Of all the versions of this song out there, this is by far my favorite. I saw him perform it at Winterland in 1972. I wrote about it in my memoir, The Rise and Fall of the HoneyBun Empire.
The early seventies: all things permitted. February 2, 1971: A Clockwork Orange is released.
November 10, 1971: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Part one, by Hunter Thompson, published in Rolling Stone Magazine. Also my twenty-first birthday.
June 16, 1972: The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, by David Bowie, released.
Bowie at Winterland, October 27, 1972: unbelievably sparse audience.
Midway through the set, he sang “My Death” written by hyper-romantic Belgian songwriter Jacques Brel.
Bowie and his acoustic twelve-string, in his brightly colored spacesuit, orange hair and kabuki make-up. Bowie under a single white pin spot, midway through the song and his voice soared, just him and his guitar, and I knew that we, perhaps two hundred lucky souls in that terribly empty auditorium, were in the presence of a singular, incandescent talent that would cleave the century, or at least my life, in two, with the surgical arc of a samurai sword or a Bowie knife.
My death waits like a beggar blind
Who sees the world through an unlit mind
Throw him a dime for the passing time
My death waits there between your thighs
Your cool fingers will close my eyes
Let’s not think of that and the passing time
My death waits to allow my friends
A few good times before it ends
So let’s drink to that and the passing time
But what ever lies behind the door
There is nothing much to do
Angel or devil, I don’t care
For in front of that door, there is you
Radical drag and disco, glam and punk, expanded and contracted, simultaneously, thanks to cocaine, quaaludes, and the Pill. In my late teens, I had practiced guitar four to eight hours a day. I wrote music. I wrote the beginnings to numerous stories. Music, the only thing that really mattered to me, other than clothes, booze, drugs, and girls, was the first thing to go as decade progressed: when partying like David Bowie, one is David Bowie.
Wild club nights, all blurry now.
Some incidents shine through the fog like pinpoint spots, diamond bright, crystalline moments that comprise a fragmented remembrance of the decade.
Leave a Reply