When has Bowie not had a backing band? And all his most celebrated music stuff has when he collaborated with brilliant musicians or producers like mick ronson or eno.
And the spiders from mars were probably the greatest backing band ever.
I'd forgotten about it but upthread I mentioned how he needed Brian Eno to pull it together for him. I think his best work was mostly on
Hunky Dory. It's got most of his best compositions, and I think that's probably because he was (it seems) for himself on piano.
The Spiders from Mars were brilliant. Listen to any one of them and they're doing something really quite technical and tight. But they aren't playing off each other, they're just doing their thing in their allotted place.
Exercise: Listen to Lou Reed's
Satellite of Love and then listen to Bowie's
Moonage Dream.
Listen how well the drums follow and enhance the piano on the former in this organic way. Listen to how tender the phrasing on the piano is. If you took Reed's vocals alone the song would be really flat, but it comes alive with the sheer (understated) musicianship.
Whereas the latter is a cool chord progression with cool drum parts, cool bass parts, a really nice guitar solo. Everybody has this part they've leant and perfected. Where's the delicate touch, the rock out groove, or the soul or the spontaneous magic? It sounds mechanical and lifeless in comparison. This is mediocre music made by brilliant musicians.
Or we could compare with Roxy Music or T-Rex. So often Bowie just fails to get his band to pop.
I think in this age of AI we need to be brutal about these things.
