My final extended Bowie thought, at least, for now.
It started to sink in a little more last night, but to sink in in a way that made it clear that there is no such thing â there never is â as closure. Thatâs too easy a word, too quick. Itâs used as bandaid or sometimes as hope that pain â often someone elseâs pain â goes away, or doesnât become an issue. Iâm old enough now to know that people always come back to mind, that regrets always linger. Last words unspoken, last feelings cleared up. Tell me I need to have closure over those I could count in my head who should still be here, or who, if they passed for no other reason than time and age, still seem like they should be here, and I will shake my head. It will bubble up as it does, brief moments of reminding, then we go on, and another moment, at some point in the future, will hit.
But those are people I knew and loved and spoke with and more, relatives or dear friends. What of a man who I rode a bus with once to a promo show, saw another time at a distance across an arena floor, and no more?
Kate, I hope, will not mind if I could simply say that, as she described it, we sense what is happening because what happens when the hero for our heroes has passed? And thatâs a profound but true thought. I think of all the messages and emotions from so many artists who I love and follow, and who counted him as a lodestone. Then there were the ones who I didnât fully appreciate felt that deeply until after the fact, tracing back earlier comments, acknowledgments, covers. Not just musicians. NEVER just musicians.
I must be blunt for a moment, though â very blunt. Turning over in my head who will get this kind of coverage, reaction, when the end comes for them. The surviving Beatles? Mick, Keith? Chuck Berry? Little Richard? Diana Ross? Dylan? Aretha?
For Aretha and Diana, I couldnât ask for more. I mean, assuming you have a pulse. For Chuck and Little Richard, of course as well. Those are some building blocks right there.
But for the othersâŠtheyâll get that attention. But I wonât feel it as deeply. I wonât post as much. I wonât have that dug so deeply into my brain. And I wonât find so many of my waking moments so consumed, so thoroughly, for so long already.
Itâs not just Kate and I feeling it, and we are. Iâm reading those stories, some of which Iâve linked, others of which Iâve just read and thought about. Weâre almost questioning ourselves. Why SO deeply? Is it simply the surprise and shock? Nobody was thinking of it beyond the deepest of Bowieâs inner circles until a mere 72 hours ago or so. Lemmyâs passing, though deeply felt and truly upsetting, also, simply, wasnât surprising. Bowieâs, at least, we could pretend a bit, or pretend a lot. He might simply have just been haggard, had a bad bout with something, still recovering slowly. But no.
Itâs not just that though.
Turning back to my other musical comparison points â Bowie hiimself would laugh. Fans of them all, to the core. Had he been here when any of them had gone, his grief would, I think, have been profound â they were among his own many lodestones already. Imagine asking Bowie to consider living in a world without Dylan! He wouldnât have imagined it, or wouldnât want to have had. Imagine him getting up of a morning and going âDylanâs goneâŠâ and just shaking his head in confusion. Nothing more to hear.
Thatâs how I feel right now. Thatâs how a lot of us do. And we just donât want to, but here we are.
Bowie was never my âfavoriteâ artist if you had to quantify things that way. Hell for the longest time I said it was MBV, and I think it still is. But I think of the umbrella under which so much opened and was included â thereâs no real throughline between the two artists, entirely, but there are refractions, connections that glance. A band like MBV makes sense in a world that Bowieâs in than without.
He passed for normal. He was lucky, wasnât he. White, male, could play straight. Almost ridiculously good looking. All those built in advantages in this world; add in the accent for those away from home too. Canât handwave it, canât try. But he didnât stay there, in what could have been expected him. He could have been normal. And normal doesnât mean something cruel to suffer. When he spoke of addiction, of mental instability, part of it might have been from fascination, but a larger part was probably fear. Time helped him there, that the art that resulted from it was one thing but the actual state of being was another.
So the real gateways were something else. Not always smooth, not always without hurt to himself â or to others, let us be frank. (Let us ALWAYS be frank.) The sex, the drugs, the rock and roll, yes yes. But the images, the art, the lyrics, the books, the authors, the filmmakers, the painters, the dancers, the designers, the photographers, the translators of impulse and talent and hard-won skill. How many did he endlessly explore and credit and reference and connect with and build upon and share outward? How many did he in fact not keep for himself, where most would simply think âWell that was niceâ and leave it at that.
