BEFORE: I saw something trending on Twitter today, and I got my hopes up, thinking it was National Bowie Day - but then I looked at it a little closer and determined that it's really National BOWTIE Day. My mistake.
David Bowie carries over from "Ziggy Stardust" and we move forward about 43 years. Jeez, that seems like a lot.
THE PLOT: A documentary about David Bowie's final two albums "The Next Day" and "Backstair" and his Broadway musical "Lazarus".
AFTER: This is another one of the original 13 films, which I used as the foundation for this Rock Music documentary list. The other 39 films were added on as linking material, from what was active and available on Netflix, along with what I remembered as being released in the last few years on this topic, which I then had to track down on iTunes, or in one case, by purchasing a DVD on Amazon. After this I've got 11 more films in the chain, two of them are part of the original 11 - one film about Black Sabbath and one film about Rush. (The other 10 films I started with were "Eight Days a Week", "Eric Clapton: Life in 12 Bars", the two Rolling Stones concert films set in Latin America, "Elvis Presley: The Searcher", "George Michael: Freedom", "Whitney: Can I Be Me", "This Is It", "The Beach Boys Making Pet Sounds" and "Eat That Question: Frank Zappa in His Own Words".)
Prior to watching this film, I wasn't aware that there was such a long gap in David Bowie's recording and performing career, starting with his last concert in 2004. It turns out that Bowie went out on the longest set of tour dates in his whole career, over the course of 2003 and 2004, and then had a heart attack during a show in Oslo, Norway. He thought it was a pinched nerve at first, so he finished the concert, then left by ambulance. That does seem to demonstrate a large amount of devotion to his job. But following the heart attack, the remaining 14 tour dates were cancelled, and he took a few years off, except for minor festival curation jobs.
It wasn't until his 66th birthday, in January 2013, that he even began talking about releasing a new album. The musicians interviewed here all tell variations of the same story - "I got an e-mail from David Bowie, asking me if I would join a session to record some new music..." So, if they all have the same story, why do we the audience need to hear it 11 or 12 times? Over the course of a 2-year period, starting in 2011, Bowie met and recorded with these musicians that he trusted, working according to his own schedule, and getting all of the musicians to sign NDAs, most likely because he was thinking about his own health, and not overdoing it. Then Bowie would take the results of the recording sessions with him, listen to them in private for a month or two, then call the band back together to make changes. This is a fascinating process, because it managed to be both collaborative and intensely personal at the same time.
This movie, on the other hand, drove me a little crazy because it claimed to have a singular focus on Bowie's final five years of creation, but then it kept dipping back to show us clips from his past videos and concerts quite liberally. This was done under the guise of illustrating certain points about his work, or to give the audience certain reference points, especially if Bowie was referencing his own work. It might be helpful for non-experts to see these clips, but at the same time it manages to distract from what was SUPPOSED to be the focus of the film, which is his last two albums. You can't have it both ways, you can't say "This is the subject of the film" and then keep showing clips that stray off of that subject and out of the time period covered.
I mean, I get that his proposed Broadway musical "Lazarus" is supposed to feature the character he played in "The Man Who Fell to Earth", so I guess you kind of have to show clips from that film, but that should have been a one-off, and instead the filmmakers took every possible opportunity to work in clips from his back catalogue. That ended up feeling like a bunch of documentary shortcuts, or an admission that they didn't have enough recent clips. While I have to admit that I don't own any Bowie music that was released after 1984, and I like a Greatest Hits package as much as the next person, that's not why I came here today - I tuned in specifically for the new stuff.
On the upside, we are presented with a man who worked very hard to put himself out there, even if that public persona was always changing - he'd just craft another costume, another personality, and put that one out there next. In an interview quote, he admits to having been very shy on stage at first, and that certainly helps to explain why he crafted the Ziggy Stardust persona in the first place, because it was easier to go out on stage and pretend to be someone else. And Bowie sort of imagined that he'd be dead by the age of 30, which explains all the references to death and suicide on his first few albums. At least he was conscious of the desire to be a star while still hating being famous - he found that being famous was great for getting concert tickets and restaurant reservations, but other than that, it was a pain in the ass. In some clips he enjoyed walking anonymously around Berlin or having fun at a rest stop in Montana, and that may be our only chance to see him just being funny, enjoying life, and letting his guard down.
But that's life for a rock star, just as it is for normal non-famous people - you do what you do, then you wake up the next day and you do it again, and you keep doing it until you can't do it any more. As haunting and introspective as that last album and those last few videos were, Bowie returned to his home planet on January 10, 2016, two days after his 69th birthday. Now, what I need to get is some kind of Greatest Hits Vol. 2 CD, something that will allow me to collect the hits from the second part of his career, without re-buying all of the songs I already have. I'm not sure that even exists, though.
Also starring Mike Garson (also carrying over from "Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars"), Geoff MacCormack (ditto), Earl Slick, Gail Ann Dorsey, Gerry Leonard, Catherine Russel, Sterling Campbell, Tony Visconti, Zachary Alford, David Torn, Ava Cherry, Carlos Alomar, Reeves Gabrels, Floria Sigismondi, Maria Schneider, Donny McCaslin, Mark Guiliana, Tony Oursler, Michael C. Hall (last seen in "Paycheck"), Toni Basil, Jonathan Barnbrook, Johan Renck, Ivo van Hove.
RATING: 5 out of 10 Tin Machine cassettes
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