(Originally published March 31, 2009)
1975, Age 3. “Starman,” by David Bowie, from The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.
I don’t have children. It’s not that I don’t want children; I just don’t want them yet. I’ve thought a lot about raising children, about the best way to not screw them up for life. I’ve wondered about what music I will play for them when they are very young. My friend Eric, who is also a musician, intentionally played a great variety of things for his kids when they were small: Stevie Wonder, Ornette Coleman, Gustav Mahler. When my twin sister had her first son, I bought CDs for him: John Coltrane, Beethoven, Jean Ritchie. Nowadays, people think about these things. The Baby Mozart and Bach for Babies CDs are big sellers. Parents hope that by playing this music for their children they will have high SAT scores.
My dad was born in 1931 and my mother in 1939. They each came from big families in coal mining communities in southern West Virginia. I am the youngest of five children. My parents didn’t think about these things. They thought about mortgage payments and grades and new tennis shoes. They even thought about music: piano lessons and band instruments and church choir. But they didn’t worry about playing the “right” music for us when we were small. If I could go back and pick the first record I would ever hear, it would probably be John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme. Strike that: no probably to it. It would definitely be Coltrane. When I have children I will make sure that the opening gong and Trane’s arpeggiated answering phrase from that record will quickly follow the sounds of their parents’ voices. I suppose they won’t remember though. Memory is like that. Augustine wrote about it. Paul Simon, too: “First thing I remember I was lying in my bed – couldn’t-a been no more than one or two.” I doubt he remembers being one and probably is stretching it if he expects us to believe that at two he remembers the “radio – coming from the room next door.”
I was three. I am sure I had heard records around the house. There were lots of records, especially from my siblings. Who knows what I heard played in our house in those first years. The first record I remember is easy though. It was “Starman” from David Bowie’s seminal glam rock album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. It’s funny to think about that. I’ve read interviews with musicians who talk about hearing their parents playing Charlie Christian records or their brother listening to Miles Davis or whatever. The first recorded sounds I remember were from an androgynous Brit-rocker singing science fiction lyrics. That’s OK. I still really like the album. It seemed that they played it a lot when I was very young. My brothers lived in basement bedrooms. My father had built our house just a few years prior and the basement was the first finished floor. They had the back two bedrooms, rooms probably typical of 70s teens. I remember Corvette posters and the smell of incense. And music. T. Rex, Mott the Hoople, Led Zeppelin, Santana, Alice Cooper. But Bowie seemed to be a special favorite.
I think that at even a relatively young age the song seemed mysterious to me. The introduction opens quietly with an acoustic guitar rhythmically strumming a Bb chord with an incongruous E natural, while Bowie sings a couple of phrases incomprehensibly. When he begins the song proper, he almost whispers the lyrics:
“Starman” has the power to evoke a particular time to me. Most songs lose this power after hundreds of listenings, yet this song retains it after 30-plus years. To my ears it sounds like blacklights and platform shoes. It is the sound of traveling to visit my grandparents. It reminds me of indoor/outdoor carpet and wood paneling and being small. There is something to do with swimming pools and cousins hitch-hiking in there, too.
But beyond specific memory, it brings up a recollection of a feeling: what it was like to be very young with the promise of more music to come. This is, no doubt, largely due to the lyric. For the uninitiated, I will try to synopsize the plot. A starman has come to earth and he has a message for us: let the children boogie. I’m leaving out a few details, but not much really. How great is that? Forget all that “give peace a chance” and “what the world needs now is love” crap of the 1960s. The 60s are over and the kids of the world want to shake a tailfeather again. They have heard legends, no more than rumors by 1972 really, that rock-and-roll music used to be fun and that kids used to dance to it. Now a man from space, from a more advanced and civilized culture, has come to restore order, to return the job of running the place back to the grown-ups and to ensure that children are given an allotted period of time each day for boogying.
Don’t get me wrong. I enjoy “message” music and I think pop songs have the power to say something important. But I am glad that the first song I remember wasn’t “Ball of Confusion” or “Revolution” or “The Times They Are A-Changin’.” Your first few years in this world are traumatic enough without immediately inheriting the previous generation’s emotional baggage. There will be time enough for that later. Yet let me hasten to add that I am equally glad that the first song I remember wasn’t by Barney or The Wiggles. I don’t mean anything by it if yours were, it’s just that I’m not sure I would have ended up loving music as much as I do. “Starman” made me feel happy to be alive, happy to be listening to music and sure that things were going to be . . . well . . . really cool if this song was any indication.
