The Sun Machine is Coming Down
My older brother, a long time heavy metal fan who introduced me to Rush and Van Halen when I was quite small, recently asked me, “I don’t get David Bowie. Why do people think he’s so great.”
Now, my fascination with the late Mr Bowie is well documented. When he died almost 10 years ago, I fell into a noticeable depression for many weeks, to the point where my spouse had to have something of an intervention. To this day, I listen to his music every single day. It never gets boring, and there is always something new to discover.
I had a lengthy response for my brother, as I had been thinking about this question for many years. But partway through my lengthening exposition on chord changes, vocal majesty, complex lyrics, and Bowie’s unending artistry and interrogation of art’s influence on human meaning, I realized that there would never be a satisfactory answer. And I suddenly felt sad for the many people who know of Bowie but who will never appreciate that they got to live in the same moment as one of the greatest musical composers in human history.
So, I won’t bore you with more of my cogitations on this topic. Instead, I want to tell you a story about a dream I had earlier in the summer. It was such a funny dream that I immediately summarized it into my smart watch’s voice recorder so I would not forget it. It was after a largely sleepless night of caring for my sick child. So my brain was already in funky mode.
In the dream, I was attending some kind of low level fundraiser or video awards event, and a certain David Bowie was in attendance. In the dream, it felt like the early 2000s. Neither Bowie nor I were married (even though he was, in real life). And at this event, I was relentlessly hitting on one poor, unassuming young woman. And making no headway, of course, because, as you all know, I got no game.
After my repeated failures, Bowie himself –who had been watching my emasculating misadventures throughout the afternoon– sauntered up to the girl and took his own shot. In the dream, she was not immediately into him. But it was David Fucking Bowie, after all, so eventually she fell to his impeccable charm and timeless good looks.
This was a moment of deep conflict for me. On the one had, I was very much a fan of the man and his work. On the other hand….. duh. So I went outside and screamed into the wilderness, “David Bowie! I’m your biggest fan, but man do I resent you now!”
Of course, this dream didn’t come come completely out of nowhere. If you browse the Bowie threads you will find multiple stories of him attempting to steal people’s girlfriends or sexually outcompete other men. My favourite is the story of Axl Rose chasing down Bowie with violent intent, after the latter made the moves on Axl’s girlfriend. Some versions have Axl angrily calling him, “Captain Tom.” Then there’s the story of George Underwood punching Bowie in the eye after the Starman told big fibs in order to steal a love interest from Underwood. (That’s how he got his heterochromatic eyes, that punch.)
The best part of the dream was the end. As Bowie and the unnamed woman strolled off into the crowd, the DJ started playing Bowie music. I slunk off to pout in the corner. My good friend Ed Wong was there. He asked me, “Hey, why the long face? I thought you were a Bowie fan?”
I said, “Shut up, Ed,” and the dream came to a close. Scene.
This dream came at a time when I was exploring Bowie’s very early work from the late 60s, well before he was famous. One song in particular was resonating with me then: 1969’s “Memory of a Free Festival.” It is such a beautiful hypnotic song, coming just months before Bowie’s leap into super stardom. Two years later he would play Glastonbury for the first time; and a year after that would come the historic transformation into Ziggy Stardust and rock godhood.
By the way, I enjoy the fact that he would re-grow his hair for his 2000 Glastonbury appearance, to mirror his look 3 decades earlier.
“Memory of a Free Festival” was about a literal free festival organized by Bowie and the Beckenham Arts Lab in 1969. He was just 21 or 22 and it was mere weeks after his father had died. Fellow organizers have since spoken about how horribly he was behaving at the time. Bowie himself has commented that drugs were liberally used at the event and were a driving force in the development of the song. (The lyric, “Someone passed some bliss among the crowd” stands out).
In classic Bowie style, the song is filled with suggestive lyrics that plumb the depths of shared consciousness, religion, and literature, but which never really exposit their meaning. One word jumps out from the lyrics, “satori”, which is a Japanese Buddhist term referring to sudden enlightenment. Back in 1969, though, people did not have easy access to lyrics or to the internet to just look stuff up. So the word “satori” was mysterious to many, including travel write Ric Garrido who made it his online name for many years, in homage to this song. As Garrido explains in this blog, people assumed he was Japanese and not just a Bowie fan.
The song is transcendent and comes in many versions. I prefer the original, lengthy studio album version:
Though the hyped up shorter AM radio single version has its qualities:
There’s also a fantastic acoustic audio version from one of Bowie’s appearances on a BBC live session in 1970. I absolutely adore this treatment:
The song features an elongated outro of Bowie singing, “The sun machine is coming down and we’re gonna have a party,” in “Hey Jude” style. It was eventually sampled by UK electro band E-Zee Possee for their song, “The Sun Machine.” I’m still not clear what the sun machine is supposed to be. But I gather that at this free festival concert in 1969 there were either many balloons in the sky, or the drug-driven hallucination of many such balloons, which I presume Bowie refers to as “machines.”
Regardless, I enjoy the fact that no one really knows what he’s talking about. That’s one of the reasons I like Bowie songs. I can never guess what the next lyric or chord change is going to be. And I know that the lyrics are not random gibberish, like you get from bands like Duran Duran. There was something bubbling in Bowie’s deeply referential brain when these lyrics emerged, something evocative. And even if there wasn’t, there is always something about his music that speaks to something in my life.
In any case, that’s my little story about a dream I had this summer about David Bowie, and about how I’ve been rediscovering his 1960s efforts. What more is there to say except, the sun machine is coming down… and there’s gonna be a party.
UPDATE:
I asked AI to create a photo of me palling around with David Bowie, as per my dream. It did an okay job, but made me look way too much like Robbie Williams:
