Space Oddity: An Unexpected All Time Favorite Album

Space Oddity: An Unexpected All Time Favorite Album

There is not an artist in the history of rock and roll that has explored so many paths and places in the musical landscape as David Bowie.  When I was growing up my father had a huge box that was completely full of all of the 45 lp’s he had bought and every once in a while my Dad would pull out this box and play his old 45’s for hours and this is where I heard “Ziggy Stardust”, “Suffragette City”, “Starman”, and “Rebel Rebel” for the very first time when I was a kid.  Although I am sure my Dad played me his 45 of “Space Oddity” when I was 3 or 4 years old, I didn’t really remember it.

Transitioning forward to the year 1989, it was really early on a Saturday morning and that particular evening I could not sleep so at about 2:00am I was flipping the channels between MTV and VH1 back when they used to show music videos just killing time before my newspapers arrived for my morning route.  During the wee small hours of this morning I was tired and spacy and VH1 played the music video for the song “Space Oddity”.  I thought it was the weirdest song I had ever heard in my life and I did not like it at all.  At 4:30am my newspapers arrived, I folded them up, and started to do my paper route.  Although I was listening to something like either Van Halen, AC/DC, Rush, or Aerosmith on my cassette Walkman “Space Oddity” kept playing in my head to a point where it was starting to annoy me pretty bad.

When I finished up my paper route my father had arrived home from the evening shift at the post office and as I was having breakfast with him I was telling him that I saw a video for “Space Oddity” and how much I thought the song sucked.  Then my father told me about the first time he heard the song “Space Oddity”.  It was 1969 and he was serving as an LDS missionary in Los Angeles back in the day when AM radio strictly played pop music and FM radio was commercial free and played very different and more experimental music.  On FM in Los Angeles late one evening he heard “Space Oddity” and thought it was one of the most far out and coolest songs he had ever heard and it reminding him of some amazing days on his mission.  He even knew how to play it on the guitar.  It was one of his favorite songs of all time.  However, I did not share the same sentiment my father did and I still felt like the song was kind of out there and weird at age 12.

About a year later I was the record shop with my Dad and I bought my cassette of Changesbowie, one of David Bowie’s greatest hits albums.  I bought it mainly for “Ziggy Stardust”, “Suffragette City”, “Jean Jeanie”, “Diamond Dogs”, and “Rebel Rebel”.  However, “Space Oddity” was the very first song and I didn’t really feel like fast forwarding past it so I gave it another listen.  This time I caught the vision and like my dad I thought it was the coolest song I had heard.  It was just so different.  The thing that captured me the most about “Space Oddity” is that the song instantly took me into the vacuum of space and I really could feel the isolation from friends and family, and yet still be amazed by a view of the world and space that very few people get to behold with their own eyes.  Changesbowie became one of favorite cassettes and the song “Space Oddity” sounded especially good at 4:30am when I would be throwing my paper route.

When I was 14 years old my LDS ward was doing a road show (a musical stage production involving all of the 12 to 18 year old youth in my ward and written and composed by the members of my LDS ward).  I was recruited along with the other members of my Teacher’s quorum to dress in black clothes with dark sunglasses and bandannas portraying a gang trying to lure the main star into our mischievous and no good ways by singing a quasi rap song in the road show.   Being the 14 year old way serious rocker with a reputation to maintain at Union Middle School participating in this road show is something that was pretty high on my blatantly uncool list of things to do.  But my parents, being good and devoted parents, made sure I was part of this road show with the youth in my ward.  For my costume I wore a torn up AC/DC shirt, a black and white hair metal styled wig, black sunglasses, and I wore my bandanna over the lower half of my face.  I at least looked like I was ready to commit armed robbery, that I had already done hard time, and I frankly I thought I looked pretty cool and I did not really resemble anyone else in my ‘gang’ of Teachers which was even cooler.  My mother found out about my costume from other members of my ward.  She was ok with all of it, but she thought the bandanna was too over the top and she was trying to convince me to take the bandanna off of the lower half of my face and I would not budge on removing it.  A few days later after the next rehearsal I came home in full costume and my mother looked at me in my costume and started to sing “Space Oddity” with the alternate lyrics of “Ground control to Major Dumb, please take off that bandanna and never wear it again!” and I started laughing really hard.  At this point I decided to remove the bandanna covering my face from my costume and my mother, and for that matter the director of the road show, were very happy.  This version of “Space Oddity” is still a running joke between me and my mother.

