Bowie: A Biography - JFK247

Once it was finished, Lee, the technophile,
stepped in again to ensure that the single would be
truly monumental. “I wanted a couple things done and
got them to do it,” he tells me. “I wanted the single to
be mixed in stereo. That had never been done for a
single before. I also wanted to make sure it was as
long as possible. Not just three minutes. And I
wanted David’s picture on the sleeve, which was
also hardly ever done [singles were usually issued in
plain paper sleeves with the name of the label
printed on it]. I wanted to give his first single for
Mercury a huge sense of impact.”
His first single for the label has also become, in a
way, David Bowie’s signature song, traditionally the
first track on any of his many best-of compilations.
It’s as good an introduction as you will get to his
peerless period (say, ’69–83). Forty years on, it
remains one of the half dozen David Bowie songs
that are played daily on American classic rock radio,
and to hear the watery acoustic guitar intro rise
slowly from a segue of, say, a Joe Walsh or Bad
Company song provides lasting proof of just how
powerful a song it was and remains. It’s a mood
changer. It’s a put-down-what-you’re-doing-and-payattention-to-this
kind of song, a five-minute story
song with sonic invention and vocal charisma to
burn. In the spring of 1969, shortly before its rush
release, it seemed like the only thing that could stop
“Space Oddity” from its destiny of becoming David’s
first genuine hit single was the failure of NASA and
its astronauts themselves. This was in fact