Now that they are both dead, time wants us to answer the question who was the more influential artist, Lou Reed, the self-positioned street poet of New York City, or David Bowie, the globe trotting style inventor from London Town. Both were seen as treading the limits of popular taste while managing to stay in demand. There were bigger acts, for sure, there were hypes vying for attention, but Bowie and Reed were considered flag bearers of what was supposed to be serious music in the nineteen seventies. So let's check them out.
Being five years older, Reed started out with a clear advantage. By the time Bowie appeared on the scene, Reed in partnership with John Cale had already defined rock 'n' roll as a serious adult art form fit to discuss the realities of life instead of adolescents' happiness dreams. The Velvet Underground's first album , Bowie was always eager to admit, had forever pushed the boundaries of pop music into the realm of authenticity. When Bowie started gaining fame with his teenager cat from Japan show, an instant hit Britain hadn't experienced since Beatle mania, Lou Reed seemed safely seated on his throne, but young Bowie was planning an assault. It was clear Bowie was much more exciting, certainly for the kids who heard him urge them to listen to Reed, which many did, opening them up to the great decade of the seventies the big apple experienced. The Spiders that winter were touring the States on a high speed show, as this take of the Santa Monica show proves. During a meeting, Bowie had convinced Reed to let him produce his next album, a collection of Manhattan poems and looser sketches of the wild side. The promise of working with guitarist Mick Ronson apparently won Lou over. Ronson would give it his thrilling best, with Bowie outsinging Reed from the backup stand. With Lou Reed transformed from an often sitting performer into a coke sniffing, white haired death icon, Bowie had lured him into his scene, offering him to his fans in a David approved consumer version, as by then customary of such high quality that nobody dared question the applied tactics. There's a top take from Providence 73 where the band are clearly Bowie influenced, especially notable on their version of Waiting for the man.
Reed would detach himself from the scene on his next album, a painful story about loving a doomed woman put to music, an originally overlooked master piece which would much later earn its rightful place under the best work the still very much pace setting angry man ever produced. An honest post-mortem homage was made by Andrés Lima, who turned the whole sordid afair into real play, with the music both delivering soundtrack and story board. After Berlin came Sally Can't Dance, a lightly spun but equally unsettling story about the demise of a hipster girl, a record he later distanced himself from but which forever will be worth the devastating truth of Kill your sons, a song as unnerving as they ever came. Reed's swan song The View, by the way, is an interesting attempt at being straight one more time.
Bowie by now had left the Spiders behind and concentrated on becoming a famous American, something he managed to do at the cost of a life-threatening cocaine addiction, turning his body into a camp survivor's and his mind towards the darkest logic the filthy drug was able to suggest. I guess at this moment in time the old Reed loyals felt they had their man back, and he wouldn't disappoint them, still coming up with a twenty odd string of records, close to half of them between remarkable and just very good. Though it must be said none of them succeeded in drawing him back into the limelight of a continueously changing pop scene. Lou Reed was fading from the public mind.
Bowie mid-seventies was planning his way out of the mess he had created for himself, saying goodbye to USA with the dangerously attractive Station to Station, his return from a year in the dark, followed by his well-known European trilogy. The Berlin episode, including putting dear pal Iggy Pop back on his feet again with a highly and a lesser influenced album, established Bowie as the main reference of the late seventies. Punk was nice, but it couldn't touch the work of the man they all secretely admired. After punk had died out, the new romantics openly showed their infatuation. Bowie was the man, all of his records in demand. For great musical reviews of most of his songs, a visit to Pushing ahead of the dame is strongly recommended.
Then John Lennon was shot, for being famous it seemed. Fearing to be next, Bowie turned away from the frontline and tried mainstream, an amazing succes at first but followed by a new period of coke abuse and a cringing attempt at being normal, with horribly ordinary music the result. Tin Machine was a clean-up act after which Bowie, now sunk under the radar of most of his early followers, met a woman and became happy. The story of David Bowie the husband troubadour is an amazing second life experience, the nervous freak of old who hid behind all the masks he found to continue being the young man he couldn't leave behind, suddenly grew into a well-balanced man his age. The music took a while to adjust, but there were lucky hits along the way and come the new century Bowie had establised a fine show band and found the esteem to put his middle-aged observations on rock music again. There was reason to assume he would age well, after all.
The new David Bowie never gained close to the influence he had in the nineteen seventies, when he introduced hard rock, glam, theatre, dance and ambient in pop music, all between the age of 23 and 30. Bowie nicked it and made it popular. It was his trade mark approach and he was hated for it by fans of the original versions. But he sure reached out to a lot of people. And when he was quick to embrace the internet, he gained new followings again, taking yet more generations to his back catalogue. David Bowie, who suffered from bad contracts throughout his golden years, had become a wealthy man, living in his four storey Manhattan loft with wife and baby.
The first to go was Reed. I never saw him perform until he showed up twice in a year, the first time reciting poetry, not his own, in a tiny theatre full of old fans who hadn't been able to resist the temptation to look their hero straight in the face. A worthy experience. Bowie produced a record the next year, his unexpected come-back after a heart attack had bound him to retirement in 2004. The voice was gone, but he got away with a clever production by old pal Tony Visconti. Two years later there was his goodbye, a play and an album by a dying man. He left when the disc was out.
Commerce never touched Lou Reed's inheritance, his passing bemoaned only by his fans. Bowie's death was instantly turned into an iconification mass, still fully in swing. Prince's shocking early exit, rich with dark suspicions of foul play, was completely eclipsed. Everywhere you look, David Bowie stares you in the face. You see him in fashion, in art, in internet postings of a still growing batch of coveted live shows and rarities, anytime you do not necessarily need him. 2016 has become the year of being David Bowie.
So Bowie is the shining star. But who was the more influential? The poet or the composer? The creator or the disseminater? I'm too biased both ways to be of any use for an answer. So I look for different approaches. Was it Mick Ronson after all? Once we start there, a whole series of collaborators are waiting for mention.