And how many of those he discovered and enthused and shared about escaped new canons and standards in turn as a result? Bowie never seemed to draw a line and say that that was that. The high and the low always seemed to mix and match with him, a product of the music hall, of the legacy of Eton and Oxford, of neither. The great, strangely glorious potential of the middle, the suburban kid made good. As I mentioned soon after his passing, do not forget his upbringing but neither his good fortune and good luck to be born in a society that, at least at the time, thought âYes, expanding education and opportunity to all, thatâs a good idea. Letâs break some chains, via social commitment to offering possibilities.â Bowie the great individualist but Bowie the product of a wider churn, always the two intertwining.
For those who felt it â not everyone, of course â we see in Bowie the eternal possibilities. The reinvention that became a cliche but was always a reinvention, the cliche we wanted to have happen. If he was trapped by the amber of the seemingly perfect 1970s for him where everything that followed was either simply good or not as good, then that was because others were writing his stories and fitting them into place. âRemind us of when we were young and no more! Only the old glories.â Meantime the disciples emerged and they always seemed to keep emerging over each generation, sometimes from very odd corners indeed. And maybe they locked into one thing Bowie did. Maybe they locked into another. Maybe it was a melange. Maybe it wasnât even any one thing but just the example. He played it at putting it all behind him, let it creep back in but never felt totally obligated to say âYes, youâre right, it was just the Ziggy stuff.â Or âJust the Berlin stuff.â He had all these songs that connected and the tribe was the one that didnât want to be in a tribe, but then again, he wanted them to connect nonetheless, and not just to the tribeless. But he never turned his back on the tribeless in turn.
The love is sometimes contextual. Sometimes very specific. Those seventies kids who suddenly had a figure, ivory and made-up, telling them his truth â at least at the time â about sex, gender, art, thatâs a door burst open I never needed to have happen for me, in my slow accretion and general sense that I was, at heart, awfully normal indeed. I could just enjoy him. I didnât need to have a reason to live from him. And yet then why I am crushed, still?
Time, as he once sang. Time. Never enough of it. I wanted more, selfishly. I wanted more music. More thoughts. More inspirations and more surprises. But I didnât even want him to do anything, to do things for me. I just wanted him alive, and happy. Why not enjoy his gains? The man who sold the world? The man who beat the system. I have a secret wish: that in his last months, if he felt he wanted to do so, that he destroyed his archives. Cruel to say: Chris O'Leary already spoke about how he hopes thereâs songs and songs to come. But if it turns out Bowie wanted nothing to survive beyond whatâs already there, Iâd be at peace. Whatever worked for him.
But this presumed I wanted him dead. I wanted him alive so he could talk with his son as he felt, see what films he had yet to make. So he could enjoy life with his wife and ask himself, as he almost certainly did, as any couple so well set together does, how he got so fortunate. So he could enjoy whatever his daughter wanted to do next in life as high school wound on to it end. So he could just read, and sing, and paint, and watch, and talk, and enjoy.
I want that for everyone, in this horrible hard world without guarantees. Nearly all are strangers to me. But he flipped some switches almost nobody else did, and embraced things almost nobody else in his line seemed to even want to try to acknowledge. Thatâs why a guy I rode on a bus with once and then saw again across an arena floor and never spoke to resonated with me so hard.
Imperfect, yes. But Iâll accept that over the possibility of perfection that is only a dream and chimera. No alien, no starman, simply human. Owen Pallett called him 'the fly in the ointmentâ in how he combined and recombined his musical collaborators and created things that wouldnât have resulted without him, that he could never have done on his own. Thatâs what he did in general, though, didnât he? The fly who came in, stirred things up, caused things to be a little bit wrong - and then it all went from there.
The exact reality of what happened to him in those last days is something only for his family and closest. They will share as they choose, if they choose. I will accept the image instead.
In the end he saw the black star, he sang his laments and left his final words, then he rose from the bed and went into the wardrobe, and farewell.
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