David Bowie always seemed to be everywhere. From the moment he dyed his hair orange, cut it into a spikey pre-mullet and adopted the persona of Ziggy Stardust, Bowie became an international superstar.
For the next 30 years, through an endless number of guises and creative left turns, Bowie was hardly ever out of the spotlight. That is until ill health—and an apparent onstage heart attack— forced him to all but retire from live performance in July 2004.
Then, suddenly, in January 2013, Bowie dropped a surprise release, and roared back into the public consciousness with the single, “Where Are We Now?,” and, in March of that year, a stunning new album, The Next Day. Still, there was no new tour. Sure, Bowie could be seen walking around New York City’s SoHo, and lunching with friends and former collaborators. But after the excitement around the release of The Next Day subsided, Bowie appeared to retreat happily back to the life of a family man.
Then, in the fall of 2015, he was everywhere once again. Two dazzling singles, “Lazarus” and “Blackstar,” were released, accompanied by striking videos, and a new play, Lazarus, loosely based on the main character from Bowie’s first major film, The Man Who Fell To Earth, from 1976, and including both classic and new Bowie music, was announced.
On Jan. 8, 2016, Bowie’s 69th birthday, the gorgeous, genre-defying album, Blackstar, was released. But before the public could even absorb this latest creative burst from the pop culture giant, he was gone, dead after a long-concealed bout of cancer.
In all of the books and essays and documentaries that followed, one thing became clear: We never really knew David Bowie. Sure, his public persona and rock legend status were set in stone, but David Jones, the man Bowie was when the cameras and the record button were off, remained a wonderful, remarkable enigma.
A new box set, I Can’t Give Everything Away (2002-2016), finally sheds some light on the mystery. Covering the last 15 years of Bowie’s remarkable life, what’s most remarkable is that this era now appears to be perhaps the most consistently fruitful period of Bowie’s recording career. But it’s also the one in which the characters and guises were largely abandoned, in favor of top drawer songcraft and unfailingly stellar performances.
“I think this period was a time in his life where he had more options,” longtime bassist Gail Ann Dorsey recalls of the final years of Bowie’s career. “Early on in his career, there was so much going on, from Ziggy Stardust to the Thin White Duke, elaborate things, and the music was always great, the songwriting was always brilliant, and the singing was just beyond. But in this era, he was getting older, and he still had so much to say. And he was excited about it.”
Because he was getting older, Dorsey continues, “he felt he didn’t have to go out in high-heeled boots and he didn’t have to dye his hair. He said after he turned 50, ‘I don’t need to do all that stuff.’ And I think he discovered, within himself, more freedom to even be himself. And it comes out in this music. That’s what I hear. He was increasingly more comfortable with being whatever he was—really, deeply was—without having to shock anybody. He just had to do the work.”
Below, some of Bowie’s closest collaborators during the period covered within I Can’t Give Everything Away remember the man they came to see as a mentor, creative role model and, even, friend, in turn giving us a window into the David Bowie we never knew.
The Next Day wasn’t just a surprise to David Bowie’s fans.
“I got a phone call from him about The Next Day sessions,” Dorsey recalls of the 2012 call from Bowie that kickstarted things. “It had been pretty quiet leading up to that, because he’d had his health issues, so I was surprised.”
By the time of The Next Day, Bowie had replaced booze and drugs with some unexpected indulgences.
“We’d done pretty much every drug under the sun either together or around each other over the 40-plus years we knew each other,” guitarist Earl Slick recalls of his off again, on again boss since 1974. “But when I showed up at the sessions for The Next Day, things had really changed. We were both family men and we’d both been sober a long time. So, on the way to the studio, I grabbed some biscotti from this little shop I knew that David loved. Man, was he happy when he saw them. Between those and the espressos we were downing while we were recording, we were both flying pretty high on sugar and caffeine. We had a good laugh over how different things were from the old days.”
The Next Day can rightly be considered the first surprise drop of the modern era by a major star. And that’s just how Bowie intended it.
“He called me and said, ‘Hey, I’m gonna do another album, but you have to promise you’re not going to tell anybody about it or you can’t be involved,’” remembers Dorsey. “And I said, ‘Of course. I’m not going to say a word.’ He was kind of pissed off. I remember him saying, ‘Every time I do anything, it gets leaked out onto the internet.’ He didn’t want all of that energy floating around. He wanted to make a record that was like when he made a record, when anybody made a record, in the ‘60s and ‘70s. They just were making a record. There was no publicity around what they were doing. And then a record came out and we were ready to receive it. He wanted to go back to that model, where there was no interference from the outside about what he may or may not be doing, or when it was coming out, or any other speculation.”
The sessions for The Next Day were intense, but also Bowie kept a sense of humor about the secrecy of them.
