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

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

  1. Galeans

    Galeans Forum Resident

    Location:
    Italy
    Pretty great, worth recommending
     
  2. ATSMUSIC

    ATSMUSIC Senior Member

    Location:
    MD, USA
    Probably in my top 5 Bowie Albums
     
  3. Vaughan

    Vaughan Forum Resident

    Location:
    Essex, UK
    I've found Hours to be a real "mood album". If I'm in just the right spot, it's ace. If not, I'm struck by its lack of energy and its mournful tone.
     
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  4. strummer101

    strummer101 The insane on occasion aren't without their charms

    Location:
    Lakewood OH
    I think most of it is pretty good, a couple tunes are borderline great, and a couple tunes are great.
    But that's just my opinion and doesn't mean squat to anybody but me.
     
  5. Onrd

    Onrd I am not a number

    Most of my CDs (3,000 plus) are in storage now as I've moved the data onto file servers, so I can't readily locate it. I still haven't got around to putting my CD catalog onto Discogs - I just finished doing my vinyl and that took over 2 weeks.
    What I do remember is that I bought it at the Amsterdam airport right next to the porno section. The actual CD in the box was a West German pressing. If I do locate the CD I'll post the info you need.
     
  6. scobb

    scobb Forum Resident

    Location:
    Sydney, Australia
    Are you sure it wasn't the two disc 30th version? I specifically bought the made in Holland version because it wasn't incripted with tha horrible copy control that EMI were using at the time.
     
  7. Onrd

    Onrd I am not a number

    Definitely was one disc - I bought it in 1989 so it couldn't be the 30th version. I bought a Sgt Pepper at the same time that was in sleeve with a fairly large booklet - so obviously Amsterdam was getting variations that I never saw anywhere else in my travels.
     
  8. The Panda

    The Panda Forum Mutant

    Location:
    Marple, PA, USA
    I can't get into the ballads and God knows, I've tried for years. But the three fast songs are stone classics, among his best stuff.
    "As they pulled you out of the oxygen tent, you asked for the latest party" What an opening line for a song.
     
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  9. Haristar

    Haristar Apollo C. Vermouth Thread Starter

    Location:
    Hampshire, UK
    I love every line of that song. It's great.

    "Crawling down the alley on your hands and knees, it's clear you're not protected for it's plain to see"
     
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  10. Schoolmaster Bones

    Schoolmaster Bones Poe's Lawyer

    Location:
    ‎The Midwest
    A few more entries from Pushing Ahead of the Dame

    Future Legend

    [​IMG]

    Future Legend.

    It works ’cause we said it worked.

    John Lennon, 1980.

    The one-minute “Future Legend” is almost the entirety of the Diamond Dogs LP “concept.” Not for Bowie the libretto and motifs of Pete Townshend’s Quadrophenia, or the painstaking dreamscape theater of The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway. As a narrative, Diamond Dogs barely exists. Its story is told only in abstracts: the back cover and inner sleeve of the LP, and the record’s first two songs.

    Bowie neither had the time for nor the interest in making his songs a narrative, even a loose one. As he told William Burroughs, he got distracted easily, and while he seemed to like the idea of making odd concept records, he managed to avoid the grim business of actually having to write one. And time was pressing: Bowie was going on tour again in the spring of ’74, needed a new record, and didn’t have the material for an LP on the Diamond Dogs idea alone (hence the scrapped 1984 songs were used to fill a side).

    Bowie could argue he had a fine precedent: the king of all concept records, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. As John Lennon later said, Sgt. Pepper’s‘ “story arc” consists of the LP cover, the title song, maybe “With a Little Help From My Friends,” and then the “so-called reprise,” as Lennon described it, late on the second side. The rest of it was a set of random Beatles compositions: if they fit together, it was only because the listener wanted them to.

    So “Future Legend” is stage setting for an absent play, with the SF juvenilia of the lyric (“fleas the size of rats sucked on rats the size of cats,” etc.) set against a rolling scrim of ominous music—air raid sirens; dog howls; synthesizer washes; “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered” on electric guitar; what sounds like an impersonation of Scott Walker singing “Any Day Now”; lost children wailing in the streets. The obvious influence is the aural montage opening minutes of Lou Reed’s Berlin. “Future Legend” ends with canned applause and genocide.

    Recorded ca. mid-January 1974.

    -----------------------------------------

    Diamond Dogs

    [​IMG]

    Diamond Dogs.
    Diamond Dogs (live, 1974).
    Diamond Dogs (live, 1976).
    Diamond Dogs (live, 1996).
    Diamond Dogs (live, 2004).


    They’d taken over this barren city, this city that was falling apart. They’d been able to break into windows of jewelers and things, so they’d dressed themselves up in furs and diamonds. But they had snaggle-teeth, really filthy, kind of like vicious Oliver Twists. It was a take on, what if those guys had gone malicious, if Fagin’s gang had gone absolutely ape-****? They were living on the tops of buildings…they were all little Johnny Rottens and Sid Viciouses, really.

    David Bowie, on “Diamond Dogs,” 1993.

