David Bowie: Who Can I Be Now? (1974-1976) review – an artist on the edge

In May 1974, David Bowie released his eighth album, Diamond Dogs. Now it is enshrined as a classic, but at the time it received a mixed critical response: for every critic proclaiming it a work of genius, there was someone like Robert Christgau in Creem, deriding it as “escapist pessimism” and snorting: “$6.98 for this piece of plastic?” Rolling Stone thought its “obscure tangles of perversion, degradation, fear and self-pity” signalled the end of his career: “Bowie’s last gasp.” You don’t have to agree with their assessment to understand why people might have thought the album represented a dead end. Diamond Dogs was an album that pushed the style he had minted two years before on The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars to its limit in every respect. Perhaps it was hard to see how Bowie’s apocalyptic lyrical fantasies could get any more lurid and strange, how his brand of glam rock could sound any more dense and decadent and diseased than this, without tipping into the realms of self-parody.

As it turned out, Bowie was thinking something roughly similar himself. What happened next was arguably his most audacious career move since telling Melody Maker he was gay. He reappeared less than a year later, looking and sounding so different that, as one observer claimed, his new approach “might as well have been a completely different artist”. A 180-degree artistic turn is an incredibly tough stunt to pull at all, let alone with the aplomb that Bowie appeared to execute it. Young Americans didn’t signal a dip in commercial fortunes – it finally made him a fully fledged mainstream star in the US. Nor did it occasion a slackening of his influence. Indeed, just how influential Young Americans was didn’t become fully apparent for another decade, by which point hamfisted attempts to mimic its “plastic soul” sound – a white artist melding black funk with an art-pop sensibility, as heard on Fascination or Fame – had, for better or worse, become mainstream pop’s dominant mode. And Bowie made the transition seem effortless.

But as proved by Who Can I Be Now? – a lavish box set that traces his career from Diamond Dogs to 1976’s masterpiece Station to Station, by way of David Live and the vastly superior Live Nassau Colosseum 1976 – the shift was more convoluted and problematic than it appeared at the time. Most attention has been drawn by the inclusion of The Gouster, a reconstruction of an early version of the album that became Young Americans. The Gouster’s appearance has proved controversial – it features none of the unreleased tracks long rumoured to have formed part of the album, such as Bowie’s own version of I Am a Laser, originally intended for soul trio the Astronettes and subsequently rewritten as Scream Like a Baby on 1980’s Scary Monsters, or the near-mythic Shilling the Rubes. But then, they’re not in the album tracklisting handwritten by Bowie, nor the copious notes about mixing that the artist passed on to producer Tony Visconti.

What is there is still markedly different to Young Americans, despite sharing four of its tracks, albeit mostly in slightly different versions. If you had to characterise what sets them apart, you could do worse than alight on their respective covers. On the front of Young Americans, Bowie gazes at the camera like a matinee idol, confident and assured beneath the haircut that launched a thousand soulboy wedges. On the front of The Gouster, his stare is uncertain and scared, his fingers clasped to his lips. He looks like the man who wrote Who Can I Be Now?, The Gouster’s defining track, a song ostensibly about the redemptive power of love that is clearly really about Bowie’s uncertainty regarding fame and his ability to reinvent himself: “Please help me,” he sings, sounding anguished, before a chorus that sounds infinitely more like one of those triumphant-yet-elegiac ballads that glam rock artists were so adept at – like Mott the Hoople’s Saturday Gigs or Diamond Dogs’ Rock’n’Roll With Me – than the kind of contemporary soul music that Bowie had relocated to Philadelphia’s Sigma Sound Studios to try and capture. A similar sense of insecurity and ambiguity haunts It’s Gonna Be Me, clearly inspired by the stark, intense, gospel-infused soul that emerged from studios in America’s deep south rather than the luscious, forward-thinking music released on Philadelphia International. It starts out as a bit of serial seducer’s braggadocio – “I balled another young girl last night” – and gets increasingly dark and troubled, emotions amplified by Bowie’s agonised, raw vocal.

Those two tracks set the emotional tone. The songs The Gouster shares with Young Americans are the latter album’s bleakest. There’s no room for anything as straightforwardly gorgeous as Win, or Fame’s slick cynicism, or even the beatific message that lurks somewhere beneath Bowie’s scenery-chewing performance of Across the Universe. Instead, you get the corrupt demagogue portrayed on Somebody Up There Likes Me; the twitchy, agitated note-to-self that is Right (“never no turning back … never been known to fail”); and Young Americans itself. It’s easy to miss what a spectacularly grim lyric that song offers, buffeted as it is by carefree sax breaks and a joyous chorus, but it opens with a dismal sexual encounter that an apparently desperate woman accepts as her due (“heaven knows she’d have taken anything”) and gets progressively less cheery from there: spousal abuse, political corruption, intimations of suicidal thoughts, a depiction of ageing as slow death and of emotional numbness that not even music can touch. You somehow notice its tenor more as the penultimate track on The Gouster than as the opener of the album that bears its name.

Young Americans and Station to Station are albums that make you wonder how Bowie did it, given the state he was in, by all accounts, when he made them: almost nothing about them – except perhaps the baffling lyrics of Station to Station’s title track – suggests their author was in the process of driving himself temporarily insane via cocaine and starvation. The Gouster, on the other hand, sounds remarkably like an album made by a man on the verge of cracking up. Even the allegedly carefree paean to the transcendence of the dancefloor, John I’m Only Dancing (Again) has a manic intensity to it: “Trapped! Charlie! Dance on!” Bowie barks, tellingly, as the song abandons its verse/chorus structure halfway through in favour of a repetitious groove. Perhaps that’s why he binned The Gouster. Bowie was, after all, an artist not much given to revealing himself in the way he apparently does on Who Can I Be Now? – better to stoke the myth than tell the truth. Or perhaps his reasons were more prosaic. “I thought I’d better make a hit album to cement myself [in America],” he said in 1976, and Young Americans feels far more like one of those than The Gouster does: Fame – tight, imperious, catchy – was obviously more likely to be a huge hit single than the confused John I’m Only Dancing (Again). In the end, he clearly knew exactly what he was doing. The Gouster feels like eavesdropping on a moment when he wasn’t so sure. It makes for fascinating listening.