The Bowie Project
#15 – Baal (1982)
By the time we get to the 1980 and the release of Scary
Monsters David Bowie was taking stock of his life and trying to think ahead
to the future. As he was getting older and watching a new generation of artists
and musicians coming up, he wanted to prepare for a life beyond rock n’ roll,
he wanted to become an actor. He already had two major film roles, the alien
Thomas Jerome Newton in the 1976 picture The Man Who Fell to Earth, a
part he said he didn’t need to even act for because he was so spaced out on
drugs he already seemed like an alien, and the WWI veteran turned male escort
Paul Ambrosius von Przygodski in 1978’s Just a Gigolo, a movie which by
all accounts was a complete failure. However, his appearance in The Man Who
Fell to Earth was noticed by theatre director Jack Hofsiss who offered him
the lead role as John Merrick in the Broadway show The Elephant Man. The
story is based on Joseph Merrick, a real man who lived in the Victorian era and
was known for the extreme deformity of his body. Hofsis felt that Bowie’s
otherworldly aura would translate well to the part, and he was correct, Bowie
received huge critical acclaim in theatrical circles for his performance for
which he wore no prosthetics and used his mime training to distort and contort
his body and limbs.
By early 1981, director Alan Clarke proposed reviving
Bertolt Brecht’s first full length play Baal for the BBC. After the
recent success of The Elephant Man, the producer and translator travelled to
Bowie’s home in Switzerland and offered him the role where they were shocked at
the depth of knowledge he had not only of the Brecht but around the context of
early-twentieth century Germany. While some consider Bowie’s time working on Baal
as a kind of stop gap while he was waiting out different contacts to expire,
the EP he released containing its soundtrack demonstrates a side to Bowie’s
musicality and a traditional theatricality that was seldom laid this bare.
Music biographer Chris O’Leary said it acts as “a farewell to the performer he
once was and a glimpse of the artist he could have been and sometimes wanted to
be”.
David Bowie and Bertolt Brecht on first glance might not
look like an obvious duo but with a little bit of investigation you can see why
Bowie might have been drawn to this role. Brecht is primarily known for his
plays that offer a socialist critique of a capitalist world, he specialised in
epic theatre a practice which focuses on the audience's perspective and
reaction through techniques that make them engage with art in a different way,
the goal is not to suspend disbelief but to shine a light on the world as it
is. Bowie has throughout his career played with his audience’s expectation of
him, through music, but also through theatricality, style, and a subversion of
societal expectations. What Brecht tried to accomplish with theatre is similar
to what Bowie was trying to do through rock n’ roll.
Baal as a play also suits Bowie quite well. It
concerns a poet named Baal, an anti-hero who rejects the conventions and
trappings of bourgeois society and draws on the German tradition of the Sturm
und Drang which celebrates the tortured genius living outside of a society that
is attempting to destroy them as first seen in works like Goethe’s 1774 novel The
Sorrows of Young Werther. Baal roams the countryside womanising and
brawling, he seduces a woman who later drowns herself mimicking Ophelia in Hamlet,
he impregnates his mistress and abandons her, and he murders his best friend
becoming a fugitive to the police, in the end Baal shows no remorse to the
consequences of his actions but dies penniless and alone. Brecht wrote the play
when he was just 20 and still in college and Baal represents the archetypal
troubadour magnifying and lashing out against society's expectations. It
follows the same themes as much of Bowie’s work, the role of the outsider,
gender divides and madness. The TV broadcast of the play used a split screen
that allowed Bowie to address the audience directly through song in an artistic
choice that was supposed to convey the “alienating” nature of Brechtian
theatre.
The music from Baal was released as a five song EP
titled David Bowie in Bertolt Brecht's Baal which clocks in at just over
11 minutes. In the BBC television version of the plays the song is accompanied
by just a banjo, however this release was recorded in Berlin with a much fuller
orchestral arrangement that improves upon the songs greatly. It would also be
his last collaboration, for more than 20 years, with producer Tony Visconti, who
he had been working with since 1969.
The EP opens with “Baal’s Hymn”, a song that in the play is
broken into smaller sections and played throughout the play. In essence, the
song tells the story of Baal from birth to death. Bowie’s take on Baal is that
of a rockstar, in a way mimicking what he did with Ziggy Stardust, it’s as if
through this play he is exploring the excess and debauchery of the decade
before now from a more detached distance. The track has got a Scott
Walker/Jacques Brel feel to it, is grand and powerful and showcases Bowie’s
potential as in more traditional respectable musical scenarios such as these.
“Reminiscence of Marie A.” is a beautiful song about a partly
remembered lost love from a late-summer day long ago. The narrator claims the
girl means nothing to him now, he can’t even recall what it was like to kiss
her, all he remembers is the cloud in the sky that slowly disappeared in that
lost afternoon. In the play the song is supposed to establish Baal as a
dispassionate and immoral character who fails to remember past sexual
conquests, but the studio recording of the song sees Bowie singing in such a
passionate and sincere way that it’s imbued with a sense of sadness and
nostalgia for what gets lost in our heart through the passage of time.
“Ballad of the Adventures” sees Baal returning to
civilization and singing to drunk friends after living out in the woods for
years. He’s older now and opportunities of youth have passed him by, birth and
death weigh heavily upon him and yearns for a return to the comfort of
childhood and maternal love. The song is full of anger and aggression and was
written by Brecht shortly after the death of his own mother. Bowie delivers the
song passionately and in the play this is sung in the lead up to him stabbing
and killing his friend Erkart.
Probably the most well-known piece “The Drowned Girl”
recounts the suicide of Johanna, Baal’s underage lover. Originally Brecht wrote
the poem about the murder of German communist revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg.
After the failed Spartacist Uprising, a general strike in Berlin in 1919, a
paramilitary death squad shot Luxembourg and her body was dumped into a canal.
The piece also evokes Hamlet’s Ophelia and her slow descent into
madness. The track was released as a single with low commercial expectations
and surprisingly it did reach 29 in UK singles charts. It’s a slow sad track
and demonstrates the powerful vocal range Bowie had.
The EP finishes with a short upbeat track “The Dirty Song”,
in the play the song sees Baal humiliating his lover Sophie while performing to
a rowdy and drunk crowd in a cabaret club. The TV version has Bowie singing the
track with no musical accompaniment except for jeers and catcalls from the
onlookers. It’s his shortest song since “Don’t Sit Down” in 1969.
Baal would be Bowie’s last release with RCA Records who
he had been with since Hunky Dory in 1971, over the years he had become
dissatisfied with the label and felt like they were “milking” his back
catalogue according to biographer Nicolas Pegg. For his next album Bowie would
sign with EMI American Records for an estimated $17 million. Baal was a
short foray into the world of serious theatre and in a way demonstrates a path
not taken. The success of Scary Monsters and Let’s Dance
propelled Bowie into a world of previously unseen mainstream commercial
success, however had that not been the case there is a chance he could have
continued in this vein with West End and Broadway productions and a more
lucrative film acting career, but alas the path not taken is never to be
revealed and Baal is a small often forgotten glimpse into yet another
side of David Bowie.
Baal (1981) ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ [7/10]
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