How would you rate "Diamond Dogs" (1974) by David Bowie?

Discussion in 'Music Corner' started by Haristar, Jun 23, 2017.

  1. avanti1960

    avanti1960 Forum Resident

    Location:
    Chicago metro, USA
    Essential-
    1) Rebel Rebel is an iconic single, not just a classic.
    2) It was ahead of its time creating a sci-fi vision and theme adapting and advancing George Orwell's work. It became a forerunner of inspiration that seemed to bridge the gap between Orwell and the 80's UK / US industrial sci-fi films and advertisements- basically helped to spawn a sub-genre of movies.
    3) While not Bowie's strongest effort in terms of memorable singles, the album works as a cohesive concept album and in that context is essential.
     
  2. PretzelLogic

    PretzelLogic Feeling duped by MoFi? You probably deserve it.

    Location:
    London, England
    I'll go out on a limb here and declare the Sweet Thing/ Candidate suite to be his greatest achievement.
     
  3. avanti1960

    avanti1960 Forum Resident

    Location:
    Chicago metro, USA
    Listen to Neu!- "Negativland"
    In the beginning (after the jackhammers) there is a sonic industrial landscape reminiscent of the beginning to "Station to Station"- that industrial locomotive soundscape.
    Once "Negativland" gets rolling, the drum beat seems clearly an inspiration to "Chant of the Ever Circling Skeletal Family" Also in "Negativland" is a break in the middle of the song that features repetitive siren bursts that sounds eerily similar to the "rap rap rap chant" at the end of "Skeletal Family"
    Bowie took the science of Neu! and turned it into art, although this Neu! album isn't too bad either.

     
    Grootna likes this.
  4. Vangro

    Vangro Forum Resident

    Location:
    London
    Yes, well maybe. I'm not convinced Bowie was too up on German music till he actually lived there - though Eno obviously was. Neu! was already art it didn't need anyone to 'turn it into art'.
     
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  5. Scope J

    Scope J Senior Member

    Location:
    Michigan
    *
    Pretty great, worth recommending
     
  6. lordfalconer

    lordfalconer Forum Resident

    Sweet Thing might be one of the best Bowie vocals ever.
     
  7. Rufus rag

    Rufus rag Forum Resident

    Location:
    UK
    Never connected with Rebel Rebel after such classic hits that preceded it! Big let down for me!
     
  8. An essential album for me. I still play the original at least once a month. Still sounds relevant today IMO
     
    oldturkey likes this.
  9. Andy Smith

    Andy Smith .....Like a good pinch of snuff......

    Easily one of his finest. Never tire of it.
     
    oldturkey likes this.
  10. Schoolmaster Bones

    Schoolmaster Bones Poe's Lawyer

    Location:
    ‎The Midwest
    Sweet Thing—Candidate—Sweet Thing (Reprise)

    [​IMG]

    Sweet Thing—Candidate—Sweet Thing (Reprise).
    Sweet Thing—Candidate—Sweet Thing (Reprise) (live, 1974).


    The rotten heart of Diamond Dogs; a triptych where prostitutes are the only lovers left, where street hustlers double as politicians.

    ***
    Tony Newman, who drummed on most of the record, recalled Bowie switching off all the lights in the studio save those directly over his microphone. So Bowie sang “Sweet Thing” in a spotlight, the musicians around him mere shadows.

    ***
    During the summer ’74 Diamond Dogs tour, Bowie sang the “Sweet Thing” suite from a catwalk above the stage. He preened, writhed as though being electrocuted; he looked like Baron Samedi gone Hollywood.

    ***
    It’s Bowie on guitar (and sax), Mike Garson on piano, Herbie Flowers on bass, Tony Newman on drums. Bowie coached his players like actors. For the first 32 bars of “Candidate,” up until Bowie smells “the blood of les Tricoteuses,” he told Newman to play his snare rolls as if he was a French drummer boy watching his first guillotining during the Terror.

