7 min read

♬ ”The Man Who Sold The World” (ChangesNowBowie Version)

David Bowie’s “The Man Who Sold The World" serves up a trifecta of emotional experiences.

First, obviously: Joy!

Because it’s just so freaking wonderful. It’s also Very Bowie, which is not even true of every David Bowie song. When a David Bowie song is Very Bowie, you’re almost certain that Bowie took his inspiration from a novel that sold fewer than 800 copies and God knows how or where he came across it. You’re not hopeful that the novel was in English, but you go out looking for it anyway. And then you’re disappointed to learn that, no, the story behind the lyrics originated through an irreproducible interaction between whatever Bowie was on at the time and just the usual chemical cocktail that his brain generated in situ.

Surely there was something that inspired these lyrics. Perhaps Bowie was walking past a newsstand, and a cockney newspaper vendor thought the coat he had on was a little fancy for the neighborhood, and he called out to the future Thin White Duke:

“Crikey! ‘Ere goes th’ man ‘oo sold th' world!

(My exposure to Hollywood cockneys assures me that the guy would have used some kind of charming rhyming slang somewhere in there, too.)

I’m now very keen on exploring the available scholarship on this question. Chris O’Leary’s “Ashes to Ashes: The Songs of David Bowie, 1976-2016” (Amazon affiliate link) says that as soon as the band finished recording all of the backing tracks, Bowie literally went out to the studio’s reception area and wrote the lyrics while everybody inside waited. This sounds remarkable and very rock-and-roll; I approve.

Years later, Bowie said that the lyrics had been inspired by different poems that were rattling around in his head at the time. Among them was William Hughes Mearns’ 1899 poem, “Antigonish”:

Yesterday, upon the stair,
I met a man who wasn't there
He wasn't there again today
I wish, I wish he'd go away...

When I came home last night at three
The man was waiting there for me
But when I looked around the hall
I couldn't see him there at all!
Go away, go away, don't you come back any more!
Go away, go away, and please don't slam the door... (slam!

Last night I saw upon the stair
A little man who wasn't there
He wasn't there again today
Oh, how I wish he'd go away...

So which was it? Did he make it all up at practically the last possible minute, or did he weave a carefully considered web of delight and mystery?

I suppose it could have been a combination of the two. Perhaps a more accurate answer to the interviewer's question “Where did the lyrics for 'The Man Who Sold The World' come from?” would have been:

“Oh, utter desperation. I thought we were just going to record the backing music and then knock off for the weekend. I was counting on a couple of days to figure out the lyrics before we laid down the vocals on Monday. But then it turned out that Emerson, Lake and Palmer had booked the studio for that whole week, so it was now or never. I started scribbling down everything I could remember from everywhere, on any piece of paper that was at hand…”

The second emotion that “The Man Who Sold The World” inspires in me is “disappointment.” Because my absolute favorite version is Bowie’s live performance on the December 15, 1979 broadcast of “Saturday Night Live.” I wish I had a digitally-remastered stereo track recorded in a real studio, but no such thing exists. I have to settle for the mono, slightly muddy 1979 TV-broadcast-quality audio I ripped from the Season 5 DVD set I bought expressly for that purpose.

I declared at the outset here that “The Man Who Sold The World” is a "Very Bowie" Song. Perhaps you agreed with me and asked, rhetorically, “Could this song be any more 'Bowie'?”

The correct answer is “No. Not unless he were to sing it while wearing a facsimile of one of the theatrical costumes designed by Sonia Delaunay for the iconic 1923 staging of Tristan Tzara’s 1923 Dadaist play Le Cœur à gaz.”

He couldn’t even walk in that getup. His two backup singers carried him to the front of the stage, walking on either side while Bowie maintained a straight-arm hold on their hands, like a gymnast on the parallel bars.

His backup singers were the 1970s NYC club performers Joey Arias (legend) and Klaus Nomi (superlegend; he would later hire the same costume designer to build him an iconic stage outfit of his very own). Their presence elevates the performance from "More Bowie" to, arguably, "The Very Most Bowie possible."

As big as Arias and Nomi's theatric contribution to this performance was, it was overshadowed by their musical contribution. They completely transformed the song. It had taken nine years for David Bowie and the world to realize something that had instantly become an irrevocable fact: “The Man Who Sold The World” had been missing a tenor and a countertenor all that time.

