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David Bowie at the Beeb

by Matt Ashare

It takes a while before the real fun starts on Bowie at the Beeb: The Best of the BBC Sessions '68-'72, a two-CD collection of 37 tracks Bowie and various back-up bands recorded live for the BBC at 10 different sessions between 1968 and 1972. (A third CD, or "Extra Disc," featuring a semi-greatest-hits live show Bowie and his current band performed for an invitation-only audience at the BBC Theatre this past June 27, is included, but it's of marginal value.) Indeed, not everything here is top notch, from the song selection to the band performances and recording fidelity. There's a reason why the Mersey Beaten "London by Ta Ta" has yet to be included on any Bowie best-of collections, and why few people scream out for "Karma Man" at Bowie shows. But uniformity and consistency aren't qualities one necessarily prizes in a historical document like Bowie at the Beeb. It's the bits of roughness around the edges of classics like "Ziggy Stardust" and "Space Oddity" (the polished studio versions of which have largely been internalized even by casual Bowie fans) and the formative deep cuts -- like, oh, 1968's "Silly Boy Blue," with its vaguely Eastern-tinged melody threatening to eclipse the kind of politely folkish arrangement that was Bowie's style at the time -- that make a collection like this so special.

To refer to the years 1968 through 1972 as "formative" ones for Bowie would be like calling the Bush/Gore tussle kinda close. In '68 the former David Jones was just another good-looking pop singer whose record company (London) was hoping to see him ride the frayed coattails of the fading British Invasion to the top of the pops. But for the most part, while Bowie pursued his varied artistic interests (spending time at a Buddhist retreat in Scotland, acting in short films and TV ads, apprenticing with Lindsay Kemp's mime troupe), his pop career faltered. (When BBC host Dave Lee Travis refers to "Space Oddity" as "undoubtably your biggest success to date," Bowie responds, "My only success to date," before pointing out that he won't be performing it live because he'd need "about five orchestras to get the right sound" -- on disc two, however, he does perform quite a nice version of it with the Spiders from Mars.) Yet '68 was also the year that Mark Bolan introduced the glam-rocker-to-be to T. Rex producer Tony Visconti, and it's the Tony Visconti Orchestra (with Visconti on bass) who back Bowie on the Beeb's earliest tracks.

By February of 1970, drummer John Cambridge had introduced Bowie to the lead-guitarist who would help define the groundbreaking Ziggy Stardust sound, Mick Ronson. Calling themselves the Tony Visconti Trio (and, later, the Hype), they become the backing band on the John Peel show recordings of "Unwashed and Somewhat Slightly Dazed" and "Memory of a Free Festival." (As Bowie as much as admits to Peel before "The Width of a Circle," he'd met Ronson only several days earlier.) And though you can hear a more free-form Bowie emerging in the 1971 recording of "It Ain't Easy" that ends disc one, it isn't until the full Spiders from Mars join him, in January of 1972, on disc two that Bowie and Ronson come into their own and the real space odyssey begins. The countdown to blastoff takes place in the form of two mostly acoustic laid-back tunes ("The Supermen" and "Eight Line Poem") featuring just Bowie and Ronson, but when the band rip into "Hang onto Yourself," there's no turning back. It's the sound of history being made, of a new rock-and-roll era being born. And though it would be just the first of Bowie's many transformations, it was the one that rang the truest and the loudest in terms of reaffirming rock and roll's transformative powers.

Bowie goes on to tackle a number of golden oldies on the "extra" disc -- "Ashes to Ashes" and "Let's Dance," to name two. But he's wise enough to leave the Ziggy material alone. Even he knows that though it might be possible to play some of the songs better, there's no way to match the special feel of those performances.