Bowie: A Biography - JFK247

Man” and “Like a Rolling Stone”). Its title is a clever
take on Dylan’s Woody Guthrie exhortation “Song for
Woody.” Dylan was still laying low up in Woodstock
following his 1966 motorcycle crash when Bowie
penned the track, which outlines just how bad the
culture needs him to return.
“Now hear this Robert Zimmerman / Though I don’t
suppose we’ll meet,” Bowie sings on the final verse,
and it’s hard not to laugh when I think about how they
did, obviously, meet, and how Dylan was apparently
an “asshole” to Bowie. “The Bewlay Brothers” has
long been interpreted as a song about Terry. Its
lyrics presage the kind of cut-and-paste word
jumbles that would mark Bowie’s mid-seventies
albums (“The Factor Max that proved the fact / Is
melted down”) but like “Quicksand” its potentially
fatal cleverness or poetic pretentiousness is offset
by a feeling of genuine lament (“And the solid book
we wrote / Cannot be found today”) and the touchedby-God
genius of some of those phrases he turns
(“Kings of oblivion,” “stalking time for the moon
boys”). The record ends with an ellipsis. Over Doorslike
Latin percussion, the song fades into Victorian
sing-along: “… I’m starving for me gravy / Leave my
shoes and door unlocked / I might just slip away …
just for a day … Please come away …”)
“The only pipe I have ever smoked was a cheap
Bewlay,” Bowie would write years later, explaining
the cryptic title in London’s Daily Mail in the summer
of 2008. “It was a common item in the late sixties
and for this song I used Bewlay as a cognomen—in