Of course I had a GBV related post all ready for my first FMD and then David Bowie surprisingly died, meaning I had to switch things up to recognize his role in my love of music while writing the first post-Bowie FMD in WGOM history.
There’s probably only a few of us citizens old enough to grow up on albums. I’ve told my son many times that when I hung out with friends, we didn’t play video games, we played albums. We would bring our records over to a friend’s house and just listen to music. Not only did we listen to music, but we would spend hours looking at the album covers and reading liner notes. I was lucky in that I had a friend who’s parents weren’t home a whole lot and had older siblings, meaning access to lots of music and hours of unsupervised pot smoking and album cover gazing. David Bowie took up a lot of those hours.
My two favorite Bowie albums were David Live and Ziggy Stardust. Bowie looked so cool on that live album cover and the songs were great live. Ziggy Stardust was mindblowing of course and to this day remains one of my favorite albums. We spent hours trying to figure out that album cover and contemplating the songs. It was heady and it rocked. I’ve always been a Bowie song guy, not so much an album guy, but Ziggy Stardust is something else.
When we were doing college visits with my son, I played a bunch of Bowie in the car and then we had dinner with some of my college friends in Chicago. Charlie was both blown away by the songs and our in-depth discussion of the different Bowie personas. How freaky he was and how damn cool he was. Boys and girls both wanted to sleep with Bowie and who could blame them? Charlie became a fan that weekend.
Charlie is now in Norway for Study Abroad and this past Monday morning, I wake up and before I turn on the radio, I notice I had gotten a text in the middle of the night. It was Charlie texting from Bergen telling me Bowie was dead. Even though he knew I was sleeping, he had to reach out to experience our shared grief. Thanks Bowie you freaky handsome musical genius. The stars do look very different today.
Drop your lists.