FEATURE:
Groovelines
David Bowie - The Jean Genie
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THERE is a lot of celebration happening…
around the fiftieth anniversary of David Bowie’s Aladdin Sane. His sixth studio album was released on 20th April, 1973, and it is considered to be one of his classics – in a career that has boasted more than its fair share of them! There is a photography exhibition in London, and I know there will be articles written about one of the all-time best albums. I am going to start with some overview and opinion about this album, but I want to focus on perhaps the best-known song from Aladdin Sane, The Jean Genie. First, Rhino give us some background to Bowie’s work of brilliance. Recorded between Trident (London) and RCA (New York City), this was a hugely important point in his career:
“The year was 1973, and new British import David Bowie had begun to achieve star status in America. Bowie's 1972 full-length, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, was a breakthrough in the States, spinning off radio hits including "Suffragette City," "Starman" and "Ziggy Stardust." As he toured the States in support of Ziggy, the profound experience influenced his songwriting, which was happening between shows. With a dose of inspiration from the Rolling Stones (Exile on Main St. was released in May '72), Bowie was moved to rough up the sleek Ziggy sound with a harder edge for his next LP.
Hitting the recording studio between tour legs in late 1972, the first fruits of Bowie's labor came in the form of lead single, "The Jean Genie," released in November of that same year. The song's blistering guitar riffs and strutting rhythm drove it up the charts, with the track peaking at #71 on the Hot 100 for the week of December 23, 1972. The #1 song in America that week: Billy Paul's "Me and Mrs. Jones." Over in the UK, "The Jean Genie" charged all the way to #2 on the Singles Chart.
Bowie took a radical turn with the follow-up, the brilliant "Drive-In Saturday," released as a single in early April 1973. Originally written for Mott the Hoople, Ian Hunter and company turned the tune down, unable to get a handle on the song's complexity. The rejection stung the artist, who recalled on VH1's Storytellers that he drunkenly shaved his eyebrows after the song was rejected, joking "that taught them a lesson."
"It's about a future where people have forgotten how to make love, so they go back onto video-films that they have kept from this century," Bowie told the audience at Cleveland's Public Auditorium in November 1972 before one of the first live performances of the track. He allegedly also asked anyone recording the show to to leave, as he was about to play new music. "This is after a catastrophe of some kind, and some people are living on the streets and some people are living in domes, and they borrow from one another and try to learn how to pick up the pieces." While the song failed to chart in America, it peaked at #3 in the UK. In Ireland, the tune climbed as high as #14.
PHOTO CREDIT: Masayoshi Sukita
It was sometime in April 1973 (April 13 is the date most commonly listed, while Bowie scholars have the release date as April 19), when David Bowie released the Aladdin Sane album (that same day, the third single from the set, the Mike Garson piano-powered ballad, "Time," was also released). The album helped solidify Bowie's growing star status, selling enough copies in America to peak at #17 on the Billboard 200 for the week of June 16, 1973. The #1 album in the country that week: Paul McCartney & Wings' Red Rose Speedway.
"I wasn’t at all surprised Aladdin Sane made my career," Bowie told Cameron Crowe for Rolling Stone in 1976. "I packaged a totally credible plastic rock star – much better than any sort of Monkees fabrication. My plastic rocker was much more plastic than anybody’s."
FUN FACT: The iconic cover of Bowie's Aladdin Sane record was the most expensive ever produced at the time. Shot by Brian Duffy, an unprecedented seven-color process (four-color was the standard at the time) drove costs through the roof: ‘(Bowie's manager) Tony Defries commissioned it through [his company] MainMan Productions," remembered Duffy's studio manager, Francis Newman. "I don't think there was any budget as such. Tony just told Duffy to get on with it. Duffy told the story that Tony wanted it to be as expensive as possible to commit RCA into promoting it. Certainly it was [expensive] because the dye transfer print was incredibly expensive, about £1,000, which given that our day rate at the time was about £300 – that’s a lot of money."
FUN FACT #2: The contact sheet containing the original cover photograph as well as outtakes is currently up for auction. It's estimated to sell for anywhere between $20,000 and $30,000”.
I am keen to explore the brilliance that is The Jean Genie. The first single from Aladdin Sane, it was released on 24th November, 1972. One of Bowie’s absolute best songs, it is one that sits alongside so many other greats on Aladdin Sane. This is what AllMusic said about the classic album:
“Ziggy Stardust wrote the blueprint for David Bowie's hard-rocking glam, and Aladdin Sane essentially follows the pattern, for both better and worse. A lighter affair than Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane is actually a stranger album than its predecessor, buoyed by bizarre lounge-jazz flourishes from pianist Mick Garson and a handful of winding, vaguely experimental songs. Bowie abandons his futuristic obsessions to concentrate on the detached cool of New York and London hipsters, as on the compressed rockers "Watch That Man," "Cracked Actor," and "The Jean Genie." Bowie follows the hard stuff with the jazzy, dissonant sprawls of "Lady Grinning Soul," "Aladdin Sane," and "Time," all of which manage to be both campy and avant-garde simultaneously, while the sweepingly cinematic "Drive-In Saturday" is a soaring fusion of sci-fi doo wop and melodramatic teenage glam. He lets his paranoia slip through in the clenched rhythms of "Panic in Detroit," as well as on his oddly clueless cover of "Let's Spend the Night Together." For all the pleasures on Aladdin Sane, there's no distinctive sound or theme to make the album cohesive; it's Bowie riding the wake of Ziggy Stardust, which means there's a wealth of classic material here, but not enough focus to make the album itself a classic”.
