I am in the process of writing the companion piece to the blog entry of a few days ago, “Bowie knew how to end an album,” which, of course is going to be, “Bowie knew how to start an album.” Its going to be long and I’ll probably break it up. In the writing, I realized that I never posted…

Gail Ann Dorsey was a conspicuous and much-welcomed presence in Bowie’s live shows for the last several years he performed and was a regular member of his band, playing bass and singing, from 1995 until his death. Of course she plays the bass very well, but she also have a terrific singing voice and more stage presence than maybe anyone…

After posting the Last Shadow Puppets’ version of this song it occurred to me that I have never posted a stand alone version of Bowie singing it. I have never been drawn to this song so I haven’t devoted too much thought to it. It isn’t in contention for Bowie’s worst song— it is far from his worst from this…

I posted a cover of “Moonage Daydream” by this band as the cover of the week yesterday. In the course of reading about the band, I saw that their first single was a 2008 cover of this obscure Bowie song from 1967. I’m not fond of Bowie’s original Actually, there’s an original studio recording by Bowie and a slightly different,…

The Last Shadow Puppets are very much a “real” band, and I’ll link to both their Wikipedia page and their own web page at the end of this post. I had never heard of them before finding this recently posted (but possibly originally older) concert video. As I’ve just learned, Bowie was one of the band’s inspirations for coming together…

Cherry Vanilla was (is— she’s still very much alive) a figure out of Andy Warhol’s “Factory” who, among other things, appeared in Warhol’s infamous play, Pork in 1971. Bowie saw the play and hired various people involved with the production including Cherry Vanilla, who he hired as a publicist. Her tactics as a publicist were unconventional — for instance she…

My new favorite Tin Machine song. I never heard this before today. In writing yesterday’s post, I came across a reference to a vocal version of the unlisted piece of music that ends Tin Machine II called “Hammerhead.” To make things confusing, though the instrumental that ends the album is also called “Hammerhead,” what that actually turns out to be…

Most Bowie albums are structured in a particular way. With some exceptions, Bowie was very deliberate in song order. Time and again he picked the perfect song with which to begin and end an album. I’ve been wanting to write about this for a while, and its coming out as two lists. I’m going to start with the end— ranking…

Photographer Markus Klinko has an exhibit on display in Dallas through June 22nd called, Icons: Bowie to Beyoncé featuring photos of various celebrities including — you guessed it, Bowie and Beyoncé. I didn’t recognize the name but came to leader that Klinko was a prolific photographer of Bowie during his later years. His photos were used in relation to albums…

I came across this video of the cover of Heroes comically brought to life via a YouTube page called Dave’s Hit Parade. “Dave” “presumably” has made a series of such videos, poking fun at different famous album covers. Not really much more to say, but I thought it was amusing…

At first glance, this is a “guy in his basement” video, which, at the end of the day it essentially is. But the guy is Jimmy Flemion, late of the Frogs. The Frogs had a fairly large cult following that included many better known rock stars and performed for more than thirty years. While I’m not personally familiar with their…

The much anticipated and long awaited announcement of this week’s cover of the week will be postponed for a day and instead I’m posting this remix of “Tonight” that brings Tina Turner’s singing to the forefront. The mix makes the song more of a duet than the version from the album of the same name. The music is also considerably…

It will be a while before I process the passing of my dear friend, Letizia Tagliafierro. I write this post on the day of her funeral. The wake and funeral were among the hardest things I have ever experienced. I have been crying for the last three days. Because I listen to so much Bowie music and have for so…

On the occasion of Tina Turner’s death I was looking back over past blog entires and noticed that the video I linked to my discussion of the album Tonight had broken. That provided me an opportunity to update the entry and add a new link, which is the audio of the album’s version of the title track, which Turner sings…

This full-length video of Bowie’s appearance on the French show, Taratata, is as clear as YouTube videos get, both audibly and visually. It contains Bowie and his 1995 band performing “The Voyer of Utter Destruction as Beauty,” “The Man Who Sold the World,” “Hallo Spaceboy,” “Strangers When We Meet” and “Under Pressure” (with Gail Ann Dorsey singing the Freddie Mercury…

Those of you who know me know that I lost a dear personal friend on Tuesday, May 23rd. Within 24 hours we got word that Tina Turner had also passed away. Tina Turner and Bowie collaborated in the 1980s, including in the concert from which this video was taken. Tina sang backup on Bowie’s version of “Tonight,” and she covered…

Chat GBT gave coherent and plausible responses when I asked it about Bowie’s best albums since Scary Monsters (see yesterday’s post). Its response to my asking about Bowie’s worst song showed the inadequacies of the AI in its current form. I’m not referring to a difference of taste I have with the algorithm, but rather that it gets some of…

