David Bowie's love affair with Bob Dylan's Time out of Mind
David Bowie’s secret dialogue with Bob Dylan and the miracle chord that ties them together.
It’s just a hunch, but I think David Bowie deep-dived Time out of Mind, in fact so deep and for so long that when he returned to the surface the experience coated his own stylings like a new layer of skin, specifically influencing some of The Next Day, Blackstar and his play, Lazarus. Some of these suspicions would later be confirmed by novelist Michael Cunningham. Following Bowie’s 2004 heart attack, Bowie began a collaboration with Cunningham and according to him:
“David reluctantly told me that he imagined the musical taking place in the future… the plot would revolve around a stockpile of unknown, unrecorded Bob Dylan songs, which had been discovered after Dylan died. David himself would write the hitherto-unknown songs.” — Michael Cunningham speaking to GQ
The original project slowed to a halt as Bowie continued to suffer through heart problems and it was abandoned altogether. Part of the concept was later revived for Lazarus, and tracks on Blackstar.
I think the genesis of it all may have been Time out of Mind and specifically, ‘Tryin’ To Get To Heaven’ as well as ‘Standing in the Doorway,’ but more on that later:
In February 1998, Bob Dylan would win the Album of the Year Grammy for Time out of Mind and give that historic performance of ‘Lovesick’. One of the internet’s first viral moments.
Time out of Mind was smokin’ hot right then and in that very same month Bowie was recording his own version of ‘Tryin’ To Get To Heaven’, a track from that same album, featuring Reeves Gabrels on guitars and synths, Gail Ann Dorsey on bass and vocals, and Zachary Alford on drums. That session stood somewhere between Bowie’s albums Earthling and Hours and was very much the sound of Bowie at that time. It leaked not too long after and you could get it on Napster.
Dylan’s original is surprisingly bright and upbeat, even given the lyrical content and the mood of the rest of the album. The piano crash of the chord turnaround at the start leads into those rising chords, the 4th to the 5th, “the air is getting hotter”, climbing up the verse and then working down into “everyday your memory goes dimmer”.
Dylan’s piano is loose and his vocals effortless and heartfelt. And with the word play of “when I was in Missouri (misery) they would not let me be” and the exceptional slices of American Folk, Gospel and Blues lyrics I can imagine the hairs on Bowie’s neck standing up on end.
When Dylan sings, “everyday your memory goes dimmer,” theres an unusual tension, thanks to Tony Garnier’s bass, it’s a C minor chord with A played in the bass, after which the tension releases as that bass note drops down a semi-tone to Ab.
Variations of this chord change and the layered sonic landscape (and the musings on mortality of Time out of Mind) began showing up in Bowie’s material from The Next Day and on Blackstar. He often revisits this chord change or close inversions of it, as if his cover of ‘Tryin’ To Get To Heaven’ became a kind of wellspring or jumping off point for those later songs.
Bowie uses a close variation of this chord change on ‘No Plan’, one of the Lazarus era singles, on the intro of the song to create a tension that’s sprinkled with Middle Eastern saxophone. ‘No Plan’ is very much a song about time being out of mind, or very much in mind but not moving, “this is not quite yet”. Bowie is “lost in streams of sound”, he’s “nowhere now”. A kind of being and nothingness, about consciously being in stasis, between the future and present, and maybe that’s exactly what consciousness is. Bowie says “This is no place, but here I am. This is not quite yet.”
When I first heard ‘Where Are You Now?’ From 2013’s The Next Day, the first thing I thought about was ‘Standing in the Doorway’. The slow pace, the sway, the sonic landscape, the suspended chord changes and the drumming which felt very Jim Keltner to me — but also that kind of template of Bowie’s version of ‘Tryin’ To Get To Heaven’ seemed to linger there too. I’m sure much of it is simply down to the very distinctive sound of Bowie’s band at that time.
But aside from the cover of ‘Tryin’ To Get To Heaven’ and a couple of tracks on The Next Day it wasn’t really until Blackstar, No Plan EP and Lazarus that I suspected some conscious Dylan manifestation, somethimg that Cunningham’s remarks further crystallised in my mind.
On the final song on The Next Day, ‘(You Will) Set the World on Fire,’ Bowie calls to Seeger, Baez, Ochs and Bobby, to midnight in the village, to the Gaslight and The Bitter End. “Kennedy would kill for the lines you’ve written” says Ochs to Dylan. Perhaps some echo of No Direction Home and Odetta’s rendering of Water Boy led Bowie to this song.
