OUR SALUTE TO GREAT ALBUMS
IS SITTING IN A TIN CAN
Some things retain their strangeness despite the years and endless poking of generations. David Bowie's second album, Space Oddity, was recorded in the summer of 1969 and remains to this day a source of incandescent charm and inspiration for listeners and musicians alike. Long before his "Thin White Duke" days or his invitations to dance, Bowie tapped into the melancholy, lonely side of the space age, plopping us down inside a rocket ship while he pried open our astronaut hearts.
The album is light years away from his theatrical, often silly debut, and offered the first glimpse of his gift for societal insight. Long before most people realized, Bowie was telling us about the post Summer of Love malaise descending on young people in Europe and America. There's a peculiar mixture of floaty reflection and arching cynicism to Space Oddity. Both hippy dippy and dark spirited, the songs are hopeful yet ringed with realism. If everything was happening "out there," it asked, then what's happening inside of us?
The Stylophone warble behind the acoustic guitar on the title cut is one of the great modern combinations, folk music reaching into the atmosphere, straining upwards from the woods. There's a debunking of messiahs ("Cygnet Committee") and a 50-person strong orchestral rumination on Buddhist ideals ("Wild Eyed Boy From Freecloud"). The ambition and cerebral artiness that would infuse the majority of Bowie's future career make themselves known with almost gleeful candor. He's not shy in any respect, right down to announcing with considerable cheek, "God knows I'm good." While neither as brilliant (Ziggy Stardust, Low) or simply enjoyable (Young Americans, Diamond Dogs) as his later albums, in retrospect, Space Oddity laid out the pieces of what would come in the next two decades, a proud announcement of a musician that refuses domestication or rank simplicity in his work.
Space Oddity track list:
Side one
Space Oddity
Unwashed and Somewhat Slightly Dazed
(Don't Sit Down)
Letter to Hermione
Cygnet Committee
Side two
Janine
An Occasional Dream
Wild Eyed Boy From Freecloud
God Knows I'm Good
Memory of a Free Festival
Here's a promo clip for the 1972 U.S. reissue of the album.
Happy Rhodes does a really lovely cover of "Space Oddity" in 1996.
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