I was tagged by my friend Dan to post a Bowie song a day for seven days. This is day seven. Unfortunately for the chain letter effect, I don’t know any more Bowie fans to pass this on to for the next seven days. Anyone want to step up?
Ok, you knew this was coming.
This track isn’t *about* Marc Bolan – it just features him on guitar. According to standard Bowie lore, the “Prettiest Star” herself is Angie Bowie, back in those halcyon days when Angie was his girlfriend and both Bowie and Bolan were graduating from being hippies – fabulous clothes from Granny Takes a Trip, all the right friends in Ladbroke Grove, all the right gigs at UFO and Middle Earth – to full-fledged swans, all the satin and tat and cool visible to all but paddling like motherfuckers out of sight below the water, trying to get ahead.
The track was released as a single, a follow up to Space Oddity and it appears Bowie thought it would soar away. In fact it fell back to earth with a thud, selling (it says on Wikipedia) 800 copies. It’s remarkable that people we regard as natural stars like David Bowie struggled so hard for so long. The old adage attributed to Edison that “genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration” certainly applies to popular music, though I’m sure Bowie would never perspire. “Glow”, perhaps, but not perspire.
Bowie redid the track shortly afterwards with Mick Ronson on guitar, though Marc’s chiming Beard-of-Stars guitar figures were deemed matchless and were re-played as is. The video above obviously isn’t that one, because I have my biases. It’s the original 1970 single cut. (I hope.)
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