OK, one last post on “Silver Treetop School”— Bowie’s 1967 Demo

OK, this song is starting to grow on me. It’s still pretty bad, but at least it doesn’t sound worse upon repeated listening. This is Bowie’s demo version from 1967. The sound quality is awful, but the singer is very recognizably Bowie, and because of that this sounds much more like a Bowie song (if that makes any kind of sense at all).

So, by the way, what’s the song actually about? You guessed it, it’s a drug song! To the extent you can follow the lyrics, its about students and teachers at a school who at first appear to be ordinary and mundane, but as the song goes on are revealed to be increasingly bizarre in their behavior. The punchline lyric is, “And everyone just loves the grass at Silver Treetop School for Boys,” which is an early and fairly obvious example of the kind of double entendre Bowie would become more adept at later.

At the end of the day, this song is more of a curious artifact than anyone else. Had Bowie stopped his musical career at this point, you would not be reading this blog today. And I expect this will be my final entry about this song, at least for a while.