When you are young, or when you want to feel young, nothing does it better than those songs that take us out of ourselves for three or four minutes. I have a long list of songs that do that for me and most of them are pure rock-and-roll: “Rock and Roll Is Here To Stay,” by Little Richard; “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man,” by Chuck Berry; “Everyday,” by Buddy Holly; “You Can’t Hurry Love,” by The Supremes; “Should I Stay Or Should I Go,” by The Clash; “Do You Wanna Hold Me?” by Bow Wow Wow; “Hey Ya,” by Outkast; you get the picture. Mostly it’s guitars, a grooving (or maybe pounding) bass, and drums – they all have drums. Throw in a honking saxophone or someone banging the hell out of a piano and it’s even better. But they don’t have to have any of these. Songs like these are like alchemical potions and their practitioners only know that they work, not necessarily how. Mix powdered unicorn horn, a handful of scarab beetles and a powder-blue early model Stratocaster and listeners are transformed into columns of electric, vibrating particles. For those few minutes you are not simply above yourself, you actually are the music.
“Starman” was a great initiation into this power that music has. It’s not quite as exuberant as the songs on the list above, but it’s hard not to feel pretty hip just listening to it. There’re guitars. There’re strings. The chorus sounds like “Over the Rainbow.” There’s a “la-la-la” section over a guitar solo. Bowie sings with this fey British accent. He rhymes “lose it” with “boogie.” Did I mention it’s about space aliens?
I should say at this point that I am a big fan of space alien music – songs, concept albums, alternate personalities, the whole bit. I’m sure some doctoral student somewhere has explored the history of this phenomenon and the artist as alien metaphor, etc. Actually, I would really like to read something about that. Bowie is one of the most well-known examples, but certainly not the only one. Sun Ra, George Clinton and Parliament-Funkadelic, Bill Haley and The Comets, T. Rex, Jimi Hendrix . . . the list goes on. My childhood seems filled with space aliens. Star Wars was out when I was four or five, followed by a quick succession of space-related movies. I wonder if anyone ever asked George Clinton to do the soundtrack to Close Encounters?
My teenage rock-and-roll fantasies often involved singing the music of Bowie, in full glam make-up and spandex of course, to an adoring crowd of my classmates for a talent show in the Shady Spring Junior High gym. The most popular band at my junior high was, in fact, AC/DC. Now-a-days I am really glad my junior high never had a talent show.
That’s the other thing about this song and other space alien songs though. They are great for anyone who has ever felt like an outsider – which is really everyone. That feeling that I guess most of us had when we were adolescents, that sneaking suspicion that we were not like everyone else because we dressed differently or thought different thoughts or listened to different music, Bowie picks up on that perfectly. “Is there life on Mars?” You may have gotten a wedgie in gym class that day, but you put on the headphones and subliminate all that: “Here am I floating round my tin can, far above the world . . .”
Music for aliens trapped in teenage bodies. Music to make them feel groovier. Music to reassure them that the day is coming when they will be liberated, returned to their people and spend their nights in booty-shaking bliss. It’s no wonder that space themes return again and again in pop music.
These days, David Bowie appears in sit-coms and video games, full of self-deprecating wit. He’s married to a supermodel who sells knock-offs of designer jewelry and clothes on the Home Shopping Network. He’s one of Britain’s wealthiest entertainers and lives a rich-and-famous lifestyle. Kudos to Ziggy. As for myself, I am more well-adjusted than I was as a teenager, though I suppose that’s not saying much. I don’t need an alien rock-and-roll messiah to take me away from my life. I’m actually kind-of happy with the way things are going. Yet there is sometimes this creeping suspicion: Are these really my people? Is this really the life I’m supposed to be living? Sometimes I say to myself, “This is not my beautiful house! This is not my beautiful wife!”
When those moments come I know just what to do. I get in my spaceship, roll down the windows, cruise down the highway at something approaching light speed. Then I put on a little rock and roll – a little hazy cosmic jive – and turn it up. I want to be ready just in case. The starman may be waiting in the sky and I don’t want to blow it. La la la la etc.
1975, Age 3. “Starman,” by David Bowie, from The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.
