“Scream Like a Baby” early version (1980)

An early working title for the album Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps), which is my favorite, was Vampires of Human Flesh. Bowie clearly had monsters in mind when making the album. There are enough early versions of some of the songs that would be refined for the final album out there that so too is an unofficial collection presented as an album, bearing the working title. My way of describing it in the last sentence is a little tortured because, despite finding Vampires of Human Flesh on YouTube, I’m not convinced that it is or was ever meant to be an album, and I wouldn’t be surprised if other, different packages of songs exist using Vampires as an album title. That said, the YouTube version provides several interesting alternative versions of songs that are among my favorites.

“Scream Like a Baby” has an intersecting history. Its music first appeared as an Astronette’s song, “I am A Laser.” The lyrics to that song are embarrassingly bad, but Bowie recycled the music for “Scream.” But this early version shows how Bowie could take an entirely coherent message and deliberately mess around with it to both make it sound better as a song, and inject ambiguities into what the words actually mean.

For people who know the final version of the song, the first difference that jumps out is, “I mixed with other targets,” instead of the more familiar, I mixed with other colors.”

A more meaningful change, a few lines later is in the refrain— “Scream like a baby, scream like a gun.” The final version is, “Scream like a baby, Sam was a gun.” In both versions of the song, Sam is the oppressed hero. “Sam was a gun” never made sense to me. For years I thought what I was hearing was, “Sam was a god.” “Scream like a gun” makes total sense, and not the only time Bowie evokes the shooting of a gun on the album. “Ashes to Ashes” contains the line, “One flash of light but no smoking pistol.” In the draft “Scream” lyrics, the gun simile evokes a sound, whereas “Ashes” conjures an image.

In any case, Bowie changed the “Scream” line to make it more nonsensical. Again, he was probably first concerned with how it sounded, but Bowie likes to remind us that the world is chaotic and not everything has linear meaning. At his best, Bowie didn’t like to tell us exactly how to think, which is kinda the point of the song in the first place. So in this little way, he’s giving us something to think about and assign our own meaning.

Probably the most noticeable difference between versions is the draft’s clear sentence, “Now I’m learning to be an integrated part of society,” which becomes, “Now I’m learning to be a part of socie-soc-soci…”. Again, Bowie decides to be more impressionistic. He says more in his feigned inability to articulate the word, “society” than he does by more clearing stating what he had in mind.

Finally, this draft version lacks some of the vocal distortions that are used on the final version. Those distortions layer on the sense that societally imposed conformity is a kind of madness, that distorts mind and meaning. I don’t think the final version of the song is terribly ambiguous, but if there is any doubt as to what the song’s about, this draft answers all questions.