My junior year of high school in 1994 after being addicted to my cassette of Changesbowie for many years at that point I finally broke down and started to buy some of David Bowie’s albums on CD.  I instantly loved The Man Who Sold the World, Aladdin Sane, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, Hunky Dory, and the live album Ziggy Stardust: The Motion Picture.  Shortly after I graduated high school I bought a CD of the Space Oddity album.  Having been a fan of the song “Space Oddity” for so long I was really excited to give the album my very first listen.  The album opened with the song “Space Oddity” this was pretty much a straight up folk album.  With the exception of Bob Dylan, at this stage of my life I was not really embracing of folky/acoustic music and I thought the album was really weak and very disappointing compared to the other David Bowie albums I really enjoyed.

In 1998, I had just come home from serving my LDS mission in Pennsylvania, which to this day is one of the hugest growing experiences of my life, and I was adjusting to civilian life again after being away from home for two years.  At this time I was working as a casual clerk (temporary worker) for the U.S. Postal Service in Salt Lake City and I was working 12 hours a day, six days a week, and had very little free time from July to December of 1998.  My job at the post office was very physically demanding and during this period of my life and I generally did not really want do anything on my days off.  On one of my rare days off I was relaxing in my bedroom just listening to music and at that time I was listening to a lot of Alice Cooper, Grand Funk Railroad, Queen, Dave Matthews Band, Sheryl Crow, and James.  I was just in the mood for something different and I looked through my CD’s and saw my copy of Space Oddity and for whatever reason I decided to give the album of Space Oddity another listen.

The song “Space Oddity” came over my speakers which I sang along with and really enjoyed.  However, after serving my mission and not listening to my CD of Space Oddity for three years I had a completely different experience.  This time I finally got into it.  It was a straight up folk album with very unique lyrics and the album just had a very emotional, personal, and stripped down feel to it.  In a way, I cannot imagine this album being done with an electric guitar; it would take away from the beauty of Space Oddity.  The song that just entered my heart the deepest was the over 9 minute epic “Cynget Committee”.  Although many musicians wear their hearts on their sleeves with their lyrics, a number of them tend to hide the true meaning of their lyrics and prefer to have lyrics that through storytelling and poetry convey their thoughts and feelings, rather than blatantly discuss their innermost thoughts and feelings.  “Cynget Committee” is lyrically a very rare glimpse into some very personal experiences of David Bowie’s where he felt very used, alienated, and disillusioned, my favorite lyric that conveys this is “Who praised their efforts to be free?  Words of strength and care and sympathy.  I opened doors that would have blocked their way.  I braved their cause to guide, for a little pay”.  To me the boldest lyric of the song, where David’s feelings of alienation really peak is “and the road is coming to its end, now the damned have no time to make amends”.  “Cynget Committee” is one of my most favorite David Bowie songs ever and because it’s long and fairly obscure this song remains a hidden gem (in fact, I bought I David Bowie guitar book specifically to learn this song).

In all reality, as much as David Bowie has many albums and songs that I absolutely love, Space Oddity has gone down as my favorite David Bowie album.  It’s one of his most unique and he very radically changes direction with his next album The Man Who Sold the World in 1970 and many times throughout his career.  I admire how David Bowie is not afraid to explore many different styles and has one of the most fascinating volumes of music and careers in rock and roll.  I think that is another reason that Space Oddity is such a special album to me is it is the most traditional and stripped down album David Bowie has ever made, yet it is still very uniquely David Bowie.  In addition, albums like Space Oddity are the reason why even if I buy a CD and I don’t really like it, I still keep it in my collection.  There have been a few other albums besides Space Oddity that sounded a lot better to me years after I had bought them.  Because of my experience as an LDS missionary my tastes in music became broader and my tastes had expanded by the time I finished my mission and albums like Space Oddity sounded great and fit right in with everything else I am listening to.  It never ceases to amaze me how my tastes in music keep expanding and growing to include so many genres of music and how music that initially was not that appealing, becomes some of my favorite, as was the case with Space Oddity.