    ***
    The suite opens with thirty seconds of a slowly-emerging wash of backwards tapes. It closes, after the “Zion” mellotron line and Garson playing a bar’s worth of “Changes”, with a minute of musical violence.

    ***
    It’s safe in the city/to love in a doorway. “Sweet Thing/Candidate,” an urban debasement, is part of a long English tradition of city nightmares. So Thomas Hardy, describing an 1879 Lord Mayor’s Show: As the crowd grows denser, it loses its character of an aggregate of countless units, and becomes an organic whole, a molluscous black creature having nothing in common with humanity, that takes the shape of the streets along which it has lain itself, and throws out horrid excrescences and limbs into neighboring alleys.

    ***
    In the two verses of “Sweet Thing,” Bowie’s voice rises from the depths (the basso profundo of the opening verse), settling first on a conversational tone (“isn’t it me”) then vaulting to high, long-held notes, starting with “will you see.” There’s the cartoon New Yorkese voice he uses in the first bridge (“if you wannit, boys”) and he nearly laughs when he sings the cut-up-produced nonsense of “turn to the crossroads and hamburgers.” (Or is it “of Hamburg”?) This isn’t the step-by-step graded elation of something like Carol Douglas’ “Doctor’s Orders,” where the song seems to be willing its singer to keep moving higher. It’s more a menagerie of voices that Bowie barely can keep under control.

    ***
    George Gissing, on Farringdon Road, in The Nether World: Pass by in the night, and strain imagination to picture the weltering mass of human weariness, of bestiality, of unmerited dolour, of hopeless hope, of crushed surrender, tumbled together within those forbidding walls.

    ***
    There’s a funereal tone to the suite, fitting for its year of creation. Nick Drake, after recording hisfour last songs” in February, died in November. Duke Ellington died in May. Archigram closed. Candy Darling died, age 25. Gene Ammons recorded Goodbye and departed. It was the year of Shostakovitch’s last quartet, Syd Barrett’s last-ever studio session. All that came out of the latter were a few brief guitar pieces. One, known as “If You Go #2,” (3:00 in the preceding link) is a jaunty hint of a song, incidental music for an impossible life.

    ***
    Bowie’s guitar keeps to the margins until “Candidate,” when begins to cut into the vocal, like an increasingly belligerent drunken party guest. Crude and insistent, possessed by an appalling truth. At first confined to the right speaker, the guitar starts bleeding through. Bowie’s vocal starts matching the guitar’s tone, his phrasing mimicking the riffing.

    ***
    Making bullet-proof faces, Charlie Manson, Cassius Clay. 1974 was the wake for the Sixties. Everyone came wearing tatters or suits: they dressed as the person they pretended they once were. Bob Dylan and the Band, touring North America early in ’74, played songs that had earned boos and jeers in ’66, but the songs had become, blessed by time, victory anthems. Dylan sang in a bellow: he might as well have used a bullhorn. He played “All Along the Watchtower” in Boston as if he meant to roust Hendrix from the grave.

    ***
    Bowie tugs and tears at words, particularly in “Sweet Thing”‘s first verse (“see that I’m scared and I’m lonely“), while he tumbles out other phrases in a bushel (“where the knowing one says” is muttered over three beats). In “Candidate,” the hustler starts out all business, with Bowie sounding confident, even wry, but as the verses keep coming, and he’s not closing the sale, he grows more desperate. He sounds as though he’s suppressing screams: his vocal becomes a run of slurs, colliding syllables, forced marriages of words not meant to rhyme (he mates “shop on” with “papier”). The “Sweet Thing” chorus returns, now only four bars long and taken at a hurried, less alluring pace—time’s running out. When it’s good, it’s really good, and when it’s bad I go to pieces. The merchant at the mercy of his customer.

    ***
    Margaret Thatcher, in 1982, was Lent to the past Carnival: We are reaping what was sown in the sixties…fashionable theories and permissive claptrap set the scene for a society in which old values of discipline and restraint were denigrated.

