When you spend as much time on the internet as I do, you start getting used to celebrity deaths. They sweep over you almost every day.
“Awww,” I’ll say to my wife, looking up from my laptop, “the guy who played Trapper John on MASH passed away.”
And we’ll shake our heads sadly.
Then there are celebrity deaths that shake me to my bones so badly that I do repeated Google searches just to make sure it’s not another online hoax.
David Bowie died last weekend, and it’s rattled me.
Bowie fills an enormous part of the past 40 years of my life.
I bought every LP, then every CD. I saw every movie and TV appearance.
Diamond Dogs remains, well, one of the greatest albums of all time. And since its release in 1974, a year doesn’t go by that I don’t pull it out and listen again.
I saw Bowie in concert only once, in the summer of 1974, shortly after Diamond Dogs came out. Much of the crowd that night was decked out in Ziggy Stardust duds. There was lots of orange and bright red hair out there.
Bowie emerged on stage, and there was an audible gasp from the audience. He wasn’t wearing his usual androgynous, sci-fi garb. His hair was slicked back, and he wore a baggy white suit with shoulder pads and suspenders. Without warning, Bowie had left his fans and their expectations behind. He was making one of his early career transitions, this time from glam rocker Ziggy to what would become eventually the soulful Thin White Duke.
You couldn’t hold Bowie down. He was a rock ‘n roll shape-shifter. With each album or movie or concert tour, he reinvented himself.
Reinvention keeps you fresh, and for better or worse, David Bowie remained fresh for more than four decades.
A lot of us are feeling his loss very deeply.
