After a 1977 performance that still ranks among the wildest, most manic musical performances to ever hit daytime TV, Iggy Pop chats with talk show host Dinah Shore, the top-charting female singer of the ’40s, with his collaborator pal David Bowie by his side; jazz vet Rosemary Clooney flanks Shore. Their interview is mutually respectful and endearingly sincere even as the host tries to navigate Pop’s nihilistic answers. Aiming to steer the conversation in a positive direction, she asks her guest if he’s influenced anybody, and the punk pioneer—much to everyone’s delight—nonchalantly replies, “I think I helped wipe out the ’60s.”
Great quote, but here’s the thing: Pop never sold enough to do that directly. Instead, it was Bowie, his most ambitious student, who revolutionized ’70s music and style by uncovering the discomfort and despair of urban life that hippie idealism denied. His third consecutive UK chart-topper and U.S. Top 5 breakthrough, 1974’s Diamond Dogs—Bowie’s first record of original material since killing off the Ziggy Stardust character that made him an instant superstar back home—remains rooted in his still-reigning glam scene that knocked most utopian ’60s rockers off the UK charts with glistening shards of pansexuality, sci-fi fantasy, and bespangled spectacle. His bleakest album until recent swan song Blackstar, Diamond Dogs is a bummer, a bad trip, “No Fun”—a sustained work of decadence and dread that transforms corrosion into celebration. Whereas Ziggy features its titular messiah, Diamond Dogs has jackals that live on corpses the way Bowie fed off rotting urban culture and reckless rock’n’roll.
The last glam gasp of Bowie’s English years, Dogs also sprawls toward Bowie’s forthcoming Thin White Duke persona, embracing Blaxploitation funk and soul, rock opera, European art song, and Broadway. The album cracked FM radio with “Rebel Rebel,” an Iggy Pop–like blast aimed at America’s teenage wasteland. Recapitulating his earlier achievements while raising their stakes, it stomped on whatever good vibes remained in British rock, and cleared the stage for punk and goth. As Bowie noted decades later, the tribal “peoploids” that rummage through the album’s fantastically bleak Hunger City like the orphaned pickpockets of Oliver Twist presaged a generation of Johnny Rottens and Sid Viciouses. Dogs envisioned a no-future future just before the next breed of pop stars lived it.
As befitting a post-apocalyptic work, Dogs was born from the frustration of failed opportunities. Bowie initially endeavored to create a TV musical adaptation of George Orwell’s totalitarian milestone 1984—until the social critic’s widow refused permission. Around the same time, Rolling Stone’s London bureau arranged for Bowie and William S. Burroughs to interview each other, which introduced the singer to the author’s Nova Express. Immediately thereafter, Bowie began penning lyrical non sequiturs via that novel’s cut-up technique, and planned a Ziggy musical to be similarly shuffled each night. This, too, faltered, although it inspired new tunes. These two projects, sharing dystopian themes, fused together to form the mutant Dogs.
While all this was happening, Bowie shed the Spiders From Mars, who enabled his transformation from folky space oddity to eclectic, hard-rocking freak. The biggest break was with guitarist Mick Ronson, whose biting, formally schooled style and arrangements had redefined Bowie. Rather than replacing his sidekick, the singer handles most guitar parts himself, as well as contributing sax and electronic keyboards while solely producing this emphatically solo project. Tony Visconti—who oversaw 1970’s metallic The Man Who Sold the World while providing bass guitar—returns only to assist the final mix and fulfill the singer’s request for “Barry White strings” on “1984”; he’d later co-produce much of Bowie’s output. If you measure his albums by how much he calls the shots and actually plays, Diamond Dogs is the Bowie-est one of all.