Interviewer: In the late work, Bowie seems to be in dialogue with other older musicians, you note. Scott Walker, Leonard Cohen. Dylan’s Time Out of Mind is very much an influence on Heathen, I’ve thought.
Leah Kardos (author of Blackstar Theory): I think so too, so many great parallels. The more you look at them, you think, were they looking over each other’s shoulders? While Dylan was writing Chronicles, Bowie’s working on his books. There are the musicals with Irish playwrights; the archives.
It’s also been argued by Bowie fans that even the album Heathen may have been Bowie’s response to Bob Dylan’s Time Out of Mind, from “similarities in tone, in tempo, and, notably, in critical responses—both albums were hailed as returns to form for legacy artists, both seemed to address mortality in the way that anyone over fifty is supposed to (regularly, with grace and time-weariness).”1
I’m trying to think if there’s anyone who truly has honed his craft to a point that you are really, really glad that he stayed with one thing all the way through his life. Of course there is. How stupid of me! Bob Dylan. He’s not actually changed his course very much, and now his music has such resonance that when I first put his new album on (Time out of Mind) I thought I should just give up.
David Bowie, 1998.
As for Time out of Mind, The similarities don’t end there either. The release of Time out of Mind was swamped by the shadow of Dylan’s summer heart condition, while Bowie’s 2004 heart scares and later cancer diagnosis and battle penetrated the creative landscape he was working from with The Next Day and Blackstar .
There’s a number of tracks on Blackstar which seemed to lend their influence to Bob Dylan from ‘Dollar Days’ to ‘I Can’t Give Everything Away’ even the more vulgar lyrical flourishes of ‘Tis A Pity She Was A Whore’ which, deviating slightly, has something of the feel of Dylan‘s post-Modern Times material where his lyrical language suddenly became more vulgar, more violent, more direct and more cutting and often quite damning of women — “She punched me like a dude,” “she kept my cock,” “she stole my purse,” — along with the use of rather archaic English language much as Dylan does on Tempest, “‘Tis my fate I suppose.”
On ‘Dollar Days,’ again the sonic landscape is layered, there’s a depth of field reminiscent of Time out of Mind, and there’s that ‘Tryin’ To Get To Heaven’ chord again, although here it’s a minor-seven-flat-five-chord (Em7b5), close enough I’d say — see Dylan’s live versions from 2000 where that chord variation also figures.
Lyrically though much of Blackstar’s approach is somewhere between, and I’m projecting here, ruminations on death (like Time out of Mind), the Lazarus myth/Prodigal Son and the esoteric, Bowie’s death and a sort of proto-late-career Nick Cave way of writing. Something Leonard Cohen also dived into in his final works.
‘I Can’t Give Everything Away’ features harmonica in the Dylan style and again features that very same chord change associated with ‘Tryin’ To Get To Heaven’ on the first line of the chorus resolving on the second line.
Both Bowie and Dylan are among the rare artists whose work demands deep analysis from their fans. Their lyrics, imagery, personas, the cultural references, genre mixing, songs that become a puzzle-box of allusions. Bowie and Dylan are magpies of culture, Bowie and Dylan’s own names are inversions of eachother and inventions, they both comb through literature, art, film and pop detritus constructing new works.
Scott Warmuth’s extensive research into Dylan’s Chronicles Vol. 1 and beyond demonstrates just how deliberately Dylan weaves language, phrasing, and concepts from a broad array of sources into his lyrics, from Civil War-era newspapers, Japanese crime novels, obscure academic texts, blues lyrics, and Hollywood films.
Bowie is somewhat of a kindred spirit. A Tumblr blog, supposedly by Bowie himself, The Villa of Ormen, which surfaced in the months before the release of Blackstar, is an esoteric smorgasbord. Like Dylan, Bowie’s late work reveals an artist working with many sources at his disposal. That both men moved in this direction more overtly in their later years suggests a maturing artistic worldview: one where originality is not about invention from scratch, but about the elegance and imagination with which disparate influences are synthesized. That Dylan still carries this process forward is a blessing, that Bowie can no longer share with us his dialogue is a curse.
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Afterword:
I wonder if Bowie saw Dylan’s 88 Interestate Tour, the birth of the Never Ending Tour, because this Tin Machine version of Maggie’s Farm is virtually identical to the sound of that first Never Ending Tour band.
A brilliant website: https://bowiesongs.wordpress.com/
I still remember an interview with David Bowie in Playboy magazine where Bowie describes the first time that he met Bob Dylan at some party in New York City and he said he was just blathering on like some star struck fan and Dylan just kind of looked at him, then past him, and then walked off.
I loved that.
Great article, Trev!