    Where I lived was with my dadda and mum in the flats of municipal flatblock 18A, between Kingsley Avenue and Wilsonway. I got to the big main door with no trouble, though I did pass one malchick sprawling and creeching and moaning in the gutter, all cut about lovely, and saw in the lamplight also streaks of blood here and there like signatures, my brothers, of the night’s fillying.

    Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange.

    “Diamond Dogs” has never sounded quite right: a sordid, overlong Rolling Stones imitation, someone else’s nightmare inflicted with malice upon you. As darkly comical as it is menacing, it’s a “classic rock” song overrun by grotesques (amputees in priest’s robes, Tod Browning rejects, various ultraviolences).

    Audiences didn’t know what to make of it. “Diamond Dogs” was Bowie’s least-successful single since the Hunky Dory days, reaching only #21 in the UK, and going nowhere in the States. On the radio, it never seems to segue well: it burlesques whatever song it follows or precedes. Leading off the second side of Bowie’s hits compilation, ChangesOneBowie, it was a wide moat of a groove, taking up the space of two less disturbing songs (I often skipped it, dropping the needle on “Rebel Rebel” instead). The track sounds used, repurposed, as though Bowie found an old master tape and overdubbed slurs and noises onto it.

    The germ of “Diamond Dogs” came from Bowie’s father, Haywood Jones, who had worked at Dr. Barnardo’s Homes, a British children’s charity. Jones had recounted to his son stories of the Homes’ founder, Dr. Barnardo, and his patron, Lord Shaftesbury, who had gone around Victorian London finding bands of homeless children living on the roofs of buildings. Bowie transposed that image into his now-standard future dystopia, turning the Victorian “ragged boys” into”diamond dogs”: a pack of feral kids living on high-rise roofs, going around on roller skates, robbing and mugging, terrorizing the corpse-strewn streets they live above.

    A Clockwork Orange was again central (see “Suffragette City”), not only in Bowie’s droogs-like “Dogs” and their Alex-like leader, Halloween Jack, but in the song’s setting—a ruined, post-apocalyptic modernist building. It could be set in a more decayed Thamesmead South estate where Stanley Kubrick shot Clockwork Orange (or Alton West, which Truffaut used for Fahrenheit 451, or La Défense, playing a future city in Godard’s Alphaville, etc.).

    Each day the towers of central London seemed slightly more distant, the landscape of an abandoned planet receding slowly from his mind.

    JG Ballard, High-Rise.

    Watching films from the early ’70s, you can’t avoid the general sense of shabbiness, regardless of where the films were shot. Take one contemporary example, Hal Ashby’s The Last Detail, which is a guided tour of blighted Atlantic Coast America, from Philadelphia slums to New York whorehouses to empty Boston parks. It’s decay worsened by the knowledge that the run-down train stations, corner stores and row houses were once clean, stylish, even modern places. Enduring the Seventies meant living in the ruins of the postwar dream of general prosperity, particularly in the cities, which were more and more depicted in films and in the press as asylums, graveyards and prisons.

    But “Diamond Dogs,” set in appalling urban ruins, isn’t a despairing song in the slightest. It’s full of vitality, cheap loud tricks, carnival horns, vulgarities, hammering beats (take the way someone keeps thwacking on a cowbell for the nearly the entire track). It makes do with style, it makes playtime out of collapse. The elevator’s shot, so Halloween Jack swings by a rope, Tarzan-style, to reach the street.

    The song seems to predict JG Ballard’s High Rise, published the following year, in which residents of a high-rise apartment complex fall into tribalism and warfare. But the high-rise dwellers come to love their new condition: they stop going to work, devoting all their energies to feral pleasures, devolving into hunter-gatherers. It ends with one survivor watching the lights go out in a neighboring high-rise, which makes him happy. He’s “ready to welcome them to their new world.” Bowie was already there.

    [​IMG]

    In the year of the scavenger: “Diamond Dogs” is made partly out of stolen goods. It opens with applause lifted from the Faces’ live album Coast to Coast (you can hear Rod Stewart yell “hey” just as the guitar riffs kick in), and towards the end there’s a blatant rip of Bobby Keyes’ saxophone line on the Stones’ “Brown Sugar.” Bowie’s main guitar line might well be a rewrite of the Stones’ “It’s Only Rock ‘n Roll (But I Like It),” which was born out of a jam session that Bowie took part in. The track ends with Bowie furiously chording on a Bo Diddley riff.

    Like “Rebel Rebel” it’s structurally simple, a standard I-IV-V rock song (it’s in A major, and the verses mainly go from the tonic, A, to the dominant, E, while the choruses are basically repetitions of D-A-B, ending back in A) with, as in “Rebel,” two verses, a bridge (6 bars here, starting with “I’ll keep a friend serene”) and ending with an extended chorus.

    Bowie sings with exuberance, sometimes ranging widely (“Tod Browning’s freak you was” falls an octave in a single bar), sometimes digging in place (“crawling down the alley on your/hands and knee” is all one note). His guitar work is primitive and brutal, and mixed to be inescapable—as ace commenter Snoball wrote in the “Rebel Rebel” entry, Diamond Dogs tracks like “Rebel” (and “Dogs”) are filled with Bowie’s sledgehammer riffing, lacking the tension-and-release precision of Mick Ronson’s work.

