Tin Machine (1989)

The Bowie Project #20 – Tin Machine (1989)

In 1987, David Bowie’s latest album, Never Left Me Down, and the subsequent elaborate Glass Spider Tour that promoted it, left critics unimpressed and in the court of public opinion the enigmatic artist, who just a few short years before could do no wrong, was now decidedly in danger of becoming uncool, a throwback to an earlier era, desperately trying to fit in amongst the zeitgeist of the late 1980s. Even Bowie himself was admitting that he had started making music with an imagined audience in mind, he was no longer producing for himself but instead to try appeasing the masses. This was no good, Bowie had long made a reputation for himself as someone who pushed the boundaries, who never stood still, who was constantly changing and transforming. But now, he was feeling a creative deficit, he knew he needed to do something to kick start his passion once again, and to do this he wanted to collaborate, to take a step out of the limelight and move away from the legacy and expectations of being David Bowie.

The result of this was the hard rock band Tin Machine. The seeds of this project begin in 1987 during the Glass Spider Tour when through a mutual friend Bowie meets Reeves Gabrels, discovering they have common interest and outlooks Bowie asks to collaborate with him stating that he’s “lost his vision” and wants his help getting it back. Gabrels later highlighted how Bowie said "Basically, I need somebody that can do a combination of Beck, Hendrix, Belew and Fripp, with a little Stevie Ray Vaughan and Albert King thrown in. Then, when I’m not singing, you take the ball and do something with it, and when you hand the ball back to me, it might not even be the same ball.” For the first time in a long time Bowie wanted his creative experience not just to be co-songwriting here or there but a true collaboration, part of a real band where everyone has equal standing and the power to question and override each other. They recruit the two brothers Tony and Hunt Sales, who Bowie had previously worked with while making music with Iggy Pop in the late 1970s, and the band is born.

The group clicked and they said they wanted a name that represented the type of sounds they were creating, they settled on Tin Machine which echoes the hard rock industrial music that the band would produce. This was heavy music, the only thing even slightly comparable to it in Bowie’s career would be the hard rock found on his 1970 record the Man Who Sold the World. Bowie wasn’t making this music with commercial success in mind, he just wanted to have fun again and remember what it means to be a member of a band. EMI, the record label was not happy, they would have preferred to be able to market this as a Bowie solo album, but he was having none of it. He said he couldn’t release this under his own name even if he wanted to, his fans wouldn’t know what to do with it, he didn’t want to alienate them, he wanted this to be something new. The band presented a united front, they each had an equal stake in the contracts, Bowie didn’t speak over bandmates in interviews and sometimes he didn’t speak at all just letting the other members take the limelight, they wore designer Prada suits to demonstrate a unity of style as well. Those around Bowie were not quite happy with this arrangement with Gabrels stating he thought his assistant Coco Schwab felt “Tin Machine was bringing down the currency of the David Bowie name”.

The sound of this record just might be a couple of years ahead of its time and could be seen as a forebear to the grunge sounds that were just starting to pick up steam in Seattle with bands like Pearl Jam and Nirvana.  It’s hard rock, art rock, and noise rock, it’s got a blues influence which also infuses aspects of punk, post-punk, and new wave. It’s like Bowie is taking a sledgehammer to everything he built up in the 80s, he’s showing people that he never lost his edge, this is raw and gritty music.

The record opens with “Heaven’s in Here” and it was the first song the band recorded together and would also be the first and last track they ever played live together. Right from the get-go you can tell this is going to be a different type of project from the last couple of Bowie records, the sound owes a lot more to classic rock, it’s loud, it’s powerful and Bowie has lost the chic over-produced 80s twang in his voice, he’s going back to basics, he’s ready to rock. The guitars are loud, the drums and crashing, there’s room for solos and to give the band some central space. On tour they would extend this song to over 10 minutes acting as a space for pure musical excess and allowing Gabrels to go wild on the guitar. It’s a decent opening but moving at a slightly slower pace than a lot of the other tracks on the record I don’t think it really showcases Tin Machine at their best.

When I start to get really interested is on the second track which is also their namesake “Tin Machine”. This song feels like punk rock and the band said it was like having their own theme song. When questioned why they were called Tin Machine Hunt Sales said, “I don’t know? What’s a Led Zeepelin? What’s Strawberry Alarm Clock” adding that it was either that or being called Liquid Chicken. The imagery in this song also demonstrates a band who are not concerned with being clean cut and are more interested in being fast, simple, and angry.

