BRADLEY R. GITZ: When rock stars die

I had planned to write this week's column about the absurdity of the coming Iowa Caucus, but then saw the headline saying David Bowie had died. It seemed almost a betrayal to write about Donald Trump, ethanol and Iowa instead of Ziggy Stardust.

There isn't much that can be said about Bowie that a week's worth of eulogies and remembrances hasn't already said. Nor can I claim to be much of an authority on his career or music, having stopped following not only Bowie but "pop" music in general several decades ago.

Sad as it might seem to some, I can't name a single song of Eminem (is he still around?), of Lady Gaga, or of the guy (I think it's a guy) called "50 Cent," and I don't really care that I can't. I gave most of my large collection of rock albums from the 1960s and 1970s to my youngest son some years back, vinyl apparently having become popular again.

Even my use of the term "album" signals how out of touch I am.

But way back when I was in junior and senior high school and on through college, we cared a lot about rock music, perhaps more than anything else. And Bowie was one of my "finds"--I'd bought The Man Who Sold the World and found it so weird and different that I pestered my friends for days before they finally agreed to listen to it, as an act of appeasement (little did I know, at that point, that just about every Bowie album would turn out to be weird and different, even in relation to the others).

I therefore acquired a certain proprietary interest in Bowie, as we became the cool kids who listened to him (and The Who and Velvet Underground) while the girls listened to Olivia Newton-John and Captain & Tennille and the motorheads in wood shop bought Aerosmith and KISS albums.

The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars was always my favorite because no other rock album sounds as good in the dark at midnight with headphones near full volume. Aladdin Sane was a close second and I still remember driving 30 miles to a record shop in Rockford, Ill., to get a copy of Diamond Dogs before anyone else I knew could.

Bowie dying thus seems a bit like losing a chunk of my formative years--when Bing Crosby or even Elvis died, it didn't matter as much, at the time at least, because they were old guys from earlier generations.

I even vaguely remember arguing with my parents about how Bowie, of whom they'd never heard, was so much more important than that old fogey Frank Sinatra, which was the dumbest argument I ever made, except perhaps for efforts to persuade classmates to vote for Jimmy Carter.

Thankfully, my politics, including my opinion of Carter, changed with time (and further education). And so did my taste in music. By the end of the 1980s I'd moved on to Miles Davis, John Coltrane and even that old fogey with the blue eyes. And when I occasionally listen these days to what is now, amusingly, called "classic rock," it's not Bowie or Jethro Tull or King Crimson that I turn to but Dylan, the Band, and early Neil Young; music that seems less dated and more "mature" in some ways (although the Beatles and Stones each still get reverential bouts of binge play roughly every other year, and watching Love & Mercy made me go back to Pet Sounds).

I listened a few times to Bowie's last album because I'd read reviews comparing it to his work from the 1970s, and I might get around sometime to the one he released on his 69th birthday because of the reported jazz elements, but it will likely be only a temporary revisiting out of homage and nostalgia.

Rock music just doesn't sound the same to me as when I was 18 and it's perhaps telling that the vast majority of what I now listen to was recorded well before I bought that first Bowie album, much of it before I was even born.

In the end, however, Bowie always retained at least some interest because of his obvious intelligence, a word that doesn't often come to mind when thinking about rock stars--indeed, I've come to suspect that the beginning of the end of my love affair with rock music was Rob Reiner's This is Spinal Tap, which came out when Bowie's last indisputably great album, 1983's Let's Dance, was still on the charts.

There are precious few rock stars about whom one could say what could be confidently said of Bowie: that rock music was just the medium he chose to work in, that he could have just as easily been an important painter, a profound writer or (as The Man Who Fell to Earth or Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence attest) a superb actor.

Strange, but probably fairly typical, when I was 18 it never occurred to me that the rock stars I listened to would get old and die. And that I would someday too.

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Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.

Editorial on 01/18/2016

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