Let's Dance
Written and Performed by David Bowie
Let's dance,
Put on your red shoes and dance the blues
Let's dance,
To the song they're playin' on the radio
Let's sway,
While color lights up your face
Let's sway,
Sway through the crowd to an empty space
If you say run,
I'll run with you
And if you say hide,
We'll hide
Because my love for you
Would break my heart in two
If you should fall into my arms
And tremble like a flower
Let's dance
Let's dance,
For fear your grace should fall
Let's dance,
For fear tonight is all
Let's sway,
You could look into my eyes
Let's sway,
Under the moonlight, this serious moonlight
And if you say run,
I'll run with you
And if you say hide,
We'll hide
Because my love for you
Would break my heart in two
If you should fall into my arms
And tremble like a flower
When the alarm went off on the clock radio yesterday morning, I heard just a snippet of the news before Dave turned it off. "Did they just say that Bowie died?" I asked. Dave came more awake and said, "What? What did they say? I wasn't listening." I repeated what I had heard "it is rumoured that he once turned down a knighthood. Bowie was sixty-nine" and Dave was quiet for a moment before saying, "That sounds about right. Bowie is dead?" Of course the sad news was confirmed before long, and as a life-long Bowie fan, Dave was very upset about it. He reached out to an old high school friend once he got to work -- Anna, with whom Dave saw the Serious Moonlight tour in 1983 -- and they shared their memories about the old days; about how they each found out about Bowie's death just hours earlier. Dave said that he was listening to Bowie albums at work all day, and when he got home, he spent the evening on his iPad, watching videos and looking for news links. Dave said that Bowie's death made him feel old; older than turning fifty did last month (and it didn't make him feel any better when I pointed out that Bowie was still a different generation, old enough to be Dave's Dad).
I'm sure it's obvious by now that my own music tastes have always been pretty square and I can't say that I was ever a Bowie fan myself: he was too weird; too experimental; too other. I totally didn't get the whole Ziggy Stardust thing, and Bowie and Jagger doing Dancing in the Streets was one of my least favourite songs ever; a song that would always make me change the radio station when it would come on. By the time I met Dave, it was widely agreed that Bowie had lost it (even if it turns out he hadn't), and although we had a fun time going to the Sound+Vision tour when it came to Edmonton, as a greatest hits concert, it felt more historically interesting than culturally relevant to me. But here's the thing: as with a lot of the music of my youth, Bowie has grown on me, and in retrospect, I can totally appreciate what his special genius was; music needed Bowie and some of his songs deserve to be listened to forever (Heroes and Changes and Rebel, Rebel and too many others), and I'm pretty sure that if I had met Dave at the height of his fandom (when he was tall and skinny and had dyed his hair a Bowiesque orange; at a time when my own hair was pink), he could have convinced me to give the Thin White Duke a fairer shake.
As for my specific music selection this week, I had saved one more story from my wrap-up of grade nine, and not only is Let's Dance a very literal choice to accompany this story, but it was the only single (other than Little Drummer Boy/Peace on Earth) that Bowie released in 1982, the year I'm talking about. Too perfect, right? To the tale:
I have no recollection at all if my friends and I went to the various dances throughout the year when we were in grade nine, but I do remember how excited we were that the final dance was going to have a live band. I had never been to a rock concert by this point and this was as close as I could get. I need to break in for two tangential stories:
In either grade eight or nine, my Dad bought tickets to take me and Cora to Beatlemania in Toronto. That was totally out of the blue, totally out of character, and a total blast. Before the show, Dad brought us to a funky burger joint for dinner, and it blew my mind when he told us that he ate lunch there most days: here I was, someone who could have counted on one hand how many times I had been taken to a fast food hamburger restaurant by this point, and my Dad went out for lunch every day? I remember the little cafe tables we sat at, the slightly bloody burger patty that was unlike anything I had ever eaten in my life, and I remember there was a girl in a sleeveless dress at a nearby table with a rose tattoo on her shoulder and my Dad gave us a disgusted lecture on how trashy it looked and how she'd live to regret it when she got old. Beatlemania was a wonderful show that blew our young minds, but sitting as we were in a small amphitheater, it wasn't really a rock concert.