Things slow down for “Prisoner of Love” a song written for Bowie’s then girlfriend Melissa Hurley and reads as worldly advice from the singer to his naïve younger girlfriend. It was released as a single and failed to chart at all in either the UK or the US. Near the end of the song two couplets paraphrase Allen Ginsberg’s landmark beat poem “Howl” with its famous opening “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix”. The song’s lyrics “just stay square” are a call to his young lover telling to hang onto the innocence of life for as long as you can, not to let yourself get bogged down by all the crap out there, and there’s nothing wrong with being uncynical.

The anti-drug song “Crack City” picks up the crack cocaine epidemic that was spreading rampant throughout the United States throughout this period. Bowie had been writing pro and anti-drugs songs since the mid-60s, but after his debilitating cocaine addiction in the 1970s he was now in a more firmly educated position to talk about such things. Even in the midst of outlining the horrors of drug addiction Bowie can’t help but through in a cheeky reference to one his musical heroes and legendary drug user Lou Reed with the lyric “They’ll bury you in velvet/And place you underground” being an allusion to his group the Velvet Underground well-known for their own not so anti-drug song “Heroin”.

The most well-known Tin Machine track is one he later re-recorded as a solo artist in 1997 called “I Can’t Read”. The song is a real high point for the album with Bowie describing the track as “full of remorse and agony, I expect, it's when jobs go wrong, and home doesn't really feel warm anymore, and you don't need anybody - you don't even pretend you do - and you end up in this kind of state”. Like the previous song we get a call back to one of Bowie’s previous influencers Andy Warhol with the line “Andy where’s my 15 minutes?” alluding to his notorious statement that in the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes, which I am sure I’m not the first person on the planet to make this point in a way foresaw the rise of social media. In the wake of Warhol’s death in 1987 Bowie referencing now as more as a celebrity allusion rather than the enigmatic figure whose attention he was vying for back on Hunky Dory in 1971. Bowie considered this to be the best Tin Machine track, it’s for that reason he returned to it later in the 1990s and there is a couple of different versions available. In the song reading stands in for creativity, the lull Bowie had found himself in at this point in his career, the well had run dry, he’s exploring the problem he’s having as he's solving with Tin Machine.

“Under the God” is an incredibly fast hard rock song, written about the rise in far right politics. It firmly showcases Bowie’s disdain for these ideas which a decade before he had flirted with through his Aryan superstar persona the Thin White Duke. Originally the song was a demo called “Night Train” and Bowie wanted to directly speak about Neo-Nazism without the use of highfalutin metaphor so there was no mistake how he felt about these “right wing dicks in their boiler suits”. Playing the song live Bowie would say it was dedicated to all the “unfortunate immigrants in the decaying Western world”. With fascist bands like Screwdriver starting to wheedle through way into the public consciousness it was important to take a real stand and distance yourself from fascist ideology, the days of being playful with it were over, WWII was well over, and these viewpoints were starting to gain traction once again, and if you take a look around today they never really went away.

Opening side two is a straightforward love song with “Amazing” and is probably one of the most straightforward expressions of love and devotion heard in a Bowie track with the lyric “since I found you my life’s amazing”. Although the song hints at a possessive nature with jealousy and insecurity to boot stating “I am scared you’ll meet someone/In whom you’ll confide” and “my nightmare, rooted here watching you go”. At this time Bowie was engaged to Melissa Hurley and they split the next year shortly before he met his future wife and love of his life Iman Abdulmajid.

Now we get to the John Lennon cover “Working Class Hero” which Bowie stated was always one of his favourite Lennon tracks. A strongly political song that comments on the differences between the social classes, about the way the working class is supposed to be processed and attained into the middle class and confirms to the machinery while being looked on with distaste by those in power. Tin Machine give the song a hard rock edge that it probably doesn’t really need, maybe it just feels like this song has been overdone with later covers by the likes of Marilyn Manson and Green Day, but to give it credit at this point this song was one of the lesser-known John Lennon solo songs and Bowie was also attempting to bring it a wider audience.

