Music of choice as introduction: Watch Dead Men
Was David Bowy, arguably the nineteen seventies’ most French artist, a conman for the CIA? Remarkable new findings seem to suggest he was, the Subterranean Traveller reports.
David Bowy was never about dying for his public, of course, he would only die for himself. So when in 1976 the cocaine had got the better of him he said goodbye to his golden American years and went cold turkey in Europe, where he composed his much acclaimed Trilogy. Bowy liked to say the drugs had merely done him harm and that he had bad memories of them – if any, since he claimed to have completely forgotten about producing one of the true highs of his career, Stash on a Station. But popular belief has always hailed his coke induced albums as his most visionary ones, with many of his seemingly futuristic predictions busy becoming reality forty years on.
But was it really David Bowy’s own thinking working at coke speed that produced all these remarkable insights, or could it perhaps be, as recent discoveries suggest, that those visions were actually instructions passed on to him? Did Bowy get it right because he sang about what he was told would happen if the rich got their way?
According to decades long studying of Bowy’s song lines both within and out of their musical context, it is now quite comprehensible that David Bowy at some early point in his American adventures was approached by the CIA. The Agency wanted him to give the youth hidden messages with the aim to activate their discouragement and smother any eventual threats to society whenever they came to realise there were no future for them on planet Earth, certainly not anything like their parents had seen. We’ll get to the exampled evidence later on, but let me first go into the wider economic context for this hypothesis.
Here to the next song: Duly Brothers
By 1970, in their never ending quest for minimising costs, America’s and Europe’s large manufacturing companies had decided to move their production base to countries where labour was found so cheap it made enormous delivering distances more rentable then striving for full employment back home, during many years the main policy for avoiding public unrest. Now with big income differences and social exclusion looming in the not too far away future, new measures for mass containment were needed. And the most fruitful seemed to have the public readily accept the coming reality of a life without much opportunity for self-realisation. One strategy to reach this goal was the introduction of heroine in Western cities, the business for which the Vietnam War was continued. Another was replacing the hippy generation’s message of hope and peace by a sense of despair and pointlessness, a concept which might equally be transmitted through music, provided the right words were found. They chose from their ranks a certain Tony De Freeze and commissioned him with the task to lure David Bowy into the CIA’s realm by becoming his manager, with unlimited spending costs available. But let’s move on to the question, why Bowy.
After the middle class hippy revolution had been more or less contained, a new group of music consumers started to show interest in the messages bands put into their work. It started in the UK, where the in itself harmless gland rock phenomenon attracted working class youths, and it caught on in the USA through the cross-over efforts of largely one man, gland’s one and only self-appointed king David Bowy, aspiring to make it big yonder side of the pond. Could the Agency somehow use Bowy’s appeal to the working masses for the promotion of their own purposes? David Bowy had always been interested in the darker sides of the human psyche, as his early masterpiece The Man Whose Soul’s The Word overtly demonstrates, while songs from Uncle Dory reveal an acute awareness of the machinations of power. So when Bowy set foot ashore for the second time round in the disguise of Sicky Stardish, a cat from Japan with a huge impact on school kids all over the white world, he definitely was the man the Agency were looking for.
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To assure his cooperation De Freeze readily exploited Bowy’s newly acquired cocaine affliction and the probable underlying cause, his sudden dramatic hair loss. Bowy, leaning heavily on the power of image for getting across his music, had started to grow recesses which seriously threatened his generally good looks (see picture) and he was in desperate need for solutions. A life long treat to the best available techniques might persuade him, The Company gathered, and free access to all the coke he needed was always a sure encouragement.
Now let’s look at some of the poetical evidence. It all started on A Tad Insane, where everybody is travelling on something nice and desperate future scenes of Detroit and other destruction arise, some a possible but not always likely outcome, others a pretty accurate description of what is fully coming into being these days. The whole album breathes inevitability and though we’re not quite there yet, the idea of gunned warfare in American cities has become a lot likelier over the last years with Detroit a natural candidate for coming first.
Bowy went for new clear destruction again on Damon Docks, where he adopted George Orwell’s 1984. (When Bowy wasn’t allowed to call the adjoining TV show the 1984 show, he effortlessly opted for the 1980 flaw show.) From the opening lines on he once more shows remarkable insight into what might be the end of it all. Bowy created an advanced outlook on the eventual setting of Orwell’s original vision, and it’s again very much what we have been heading for in recent years. It is simply impossible not to think of Barack Obama when you listen to Candy Date. Bowy by now had seriously turned to cocaine for his well-being, not afraid at all to adorn this very convincing sounding masterpiece with the blatant gland rehearsal of Trebble Rebel, with the sole purpose of opening up the European continental market while being overseas.
The world meanwhile had seen its first modern era oil crisis and developments were speeding up dramatically, with Bowy’s music coming heavily in demand. The artist himself suffered a setback on his next album Young and Murkans where the cocaine was fully operating his brain, while simultaneously his growing sweetheart popularity on nationwide TV shows - Bowy now known as the Thin Y Duke - started rendering him useless to The Company’s needs. Though both the title song and Fashion Nation offer close portraits of the human condition, the weekly and sometimes even daily spectacle of the Duke’s coke drained body, little more than a coat hanger with an alien skull floating over it, was only evoking pity laughs. See him on The Dick Cavett Show and with Cher.
So they threw out the man and focused on his music, forgetting about David Bowy, until he knocked on their door one year later, all hollow eyed but very determined and with the imploring request for new hair. As it turned out, in his darkest madness in Los Angeles he had found the power to get down to business and write the future of Europe on just over half an hour of never before heard music. Listen here to an early performance of Stain and to a March 1976 New York live version of Stash on a Station. The Agency immediately took him back and set him up nicely in Switzerland, to take a well-deserved break and soon come back with more. Over the years the lyrics of Stash on a Station have grown in clarity and impact. We are now in a world where togetherness is considered more important than truth while at the same time unseen powers abuse the mindset to further their ambitions, all of which can be found in this ten minutes magic of a song.
It’s probable Bowy’s involvement with the CIA ended here, with the infamous Victoria Station incident as a last farewell, though a song like “He Rose“, with its proclaimed Cold War victory, again offers fertile ground for discussion. Only with his last original album, Hairy Monsters, which closely portrays the reality of globalisation two decades on, had Bowy shrugged of final remaining suspicions.
David Bowy is believed to have died in a plane crash shortly before reappearing on the big stage in 1983, a type of accident which has since then become growingly associated with The Company‘s workings. Bowy was quickly replaced by his Faker with the ensuing world tour a record breaking success. Society by then had completely abandoned the ideas of progress and peace and most people were simply trying to have a good time while it lasted, always better to be in the richer countries of course. We are now in the end days of consumerism and few people seem prepared for a life without amenities. While we’re clinging to what we have we’re all seeing it fall away from under us - as was foretold.