There is some interesting discussion about the iconic The Jean Genie. It is a song that remains one of David Bowie’s most famous and loved. Because Aladdin Sane is fifty soon, I wanted to spend some time diving into one of its best moments. Rhino looked back to the release of The Jean Genie in November 1972, where they also revealed some facts about this monumental song:
“It was November 24, 1972, when David Bowie released the lead single from his sixth studio album, Aladdin Sane: "The Jean Genie." Powered by an instantly classic rock guitar riff, the song is among Bowie's most enduring and truly timeless tunes.
The single wasn't exactly a chart monster, peaking at #71 on the Hot 100 for the week of December 23, 1972. The #1 song in America that week: Billy Paul's "Me and Mrs. Jones." Here's a look back at David Bowie's 1972 hard rocking favorite, "The Jean Genie."
1. The song was inspired by Iggy Pop, Cyrinda Fox, Jean Genet and New York City
The high-energy track was the result of a whirlwind of influences borne from a 1972 trip to NYC. He was hanging out with Andy Warhol associate Cyrinda Foxe, and started writing the tune as a way to win her over. "Starting out as a lightweight riff thing I had written one evening in NY for Cyrinda's enjoyment, I developed the lyric to the otherwise wordless pumper and it ultimately turned into a bit of a smorgasbord of imagined Americana... based on an Iggy-type persona," the artist shared in book Moonage Daydream. "The title, of course, was a clumsy pun upon Jean Genet."
PHOTO CREDIT: Masayoshi Sukita
2. Another influence: the Rolling Stones
“I wanted to get the same sound as the Stones had on their first album on the harmonica,” Bowie once said, via Rolling Stone. “I didn’t get that near to it but it had a feel that I wanted – that Sixties thing.”
3. "The Jean Genie" is where the band Simple Minds got its name
Childhood friends Jim Kerr and Charlie Burchill were ready to take their music careers seriously, they broke up previous band, Johnny and the Self Abusers, and looked to Bowie for guidance. Inspiration came in the form of "The Jean Genie" lyric, "He's so simple-minded, he can't drive his module." Simple Minds was born.
4. An inventive cameraman saved Bowie's Top of the Pops 1973 performance of "The Jean Genie" on "Top of the Pops"
After Bowie blew minds with the performance, the BBC promptly erased the tape for reuse as a way to save money. Thankfully, cameraman John Henshall, having utilized a homemade fish-eye lens for the moment, captured the performance onto a videotape. He held the tape in his personal stash for almost 40 years before revealing it to the world. “I just couldn’t believe that I was the only one with it,” Henshall told Rolling Stone. “I just thought you wouldn’t be mad enough to wipe a tape like that”.
Before finishing off, there is an interesting thing about the song. Whilst Bowie himself might have been influenced by a few different sources when it came to that indelible and tremendous riff, another band put out a big song not long after The Jean Genie. Many have noted clear similarities regarding that riff. Far Out Magazine explain more:
“The story goes that David Bowie once told James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem, “You can’t steal from a thief, darling”. This declaration came after the New Yorker had openly informed Bowie of his love the Starman’s work and that he had stolen from him “liberally”. Whilst it says a lot about Murphy’s artistic debt to Bowie, this exchange says more about Bowie’s career-long penchant for cherrypicking from others than it does anything else.
There are many examples of Bowie “creatively borrowing” segments of work from others, but one of the most prominent is his 1972 hit ‘The Jean Genie’, the lead single from 1973’s Aladdin Sane. Boasting one of his most famous riffs, played by the late Mick Ronson, the track is inspired by a handful of other artists.
According to legend, the song originated as the impromptu jam ‘Bussin” while on the tour bus between shows in Cleveland and Memphis during ‘The Ziggy Stardust Tour’. It started when Ronson played a Bo Diddley-inspired riff on his new Les Paul. The jam became the first song Bowie penned for Aladdin Sane in the autumn of 1972, completing its creation when in New York City. During this period, Bowie spent a considerable amount of time with Andy Warhol associate Cyrinda Foxe, and he later admitted that he wrote it for her. He said: “I wrote it for her amusement in her apartment. Sexy girl”.
The swaggering R&B chug of the riff has long been likened to The Yardbirds’ style and, particularly, their cover of Bo Diddley’s classic ‘I’m a Man’, which is very similar. Elsewhere, it has also been compared to the dark blues of Jacques Dutronic’s 1966 piece ‘La Fille du Père Noël’.
With that, the song’s title is often taken as an allusion to author Jean Genet. In 2005’s Moonage Daydream, Bowie ambiguously discussed the title and riff, as he explained: “Starting out as a lightweight riff thing I had written one evening in NY for Cyrinda’s enjoyment, I developed the lyric to the otherwise wordless pumper, and it ultimately turned into a bit of a smorgasbord of imagined Americana … based on an Iggy-type persona … the title, of course, was a clumsy pun upon Jean Genet”.
Reaching number two in the U.K., it is clear there was a lot of love for The Jean Genie in 1972/’73. The penultimate song on Aladdin Sane (Lady Grinning Soul is the final track), there is so much to admire about it. If the title is a bit of a clumsy pun around author Jean Genet, and Bowie had no huge or clear lyrical inspiration, I think it is his incredible vocal and the band performance that makes it stand out. Alongside Mick Ronson, Trevor Bolder and Mick ‘Woody’ Woodmansey, David Bowie created this song that has endured for decades and produced that incredible riff. Once heard, it is…
IMPOSSIBLE to forget.