Nothing Stands In Your Way

When you’re a boy

I was thinking about Adrian Belew today, so I figured I'd post one of his albums, but therein lay a slight problem. I thought I'd post a King Crimson album, but going thru this year of music, I saw that I had done that. So, I thought I'd post Lone Rhino, his first solo album where he pretty much played everything on it...Nope, did that too. Well, what about Talking Heads? Nope. Did the albums he played on with them as well. I could've done Zappa, but I've posted a shit ton of Papa Frank's stuff lately......and then it hit me with a brick of conceptual continuity.

322 of 365

So, back when Belew was playing stunt guitar with Zappa, David Bowie was on break from tour and about to put together part 3 of his Berlin trilogy. His collaborator, Brian Eno, caught the Zappa show in Paris. He convinced Bowie to check him out, whereupon the Thin White Young Dude promptly poached the stalwart Adrian and put him in his line up. There's a full story about this, and it's much better if you read it in Adrian's own words on his blog. It's fantastic.
Anyway, I've been reluctant to bring Bowie into this little list for awhile. It's not that I don't think he's worthy, It's just that he has such a brilliant body of work, and also that so many people are deeply invested into it, I really didn't want to walk on such well trodden ground, so to speak. A ton of you out there are far more qualified to talk about DB than I.
In any case, I chose this album because, well frankly, it's pretty fucking different. I like the angularness of the whole thing. And I like that one of the principle ideas that Bowie, Visconti and Eno had come up with was for the musicians to maybe not have a good idea what the songs were about.
So, they brought Adrian Belew (among many others) to Switzerland and put him in a studio and told him to play solos over music he'd never heard. He didn't even know the key of the song. He'd get three takes, and they would use one of them. I think it turned out pretty well.

Fun Fact, when David Bowie went on Saturday Night Live that year to promote the record, he introduced the world to Klaus Nomi, of whom I should also write something about before this whole thing comes to a crashing end.

David Bowie. Lodger.
RCA Records, 1979.