The Man Who Sold the World (album)


The Man Who Sold the World is the third studio album by English rock singer-songwriter David Bowie. It was originally released by Mercury Records in the United States in November 1970, and in April 1971, with different artwork, in the United Kingdom. The album was reissued by RCA Records in 1972 used a black-and-white picture of Ziggy Stardust as the artwork, but subsequent reissues since 1990 have used the original UK cover as the official artwork.
The album was produced by Tony Visconti and recorded at Trident Studios and Advision Studios in London. Following the largely acoustic and folk rock sound of his previous 1969 self-titled album, The Man Who Sold the World marked a shift toward hard rock. The lyrics are also darker than his previous releases, exploring themes of insanity, religious themes, technology, and war commentary. None of the songs from the album were released as official singles, although some tracks appeared as B-sides to other songs between 1970 and 1973.
Upon release, The Man Who Sold the World performed well critically and commercially in the US but not as well in the UK. Retrospectively, the album has been praised for the band's performance and the unsettling nature of its music and lyrics. Multiple critics have since considered the album to be the start of Bowie's "classic period". The album has since been remastered in 1999 and in 2015 as part of the box set Five Years .

Background

David Bowie's breakthrough single "Space Oddity" was released in July 1969. It was a commercial success and brought attention to the artist. However, its parent album, David Bowie , was not as successful, partly due to the failure of Philips Records to promote the album efficiently. By 1970, the attention Bowie had garnered from "Space Oddity" had dropped and his follow-up single, "The Prettiest Star", failed to chart.
On 2 February 1970, Bowie met guitarist Mick Ronson following a performance at the Marquee in London. The two connected immediately and agreed to work together. Following their meeting, Ronson joined Bowie's short-lived band Hype, who also consisted of bassist Tony Visconti and drummer John Cambridge. For their performances, the members wore flamboyant superhero-like costumes, made by Bowie's first wife Angela Burnett, who he married on 20 March, and Visconti's then-girlfriend Liz Hartley. Bowie was Rainbowman, Ronson was Gangsterman, Visconti was Hypeman, and Cambridge was Cowboyman. Hype continued performing in the outlandish costumes for many months; after one performance on 11 March, Visconti's clothes were stolen and he had to return home wearing his Hypeman costume. Bowie halted Hype performances from at the end of March so he could focus on recording and songwriting, as well as resolve managing disputes with his manager Kenneth Pitt. The new single version of the Space Oddity track "Memory of a Free Festival" and an early attempt at "The Supermen" were recorded during this time.
Cambridge was dismissed from Hype at the end of March, with a new drummer, Woody Woodmansey, joining the group at the suggestion of Ronson. According to biographer Kevin Cann, Cambridge was dismissed by Bowie but according to biographer Nicholas Pegg, Visconti recalled that it was Ronson's request. By April 1970, the four members of Hype were living in Haddon Hall. Ronson and Visconti had built a makeshift studio under the grand staircase at Haddon, where Bowie recorded much of his early 1970s demos.

Writing and recording

The album was written and rehearsed at Bowie's home in Haddon Hall, Beckenham, an Edwardian mansion converted to a block of flats that was described by one visitor as having an ambiance "like Dracula's living room". As Bowie was preoccupied with his new wife Angie at the time, the music was largely arranged by guitarist Mick Ronson and bassist/producer Tony Visconti. Although Bowie is officially credited as the composer of all music on the album, biographer Peter Doggett quoted Visconti saying "the songs were written by all four of us. We'd jam in a basement, and Bowie would just say whether he liked them or not." In Doggett's narrative, "The band would record an instrumental track, which might or might not be based upon an original Bowie idea. Then, at the last possible moment, Bowie would reluctantly uncurl himself from the sofa on which he was lounging with his wife, and dash off a set of lyrics." Despite his annoyance with Bowie's fixation on married life during the recording of The Man Who Sold the World, Visconti still rated it as his best work with Bowie until 1980's Scary Monsters .
Bowie himself was quoted in a 1998 interview as saying "I really did object to the impression that I did not write the songs on The Man Who Sold the World. You only have to check out the chord changes. No-one writes chord changes like that". "The Width of a Circle" and "The Supermen", for example, were already in existence before the sessions began. Ralph Mace played a Moog modular synthesiser borrowed from George Harrison; Mace was a 40-year-old concert pianist who was also head of the classical music department at Mercury Records.