I don’t have children. It’s not that I don’t want children; I just don’t want them yet. I’ve thought a lot about raising children, about the best way to not screw them up for life. I’ve wondered about what music I will play for them when they are very young. My friend Eric, who is also a musician, intentionally played a great variety of things for his kids when they were small: Stevie Wonder, Ornette Coleman, Gustav Mahler. When my twin sister had her first son, I bought CDs for him: John Coltrane, Beethoven, Jean Ritchie. Nowadays, people think about these things. The Baby Mozart and Bach for Babies CDs are big sellers. Parents hope that by playing this music for their children they will have high SAT scores.
My dad was born in 1931 and my mother in 1939. They each came from big families in coal mining communities in southern West Virginia. I am the youngest of five children. My parents didn’t think about these things. They thought about mortgage payments and grades and new tennis shoes. They even thought about music: piano lessons and band instruments and church choir. But they didn’t worry about playing the “right” music for us when we were small. If I could go back and pick the first record I would ever hear, it would probably be John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme. Strike that: no probably to it. It would definitely be Coltrane. When I have children I will make sure that the opening gong and Trane’s arpeggiated answering phrase from that record will quickly follow the sounds of their parents’ voices. I suppose they won’t remember though. Memory is like that. Augustine wrote about it. Paul Simon, too: “First thing I remember I was lying in my bed – couldn’t-a been no more than one or two.” I doubt he remembers being one and probably is stretching it if he expects us to believe that at two he remembers the “radio – coming from the room next door.”
I was three. I am sure I had heard records around the house. There were lots of records, especially from my siblings. Who knows what I heard played in our house in those first years. The first record I remember is easy though. It was “Starman” from David Bowie’s seminal glam rock album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. It’s funny to think about that. I’ve read interviews with musicians who talk about hearing their parents playing Charlie Christian records or their brother listening to Miles Davis or whatever. The first recorded sounds I remember were from an androgynous Brit-rocker singing science fiction lyrics. That’s OK. I still really like the album. It seemed that they played it a lot when I was very young. My brothers lived in basement bedrooms. My father had built our house just a few years prior and the basement was the first finished floor. They had the back two bedrooms, rooms probably typical of 70s teens. I remember Corvette posters and the smell of incense. And music. T. Rex, Mott the Hoople, Led Zeppelin, Santana, Alice Cooper. But Bowie seemed to be a special favorite.
I think that at even a relatively young age the song seemed mysterious to me. The introduction opens quietly with an acoustic guitar rhythmically strumming a Bb chord with an incongruous E natural, while Bowie sings a couple of phrases incomprehensibly. When he begins the song proper, he almost whispers the lyrics:
“Didn’t know what time it was, the lights were low-oh-oh,The image of some teenager staying up late and listening to rock music on the radio seemed exotic to me, though that’s exactly what my brothers were doing almost every night of the week. I wasn’t sure how one leaned back on a radio – our radios were all alarm clocks and small transistor jobs – but I loved the idea of “some cat” “layin’ down” music for an elite audience of knowing rock-and-rollers.
I leaned back on my radio-oh-oh,
Some cat was layin’ down some . . . rock-and-roll,
‘Lotta soul,’ he said . . .”
“Starman” has the power to evoke a particular time to me. Most songs lose this power after hundreds of listenings, yet this song retains it after 30-plus years. To my ears it sounds like blacklights and platform shoes. It is the sound of traveling to visit my grandparents. It reminds me of indoor/outdoor carpet and wood paneling and being small. There is something to do with swimming pools and cousins hitch-hiking in there, too.
But beyond specific memory, it brings up a recollection of a feeling: what it was like to be very young with the promise of more music to come. This is, no doubt, largely due to the lyric. For the uninitiated, I will try to synopsize the plot. A starman has come to earth and he has a message for us: let the children boogie. I’m leaving out a few details, but not much really. How great is that? Forget all that “give peace a chance” and “what the world needs now is love” crap of the 1960s. The 60s are over and the kids of the world want to shake a tailfeather again. They have heard legends, no more than rumors by 1972 really, that rock-and-roll music used to be fun and that kids used to dance to it. Now a man from space, from a more advanced and civilized culture, has come to restore order, to return the job of running the place back to the grown-ups and to ensure that children are given an allotted period of time each day for boogying.
