aka The Looking Glass Murders). Bowie wrote and performed the songs, while Kemp played Pierrot, with Jack Birkett as Harlequin, and Annie Stainer as Columbine.

The production was in rehearsal when it opened at the New Theater—which may explain why the Oxford Mail described the show as “something of a pot-pourri.” The reviewer did however praise Bowie’s musical contribution:

David Bowie has composed some haunting songs, which he sings in a superb, dreamlike voice. But beguilingly as he plays Cloud, and vigorously as Jack Birkett mimes Harlequin, the pantomime isn’t a completely satisfactory framework for some of the items from his repertoire that Mr Kemp, who plays Pierrot, chooses to present….

...No doubt these are shortcomings Mr. Kemp will attend to before he presents Pierrot in Turquoise at the Prague Festival at the invitation of Marceau and Fialka next summer. No mean honour for an English mime troupe.

The production told the story of Pierrot’s fateful attempts to win the love of Columbine. As we know, the path of true love never runs smooth, and Columbine falls for Harlequin, and is then killed by Pierrot.

After a few tweaks Pierrot in Turquoise opened at the Rosehill Theater, Whitehaven, before going on to the Mercury Theater and Intimate Theater London in March 1968.
 

 
Bowie’s career throughout the sixties fits Thomas Edison’s adage “Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration.” He worked hard and continually toured the length and breadth of Britain under various guises: The Konrads, The Hookers, Davie Jones and The King Bees, The Manish Boys, the Blues influenced Davie Jones and The Lower Third, Davie Jones and The Buzz, and The Riot Squad, a band described as:

The Complete Musical Entertainers covering Pop, Tableaux, Burlesque and Parody

Even at this early stage Bowie was shedding musical styles quicker than he changed his haircut—from beat thru blues to music hall and pop. With hindsight it is possible to see where his career was going but by 1967 the teenager’s recording career had come to a halt after he released the unsuccessful novelty song “The Laughing Gnome.” Bowie didn’t release a record for another two years.

It was during this time that Bowie fell under the influence of mime artist and performer Lindsay Kemp, who helped Bowie channel his unique talent towards “Space Oddity” and later Ziggy Stardust. As Kemp later told journalist Mick Brown for Crawdaddy in 1974:

“I taught David to free his body,” says Kemp, smiling wickedly.

“Even before meeting, David and I had felt the need to work together. I’d identified myself with his songs, and he’d seen my performances and identified himself with my songs. I was singing the songs of my life with my body; he was singing the songs of his life very fabulously with his voice, and we reckoned that by putting the two together the audience couldn’t help but be enthralled. In other words, one large gin is very nice, but two large gins are even nicer.”

The two large gins became Pierrot in Turquoise, which (thankfully) was filmed by Scottish Television in 1969 and then broadcast in July 1970. How a small regional TV station like STV came to film this wonderful treat is probably a tale in itself—even if one cataloguer described the production as “quite creepy.”

Watch Bowie in ‘Pierrot in Turquoise,’ after the jump….

 
By now we’ve all seen some pretty remarkable paper costumes thanks to the Internet. But I must admit, I’ve never laid my eyes on anything quite like this before: beautifully detailed, wedding-themed paper costumes. Russian artist Asya Kozina designed and constructed these gorgeous pieces for the undergarment company Wild Orchid Lingerie. I can’t stop marveling over them. I just can’t.

I worked with this recalcitrant medium back in my art school days, and let me tell you this… it ain’t easy. It’s painstaking work to get the paper to fold and curve just right.

Kudos to Kozina for such jaw-dropping, perfectly-designed pieces.

 

 

 

 
More after the jump…
 

 
Built back in 1966 by custom automotive mad scientist, George Barris (and originally dubbed “The Love Machine”), the four-wheeled star of the 1977 film SuperVan has been fully restored and is currently up for auction for an undisclosed price. Which generally means that if you have to ask, you can’t afford it.
 

A view from the front of George Barris’ “Supervan”
 

Dean Martin’s tricked out Cadillac Eldorado by George Barris
 

Elvis Presley and his Cadillac limousine by George Barris
 
Barris’ has created some of the most recognizable cars in television and movie history like the “Batmobile”, the chatty “KITT” from the 1980s TV series, Knight Rider, the “Munster Koach,” and the “DRAG-U-LA” casket car from The Munsters as well as tricking out cars for celebrities like Dean Martin who requested a Cadillac Eldorado be modified into a station wagon for some reason. Barris even turned a Cadillac into a limousine for Elvis Presley. But let’s get back to the aforementioned shagadelic “Supervan/Love Machine,” shall we?
 

George Barris and his “Supervan”
 

The interior of the “Supervan”
 

 

George Barris’ signature inside the “Supervan”
 
With its crushed red velvet interior, rotating bed and disco ball hanging from its ceiling, the van certainly lived up to its original namesake. Modified from a 1966 Dodge Tradesman A-100, Barris even installed solar panels on the eight-cylinder van, which powered a television, radio and even a record player that were used during the downtime on the set of SuperVan. Ah, the 70s really were the best.

More after the jump…

 
Watch these sick videos of Slayer’s Tom Araya performing covers of Mötley Crüe, Scorpions, Judas Priest and Dio along with his brother John Araya on guitar.  Al Messi plays Bass and Jake Alvarado is on drums. Dimitri Galeos, the uploader of these clips, plays second guitar.

One of the clips dates these performances at November of 1983, which would have been a month before Slayer’s Show No Mercy dropped. Slayer themselves had included covers of bands like Priest and Iron Maiden in their sets, playing small clubs and parties around Southern California. 

It seems a bit odd, in retrospect, to see the singer of one of the quintessential American thrash bands performing songs that would be considered more “pop metal” by today’s standards. It should be noted that in the early ‘80s metal encompassed all of metal and metalheads often tended to embrace the full spectrum, much like punks in the early ‘80s tended to embrace anything under the banner “punk rock.” Once the mid ‘80s rolled around, you begin to see more splintering in both metal and punk scenes with offshoot genres springing up and fans gravitating toward their favored pigeon-holes. These clips represent a time of purity in the scene when basically anything went... as long as it was METAL (Insert falsetto wail here).

The videos, after the jump…

 
Crushing news. It has just been announced that David Bowie has died of cancer at the age of 69. Anyone who has followed Dangerous Minds over the years know how much we adore the man. Our hearts are broken.

From Bowie’s official Facebook page:

David Bowie died peacefully today surrounded by his family after a courageous 18 month battle with cancer. While many of you will share in this loss, we ask that you respect the family’s privacy during their time of grief.

 
I’ve been charmed by many of David Bowie’s appearances on screen. But this clip from British TV when he was a mere 17 is particularly wonderful. His subversive humor is already beginning to blossom as the spokesperson for The Society For The Prevention Of Cruelty To Longhaired Men. Sly devil.