Bowie

Goddammit.

Last Friday, Steve and I were listening to David Bowie’s latest album Blackstar, hot off the vinyl presses. I loved it. It will take some time to absorb, but it’s in the experimental vein of so much of Bowie’s career: a beguiling blend of pop, rock, electronics, jazz and some stuff I can’t wrap my head around. It was a trip into some of the weird, fascinating dark corners of music.

There were rumors that Bowie was going to tour and we just had to go because who knew how many more tours he had in him? We talked about it Friday and I said I would even lift my ban on seeing concerts at that concrete bunker (whatever they call it now) in Camden to see him. We excitedly speculated that maybe he would go back to the Tower Theater someday, the site of his triumphant show in the ‘70s. “Can you imagine seeing him there?” I thought. Then I wake up Monday morning and it’s too late.

At least Blackstar was a great way to go out. The public didn’t know Bowie had cancer so now I wonder if we’ll parse the lyrics and look for more meaning in songs like “Sue (or in a Season of Crime)” (“The hospital called/ The X-ray’s fine”) or the last thing he left on record, “I Can’t Give Everything Away.” I’ve thought Bowie’s last few albums left a few songs that he could call it a career on. The last album before his decade-long hiatus, 2003’s Reality, had “Bring Me the Disco King,” a meandering track that sounded like Bowie smoking a cigarette and telling stories in a cabaret. His comeback album, 2013’s The Next Day, closed with the stirring “Heat.”

The thing with Bowie is that he left such an astonishing body of work. He went everywhere. I was a fan starting as a kid with “Let’s Dance,” which I still think is a practically perfect pop song and a bright gem of the ‘80s. He could do pop but he was even better outside it, especially in the incredible string of albums he released in the ‘70s. In 10 years, he went from the hard rock of The Man Who Sold the World to the pop of Hunky Dory to the punk/glam of The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars and Aladdin Sane to the Philly soul of Diamond Dogs and Young Americans to the cocaine-fueled locomotive of Station to Station, putting a cap on the decade with the new wave Scary Monsters. Somewhere along the way, he worked in collaborations with two other giants, Bing Crosby and Freddie Mercury.

Best of all that was the 1977-79 Berlin Trilogy — Low, Heroes and Lodger — three albums that were ahead of their time then and are still astonishing today. My favorite is Low, with the off-kilter shimmer of “Sound and Vision,” the fragmented psychosis of “Breaking Glass” and “Always Crashing in the Same Car,” instrumental jams “Speed of Life” and “A New Career in a New Town” and the mournful analogue synths of “Warszawa.” And or course, Heroes gave us the landmark histrionics of the title track, with a vocal that can still curdle my blood.

So basically, you know it’s been a hell of a career if Ziggy Stardust is only like your fourth or fifth best album.

David Bowie’s legacy is all over modern pop. My top tier of favorite artists, people like Prince and Madonna, had some Bowie like qualities to me. When they were really on a roll, they were all restless explorers playing with identity and willing to try anything. Once they got into one new thing, you barely got used to it and they were on to something else. There was always this sense of motion.

Of course, no obituary would be complete without Bowie’s cameo appearance in Zoolander (“It’s a walk-off!), one of those things that makes me cackle no matter how many times I see it.

David Bowie seemed like one of those people who had been through so much that he would outlive everybody. It’s sad that he’s gone and we won’t get any more music but he sure left plenty of it to play at the wake.