    ***
    Holly Woodlawn to the dying Candy Darling: “It’s okay, hon…you don’t have to talk. I know you’re tired.”

    Candy: “Yeah. Putting on lipstick…it really takes it out of me.”

    ***
    Mike Garson’s piano gives the second verse of “Sweet Thing” a few moments of grace and levity. The little winking run of notes after “you’re older than me,” the shards of melodies he plays in the spaces Bowie takes to breathe.

    ***
    Do you think that your face looks the same? There’s pity in Bowie’s voice here.

    [​IMG]

    On the whole there’s only room for two views in this country.

    Education Secretary Thatcher’s election-night commentary, 28 February 1974.

    ***
    “Candidate” is utterly essential to the suite, its centerpiece, and it also could be excised completely and you would never know it had existed. Play “Sweet Thing” and the Reprise back-to-back and it’s a near-seamless transition. “Candidate” is an outgrowth of “Sweet Thing”‘s chorus, as it’s built on the same chords (D minor, A minor, G); it’s also the inverse of the earlier song—mainly two long verses (24 bars), two brief 4-bar choruses.

    ***
    James Thomson, in The Doom of a City (1857), came to the City of the Dead: The mighty City in vast silence slept,/dreaming away its tumult toil and strife…Within a buried City’s maze of stone; Whose peopling corpses, while they ever dream/Of birth and death—of complicated life/Whose days and months and years/Are wild with laughter, groans and tears/As with themselves and Doom…

    ***
    My set is amazing, it even smells like a street. Bowie spent some time obsessively but fruitlessly working on test footage for a Diamond Dogs movie as a daytime distraction from his drinking and drugging social circle at the time (Bowie claims that some of the footage features an impatient John Lennon in the background, berating him with the words “What the bloody hell are you doing, Bowie, all this mutant crap?”, as Bowie tinkers with a clay model of Hunger City, the album’s post-apocalyptic setting). John Tatlock, on “Cracked Actor.”

    ***
    Live, “Candidate” was introduced by Earl Slick’s guitar and David Sanborn’s saxophone, two peacock performances. On record, Bowie’s guitar solo that closes out “Sweet Thing” is far cruder yet more compelling: a hustler with grand ambitions.

    ***
    To Thomas Hardy, London was a Wheel and a Beast. (George Whitter Sherman.)

    ***
    The chorus of “Sweet Thing” is sung by a set of typical Bowie grotesques. The somber bass voices overtopped by tenors. The croaking flat voice that seems most prominent when you’re half-listening. A set of gargoyles, arranged as though on the parapet of a cathedral.

    ***
    Later in the night Thomson returned home to his own city. Its awfulness of life oppressed my soul; the very air appeared no longer free/but dense and sultry in the close control/of such a mighty cloud of human breath.

    ***
    “Sweet Thing (Reprise)” offers just one verse: it’s one of the loveliest things Bowie ever recorded, and it pays homage to cocaine, submits to the cruelties of the street. The hustler’s closed the deal at last, and the city takes another victim. It’s got claws, it’s got me, it’s got you. The soaring final notes are reminiscent of “Life on Mars,” whose empathy, grace and beauty “Sweet Thing” suggests were all just vicious lies.

    ***
    We’ll buy some drugs and watch a band/then jump in the river holding hands.

    [​IMG]

    Recorded January-February 1974. The entire suite was performed during the “Diamond Dogs” tour of summer ’74, and never again. A new edit of “Candidate” was made for Patrice Chéreau’s 2001 film Intimacy.

    Top and bottom: “Bruce,” “Maggie Sollars, Brixton, 1974”; Middle: Ted Heath faces the public, 28 February 1974.

    Sweet Thing—Candidate—Sweet Thing (Reprise)
     
  11. rstamberg

    rstamberg Senior Member

    Location:
    Riverside, CT
    DIAMOND DOGS was my first Bowie LP back in May 1974, so it's a big favorite here. So many great tracks. I remember my mom taking copy after copy back to Korvettes every day for like a week because the opening track kept skipping on my el-cheapo stereo at the time. Wonder what she must've thought of the cover ... lol.
     