Music and lyrics

The Man Who Sold the World was a departure from the largely acoustic music of Bowie's second album. According to music critic Greg Kot, it marked Bowie's change of direction into hard rock. Much of the album has a distinct heavy metal edge that distinguishes it from Bowie's other releases, and has been compared to contemporary acts such as Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath. The record also provided some unusual musical detours, such as the title track's use of Latin rhythms to hold the melody.
The album's subject matter also had a quality of heaviness, exploring themes of insanity, gun-toting assassins and Vietnam War commentary, an omniscient computer, Lovecraftian Elder Gods, and, in "The Width of a Circle", a sexual encounter – with God, the Devil or some other supernatural being, according to different interpretations – in the depths of Hell. The album has also been seen as reflecting the influence of such figures as Aleister Crowley, Franz Kafka and Friedrich Nietzsche.

Cover artwork

The original 1970 US release of The Man Who Sold the World employed a cartoon-like cover drawing by Bowie's friend Michael J. Weller, featuring a cowboy in front of the Cane Hill mental asylum. Weller, whose friend was a patient there, suggested the idea after Bowie had asked him to create a design that would capture the music's foreboding tone. Drawing on pop art styles, he depicted a dreary main entrance block to the hospital with a damaged clock tower. For the design's foreground, he used a photograph of John Wayne to draw a cowboy figure wearing a ten-gallon hat and a rifle, which was meant as an allusion to the song "Running Gun Blues". Bowie suggested Weller incorporate the "exploding head" signature on the cowboy's hat, a feature he had previously used on his posters while a part of the Arts Lab. He also added an empty speech balloon for the cowboy figure, which was intended to have the line "roll up your sleeves and show us your arms"—a pun on record players, guns, and drug use—but Mercury found the idea too risqué and the balloon was left blank. According to Bowie biographer Nicholas Pegg, "at this point, David's intention was to call the album Metrobolist, a play on Fritz Lang's Metropolis: the title would remain on the tape boxes even after Mercury had released the LP in America as The Man Who Sold the World."
Bowie was enthusiastic about the finished design, but soon reconsidered the idea and had the art department at Philips Records, a subsidiary of Mercury, enlist photographer Keith MacMillan to shoot an alternate cover. The shoot took place in a "domestic environment" of the Haddon Hall living room, where Bowie reclined on a chaise longue in a cream and blue satin "man's dress", an early indication of his interest in exploiting his androgynous appearance. The dress was designed by British fashion designer Michael Fish. It has been said that his "bleached blond locks, falling below shoulder level" in the photo, were inspired by a Pre-Raphaelite painting by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. In the United States, Mercury rejected MacMillan's photo and released the album with Weller's design as its cover, much to the displeasure of Bowie, although he successfully lobbied the label to use the photo for the record's release in the United Kingdom. In 1972, he said Weller's design was "horrible" but reappraised it in 1999, saying he "actually thought the cartoon cover was really cool".
While promoting The Man Who Sold the World in the US, Bowie wore the Mr Fish dress in February 1971 on his first promotional tour and during interviews, despite the fact that the Americans had no knowledge of the as yet unreleased UK cover. The 1971 German release presented a winged hybrid creature with Bowie's head and a hand for a body, preparing to flick the Earth away. The 1972 worldwide reissue by RCA Records used a black-and-white picture of Ziggy Stardust on the sleeve. This image remained the cover art on reissues until 1990, when the Rykodisc release reinstated the UK "dress" cover. The "dress" cover has appeared on subsequent reissues of the album.

Release

The Man Who Sold the World was released in the US by Mercury Records on 4 November 1970, with the catalogue number SR-61325. It was subsequently released in the UK on 10 April 1971 by Mercury, with the catalogue number 6338 041. According to Kevin Cann, the album was disliked by Mercury executives. However, it was played on US radio stations frequently and its "heavy rock content" increased interest in Bowie. Cann also writes that it developed an underground following and laid "solid foundations" for The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.
It was once thought that none of the songs were released to the public as a single at the time, though a promo version of "All the Madmen" was issued in the US in 1970. Mercury Records released "All the Madmen" with "Janine" as the B-side as a single but withdrew it. The same song appeared in Eastern Europe in 1973, as did "The Width of a Circle". "Black Country Rock" was released as the B-side of "Holy Holy" in the UK in January 1971, shortly before the album. The title track appeared as the B-side of both the US single release of "Space Oddity" in 1972 and the UK release of "Life on Mars?" in 1973. The title track also provided an unlikely hit for Scottish pop singer Lulu and would be covered by many artists over the years, including Richard Barone in 1987, and Nirvana in 1993, who performed a widely popular cover of "The Man Who Sold the World" for MTV Unplugged in New York.