Why didn't Bowie, Arias, Nomi, and his backing band record this arrangement properly, for posterity? How, I implore the heavens, could a kind and just God allow this discovery to be just discarded and forgotten? What have we done to deserve such careless treatment?

("Pretty much everything”? Ok, fair point. But isn’t He supposed to be big on Forgiveness? If nothing else, my religious upbringing taught me that God can’t possibly be less of a Bowie fan than the rest of us.)

I’ve given up trying to find a version of “The Man Who Sold The World” that I like nearly as much as this one. The quality of my SNL rip is better than "listenable," but not by much. Still, it's the Holy Recording.

It recently occurred to me that a modern AI-powered tool might be able to improve my DVD rip. But will the result contain the audible equivalent of a hand with seven fingers? Well, it’s worth exploring. Noted.

So which of Bowie's actual, proper studio recordings of "The Man Who Sold The World" is my favorite? Choosing one has been a journey. The original track, off the same-titled LP, throws Bowie’s vocals into some sort of trippy-hippie meat grinder. I shun it completely.

I’ve settled on the version that appears on “ChangesNowBowie.” It feels like it’s the original recording, with all of those tacky, dated studio tricks ripped out and trucked to the same dumpsite where shag carpets, children's toys decorated with lead-based paint, and Rod McKuen poetry collections wind up.

I suppose I can’t legally talk for this long about “The Man Who Sold The World” without mentioning Nirvana’s 1994 cover. It's a fine recording. But although I can enjoy a "no Klaus Nomi" version of this song, when you take out Klaus Nomi and David Bowie, I no longer see any point to the enterprise.

The third emotion I associate with this song? Anger.

But only when I watch the SNL video of the Holy Recording. I deliberately chose not to embed it here until the very end. I knew I was going to have to watch the video to make sure I got the right one. I didn't want my subsequent Sour Vibes to contaminate the rest of this writeup.

So. Here it is:

In my younger days, this video would have had me shouting the same thing over and over again at SNL’s director, as though he could hear me through both the tube of my 19” Goldstar TV/VCR Combo, and the mists of time:

“NO!!! CUT BACK TO BOWIE!!!!

If I were watching late in the evening, when shouting would have violated the Some Of Us Have To Go To Work Tomorrow Morning clause of the housemate constitution, I would have employed quiet, Gen-X sarcasm:

Thank you, o esteemed Director Of Saturday Night Live. A different director – a man who’s terrible at this job – would've just done the obvious, lazy thing: he'd have (ugh!) kept the camera on David Bowie and his two backup singers as much as possible. A director who lacked the golden, glorious vision that only God can bestow, and that only you possess, would have cut away from Bowie only during purely instrumental sequences, if at all.

"But not you. You’re a god-damn genius. A man of creative destiny, to be sure. You knew, purely by gut instinct — because this kind of artistry certainly can’t be taught — that America doesn't want to see David Bowie in the unbelievable costume he had made especially for this performance. The two men behind him in distinctive dresses and makeup sure aren't going to hold anybody's attention, either. David Bowie’s one of the most famous musicians in the world…which means that by now, his fans have seen him singing a million times, already. Speaking as a David Bowie fan, I absolutely agree with you: when David Bowie is on stage, singing, I'm desperate to see something different.

"You know, something fresh and exciting. Yes, something exactly like a guitarist standing as rock-still as humanly possible. What's this? Oh my god…it's a keyboardist playing the exact same chord over and over again while staring blankly up at the camera! 'Saturday Night Live' director, I could kiss you! Tell me, did you get hurt when the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences threw all of those Emmy awards at you? I can easily imagine that they got so excited about recognizing your achievement without delay that they forgot how pointy the wings on the statuette are…"

Today, of course, I can watch it without shouting at the screen.

I’m older. I’m much more mature. I have a greater sense of perspective. I accept that the man who directed this episode of SNL brought his own point of view to the job. It’s OK if his preferences as a director didn’t always intersect with my expectations as a viewer.

Most importantly: I’m not shouting because I'm writing this inside a Starbucks. I didn't pay $3 for a bottle of water just to get thrown out of this workspace after just a half an hour.

Listen to "The Man Who Sold The World (ChangesNowBowie Version)" on:

  • Amazon Music (this isn't tech-related, so I'm using an affiliate link. If you click through to Amazon from this, and buy literally anything, I'll get a little kickback in the form of Amazon store credits, proportional to the price. Thank you kindly.)
  • Spotify
  • Apple Music
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