Popdose Flashback: Tin Machine, “Tin Machine”

Tin Machine was flat-out great, featuring fierce guitars, edgy lyrics and even edgier production. The world thought it stunk, and threw stuff at David Bowie and his noisy bandmates when they took the stage and played its songs. For this critic’s CD-buying money, the two records Tin Machine didÁ¢€”this 1989 debut and the 1991 Tin Machine II followupÁ¢€”are still the finest post-Let’s Dance material Bowie’s made.

Tin Machine’s main fault was that it refused to pump out another tired Ziggy Stardust nostalgia cruise on stageÁ¢€”with some Low, Lodger, and Young Americans stuff interspersed to keep it realÁ¢€”that hardcore Bowiephiles wanted. Instead, Bowie forsook his brand and Tin Machine played originals like the cut after which the band was named, “Tin Machine.”

How dare he play dissonant songs, charged with aggressively political and at times angrily anti-religious lyrical content? The words were a good-news, bad-news proposition: Popdose colleague David Medsker claims that a couplet from “Crack City”Á¢€””They’re just a bunch of assholes, with buttholes for their brains”Á¢€”is one of the worst couplets in rock history.* Hard to disagree with that. Some of Tin Machine’s lyrics, and for that matter, the feedback, seem gratuitous.

The point is, we remember those words two decades later. Can anyone give me any couplet, good or bad, from Black Tie White Noise? Or from 1. Outside? Does anyone even remember those Bowie album titles? Nobody? The prosecution rests, your honor.

He was on to something with Tin Machine. Tired of being depressed like on Low or the oppositeÁ¢€”the modern minstrel of Let’s Dance and all that followedÁ¢€”Bowie got his grunge on with Tin Machine and fired off some downright angry, refreshingly unpolished tuneage. It was a rare-for-Bowie band project, and not a David Bowie record; the members collaborated on songwriting.

As with his Glam and Eno-New Wave periods, Bowie was merely ahead of the curve. A prophet, a voice in the desert predicting the coming of Nirvana. At the time, Nirvana was toiling in Seattle obscurity, pushing its debut Bleach on Sub Pop at every dive it played.

There’s an Iggy Pop connection with Tin Machine, as is often the case on Bowie records. Over the span of three decades, Bowie often played benefactor to Iggy’s ne’er-do-well, and the ne’er-do-well repaid the benefactor in kind by serving as occasional muse.

When Iggy was with the Stooges, Bowie produced Raw Power. Years later, in the late 1970s, Bowie and Iggy famously hung out in Berlin, making records together by day and cruising the city at night, trying to get straight after a decade of drug debauchery.

They were partially successful in getting straight, but the band on Iggy’s Lust For Life album and tourÁ¢€”Bowie tagged along, playing keyboardsÁ¢€”included some hardcore partiers, namely brothers Hunt and Tony Sales on drums and bass. According to music-biz legend (and a couple Bowie-ographies) the Saleses put off Iggy and Bowie’s rehab for a spell.

(The Sales boys came by their mischief honestly: In his most famous prank, their father SoupyÁ¢€”a comedian and kids’ show hostÁ¢€”was peeved he had to do his morning show on New Year’s Day, 1965. So on that episode he suggested kids sneak into their parents’ bedrooms while they were still asleep from last night’s parties, go into their wallets, and send to him the green pieces of paper with pictures of presidents on them. That didn’t go over well with the network brass.)

Flash forward a decade to 1989: After experiencing diminishing critical and commercial returns with his post-Let’s Dance recordings, Bowie re-formed Iggy’s band and inserted himself as lead singer. He renewed acquaintances with the Sales brothers and enlisted Boston guitar hero Reeves Gabrels to clear everyone’s sinuses of the throbbing synthesizers that had graced his previous records, Tonight and Never Let Me Down.

There was no mistaking Tin Machine for Duran-ny pop like on Tonight, or the British-style funky soul like on Young Americans and Station to Station or even the earthy, postdisco funk of Let’s Dance. This was raw, postpunk, pregrunge noiseÁ¢€”but, in typical Bowie style, featuring a frontman nattily attired and fashionably unshaven.

Taken out of the context of the timesÁ¢€”Tin Machine competed on the charts with the likes of Milli Vanilli, Icehouse, Taylor Dayne, Paula Abdul, Johnny Hates Jazz, Depeche Mode and INXSÁ¢€”and just judged on its merits, Tin Machine rocked. Don’t believe me? Check out “Under the God.” In context, Tin Machine stuck out like a sore thumb. Compared to Milli Vanilli, Tin Machine was grating and downright scary. Compared to some of the hardcore bands or grunge like Mudhoney out at the time, it was pretty tame stuff. The band drowned in the ebb tides between the pop charts and trendy indie rock.

The world took many years to appreciate Lust for Life as well as Bowie’s Berlin trilogy of Brian Eno collaborations, which merely laid down the foundation for New Wave and a thousand 1980s bands from ABC to Human League to even Duran Duran. Tin Machine still gets no love. Even fawning, diehard Bowie fans still regard Tin Machine as a strange side alley to Bowie’s main road, 20 years on.

That’s today. Calling Tin Machine “Bowie’s folly” represents a considerable softening of what was abject hate for the band in 1989. Back then, like Herodias did with John the Baptist, the music-critic establishmentÁ¢€”along with the angry clubgoers expecting “The Jean Genie” and “Awwwwwww, wham, bam, thank you ma’am!”Á¢€”ordered Tin Machine’s head on a platter, and Bowie dissolved the band after a couple years, shelving a Tin Machine III record allegedly in the works. Nirvana had arrived, the prophet moved on to other missions.

But Tin Machine‘s vapor trail still lingers, and this misunderstood record hangs out there for the pickingÁ¢€”and appreciationÁ¢€”of fans who missed it the first time around. I liked it then, and I like it more, now. Bowie didn’t get everything right in his career, but God bless ‘im for changing it up and trying out new things.

Tin Machine was one of those grand experiments that didn’t work out at the cash register. So the Great Rock Ledger gives it short shrift. I’m out to change that, part of a growing blog movement along with other like-minded folks such as Christian at Popshifter who are finally giving Tin Machine the credit it deserves.

_________________________________
* My own internal editor goes off when triggered by Paul McCartney’s “In this ever changing world/in which we live in,” from “Live and Let Die.” Triple redundancy? Are you kidding me? Upon hearing it, I must go club a few baby seals to restore universal equilibrium.