Bowie on making music in the 21st Century - No Patti content

["Peter Knerr" <peter.knerr>]

This is very off topic, but The New York Times has a very interesting
article in the Sunday edition about David Bowie.  He has a new album out 
on
his own record label and he has some very interesting things to say about
the where the recording industry and the process of getting record 
contracts
is going in the 21st century.  The article makes me wonder a lot about 
what
record label Patti will sign on with for her next album.  But who knows.
Maybe she'll go the self-produced route.

Regards,
Peter

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The New York Times

June 9, 2002
David Bowie, 21st-Century Entrepreneur
By JON PARELES

N a Manhattan rehearsal studio, Gerry Leonard seemed to be noodling on 
his
guitar as the rest of David Bowie's band waited. He played some sustained
notes and a bit of minor-key arpeggio; he worked his effects pedals, 
adding
echoes. A digital stutter entered the pattern, and suddenly the music 
gelled
into "Sunday," the song that opens Mr. Bowie's new album, "Heathen," 
which
will be released on Tuesday.

Chords from a phantom chorus wafted from a keyboard, and Mr. Bowie 
intoned:
"It's the beginning of an end, and nothing has changed. Everything has
changed."

Mr. Bowie sang somberly about searching for signs of life, about fear and
hope. At the end of the song, he shivered like someone coming out of a
trance. "Ahhh," he said and grinned. "Good morning!" It was just after 11
a.m. and Mr. Bowie, 55, had already worked out at the gym and given an
extended interview before starting the day's rehearsal for his summer 
tour.

Lean and affable, he was wearing a skintight gray T-shirt and stylishly
understated gray pants. His gaze, with different-colored eyes because 
of a
childhood accident that paralyzed his left pupil, has grown less
disconcerting; he laughs easily. When asked what he considered the 
central
point of his work, he said, "I write about misery" and chuckled.

Visions of cataclysm and professional aplomb: that's Mr. Bowie's life in 
his
fourth decade as a rock star. One of rock's most astute conceptualists 
since
the 1960's, he has toyed with the possibilities of his star persona, 
turned
concerts into theater and fashion spectacles, and periodically recharged 
his
songs with punk, electronics and dance rhythms. Now he has emerged as 
one of
rock's smartest entrepreneurs.

"Heathen" is the first album from Mr. Bowie's own recording company, Iso,
which has major-label distribution through Sony. In 1997, he sold $55
million of Bowie Bonds backed by his song royalties; the next year, he
founded the technology company Ultrastar and his own Internet service
provider-cum-fan club, Bowienet (davidbowie.com). In a nod to his 
art-school
background, his bowieart.com sells promising students' work without the 
high
commissions of terrestrial galleries.

His deal with Sony is a short-term one while he gets his label started 
and
watches the Internet's effect on careers. "I don't even know why I would
want to be on a label in a few years, because I don't think it's going to
work by labels and by distribution systems in the same way," he said. 
"The
absolute transformation of everything that we ever thought about music 
will
take place within 10 years, and nothing is going to be able to stop it. I
see absolutely no point in pretending that it's not going to happen. I'm
fully confident that copyright, for instance, will no longer exist in 10
years, and authorship and intellectual property is in for such a 
bashing."

"Music itself is going to become like running water or electricity," he
added. "So it's like, just take advantage of these last few years because
none of this is ever going to happen again. You'd better be prepared for
doing a lot of touring because that's really the only unique situation
that's going to be left. It's terribly exciting. But on the other hand it
doesn't matter if you think it's exciting or not; it's what's going to
happen."

With his wife, Iman, he has a 22-month-old daughter, Alexandria, for whom
he's keeping to a minimum his time away from home in Manhattan. When Mr.
Bowie signed on as a headliner for Moby's Area:Two tour this summer, he 
made
sure the schedule allowed him to return home between each of the six East
Coast dates. He is also organizing, and performing at, Meltdown, a
contemporary music, film and visual arts festival in London. (One 
songwriter
he booked is Norman Carl Odam, known as the Legendary Stardust Cowboy, 
from
whom he took Ziggy Stardust's last name in the 1970's; on "Heathen," he
sings the Cowboy's "Gemini Spacecraft," about an astronaut obsessed 
with a
girl he left behind.)

Mr. Bowie no longer expects to compete with performers in their 20's. 
"I'm
well past the age where I'm acceptable," he said. "You get to a certain 
age
and you are forbidden access. You're not going to get the kind of 
coverage
that you would like in music magazines, you're not going to get played on
radio and you're not going to get played on television. I have to 
survive on
word of mouth."