He sets the scene with “Future Legend,” a spoken-word intro soundtracked by synths evoking dripping Dalí clocks, buzzing bee guitars quoting “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered,” and other experimental studio scuzz. This slides into the bonking backward cowbell of the title track, which filters the Stones’ slam-bam boogie through a woozy mix. “As they pulled you out of the oxygen tent/You asked for the latest party,” it begins—a line Bowie later admitted as self-descriptive. Set in forthcoming years yet capturing the squalor of then-contemporary London, New York, and the Eastern Bloc nations through which Bowie recently passed, the lurid lyrics flash with gang violence: “The Diamond Dogs are poachers and they hide behind trees/Hunt you to the ground they will/Mannequins with kill appeal.” The vibe is celebratory despite the menace, if unstable—right down to the track’s note-bending central riff. Contemporary critics mourned Ronson’s absence, but Bowie’s guitar here and throughout the album is thrillingly off-kilter with unconventional chord fragments that the Edge, Sonic Youth, shoegazers, and dream-poppers alike would draw from for decades to come.
Because Bowie so convincingly portrayed decay, it went often unacknowledged how far he advanced his compositional and arrangement skills in just a few post–“Space Oddity” years. Their showcase, “Sweet Thing” / “Candidate” / “Sweet Thing (Reprise),” begins with Bowie growling at the bottom of his register, but even before the chorus hits, he’s wailing near the top of his tenor while Mike Garson’s tinkling jazz keys supply the sophistication Bowie’s squawking guitars deny. Topically shifting from a hustler turning tricks to a politician spewing empty promises to cocaine’s brain-freezing bliss, the suite’s interconnected segments assert that all three demand submission to all-conquering power—this concept album’s central theme. The tempo accelerates as his poetry gains density, then subsides again as the melody soars before surrendering to guitars that grind with metronomic precision until sputtering out on the root note of the opening chord on the album’s masterstroke.
As melodically constricted as that suite was expansive, “Rebel Rebel” is Bowie’s answer to all those deliciously dumb Sweet, Slade, Mud, Gary Glitter, Suzi Quatro, and T. Rex hits he indirectly enabled during glam’s peak. Androgyny is subtext to these acts, but the main man, per usual, pushes it to the forefront: “You’ve got yer mother in a whirl/She’s not sure if you’re a boy or a girl,” goes the opening line, but he never definitively assigns gender: Bowie’s dissident has torn [their] dress, but wants to “be there when they count up the dudes.” Yet there’s nothing ambiguous about that glorious guitar groove, the track’s stomping beat, the “hot tramp” pause between both, and their return. If Bowie often drifted above listeners’ heads, here he shoots straight at their solar plexus and scores with what ranks among the greatest, most insistent riffs of the ’70s. Rockers who’d dismissed Bowie as a dandy now gave the dude a pass.
Aside from a stray super-Bowie line about lizards crying in the heat, Side 2’s opening track, “Rock ‘n’ Roll With Me,” is even more forthright—a ballad of appreciation for his fans that provides reprieve from the sleaze and offers further proof that Bowie could belt. It’s stagey to be sure, but so is it sincere. “I’ve found the door that lets me out,” he positively roars; performance sets him free.
The album is queasy soul music signifying soullessness; on the Shaft-like tableau “1984,” he rewrites Orwell’s authoritarian state as a worldwide ghetto populated by junkies overseen by surgeon thugs who manipulate thoughts and misguide identities, all set to wah-wah guitars. The album culminates perversely, joyfully, as “Big Brother” segues into “Chant of the Ever Circling Skeletal Family,” a fuzzed-out danse macabre where irregular time signatures alternate every few measures and the percussion keeps changing accents; there’s no center, just brief, blissful release before a stuttering loop of Bowie yelping in distress fades as if to black.
All this hopelessness and annihilation would be suffocating if it weren’t for Bowie’s exuberance. He throws himself into Orwell’s draconian hell as if strutting around in Kansai Yamamoto’s Aladdin Sane–era bodysuit; it fits his skeletal contours. Determined to reaffirm his relevance in spite of his setbacks, the singer sparkled so brightly that he offset the darkness of his material. Just as Watergate was coming to a boil, singer-songwriters and prog-rockers were glutting the charts, and ’60s resistance was morphing into ’70s complacency, this sweet rebel (rebel) made revolution strangely sexy again. Glaring at you from Dogs’ cover with canine hindquarters and emaciated features like the circus sideshow Freaks he footnotes in the title cut, he served notice that rock’s outsiders remained more compelling than the softies who increasingly occupied its center, even as his ever-growing popularity chipped away at it. You can bet Patti Smith, the Ramones, and Television sat up and took notes.
