„Bitter comes out better on a stolen guitar“
A frontman without a guitarist is like a village without a church. If Bowie knew how to stab the rhythm sections that are the cream of the current offering, he had psychic abilities for guitarists. Mick Ronson, for all his qualities and importance that he had with the Spiders from Mars, was simply a mere herald of the crazy guitarists who shared the studio and the stage with Bowie.
The first after him, Earl Slick (real name Frank Madeloni) was a standard seventies rocker, only with a little more madness and cocaine in his nose. He remained faithful to Bowie for almost 40 years, so we hear him on rockier things on the album “The Next Day“. Slik is also known for being part of the team with Lennon and Yoko in their musical extravaganza. You might not find him on the lists of the most famous guitarists, but you will (through Bowie) often find him on your playlist.
In addition to Carlos Alomar, the Berlin trilogy was also marked by two avant-garde geniuses on the guitar who would cross paths a few years later in King Crimson. The said Robert Fripp dyed “Heroes” with his experimental guitar, while “Lodger” and accompanying tours were marked by Adrian Bela. Technically, he was “rubbed” by Zappa, but after working with Bowie, Belu got a wind behind him in terms of popularity and ended up in King Crimson in 1981. Anyone who has studied the guitar a little more knows that the rest is history. Both in and out of Crimson, Adrian has gone from being a goofball from Kentucky to one of the most respected virtuosos on the instrument. You can hear him with Nine Inch Nails, Talking Heads, Cyndi Lauper, Herbie Hancock, Porcupine Tree and others, and he is cited as a major influence by Stephen Wilson, Adam Jones, Henry Rollins, St. Vincent and others. Anyone who was in the company of Zappa and/or Bowie in the late seventies entered the pages of history.
But while these virtuoso geniuses were essential in the writing of musical history, none of Bowie’s “inventions” were as essential as the now famous (or not famous enough?) Texas bluesman’s discovery of “Let’s Dance“. Stevie Ray Vaughn, the last gargantuan blues virtuoso, owes his first studio appearance and hefty royalties to a lanky Englishman from Brixton making a hit pop record in New York with a struggling disco producer.
All the solo parts on the album belong to twenty-eight-year-old Vaughn, and the album’s popularity would certainly have been somewhat lower if SRV had not “explained” some things on his Stratocaster. Not only did he vampirize the blues of the eighties, when synthesizers ruled the world, but he also became synonymous with the aforementioned guitar model. Whoever got their hands on the blues after 1983 couldn’t avoid SRV. Bowie, without even realizing it, changed the face of the blues for all time. Between “Let’s Dance” and his untimely death, young Stephen honored all his bluesy predecessors while writing new pages in the same book. Anyone who has bought a guitar in the last 40 years has heard of Stevie Ray Vaughan. What good things can happen when an eccentric Englishman hires you…
While Alomar played the lead guitar on the barren releases in the rest of the eighties, the albums did not raise too much dust. Bowie was awakened from his creative crisis by Reeves Gabrels. With Gabrels, he founded the moderately successful Tin Machine, which primarily served as a catalyst to wake up from the creative coma of the eighties.
During the 1990s, Gabrels served as musical director and chief collaborator, so Bowie had a virtuoso experimentalist like Belu, but with a great sensibility for pop melody. A true underground figure, Gabrels did not allow Bowie to go to the gutter, and at the same time encouraged him to dig into new things. Thus, Bowie became a patron of Nine Inch Nails, but also remembered his experimental moments. With Gabrels, he had an unprecedented breakthrough in his career – the first online single in history (when it comes to a big name) “Telling Lies“, making music for a video game “Omikron: The Nomad Soul” and reworking his old hits. With Gabrels, he explored jungle, drum’n’bass and techno, and Reeves later ended up in the famous The Cure (we saw him on Exit). With any luck, we’ll hear him on those albums that Smith has been promising for some time.
The transition to the new millennium brought Bowie both old acquaintances and new faces, so the guitar duties were slowly taken over by Mark Pletty, Earl Slick and Jerry Leonard. Pleti ended up relatively quickly co-producing Bowie’s albums at the time and mostly spent time mixing, and Leonard and Slick defined David Bowie’s final sound (with Gail Ann Dorsey and Visconti producing).
Potentially the least explored period of his career was characterized by Slick’s angry riffs, Leonard’s melodic effects and David Thorne’s soundscapes. Thorne is one of those guitarists who avoids anything that even remotely resembles established guitar playing, so he played the role of an “effects guy” with Bowie. Due to the dynamics of the performances and the repertoire, that role was taken over by Jerry Leonard, whom David discovered in an English pub while he was playing his shoegaze stuff. The combination of Leonard’s modern guitar playing, Slick’s old guitar styles and Bowie’s gift for adding melancholic optimism to his music defined that unique “expensive” sound of Bowie’s career towards the end.
The only artist whose style of songs and production was close to Bowie’s is Bryan Ferry, who applied a similar principle of gathering musicians to his own work. While Slik was always a “classic rocker” without many vicissitudes around the neck of the guitar, Lenard always played with effects, but also with atypical chord inversions and harmonies. So we have an almost unstable guitar line in “The Stars (Are Out Tonight)“, based on Bowie’s acoustic guitar playing two chords 90% of the time and Dorsi’s Motown bass line. Over that, Thorne imitates some distant strings on the guitar, and Leonard plays a theme scattered throughout the song, guided by the marginal notes of D major. It is standard for this Bowie period that the main instrumental melodies mostly stick to some “left” melodic ideas, as if they avoid accentuating anything in the song, thereby emphasizing exactly what is needed.
While we haven’t seen many (visible) bands pull this off, there’s a big lesson in that modern Bowie pop-rock. Especially for guitarists.
Source: balkanrock.com