HIS fans among musicians, including Moby and Nine Inch Nails, have toured
with Mr. Bowie, introducing him to a younger generation.

Back in 1990, Mr. Bowie tried to jettison his past. He billed an arena 
tour
as the last time he would play his old hits. "I really did think I meant
that," he said. "I got quite a way into the 90's before I started 
thinking,
`Well, if you want an audience, David, you may want to consider putting 
some
songs into your sets that they've actually heard.' Yes, I know, I went 
back
on my word completely and absolutely."

He's now more comfortable riffling through his huge body of work. This 
week,
the Museum of Television and Radio, in New York and Los Angeles, opened
"Sound + Vision," a retrospective of Mr. Bowie on video that continues
through Sept. 15. A restored version of "Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders 
>From
Mars," the D. A. Pennebaker documentary of the 1972 tour that defined
glam-rock, will be released on July 10.

"Heathen" was produced by Tony Visconti, who last collaborated with Mr.
Bowie on his 1980 album, "Scary Monsters." He worked on most of Mr. 
Bowie's
1970's albums, including the celebrated Berlin trilogy of "Low," " `

On "Heathen," Mr. Bowie knowingly hints at his past. He echoes the song "
`Heroes' " in "Slow Burn," which wonders, "Who are we in times such as
these?" He revives analog keyboard sounds like that of the Stylophone, a
miniature electric organ played with a stylus that was heard on "Space
Oddity" in 1969 and reappears in the new "Slip Away." When Mr. Bowie 
starts
his tour with a show for fan-club members at Roseland on Tuesday, he 
plans
to play all 12 songs on "Heathen," followed by all of "Low." Hearing the
music 25 years later "makes the hairs on my arm stand up," he said.

To make "Low," Mr. Bowie recalled: "I had brought the idea of having
fundamentally an R & B rhythm section working against this new zeitgeist 
of
electronic ambience that was happening in Germany. It was terribly 
exciting
to know that one had stumbled across something which was truly 
innovative.

"At that time, I was vacillating badly between euphoria and incredible
depression. Berlin was at that time not the most beautiful city of the
world, and my mental condition certainly matched it. I was abusing 
myself so
badly. My subtext to the whole thing is that I'm so desperately unhappy, 
but
I've got to pull through because I can't keep living like this. There's
actually a real optimism about the music. In its poignancy there is, 
shining
through under there somewhere, the feeling that it will be all right."

Drug problems are long behind him, Mr. Bowie said. He now hesitates to 
take
even an Advil because. "I have such an addictive personality," he said.

Making "Heathen," he and Mr. Visconti were leery of nostalgia. "One 
thing we
haven't tried to be is cutting edge," Mr. Bowie said. "The other thing 
we've
tried not to do is to delve too far into the past and rely on our known
strengths, our known previous work. We do know, between us, how to 
landscape
a song and give it a real place, an identity and a character. I guess 
that's
the vestiges of the more theatrical things."

The album starts with "Sunday" and ends with its title song, both hushed 
and
haunted by mortality. In "Heathen," Mr. Bowie sings, "Still on the 
skyline,
sky made of glass/ Made for a real world, all things must pass." The 
album
was written before Sept. 11, however, and the songs join a long line of 
Mr.
Bowie's apocalyptic scenarios.

"I hope that a writer does have these antennae that pick up on low-level
anxiety and all those Don DeLillo resonances within our culture," he 
said.
"But I don't want to say that it was in any way trying to suggest that it
was going to happen. It's not like it's something new to me. These are 
all
personal crises, I'm sure, that I manifest in a song format and project 
into
physical situations. You make little stories up about how you feel. It's 
as
simple as that."

Between his own ruminations, he borrows "Gemini Spacecraft," the Pixies'
"Cactus" and Neil Young's "I've Been Waiting for You"; in songs like
"Afraid" and "I Would Be Your Slave," he sings about love, insecurity and
transience.

"I tried to make a checklist of what exactly the album is about and
abandonment was in there, isolation," he said. "And I thought, well,
nothing's changed much. At 55, I don't really think it's going to change
very much. As you get older, the questions come down to about two or 
three.
How long? And what do I do with the time I've got left?

"When it's taken that nakedly, these are my subjects. And it's like, 
well,
how many times can you do this? And I tell myself, actually, over and 
over
again. The problem would be if I was too self-confident and actually 
came up
with resolutions for these questions. But I think they're such huge
unanswerable questions that it's just me posing them, again and again."

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