The short “Bus Stop” talks about a man who meets Jesus at a bus stop. The song is sung with a more British twang and Bowie said it almost feels vaudeville, it’s a brief moment of levity on the often thematically and musically dour and heavy album. With three chords, two versus, and two refrains and at a length of 1:43 it is the shortest track Tin Machine ever recorded.

“Pretty Thing” is a fast track that’s probably one of the least inspired moments on the record and you could call it Tin Machine at their laddish worst with blatantly sexist lyrics especially the line “tie you down, pretend you're Madonna” which a crass sexualisation and targeted harassment of real woman, not cool Bowie.

Looking at the moral panic and social menaces of video games and horror movies in “Video Crime” is quite funny now when you think the best-selling game that year was Super Mario Bros. 3. The song is almost tuneless, you couldn’t dance to it if you tried, not that you’d want to. It’s a bit of a slog that runs on too long and the band might agree with it as it's the only song they never performed live.

“Run” was a bonus track on the CD  and cassette version of this album. Now we’re getting the point of the fall off of vinyl the rise of compact disc and I guess due to the mediums possibility to hold more content you start to see some difference in the dual releases by certain artists. The chorus resembles the Velvet Underground track “Run, Run, Run” and the subject matter is similar too as Lou Reed was also writing about scoring heroin, finding fixes, and death. It’s a song about desperation and vice and was co-written by Bowie with Tin Machine guitarist Kevin Armstrong while they were producing the Iggy Pop album Blah-Blah-Blah in 1986.

Another CD and cassette only track “Sacrifice Yourself” gives Gabriel Reeves guitar work a little time to shine and became a live favourite at Tin Machine shows often as a high voltage set opener. The song is semi-autobiographical with allusions to Bowie’s earlier career and addiction issues with lyrics a call-back to “Suffragette City” “wham bam thank you mam” refrain and the sacrificial warning of the press which may have served to eat Ziggy Stardust alive.

The final song on all versions of the album was “Baby Can Dance” it’s mostly free association in the lyrics and serves as a vehicle for the band to bounce off, which is the true spirit of Tin Machine as a group. Bowie has said the songs are almost secondary to their ability for improvisation over them. The music is loud, the band are giving it their all, Bowie is having fun with it, if you’re not sold on what this band are up to by this stage then you’re not going to be this is what it’s all about.

When this album was released, it received a mixed reception. Of course, people were curious to see what this new Bowie project was, but many fans, especially those he gathered since Let’s Dance, were turned off by the hard rock sound. Some welcomed it as a return to a more experimental challenging Bowie while others criticised it as pompous and pretentious. Whatever you want to say about it, it was deeply connected with the music styles that were developing at the time, even if they hadn’t quite picked up steam yet this could be seen as a proto grunge recorded in the vein of Pearl Jam and Nirvana and also owes a lot to the distorted styles of bands like Sonic Youth. Bowie himself thought of it very fondly and throughout later years whenever Tin Machine were brought up he would say this was the band that saved his creative process, that helped rejuvenate himself through a difficult professional period. In 1996 he reflected on it stating, “"For better or worse it helped me to pin down what I did and didn’t enjoy about being an artist. It helped me, I feel, to recover as an artist. And I do feel that for the past few years I’ve been absolutely in charge of my artistic path again.” And the next year in 1997 he questioned whether the band might be re-evaluated at a later period like much of his work has been and retrospectively given an extra level of respect. He said: “It's going to be interesting, isn't it? As the songs creep out in different forms over the years, I assume that eventually it'll be evaluated in a different way. I'm not sure people will ever be sympathetic to it entirely. But as the years go by, I think they'll be less hostile. I think it was quite a brave band and I think there were some extremely good pieces of work done. And I think they'll kind of show themselves over time."

In my opinion, this is a record that is bold and interesting, it’s powerful and daring and achieved exactly what it was trying to achieve. In the conversation surrounding Bowie’s career it is often swept under the rug and people act like it didn’t even happen. I think this wholly ignores the effect this project had on him as an artist and allowed him to develop further as we move into the 1990s. To this day it still hasn’t got the reappraisal that I think it deserves, these tracks rock hard and show that even when Bowie feels like he’s lost his groove, he always gets it back.

Tin Machine ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ [6/10]