David Bowie’s long and eclectic career involved far more than music. He left his mark on movies, fashion, painting— even the internet. But there are some things he never did: 1. A James Bond movie. Bowie was offered the role of Max Zorin in A View to a Kill but turned it down. It’s a good thing, too— Christopher Walken…

I am the wrong guy to be writing about “club music.” I have never been to a dance club, and aside from weddings, the last time I went to anything like a dance was in the 1990s (once). From a far, far distance, the concept of “dance music” seems to my alien ears to have evolved from something after a…

To my ears, this fairly obscure piece of music sounds like an overture, and, Bowie chronicler Nicholas Pegg reminds me that it was. Though I don’t actually remember hearing it used this way, “Queen of All the Tarts” was played over the sound system before the concert actually began during the Reality Tour. The song is almost an instrumental except…

This week’s winner of the highly anticipated “cover of the week” is this acoustic performance of a song that’s gained renewed popularity, apparently as a result of the documentary of the same name. According to her social media posts, Ruby Jean Walvin is an “indie artist based in Liverpool. She presents freshly pressed alternative songs washed in retro fabric softener.”…

Back on June 2nd, I posted a long piece about how Bowie closed his albums. This is the companion piece about his openers. Its long and I thought about doing it in parts, but I’m not going to keep anyone in suspense, so here it is: 1. “Space Oddity,” Space Oddity (1969). Bowie chronicler Nicholas Pegg wrote of this song,…

Far Out Magazine seems to publish at least one Bowie related story per week, many of which inspire a blog post on this site. A recent story explained how the song, “Black Screen,” by The LCD Soundsystem is a tribute to Bowie. Band frontman James Murphy worked with Bowie on Bowie’s Blackstar and, according to the story was going to…

When I did my song-a-day tribute to Bowie in 2016, I posted a video from VH1 Storytellers of Bowie singing this Tin Machine song. It is one of the only Tin Machine songs that Bowie would continue to perform after the band broke up, and I read somewhere that this is the one he’d suggest people listen to when they…

I discovered Puddles a few weeks ago and his cover of “Lazrus” made “cover of the week.” Despite his clownish appearance— actually, it’s not just clownish, he dresses as a clown— his singing is actually great! And he’s covered boatloads of Bowie songs. The benefit of an endless blog with daily entries is that I’ll have an infinite amount of…

Mel Brooks is surely to comedy what Bowie was to music. He is one of the funniest people ever to walk the earth. I find some of his gags hilarious for reasons I can’t fully explain. One such example is the end of his 1967 movie, The Producers. The plot has to do with two scheming Broadway producers who con…

Isabelle Adjani is one of France’s most accomplished actresses, being the one actress to win five Caesar Awards for acting (that’s France’s equivalent of an Academy Award). Why and when she recorded this song, which translates into, Beautiful, yes like Bowie,” is unknown to me. Some songs name-drop Bowie, but here Bowie’s name is part of the refrain. I’ve posted…

This week’s cover of the week is an entire album— Capsula, a band from Argentina with an international following, Dreaming of Ziggy Stardust is the band’s cover of the Ziggy album. Although I think the album was released, or at least recorded in 2012, it seems to have appeared on YouTube for the first time over the past week, so…

On March 2nd, 2016, during my song-a-day tribute to Bowie, I posted a live version of this song following a big, and at the time virtually unbelievable primary win by Donald Trump. My short blog entry promised to post, “The Voyeur of Utter Destruction as Beauty” if Trump somehow won the nomination. Sadly, I had to keep that promise. Seven…

This is another example of Bowie as cultural phenomenon: an exhibit of photographs depicting Bowie in the Soviet Union in 1973. The photos were taken, or arranged by Geoff MacCormack, better known at the time as Warren Peace. MacCormack collaborated with Bowie on some of the albums of the time and as a dancer and backup singer in concert. The…

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…