Your Life

Saturday, Oct. 31, 2009

Changeling: Biography recounts the evolution of David Bowie

“Bowie: A Biography” (Crown, 448 pages, $26.99) by Marc Spitz

David Bowie knows what he’s singing about when he performs “Changes.” After making a big splash in the early 1970s as Ziggy Stardust, he went on to become the Thin White Duke, an artsy Berlin angst rocker, the “straight” Bowie of “Let’s Dance” and more recently the distinguished rock elder who goes to fashion events with his model wife, Iman.

The career full of characters obscures the less fantastic, but very interesting, back story of David Jones, a British teen in the ’60s who desperately wanted to make it big. He joins some R&B bands, dabbles in acting and mime, changes his last name to Bowie and records a painful-to-listen-to-now single titled “The Laughing Gnome” that seems to channel Alvin and the Chipmunks.

Nothing in particular sticks until he records the 1969 single “Space Oddity.” Bowie later goes all-in with his pioneering glam character Ziggy, the one with the screwed-up eyes and snow-white tan. Bowie never looks back, never stops changing.

Spitz, a music journalist, does a decent job of tracking Bowie’s evolution through copious research and interviews with dozens of people who knew him.

Spitz clearly gets Bowie, and this is an unapologetic fan-boy biography. He is good at analyzing what Bowie accomplished, why it matters and what was likely influencing him at the time.

He has insightful things to say about landmark Bowie songs “Life on Mars?” and “Heroes.”

But be warned: Unlike a lot of top-rate biographers, Spitz is not big on narrative and crafting scenes. Events are recounted, at length, through gushy quotes from Bowie’s old chums.

And sometimes Spitz doesn’t know when to turn the spigot off on himself. The book is littered with superfluous pop culture references (example: Bowie was in a band called the King Bees, and Spitz informs readers not only that it was named after the blues classic “(I’m a) King Bee,” but that John Belushi sang it years later on “Saturday Night Live” dressed like a bee).

Worse, Spitz has the self-indulgent habit of interrupting Bowie’s story with vignettes about HIS story of being a Bowie fan. Who cares?

The result is a book at turns interesting and irritating that reads like a very long music magazine article.