I recently picked up a copy of Paul Trynka’s biography,
David Bowie : Starman.
It dates back to 2011, but I didn’t buy it at the time
having burned out on a couple of biographies of rock stars that you would
imagine would be fascinating but were, frankly, crashing bores – mostly the Iggy Pop
Open Up and Bleed book also by Trynka), which failed to deliver a portrait of a man raised by
wolves in a trailer park, and instead delivered a rather dull middle-class
American, as did the Kurt Cobain book and the Eric Clapton book (if you
substitute English for American). David Bowie, as a quintessential lower-middle-class
southern English war-baby, didn’t seem much more promising. I was wrong.
For many rock stories, these days, I can turn to YouTube and
get the history, in a few thousand spoken words, along with sights and sounds of the
era and if I’m lucky, and if the producer has paid the royalties, even the songs
of the rock star in question. So, given that I’ve watched Five Years (while it
was available) and a number of other Bowie documentaries, what is the advantage of a
book?
Words, mainly. (But you knew that.) The book must have
around 120,000 of them, which is sufficient to explain nuances in relationships
and timelines as well as evoke feelings and paint mental pictures. Trynka has done an enormous amount of
research, and seems to have tracked down pretty much anyone who spoke to David
Bowie throughout his career, and placed their words carefully where they’ll do
the most good in the narrative. He’s also taken care to keep mentioning dates
and, when a person or event re-enters the scene after an absence, makes sure to
recap briefly. This makes the book, unlike so many others, a pleasure to dip
into at random, or use as a reference. In a book this long, there’s always a
time or two when you flip through the previous few pages in confusion thinking
something like, “Wait, have we had the festival yet? Did I miss it?” but his
style keeps that to a minimum.
I don’t need to recap the David Bowie story here, so I won’t. His first hits came as I first started buying
records, although the records I bought were by T. Rex. Bowie was a feared rival.
Apart from a fallow period recently, he’s continued to have hits
since, and the way he’s managed to keep re-inventing himself has always been of
some interest. Trynka has a lot to say about his methods, from Oblique
Strategies, to putting an unrehearsed, inexperienced band in the studio and
demanding they deliver, to obsessively working out details beforehand. It seems
he’s used all types of methods, and is vastly well-read in the philosophy and psychology of his art, as well. Surprisingly,
neither Bowie nor his biographer seem to think he has much innate talent – they
both put it down to obsessive, single-minded hard work.
The story weaves in an out of others that I’ve read – Marc Bolan,
Mick Jagger, Lori Mattix (Maddox, Madox), Jimmy Page, Andy Warhol and the
aforementioned Iggy Pop, and many that I haven’t, though I probably should –
Lou Reed, Freddie Mercury, John Lennon. From a Mod hustling in London to a rather diaphanous
character living in indescribably luxury with Iman, probably in a pink castle
on a cloud near the Big Rock Candy Mountain, it’s not your average rags to
riches tale but it is constantly interesting.
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