Site Maintenance*: “Glass Spider” (1987/2018)

“Glass Spider” holds a place of infamy in the Bowie pantheon. The song, from “Never Let Me Down,” lent both its name and imagery to Bowie’s 1987 tour, which was his biggest and most elaborate. Famously, the set was framed by a truly enormous glass spider, and necessarily, Bowie would include this song in every performance on the tour. But both the album and the tour met with critical derision and cries of “sellout” from long-time Bowie fans (though a Glass Spider concert was my first and actually cemented my fandom). Bowie claims that after the last concert of the tour, he and his crew burned the giant spider somewhere in the Australian desert.

But the scorn heaped on both the song and the tour are undeserved. I won’t use this space to comment more on the tour, other than to say that it was a lot of fun for me. The song sounds better in its 2018 form, where it appeared alongside most of the rest of “Never Let Me Down” on a version of the album featuring different and better instrumental support for Bowie’s original vocals. But you can find more to like about “Glass Spider” even in its original version.

The biggest problem with “Glass Spider” is the first minute and a half, during which Bowie actually isn’t singing at all but verbally explains a silly, faux-mythological story about a giant glass spider and its babies. The story sets up the premise of the song, and its hard to go from digesting what Bowie just said to really listening to the musical part. If you do that, though, what you will hear is a pretty good Bowie song. Even the lyrics stand on their own. The term “glass spider” does not appear again nice Bowie begins to sing. Separated from its spoken premise, the song seems to be about the struggle for survival, perhaps without parental protection.

While Bowie does not sing of a glass spider, he (or, at least the chorus) makes repeated references to, a “mummy” who has separated from her children. Though the spoken part explains that the mother spider abandons her young when she knows they can survive, the song itself works better without this image in mind. Indeed, not only is the reason for separation mysterious, but there’s a hint that the mother abandoned her young out of indifference, and that far from the assurance survival, the children’s fate is far from secured: “if your mother don’t love you then the riverbed might.” I recently heard another commentator draw attention to that particular line, which is both harsh and almost unnoticeable by the point it appears in the song. Bowie would do that quite a bit during his pop period— hide-in-plane site challenging lyrics in what sounded like light songs.

In the end, the children haven’t quite died, but the last line, which had been part of the chorus since the singing began, is “Mummy come back ‘cause the water’s all gone.” So its not looking good.

So, the 2018 version of “Glass Spider” is an improvement, musically speaking, but this is also a song that begs to be covered by someone who drops the spoken intro.

* The Site Maintenance series features videos of different versions of songs I already covered, usually in 2016. You can go back and look at the original entry, but the original video link broke and I replaced it, but the more contemporary commentary (like this) features yet another video.