Bowie: A Biography - JFK247

on. It was already a hit in my view, it just hadn’t been
a hit.”
“Space Oddity” enjoyed a second ride up the
charts, eventually reaching number 5 and landing
Bowie his first Top of the Pops appearance in
October. He spent the waning months of 1969
finishing up his Phillips/Mercury debut with Tony
Visconti. The new songs were complicated,
reflections of the twenty-two-year-old’s darkening
vision. While not iconic, as his seventies albums
would become, Space Oddity is first-rate as trippy
rock records go. After some R & B singles and pop
kitsch forays, this was David Bowie’s first “heavy”
offering.
The album opens, of course, with “Space Oddity”
but shifts quickly into the extensive hard-rock jam
“Unwashed and Somewhat Slightly Dazed.” “I’m a
phallus in pigtails / And there’s blood on my nose,”
Bowie declares, and the deciphering begins. “This is
a rather weird little song I wrote because one day
when I was very scruffy I got a lot of funny stares from
people in the street,” Bowie said at the time. “The
lyrics are what you hear—about a boy whose
girlfriend thinks he is socially inferior. I thought it was
rather funny really.”
“Don’t Sit Down” is more or less an interlude,
something Bowie would continue to employ during
this period. “Eight Line Poem” on Hunky Dory is
another of this kind. The verse of “Don’t Sit down” is
“Yeah yeah baby yeah.” It’s repeated several times.
The chorus is the title. It is an excellent song.