And for my second related story, when I was in either grade eight or nine, my big brother Ken and some friends went into Toronto to an AC/DC concert. As I've said before, Ken was a pothead juvenile delinquent and I have no idea why my parents would have given him permission to go into Toronto to an AC/DC concert at 14 or 15; they were probably just tired of saying no to him all the time. Someone else's parents drove the boys into the city, but it was my Mum who picked them up after, and Ken loved to tell the story ever-afterwards that when they got to the car -- reeking of the dope that they had been smoking all night -- someone told Mum that there were so many people smoking joints at the concert that the air was thick with the smoke and they were all feeling kind of funny now. Mum would refer to this experience often -- can you believe those boys got high from the second-hand smoke at a concert -- and Ken was always laughing at her behind her back. So, it was unlikely I would ever be allowed to go to an actual rock concert.
Because of all this, me and my friends were really excited about the live band. It was the end of the school year, I wouldn't be returning the next fall, and being able to wear jeans instead of our school uniforms all contributed to a fairly manic atmosphere for me. I have no recollection of dancing with any boys, but I do remember jumping around with my friends and getting near the stage to ogle the musicians; they may as well have been real rock stars as far as I was concerned. As a Ringo fan, I kept watching the drummer as he played, and when he came forward to sing a slow song, I was one of many girls who swayed at the stageside. When the song was over, he took the scarf from around his neck and handed it to me. Naturally, I lost my mind and kept my eyes on him throughout the rest of the dance.
When it was over, me and my friends waited out in the hallway for the band to come out, and when I asked the drummer to sign my scarf, he asked me for my phone number.
Throughout my teenaged years, I never learned how to say no to a request like this (or even how to lie or make up a fake number), and even though I had a feeling that it was a dumb and risky move, I gave him my number as he signed the scarf with the black Sharpie he happened to have on hand. His name was Pat or something and the band was named Strider or Striker or something and I kept that yellow flannel scarf rolled up on the top shelf of my closet for years.
A couple of weeks later, during the summer vacation, Pat called me and said he'd like to come visit me. Again, I didn't know how to say no, so I told him my address. A couple of days later, this twenty-year-old wannabe rock star pulled up to my house in a white van. I was fourteen, and he probably realised that right away.
We spent an afternoon in the basement of my house listening to Beatles records on our crappy cabinet stereo and talking about whatever, and while both of my parents were away at work, both of my brothers kept coming downstairs and giving us puzzled looks. I just now remembered that, because of the white van, it was probably Kyler who asked Pat if he was a plumber and he laughed and said, "Yeah, the plumber". That probably explains why my brothers found it so odd that he was listening to music with me and also explains why I don't think my brothers mentioned him to my parents; they figured they knew about him, I guess. I'm remembering Kyler saying to me years later, "Remember the plumber with the white van?" Yeah, I remembered. I didn't hear from Pat again (which was actually a total relief for me) but that bizarre afternoon stayed with me for a long time; the scarf serving as a talisman against the loneliness that I would feel in the upcoming months when we moved away.
Let's dance,
Put on your red shoes and dance the blues
Let's dance,
To the song they're playin' on the radio
Let's sway,
While color lights up your face
Let's sway,
Sway through the crowd to an empty space
And one, less serious, note on Bowie's passing: Kennedy has a university friend who was jokingly called the Angel of Death when Shirley Temple died soon after Ashley dressed up as her for Halloween one year. Yesterday morning, Kennedy was woken up by a text from Ashley saying, "Oh no, I dressed up as Bowie". Kennedy replied, "Just now? What are you talking about?" And Ashley replied, "I was Bowie for Halloween last year and now he's dead." And that's how Kennedy found out he had died. Of course Ashley knows she's not actually the Angel of Death, but I wonder if she'll have the nerve to keep dressing up like actual people?
