Happy Birthday David Bowie

David Bowie turned 66 today and released a new video.

 

It’s a bit plaintive for my tastes but it’s nice to see him back in Berlin, the site of his magnum opus “Heroes”.

There aren’t many songs I recognize as great the first time I hear them, but “Heroes” (it should always have the quotation marks like on the original LP) blew my doors off in ’77 and only seems better now. It has a sound like no other of its time and exploded out of the cheap car radios we were obsessively fiddling with near the dawn of the FM rock radio format.

It was recorded in West Berlin’s Hansa Studios, listed on the album cover as “Hansa By The Wall”, and, IMO, perfectly captures the grey paranoia of the cold war, but also inserts a Winston Smith-ish narrator coming as close to full drunken rut as one might be able to manage on the east side of The Wall. The sixth verse (standing by the wall) calls up images of the time of dead East Germans tangled in the barbed wire.

The final verse, perversely shouted by Bowie as the volume fades, finds our hero successful in getting his quarry back to the commie love nest, but, he thinks better of it, and “maybe you’d better not stay”, because, “we could be safer, just for one day”. No opera death scene, no classical adagio, no show tune, no progressive rock, no hand-in-the-air Christian rock, has ever hit this hard.

Bowie participated in the song’s devaluation from epic meditation on the hopelessness of love under tyranny to a vaguely feel-good song about, I dunno, charity & fire fighters & puppies & stuff - and some of his greatest hits collections had a criminally truncated version that robbed the original of its power. That’s too bad, but I guess it’s his song to sell tires with if he wants. Not to mention the godawful Wallflowers version on the Godzilla soundtrack.

But, be that as it may, thanks to youtube user amindenandel, here is the original in its 6:11 glory. If you go to youtube, the lyrics are below the video.

Happy Birthday David Jones.