Inevitably, while it’s new and still funny because it makes mistakes (and not terrifying because it doesn’t), I started asking Chat GBT questions about Bowie. The answers to some, like “what are some of his best songs” are boring (they response came back with a pretty familiar list). But today and tomorrow I’m going to share a two more interesting…

“Always Crashing in the Same Car” is one of Bowie’s less covered songs but is one of many examples of a song that might be thought of as one of his best but for so many other of great songs (if you’re following me). To me, it is a song about making the same mistakes over and over, knowingly repeating…

Yet another sign of Bowie as transcendent cultural and marketing phenomena: The Hotel Ziggy is a new rock-themed hotel located on the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles. The hotel’s proprietor is quite explicit about the hotel being named for Ziggy Stardust, but if you watch the promotional video, there are no explicit images of or references to Ziggy Stardust or…

Yet another example of Bowie as a cultural phenomena, or at least an advertising phenomena— Shoezels’ limited edition Bowie-tribute urban boots. These aren’t the first— Vans did a limited run of Bowie-inspired sneakers a few years back. Not sure what more there is to say, but if you want to buy a pair, click on this link. OK— I’ll add…

Modern technology gives me access to a story in the Sydney Morning Herald about modern technology (click on the title to link to the story). The story is about AI generated music, building off attention to an AI-generated song made to sound like it was from Drake. So the story’s author wanted to see what AI could do with Bowie—…

July will mark the 50th anniversary of Bowie’s self-proclaimed final concert, at London’s Hammersmith Odeon, which was captured on film and turned into a concert movie and live album in 1983. The film will be restored, expanded and released in about 1000 theaters across the world (including the Odeon, which is now called the Eventim Apollo Hammersmith) in July. Here…

This is turning out to be covers week. I selected a cover of the week among many options, as usual, but there were three I really liked and this is the third. Wágner, according to his YouTube channel, is the former lead singer of a 90s alternative band called Nerve and recently (?) released an EP called, “A Way of…

I mentioned yesterday that several particularly strong covers were posted over the previous week, and although I chose Matte Black’s version of “Within You” for the cover of the week, there are two others that I liked so much that I wanted to post them as well. Thus is the benefit of having an endless blog in need of daily…

I am often reminded that some fans were first introduced to Bowie through the movie, Labyrinth, and a subset of them only know him form that movie. “Within You,” from the movie’s soundtrack might be prominent in the minds of such fans, but not so much for anyone else. Without watching this video, think to yourself if you remember how…

Yesterday I summarized the top 10 Bowie songs as expressed in the first ten results from Googling “Top 10 Bowie songs.” There are far more than ten such lists and, in fact, my phone and IPad gave me different results, so the lists are not necessarily meaningfully representative. Added to that, I included the top 10 results but some of…

OK, this is a very loose definition of “top 10.” I was wondering what Google would give me if I searched for “Top 10 David Bowie songs.” What follows are the first ten items that came back: 1. Top 10 David Bowie songs from sources across the web. Google’s own top ten list is … 24 songs. Its actually a…

Sara Captain is a British artist whose primary subject is David Bowie. She’s had numerous exhibitions and sells her work for upward of £2000. You can see her work— and buy it at her website, which is here. I thought I’d let the art speak for itself so I included some images from her website above. Captain describes Bowie as…

I’ve heard segments from this show before but watched the entire thing for the first time when it popped up on my YouTube account. Bowie’s performance is strong and worth hearing, but there’s much more to the show that I found fascinating. To begin with, the show’s host, Mark McEwan asked Bowie about his various personae. Bowie explained that he…

Sadly here’s another Bowie tribute show (actually, a show featuring the music of Bowie and Prince) coming close to home that I won’t be attending out of concern about the absence of COVID protection protocols. That said, I thought I’d promote the show anyway, which is taking place at Putnam Place in Saratoga on May 20th at 9:00 PM. The…

YouTube has a pretty good algorithm. It knows what I like (Netflix should have a conversation with it). That’s how I found (actually, was delivered), this entertaining remix of one of Bowie’s most accessible songs, “Golden Years.” It’s different enough from the more familiar version that it’s worth hearing. Bowie said that he originally wrote this song for Elvis Presley,…

I selected this video as the cover of the week over “I’m Afraid of Americans” performed by a death metal band called Bloody Dead and Sexy, in part because the audio quality is a little better, and although the video element is static here, the other video was somewhat fuzzy. If Bloody Dead and Sexy takes a hard song and…