#the supermen

[jt1674]

Visit Original Link

[jdubleyou]

Rest Easy to Brooklyn's Finest, God's Favorite DJ, and good human, Clark Kent. 🎧🕊️❤️

[eviltothecore13]

WIP Wednesday

Unfortunately I didn’t have time to write or to read fanfic today...but here’s a snippet (unbetaed) from Chapter 10 of The Supermen.

Wesker ran up the lower slopes of the mountain; it was practically effortless at first, but the mountain became steeper as he got higher up, and soon he found the only way up was a vertical rock face. He ran towards it and jumped, grabbing onto a handhold halfway up, and started to climb.

The rush of air alerted him to the arrow flying towards him just in time. Wesker reached to one side for another handhold, pulling himself out of the arrow’s path—it hit the rock face next to him and bounced off. He looked over his shoulder to see where the arrow had come from.

At first, there seemed to be no-one in sight. It was the glint of starlight off the Assassin’s bow that gave away their position as they crouched behind a rock on a wide ledge halfway up the rock face.

Wesker climbed across the rock face towards the Assassin, and landed on the rock they were hiding behind just as they were preparing to shoot another arrow. They stood up, backing away as fast as they could.

[bowietracks]

Santa Monica’s Civic Auditorium: 20 October 1972. Bowie’s first US tour for The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972). And the gig is being recorded for KMET FM’s radio broadcast. It’s earliest official live recording (but won’t be officially released until his fifth live album in 2008). The fourth song of the set is one of two tracks taken from The Man Who Sold the World (1970 US / 1971 UK): The Supermen. It’s a very different version of the track than that on the album, although Bowie had been playing it this way for some time, since the Hunky Dory (1971) era. There are even two radio session recordings from June and October 1971 (the first live, the second studio). Furthermore, there is the rerecording of this new arrangement of track later that year for The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, although – of course – it didn’t make the final cut of the album, but instead was included on the compilation Revelations: A Musical Anthology for Glastonbury in April 1972.

Written by David Bowie. Recorded 20 October 1972. Officially released 30 June 2008. Available on Live Santa Monica '72 (2008).

[ziggyreturns-blog]

B O W I E

[eviltothecore13]

The Supermen, Chapter 9

Apparently I forgot to post a link to this.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/19224067/chapters/56470129

I updated! Should hopefully be able to update a bit more often from now on as well.

Thanks @tafferfield for beta reading.

Also tw for flashbacks and general trauma in this chapter. Apparently dragging yourself out of a volcano messes you up. Who knew?

[bowietracks]

Only a wee moment here of The Supermen, in its post-The Man Who Sold the World reworking. The footage comes from Mick Rock’s filming of Bowie and the Spiders at Dunstable Civic Hall on 21 June 1972. While there is footage of most of the songs, much of this varies in length from 10 or 15 seconds to a two or so minutes (in fact, only Ziggy Stardust has enough footage to be edited into a whole). The footage is silent too, so the sound is taken from bootlegs that exist for other concerts at around the same time. Nonetheless, anything from this time, just as Bowie was becoming famous, is a gem that we are lucky to have found.

Written by David Bowie. Filmed 21 June 1972: visuals only, sound taken from bootleg of around same time. Unbroadcast. Available on Youtube.

[bowietracks]

The Supermen is the oldest Bowie song played at this live BBC Radio Session, bar the covers, as most of the other tunes had been composed during the first half of the year. It’s the third track of a set which is billed as David Bowie and Friends for John Peel’s In Concert broadcast of March ’71. Bowie is joined on stage at London’s Paris Cinema Studios by his new band (what would become the Spiders), other members of his side project The Arnold Corns, and some more guests – and are performing in front of a small audience. This version of The Supermen is a stripped down affair, acoustic verses, electric chorus, no mid-section with guitar solo, no outro – done. In other words, very different from the version that appeared on The Man Who Sold the World album. A fleet of foot, minimalist take on the epic, Wagnerian original. It is worth noting, that while that album had been recorded over a year before, and released in the USA in November 1970, the UK version was just out a couple of months ago in April 1971. I guess, for Bowie, this is the song from that album which still captured his imagination. And in this new form, it is gonna be played on another BBC Radio session a few months later, and be re-recorded during the first Ziggy Stardust album session in November – although it, along with most of the other tracks from that, will be dropped.

You can hear this track by going to 7’52”, if the play at time code doesn’t work:

Written by David Bowie. Recorded 3 June 1971. Broadcast 20 June 1971. Available on bootlegs.