The other day, Ray and I were at a toy store in Ballard. Ray was wearing his David Bowie T-shirt and his new black Chuck Taylor All-Stars (“Chucks!”) and looked like quite the little rocker. Upon entering the sotre, he made a bee-line for a dump truck and started playing his favorite game (“Dump-dump-dump”) and I started to browse. But my attention was soon summoned back to him when I heard a man ask him if he could see his T-shirt.
“Wow! David Bowie!! Man, you’re my hero!” the guy said to Ray, who was a little startled by all this. I walked up and made some paternal gesture towards Ray (partly to protect him). The guy stuck out his hand to me and said, “Well, actually, you’re my hero! That’s an awesome shirt.”
I shook his hand and thanked him (getting attention, after all, being one main reason I put the shirt on him that morning). We talked a bit about how Ray enjoys listening to Bowie — even requests him at meal time (“Bo-bo!”) and how his favorite album is Lodger and his favorite song is Young Americans.
Turns out the guy is the A-number-1 Bowie fan of the Northwest….
He had gone so far as to have an account on DavidBowie.com with photos of his old, Bowie-wallpapered house and some Bowie art done by friends of his. All in all, he was avery friendly, chatty guy who had simply never gotten over his obsessions with 1970’s rock music.
Now, back in the day, I fancied myself quite the Bowie fan, despite coming to it rather late in the game (I didn’t really start paying attention to pop music at all until around 1986, so well after Let’s Dance and even the abyssmal Tonight). Nevertheless, I threw myself into the Bowie-fan world with great gusto and tried to snap up everything I could find from used record stores. I amassed a pretty decent collection, including some bootlegs, rare pressings, foreign releases, and the like. I caught a show on the Glass Spider tour and saw Sound & Vision twice, once from the front-row, and even saw a Tin Machine show. I modeled my wardrobe on Bowie’s “Thin White Duke” phase, right down to the packet of Gitanes in my vest pocket. I met Adrian Belew and Coco Schwab and spent my a great deal of my hard-earned money on ephemera and other paraphrenalia.
I habitually browsed old record bins for Bowie-gems well into my 20s’ but thereafter my interest seriously waned. The box of albums I lugged with me from apartment to apartment stopped getting unpacked, and eventually became viewed as a burden especially after my turntable broke and I never replaced it. The coveted set list a roady handed me at a concert once disappaeared and I didn’t feel a loss. I recently discovered an old concert program that had been bent and folded in a box, and I did not shudder at viewing its less-than-mint condition. There was a period of several years where I didn’t listen to a DB album at all, and even now, though I have my favorities, I won’t even pretend to like a great deal of his music.
After encountering überfan, I am left to ponder why DB was such a major influence on me and why my interest so aburptly waned. I definitely needed a role-model at that age, and he fit the bill. Popular, yet unique; mainstream, yet strange. Everything I wanted to be — the odd one, but loved and accepted by everyone. Sure, he was probably somewhat of a paternal figure, too — the weird, wild father I never had. I don’t think he was ever an object of lust or desire, though his image was always so sexually charged I cannot rule that out completely.
And the drop off? Well, looking back, I would have to say that it occured around the time my father left my mother. Though that wasn’t terribly traumatic to me (and not entirely unexepected), I think that int he aftermath I questioned a great deal of previous assumption I had about my life and myself. DB represented an earlier time when the world operated under one set of rules, and now those had changed. He lost his significance. The music itself was not enough to keep him in my life. He, like so many others close to me at that time, just drifted away.
Ray has triggered a bit of a resurgence of my interest in DB (hence the T-shirt), primarily, I think, because of the father-role-model connection. Like many parents, I want my son to like the things I like (or liked) and have them be as important to him (or at least have him regonize their importance), and avoid the mistakes and missteps of my own parents. With DB, however, the relationship is a bit weird because of the specific role he filled in my life — or the particular gaps he filled, I should say. I do not want Ray to have those sames gaps — spaces of support that I cannot fill for him. But at some level, I understand that it’s inevitable and even healthy for him to seek role-models outside of his family. So, maybe I’m trying to steer him toward one that worked for me when I needed one.
Or maybe I just want to teach him to say “Wham, bam, thank you ma’am!”