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  12. Snow2

    Snow2 Forum Resident

    Location:
    Long Eaton
    I think this is Bowie's greatest album - and bearing in mind the quality of Ziggy, Hunk Dory, Low etc that is saying something.

    Rebel Rebel is irresistible, We are the Dead and Big Brother are lyrically sublime - great atmosphere, the title track is fun and, as an earlier poster said, Sweet Thing is one of the greatest songs he ever composed.

    A classic :)
     
    oldturkey likes this.
  13. Dave Thompson

    Dave Thompson Forum Resident

    Agreed. Lyrically, it's way up there... (with We Are The Dead a very close second)
     
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  14. Horse Majeure

    Horse Majeure Forum Resident

    Location:
    Uleaborg
    Just ok.
     
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  15. yesstiles

    yesstiles Senior Member

    I find only the long title track to have muddy production that could have been improved. The rest of the album sounds wonderful imo.
     
  16. Jacline

    Jacline Forum Resident

    Location:
    Real, Real Gone
    I can't help myself, because I'm a huge fan of Chris O’Leary and friends: this analysis that Sid Harta posted was copied-and-pasted from the Pushing Ahead of the Dame website. The whole thing.

    I know the last link in Sid's post will get you to the official website (I'm not sure if he knows, though?), but I wanted to spell it out and acknowledge the source.

    It's the best Bowie site on Mars. :) Every fan should visit.
    Pushing Ahead of the Dame

    EDIT: Diamond Dogs is "a true classic" for me. :thumbsup:
     
    Last edited: Jun 24, 2017
  17. Schoolmaster Bones

    Schoolmaster Bones Poe's Lawyer

    Location:
    ‎The Midwest
    Yes, I put that link at the end - and prefaced the other cut-and-paste of "Big Brother" (previous page) with an acknowledgement.

    Credit where credit is due. O'Leary's analyses are brilliant.

    Always a treat to see Giulietta Masina in an avatar.
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Jun 24, 2017
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  18. Jacline

    Jacline Forum Resident

    Location:
    Real, Real Gone
    Thank you, Sid.
     
  19. Paul Saldana

    Paul Saldana jazz vinyl addict

    Location:
    SE USA (TN-GA-FL)
    My favorite Bowie album.
     
    Haristar likes this.
  20. karmaman

    karmaman Forum Resident

    one of his daftest lyrics, it was never going to make the cut. Brendan Benson does a good faithful cover of this track.
     
  21. oldturkey

    oldturkey Forum Resident

    Location:
    Gone away.
    The lyrics are what makes it such a stand out though! I really am amazed he allowed it to be released, but I'm glad he did.
    " I make it a thing to glance in window panes and look pleased with myself...Yeah!" Wonderful.
     
  22. karmaman

    karmaman Forum Resident

    you picked the one reasonable line. the rest is most likely the cut-up technique mixed with some cheap lurid rhymes that he would have eventually replaced with something better.
    superficially enjoyable track but it makes Velvet Goldmine look like a work of literary genius.
     
    3rd Uncle Bob likes this.
  23. oldturkey

    oldturkey Forum Resident

    Location:
    Gone away.
    You won't put me off it!
    I know what you're saying - the lyrics are very teenage boy - but it is a rarely seen side of Bowie. I really love this outtake.
     
    yesstiles and NightGoatToCairo like this.
  24. CBS 65780

    CBS 65780 "Could I do one more immediately?"

    Location:
    Dublin, Ireland
    Fuc*ing awesome!
     
  25. Bobby Morrow

    Bobby Morrow Senior Member

    What's the most recent remaster like? I never cared for the 1999 CD.

    Amazon UK have the 2017 CD version for £35. That can't be right, can it?
     

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