Reception and legacy

The Man Who Sold the World was generally more successful commercially and critically in the US than in the UK when it was first released. Sales were not high enough to dent the charts in either country at the time, however it made No. 26 in the UK and No. 105 in the US following its re-release on 25 November 1972, in the wake of Bowie's commercial breakthrough The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.
Music publications Melody Maker and NME originally found The Man Who Sold the World "surprisingly excellent" and "rather hysterical", respectively. Reviewing for Rolling Stone in February 1971, John Mendelsohn called the album "uniformly excellent" and commented that producer Tony Visconti's "use of echo, phasing, and other techniques on Bowie's voice ... serves to reinforce the jaggedness of Bowie's words and music", which he interpreted as "oblique and fragmented images that are almost impenetrable separately but which convey with effectiveness an ironic and bitter sense of the world when considered together". Mike Saunders from Who Put the Bomp magazine included The Man Who Sold the World in his ballot of 1971's top-ten albums for the first annual Pazz & Jop poll of American critics, published in The Village Voice in February 1972.
The album has since been cited as inspiring the goth rock, dark wave and science fiction elements of work by artists such as Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Cure, Gary Numan, John Foxx and Nine Inch Nails. In his journal, Kurt Cobain of Nirvana listed it at No. 45 in his top 50 favourite albums. In 1993, Nirvana covered its title-track for their televised special MTV Unplugged in New York. It has been claimed that glam rock began with the release of this album, though this is also attributed to Marc Bolan's appearance on the UK TV programme Top of the Pops in December 1970 wearing glitter, to perform what would be his first UK hit single under the name T. Rex, "Ride a White Swan", which peaked at No. 2 in the UK charts.
In a retrospective review for AllMusic, senior editor Stephen Thomas Erlewine cited The Man Who Sold the World as "the beginning of David Bowie's classic period" and complimented its "tight, twisted heavy guitar rock that appears simple on the surface but sounds more gnarled upon each listen". Erlewine viewed its music and Bowie's "paranoid futuristic tales" as "bizarre", adding that "Musically, there isn't much innovation ... it is almost all hard blues-rock or psychedelic folk-rock – but there's an unsettling edge to the band's performance, which makes the record one of Bowie's best albums". In a review upon the album's reissue, Q called it "a robust, sexually charged affair", while Mojo wrote, "A robust set that spins with dizzying disorientation ... Bowie's armoury was being hastily assembled, though it was never deployed with such thrilling abandon again". Author David Buckley has described that record as "the first Bowie album proper." NME critics Roy Carr and Charles Shaar Murray have said of The Man Who Sold the World, "this is where the story really starts". Author Nicholas Pegg calls The Man Who Sold the World one of the best and important albums in the history of rock music.

Reissues

The Man Who Sold the World was first released on CD by RCA in 1984. The German and Japanese masters were sourced from different tapes and are not identical for each region. The album was reissued by Rykodisc /EMI on 30 January 1990 with an extended track listing, including a 1974 re-recording of Bowie's single "Holy Holy" originally issued as a b-side Rykodisc later released this album in the Au20 series with 24-bit digitally remastered sound. "Holy Holy" was incorrectly described in the liner notes as the original single version, recorded in November 1970 and released in January 1971. Bowie vetoed inclusion of the earlier recording, and the single remained the only official release of the 1970 recording until 2015, when it was included on Re:Call 1, part of the Five Years compilation. Similarly, the liner notes incorrectly list the personnel for "Lightning Frightening" as those who played with Bowie during the Space Oddity period, when in fact the personnel were members of the Arnold Corns sessions proto-group.
In 1999, the album was reissued again by Virgin/EMI, without the bonus tracks but with 24-bit digitally remastered sound. The Japanese mini LP replicates the cover and texture of the original Mercury LP. In 2015, the album was remastered for the Five Years box set. It was released in CD, vinyl, and digital formats, both as part of this compilation and separately.

Track listing

All tracks written by David Bowie.
;Side one
  1. "The Width of a Circle" – 8:05
  2. "All the Madmen" – 5:38
  3. "Black Country Rock" – 3:32
  4. "After All" – 3:52
;Side two
  1. "Running Gun Blues" – 3:11
  2. "Saviour Machine" – 4:25
  3. "She Shook Me Cold" – 4:13
  4. "The Man Who Sold the World" – 3:55
  5. "The Supermen" – 3:38
;Bonus tracks
  1. "Lightning Frightening" – 3:38
  2. "Holy Holy" – 2:20
  3. "Moonage Daydream" – 3:52
  4. "Hang On to Yourself" – 2:51

    Personnel

Adapted from The Man Who Sold the World liner notes.