The Man Who Sold the World by Peter Doggett Page A

Visconti), tonally rich and extravagant to the point that it sapped the drama from the story. This time Bowie’s voice cracked emotionally on the final line, but it was a gesture too far, the wave of an actor’s hand.
    The spare original arrangement was issued as the B-side to “Space Oddity” [1] on July 11, 1969. “Never have I been so flipped out about a single,” enthused one of Mercury Records’ US executives. But he warned: “I’ve been quite concerned about the record’s ending. I’ve been worried that some programmers might not play it, what with the space shot and all.” In America, the single’s negative slant on the space mission smothered its commercial prospects; in Britain it took seven weeks to make the Top 50 sales chart. By then, Bowie’s enthusiasm for his success had been jolted by the unexpected death of his father on August 5. “David’s career would have turned out differently had his father lived,” Kenneth Pitt reflected later. “[John Jones] would have [been] the moderating influence David needed.”
    Â 
    [8] CYGNET COMMITTEE
    (Bowie)
    Recorded August–September 1969; David Bowie [Space Oddity] LP
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    Written almost simultaneously, “Cygnet Committee” and “Memory of a Free Festival” [9] documented the extremes of Bowie’s reaction to the hippie movement, and his Arts Lab experiment as a microcosm of that ideal. “Here we are in Beckenham,” he said as “Space Oddity” [1] was released, “with a group of people creating their own momentum without the slightest concern for attitudes, tradition or pre-ordained moralities. It’s alive, healthy and new, and it matters to me more than anything else.” In September, as “Space Oddity” finally charted, three months after it was released, he was still suffused with optimism: “I run an Arts Lab which is my chief occupation. I think it’s the best in the country. There isn’t one pseud involved. All the people are real—like labourers or bank clerks.” Yet by the end of the month he had completed this long, near-hysterical account of betrayal, disillusion, greed, and defiant individualism, which completed one side of his album, while his radiant-eyed account of the Arts Lab festival closed the other.
    By November, he was declaring that the hippie movement was dead, * its followers “materialistic and selfish.” “These people,” he said dismissively, “they’re so apathetic, so lethargic. The laziest people I’ve met in my life.” Hippies were no more motivated than anyone else: everyone was “crying out for a leader.” Like Bob Dylan, who was fighting off all attempts to co-opt him as the figurehead of a countercultural revolution, Bowie wanted nothing more than to be allowed to live. That single word, screeched over and over like a victim’s final cry for help, provided the climax to a song that cast off the comfortable slogans of the counterculture, the catchphrases of the Beatles or the MC5 that were bandied around the underground press as gestures of solidarity. A year later, in a song Bowie much admired (“God”), John Lennon compressed the death of idealism into a single phrase: “The dream is over.” Bowie, still grieving for Hermione and his recently deceased father, struggling to adjust to the commercial recognition that had been his sole aim since 1963, needed more than nine minutes to spit out the emotional debris. * In interviews before his father’s death, Bowie talked warmly of what “we” could achieve with the Arts Lab. After his bereavement, Bowie was a defiantly singular “I.”
    His vehicle, ironically, was a remnant of the dream, as—following a brief prelude, which sounded as if the musicians were uncurling themselves after long hibernation—“Cygnet Committee” was constructed around