Something Happened on the Day He Died: Remembering David Bowie, Two Years On

Today is the second anniversary of David Bowie’s death. I will not refer to it, as some have, as an “untimely passing,” because Bowie was a master of timing, and while I’m not claiming that Bowie somehow made it happen this way, it’s hard to imagine a more dramatic exit than his -- with the surprise announcement of his death just two days after his 69^th birthday and the release of his final album, Blackstar. 

Think of it: on Friday, January 8, 2016, the album comes out. Bowie fans, primed by the earlier release of the songs “Lazarus” and the title track, flock to the new release, making it, startlingly, the only Bowie album to ever top the Billboard Top 200 chart. Over the weekend, we pore over the record. It’s mysterious – it seems to be about something, but exactly what remains elusive. Both the lyrics and the video for “Lazarus” are full of intimations of death, but you’d expect that from a character with that name, and it fits perfectly with the story of the Bowie-driven Off-Broadway musical of the same name, which had premiered a few months earlier. 

The video for the title track is even more cryptic, with its post-apocalyptic/sci-fi sets, its dead astronaut lying on the ground, and Bowie singing lines like “something happened on the day he died/Spirit rose a meter then stepped aside/Somebody else took his place, and bravely cried…” 

On then to the album’s deeper cuts: Bowie sounds unusually nostalgic and maybe even regretful on “Dollar Days,” where he sings about never seeing the English evergreens again. “It’s nothing to me,” he claims, and you don’t believe him for a moment. And what to make of the harmonica on the final track, “I Can’t Give Everything Away,” which clearly recalls the song “A New Career In A New Town” from his great 1977 album Low? That must mean something… and Bowie usually has a reason for putting a song in the final track position. This one is also full of strange imagery – “with skull designs upon my shoes” and whatnot. 

The critics, that weekend, are giving the album great reviews. Most of them remark on its puzzling nature; a few sense a man wrestling with mortality, as befits a 69-year old who’s had a heart attack. 

Then Monday comes. I was awakened by a text from the WNYC news team – would I come in and talk about David Bowie? I say yes, wondering if I’ll be able to say something clear about an album so apparently obscure. Then another text comes, and a third – two more of our shows are asking the exact same thing: “can you come in and talk about David Bowie?” Jesus, I think, what the hell is going on? I google Bowie and get the news. 

To everyone who had puzzled over Blackstar that weekend, Monday morning’s news was stunning both for being unexpected – Bowie had kept his cancer a secret – and for seeming immediately, retrospectively, inevitable.  Suddenly the big mystery of the album was revealed. In “Dollar Days” Bowie had sung “Can’t believe for one second I’m forgetting you/I’m trying to/I’m dying to.” Now all l could hear was “I’m dying too.” That song leads directly into the final track, “I Can’t Give Everything Away,” with its skull designs and its call-back harmonica… it’s almost too much to bear. And that title – a final joke perhaps, from a man who was known to have an impish sense of humor? Hey, I can give you clues; I can stick Major Tom in my new video (you did realize that that’s who he was, right?); but come on, I can’t give all of it away – you have to figure some of this out for yourself…

It is now two years to that day, and I still marvel at what Bowie did: with Blackstar he created an extraordinary farewell – both a musical and personal one. I was reminded of this two days ago, on Bowie’s birthday (he would have been 71), while watching the new HBO documentary David Bowie: The Last Five Years. I didn’t expect much – Bowie didn’t do interviews and he required absolute secrecy from those working with him; but this film somehow conjures him up through a combination of archival footage and new interviews, performances, and recording clips from those who worked most closely with him at the end. It’s less a documentary and more of a magic trick. If you didn’t see it on the anniversary of his birth, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to see it tonight, on the anniversary of his death. 

Meanwhile, today the duo known as Lost Horizons – consisting of former Cocteau Twins keyboardist Simon Raymonde and former Dif Juz sax player/percussionist Richie Thomas – have released a track that they recorded on the spot, in the studio, on that morning two years ago. It’s called “On The Day You Died.” It’s simple and heartfelt, and the sax has just the right leaky quality that Bowie’s own sax playing had back in the 70s.