With the David Bowie reissue campaign still at a standstill – it’s been six years since Station to Station got the box set treatment – a new series of sets is sort of filling the gap, but not really. Five Years, which came out last year, was all the Ziggy-era albums and a bonus disc of stuff you already heard if you owned the Rykodisc or early 2000s reissues: single mixes, b-sides, a couple non-album tracks. Ho-hum.
Between 1974 and 1976, Bowie made some good music, released a so-so live album and developed a coke habit of legendary proportions.
Who Can I Be Now, a new box set released by Parlophone, charts this mid-70s edition of Bowie. It’s tempting to say this period is overlooked, except it’s not really. Everybody knows about all the coked-out-in-LA stuff, and the weird movie he made and the even weirder shit about Jimmy Page trying to steal his soul or something.
Which is to say, there’s really not much new to say about this period.
It’s been covered to death. It’s been pressed to death, too. They’ve been issued, re-issued, then reissued again. They are: Diamond Dogs, David Live, Young Americans, and Station to Station. Now the albums are available again in at least their fourth iteration, in a deluxe box set currently retailing for $113.
All four of the records are, like anything Bowie did in the decade, well worth your time.
Some of them have slick funk guitar, others are driving rock or elaborate balladry. There are interesting touches in retrospect: you can hear hints of what’d go next among the touches of where he’d been. The funk guitar on Diamond Dogs, for example, which leads nicely into Young Americans and Station to Station. Meanwhile, the looping drone finish of “Chant of the Ever Circling Skeletal Family,” sounds like a nod to Eno’s similarly looped, droned-out “Here Come the Warm Jets,” and points a line towards his Berlin trilogy: Low, Heroes and Lodger. But really, you’ve heard almost all of this before.
What you haven’t heard is a long-lost album called The Gouster. In theory this sounds like a hell of a find, but in practice you’re hearing a rough draft of what eventually became Young Americans. The music on it is nice, and I suppose it’d be cool if “John I’m Only Dancing (Again)” was on a record, but when it’s held up against Young Americans, it’s obvious the right call was made. Young Americans is a stronger release: “Fame” is a killer jam and “Fascination” remains one of his strongest deep cuts.
The point of a box set is to keep stuff in copyright while enticing you to buy something you already own.
In this sense, Who Can I Be Now is a success: if you’re willing to drop over $100 on a Bowie box, you probably already own some of these albums already.
But the creative goal of a box set should be to add context: how something came together, how it sounded live and to flesh out the borders with colour and interest. Neil Young’s Decade presents his back catalogue in new, exciting contexts; Bruce Springsteen’s Live 1975-85 takes a decade of high-powered live performances and distills them into a breathtaking three-hour concert.
Conversely, Who Can I Be Now adds neither context nor colour. The Gouster only suggests the correct version was released. Perhaps the demos are tied up in legal issues, perhaps they’re waiting for the next round of box sets. But they’re out there and I’d have rather heard rough, working drafts of Young Americans than a polished version needing only a few tweaks.
The problems with Who Can I Be Now go deeper than just The Gouster.
There’s a bonus disc of redundant single edits. Two versions of David Live. Perhaps I’m nitpicking, but there was an entire extra CD’s worth of Diamond Dogs material on the 2004 reissue and almost none of it’s here. Where are the bonus tracks from the 90s reissues of Young Americans? Where’s “After Today” or “It’s Hard to Be A Saint in the City” which were on Sound + Vision? And what about still-unreleased stuff like the made-for-TV 1980 Floor Show or “A Lad In Vain”? As a whole, the set seems like double-dipping on a set already asking you to double-dip.
Essentially, Who Can I Be Now tries to have things both ways and ultimately comes up as neither. It’s neither a straight vinyl reissue or a creative box set. It tries to tell you a story, even offering slightly tweaked versions you can pick from, but this boxes audience has heard these stories before. And if there’s nothing new here to tell, why bother listening?