Don’t get me wrong. I enjoy “message” music and I think pop songs have the power to say something important. But I am glad that the first song I remember wasn’t “Ball of Confusion” or “Revolution” or “The Times They Are A-Changin’.” Your first few years in this world are traumatic enough without immediately inheriting the previous generation’s emotional baggage. There will be time enough for that later. Yet let me hasten to add that I am equally glad that the first song I remember wasn’t by Barney or The Wiggles. I don’t mean anything by it if yours were, it’s just that I’m not sure I would have ended up loving music as much as I do. “Starman” made me feel happy to be alive, happy to be listening to music and sure that things were going to be . . . well . . . really cool if this song was any indication.
When you are young, or when you want to feel young, nothing does it better than those songs that take us out of ourselves for three or four minutes. I have a long list of songs that do that for me and most of them are pure rock-and-roll: “Rock and Roll Is Here To Stay,” by Little Richard; “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man,” by Chuck Berry; “Everyday,” by Buddy Holly; “You Can’t Hurry Love,” by The Supremes; “Should I Stay Or Should I Go,” by The Clash; “Do You Wanna Hold Me?” by Bow Wow Wow; “Hey Ya,” by Outkast; you get the picture. Mostly it’s guitars, a grooving (or maybe pounding) bass, and drums – they all have drums. Throw in a honking saxophone or someone banging the hell out of a piano and it’s even better. But they don’t have to have any of these. Songs like these are like alchemical potions and their practitioners only know that they work, not necessarily how. Mix powdered unicorn horn, a handful of scarab beetles and a powder-blue early model Stratocaster and listeners are transformed into columns of electric, vibrating particles. For those few minutes you are not simply above yourself, you actually are the music.
“Starman” was a great initiation into this power that music has. It’s not quite as exuberant as the songs on the list above, but it’s hard not to feel pretty hip just listening to it. There’re guitars. There’re strings. The chorus sounds like “Over the Rainbow.” There’s a “la-la-la” section over a guitar solo. Bowie sings with this fey British accent. He rhymes “lose it” with “boogie.” Did I mention it’s about space aliens?
I should say at this point that I am a big fan of space alien music – songs, concept albums, alternate personalities, the whole bit. I’m sure some doctoral student somewhere has explored the history of this phenomenon and the artist as alien metaphor, etc. Actually, I would really like to read something about that. Bowie is one of the most well-known examples, but certainly not the only one. Sun Ra, George Clinton and Parliament-Funkadelic, Bill Haley and The Comets, T. Rex, Jimi Hendrix . . . the list goes on. My childhood seems filled with space aliens. Star Wars was out when I was four or five, followed by a quick succession of space-related movies. I wonder if anyone ever asked George Clinton to do the soundtrack to Close Encounters?
My teenage rock-and-roll fantasies often involved singing the music of Bowie, in full glam make-up and spandex of course, to an adoring crowd of my classmates for a talent show in the Shady Spring Junior High gym. The most popular band at my junior high was, in fact, AC/DC. Now-a-days I am really glad my junior high never had a talent show.
That’s the other thing about this song and other space alien songs though. They are great for anyone who has ever felt like an outsider – which is really everyone. That feeling that I guess most of us had when we were adolescents, that sneaking suspicion that we were not like everyone else because we dressed differently or thought different thoughts or listened to different music, Bowie picks up on that perfectly. “Is there life on Mars?” You may have gotten a wedgie in gym class that day, but you put on the headphones and subliminate all that: “Here am I floating round my tin can, far above the world . . .”
Music for aliens trapped in teenage bodies. Music to make them feel groovier. Music to reassure them that the day is coming when they will be liberated, returned to their people and spend their nights in booty-shaking bliss. It’s no wonder that space themes return again and again in pop music.
These days, David Bowie appears in sit-coms and video games, full of self-deprecating wit. He’s married to a supermodel who sells knock-offs of designer jewelry and clothes on the Home Shopping Network. He’s one of Britain’s wealthiest entertainers and lives a rich-and-famous lifestyle. Kudos to Ziggy. As for myself, I am more well-adjusted than I was as a teenager, though I suppose that’s not saying much. I don’t need an alien rock-and-roll messiah to take me away from my life. I’m actually kind-of happy with the way things are going. Yet there is sometimes this creeping suspicion: Are these really my people? Is this really the life I’m supposed to be living? Sometimes I say to myself, “This is not my beautiful house! This is not my beautiful wife!”
When those moments come I know just what to do. I get in my spaceship, roll down the windows, cruise down the highway at something approaching light speed. Then I put on a little rock and roll – a little hazy cosmic jive – and turn it up. I want to be ready just in case. The starman may be waiting in the sky and I don’t want to blow it. La la la la etc.
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