Changes – David Bowie (1971)

An irresitible, self-aware manifesto for a career which came wonderfully true, Changes features probably the best known stutter in pop music.

Welcome to the first single-song edition of WIS where, after changing the format, there wasn’t really any other song I was going to choose to kick it off. The Dame is out in front in the WIS frequent flyer list and the choice of this tune will keep him up there. The majority of his nine appearances so far have been songs from his… erm… golden years in the 70s but this is the first time I’ve gone as far back as 1971’s Hunky Dory album to lift a track.

Spurred on by US interest in his 1970 LP The Man Who Sold The World, Bowie had spent time in the States and indulged his interest in Bob Dylan, Andy Warhol and Lou Reed. He returned to his Haddon Hall flat in London and wrote over thirty new songs, mostly using his piano. He gifted Oh! You Pretty Things to Peter Noone of Herman’s Hermits who released it as a single with Bowie on the piano and even appearing with him on Top Of The Pops – the footage is sadly lost now. The single reached No 12 in the UK charts and I vividly recall as a 11-year-old being captivated by the lyrical imagery of that “crack in the sky and a hand reaching down to me”.

Bowie then began recording the tracks that would form Hunky Dory in Trident Studios in London with Ken Scott co-producing. Bowie had brought together the musicians who would go on to be his Spiders From Mars band (Mick Ronson, Trevor Bolder and Woody Woodmansey) but he also hired noted session musician and future caped prog-rocker Rick Wakeman to play keyboards. He had previously contributed the Mellotron “lift-off” part to Bowie’s Space Oddity single in 1969 and, although Bowie demoed Changes playing piano, it was Wakeman who played the distinctive piano riff that drives the recorded version. Bowie’s contribution to the song’s instrumentation was his first recorded saxophone solo at the end. And, of course, Mick Ronson’s excellent work on the string arrangements needs to get a mention too.

Changes was sequenced to be the opening track of the LP, a kind of vision statement for Bowie’s “strange fascination” with artistic reinvention made at an early point in his career before the many changes in style he was to go through. It opens with the frank admission of uncertainty over what he was doing at that time, the “million dead-end streets”. And then the second verse has that moment of honest self analysis: “I turned myself to face me” where he looks at himself the way others see him as “the faker”. At that time, he was still searching for artistic fullfilment or (Ziggy) stardom but he seems to know that it will require him to constantly evolve. And during that My Generation hat-tipping stuttering chorus, I like to see the cry of “Oh, look out you rock ‘n rollers!” towards the end as a warning, a statement of intent.

Hunky Dory was released on 17 December 1971 and Changes followed as the lead single on 7 January 1972. Statement of intent or not, both releases performed poorly in terms of sales – the LP sold less than 5,000 copies in the first three months and the single scraped into the UK top 50 at No 49. On the upside, it was Tony Blackburn’s Record of the Week on Radio 1! In keeping with his drive to change, at this point Bowie was already part way through recording Ziggy Stardust and morphing his style to suit. He appeared on the Old Grey Whistle Test four weeks after the Changes single was released in February 1972 and didn’t even play it. He performed Pretty Things and Queen Bitch from Hunky Dory, as well as the then unreleased Five Years, and looked very different from the artist shown on the sleeve of his current releases.

However, Changes was a song that Bowie took with him throughout his career. Its popularity with his fanbase surprised even him and he played it on many occasions on his various concert tours. When Bowie first performed at what was then called the Glastonbury Fair in June 1971, it was a chaotic, acid-drenched hippy festival held during the week where 12,000 people were admitted for free. He was meant to be on stage at 7.30pm on the Tuesday night but ended up going on at 5am on the Wednesday morning as the sun was rising over a pretty empty field. You can hear excerpts from Changes on this documentary extract.

A couple of years later, when it was time for the next change and Bowie was killing off Ziggy and breaking up the band, it was part of his set at the final performance at the Hammersmith Odeon in 3 July 1973.

And many years and many, many haircuts later, Bowie was to return to Glastonbury in June 2000, by which time it had become pretty much the professional, media-saturated monster event it is now. You can hear him refer to his 1971 gig in the intro to this version of Changes.

And if all these new-fangled embedded videos are not enough (or indeed too much!?), then you can skip the… erm… sound and vision and simply listen to the links for a great live session version of Changes from the late Johnny Walker’s Radio 1 lunchtime show in May 1972 as well as his white soul performance from the 1974 Tower Theatre David Live set in all it’s coked-up glory.

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Last Word

Well if you’ve got this far, you will have got here slightly quicker than before! But I am sure the jury may be out on the new format which I am hoping will settle down a bit in the week’s ahead as I get used to it.

The useless WordPress like/comment functionality remains a huge frustration to me. I know it’s a poor substitute and requires effort that it shouldn’t need, but you can feedback via the new dedicated WIS email address (weekinsound@hotmail.com) and I’ll put them on the post. You can also interact with the blog on my BlueSky (agr45rpm.bsky.social) and Facebook accounts, although I’m road testing the WordPress auto-link to these socials this week, so God knows how that will go!

And, although it will now only be increasing in single track steps, don’t forget the Master Plalylist at the link below.

WeekInSoundMaster

AR

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