    “Diamond Dogs” swims in ugliness (it’s grotesquely funny, too: take how Bowie, having introduced his first character, a genderless amputee dressed in a priest’s costume, has her/him “crawling down the alley on your hands and knee) and it makes no concessions. If there was ever an irony in dancing to a Stones song like “Brown Sugar,” a party song celebrating slavery,”Diamond Dogs” raises the ante—on its face, it’s completely unredeemable, a honky-tonk celebration of death, decay and violence. Over the years, it’s become one of Bowie’s beloved standards.

    Recorded (initially as “Diamond Dawgs”) from 15 January to mid-February 1974. Released as a single (RCA APBO 0293, c/w “Holy Holy”) in June. Performed, no surprise, throughout the “Diamond Dogs” and “Philly Dogs” tours of 1974, and also in 1976. Retired for two decades, then played in some of Bowie’s recent tours.

    For SEP, as this is her favorite Bowie song.

    Recommended reading: Ballard’s High-Rise, 1975; Thomas M. Disch’s 334, 1972; Owen Hatherley’s excellent Militant Modernism.

    blog: Diamond Dogs: 1974 | Pushing Ahead of the Dame
     
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  11. texquad

    texquad Senior Member

    Location:
    Home of The Alamo
    Best tracks are Rebel Rebel (although single version is better) and 1984 which in my opinion is a standout track. I used to have a bootleg with I believe was the Midnight Special version which if I remember was a different version and quite good.
     
  12. johnnyyen

    johnnyyen Senior Member

    Location:
    Scotland
    I would also add Harlan Ellison's "A Boy And His Dog" in the essential reading section. Along with 1984, it was a key influence on the album.

    A Boy and His Dog - Wikipedia
     
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  13. timind

    timind phorum rezident

    I still have this on vinyl and should maybe listen to it. Nah, didn't care for it when it came out and no reason I'd change my mind. Probably in perfect shape though, as it spent very little time on the table.
     
  14. The Panda

    The Panda Forum Mutant

    Location:
    Marple, PA, USA
    That was Dodo with 1984 bracketing it as like a prelude and coda. It was excellent, I agree. Had boot of that version for years and played it for many people who wanted tapes.
     
  15. Schoolmaster Bones

    Schoolmaster Bones Poe's Lawyer

    Location:
    ‎The Midwest
    The important thing is that you kept it for 43 years, and it's in perfect shape. This is why I love audiophiles.
     
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  16. Tsomi

    Tsomi Forum Resident

    Location:
    Lille, France
    I prefer the subsequent two efforts over Diamond Dogs, but it still has its charm.

    Sweet Thing / Candidate / Sweet Things (Reprise) has its moments, but it sometimes sounds a bit like a bloated-pretentious-concept-proggish thing, to me. I don't really like Bowie trying to sound serious, that's why I don't enjoy Heathen either. I think I prefer the weird "simplicity" of Alternative Candidate.

    I do love the experimental studio work, the weird sound, and the fact that Bowie was moving on. And I really enjoy this album when there's rain and thunder. Good mood.
     
  17. C6H12O6

    C6H12O6 Senior Member

    Location:
    My lab
    I wish he did this with the Spiders from Mars, it would've been a nice send-off to them and going by the "original" version of "1984/Dodo" with Ronson's "Shaft"-like fills, it would've improved the album.
     
  18. timind

    timind phorum rezident

    You'd be listening to it today if you were in Indiana.:wave:
     
  19. Vaughan

    Vaughan Forum Resident

    Location:
    Essex, UK
    Any book by JG Ballard is worth reading. Mind, he's my favorite author. High Rise is, of course, also a movie.
     
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  20. texquad

    texquad Senior Member

    Location:
    Home of The Alamo
    I just watched that song on the Midnight Special performance and was surprised to see Rono and Trevor on stage. I guess this was the transition phase.
     
  21. yesstiles

    yesstiles Senior Member

    Wow, is that the lyric? I always thought it was: "...protected for this fantasy."
     
  22. sunspot42

    sunspot42 Forum Resident

    Location:
    San Francisco
    Wasn't the 1980 Floor Show the last gig he played with Ronson?
     
  23. Haristar

    Haristar Apollo C. Vermouth Thread Starter

    Location:
    Hampshire, UK
  24. karmaman

    karmaman Forum Resident

    it's actually only part of the sentence which the next line completes...

    "Crawling down the alley on your hands and knee*,
    I'm sure you're not protected for it's plain to see
    that Diamond Dogs are poachers and they hide behind trees.
    Hunt you to the ground they will, mannequins with kill appeal."

    * yes, knee singular!
     
  25. hazard

    hazard Forum Resident

    I loved hearing Starman on the radio when I was a boy, but Diamond Dogs was the first Bowie album I heard in full when one of my school mates bought the album. I didn't know about Mick Ronson so i didnt miss him and immediately loved the album. Over 40 years later this album still thrills me from start to finish. Every track is great for me. Essential listening!
     

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