“He was in a good mood, especially because he was making music, people around him that he enjoyed working with, because that’s what he loved doing,” recalls Dorsey. “As a spoof on the secrecy of it all, I remember he had a little leather briefcase, which he kept all the charts in. People would scribble out their notes on them throughout the day while we were recording, but then, at the end of the session, he’d go by each music stand and kind of whip the paper off, very dramatically, and stick it in his special little dossier. So, that was a sort of running joke, this undercover thing that was happening. But it was playful.”
Bowie’s surprise swan song Blackstar was more than a year in the making.
“We recorded demos, based on his home demos, about six or seven months before we started the album officially, in January 2015,” Bowie’s longtime producer Tony Visconti told me during an interview a few years ago. “David was on keyboards and guitar, I was on bass, and we used [longtime Bowie drummer] Zach Alford and a jazz keyboard player friend of mine named Jack Spann.”
“I mentioned to him, ‘I’m checking out some of your older tunes,’” saxophonist and Blackstar bandleader Donny McCaslin recalls telling Bowie after getting tapped to play on what became Blackstar. “And he wrote back, ‘Well, what are you listening to?’ And I listed, maybe, 15 tunes. Things like ‘Life on Mars,’ even stuff from Heathen. And the spirit of his reply was, ‘That’s my old stuff and I’m into something new now.’ And I immediately stopped listening to all that stuff and just focused on the demos for Blackstar. Because in that moment I realized, yeah, he wants us to do what we do with his tunes.”
“The phone call is mind-blowing enough,” recalls bassist Tim LeFebvre. “We’re gonna record with Bowie? Even that was pretty mind-boggling. But when we got to the sessions we all relaxed, because he was very, very, very nice. And over time it got funnier and funnier, because the guy was hilarious. He played us the Legendary Stardust Cowboy and we were in fucking tears. He made the vibe very comfortable from the very first day.”
Alongside Blackstar, Bowie’s last great work—the off-Broadway show Lazarus—was intended to confound.
“He gave his songs a ‘new skin,’ as he called it,’” the director Ivo van Hov recalls of his collaboration with Bowie. “The songs sound different, because they are sung by women, or by totally different voices than his voice, and that’s what he loved about it. He wanted the songs to take on a new meaning. Because David Bowie’s work is not one thing. You can think and feel different things. That’s what’s great about his music. And that’s also what we wanted our theater piece to be: ambivalent. He didn’t want to tell the audience what to think.”
Although the quintessential solo artist, Bowie thrived on collaboration.
“David was very interested in seeing what other people would do with the art,” keyboardist Henry Hey, who worked on The Next Day and collaborated with Bowie on Lazarus, recalls. “He was very good at picking people to help him out, to work on his projects, to be collaborators and to be entrusted with that role. And once he’d made that decision, then he would give you that trust, completely.”
On Blackstar, Bowie was a man on a mission.
“David rolled in, and we talked a little bit, and they threw on a demo of one of the tunes,” remembers McCaslin. “We listened to it once and then we started recording. And after that, we only ever did one or two or, maybe, three takes of each song. On the strength of his songwriting, and the demos that he sent us, all the essential elements were there, so we were able to just jump in and play. It felt really cohesive right from the start.”
During the first week of the sessions, Bowie celebrated his 68th birthday with the band.
“His birthday was great,” recalls McCaslin. “We recorded this really wild version of ‘Happy Birthday,’ a really exuberant, avant garde, downtown-ish, punk version, and when he walked in that day we played it for him. Iman came at lunch, and we had this very elaborate sushi lunch and we were all hanging out. It was real nice.”
“He let us into his world a little bit that way,” adds LeFebvre. “It was a nice way to break it up. Because we were all nervous as shit that first week. But then, as time went on, it got a lot more loose and fun. But that was definitely an icebreaker.”
Bowie was committed to seeing Lazarus to the finish line despite his illness.
“He so did not want to be defined by his illness, and he never brought it up unless I’d ask, ‘How are you feeling?’,” recalls Hey. ”And he definitely never wanted it to be a part of the creative process, or temper the process. The only concession was that sometimes we wouldn’t see each other in person. But we continued the work, even if it was by Skype, although we couldn’t always be working, anyway, because he was working on Blackstar at the same time. So, David was pretty busy during that time, and he did everything that he could to never allow his illness to color or affect the process, at all.”
“He was there from the earliest read throughs, through previews, right up to the opening,” van Hov recalled of the period that ran until just a few weeks before Bowie’s death. “He’d watch run throughs, and he’d stay long afterwards, hanging out with us, exchanging ideas. It was a very normal artistic production process. His only concern was always the project itself, not his image or whatever. He always went for the artistic choices.”
Bowie even said goodbye in his own unique way.
“David always called me or sent me a card or something for my birthday, but never both,” Earl Slick recalls. “But on that last birthday, which was just three months before he died, I got a really sweet card, but then on my birthday he called me. We had a really great conversation, laughing about the old times and trading stories about our families and what we were up to. But never once did he bring up his health. After I got the news, I immediately remembered that call. In retrospect, of course, he was saying goodbye, even though I didn’t know it. Of all the time we shared together, I’m really glad I have that memory of David.”
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