![]() ![]() Back in 1979, the British artist was asked to list some of his favorite songs to be played on a radio show made available by Raised On Radio (Transcribed by Rock and Roll Garage). The Bruce Springsteen song that David Bowie said he lovedīy the time Bruce Springsteen released his first album “Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J.” (1973), Bowie already had five albums on his discography and was about to release the classic “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders From Mars”.Īlthough the kind of music the two artists made were not very similar most of the times, Bowie appreacited Springsteen and even praised him as a writer once. One of them was the legendary American musician Bruce Springsteen, that Bowie had a big respect and even said he was a great writer. He recorded quite a bit throughout the '70s, totaling nearly ten albums, but wasn't heard from on record for nearly 20 years before emerging with a new album in the late '90s.Over the decades he talked about many of his peers and gave his opinion on their music. Rose achieved some renown in the late '60s via network television appearances, particularly on Johnny Carson's show, but was never more than a cult artist as far as selling records went. Rose's Side, however, it seems an inescapable conclusion that Bowie must have enjoyed the record and played it repeatedly, so much do some of its aspects (particularly the rolling piano arrangements and chipper orchestration) resemble the production employed on Hunky Dory. Listening to the 1968 Rose LP The Thorn in Mrs. Certainly, relatively few Bowie fans would enjoy Rose's albums. History gives certain molds and stances to artists that might not be 100-percent accurate, and some Bowie fans, as well as critics who have considered his early work unremittingly hip and cutting-edge, may find the notion - that an effete musical satirist such as Rose affected Bowie's work - unacceptable. Bowie, of course, was a much better singer and a much harder rocker. There can be no doubt that Rose influenced Bowie's early-'70s work, particularly Hunky Dory, which owed something to Rose's early albums in both the quasi-musical piano styles and thorny-rose lyrics. When he sang about flowery love and idyllic free living, there were sarcastic and ironic undercurrents that made him hard to take seriously at the same time, the words were too far out for him to get accepted by Broadway or the easy listening pop market. But stick to writing, we'll get someone else to sing them." Lyrically, he was a different story, with an arch and whimsical tone that both reflected and mocked the counterculture. These were delivered in a whiney voice that made it easy to envision scenes of cigar-chomping Tin Pan Alley publishers telling him, "We like your songs, kid. Musically, Rose was firmly in the pre-World War II camp, sounding like a Broadway songwriter with his jaunty piano and bouncy singalong melodies. Bowie also covered another song from that album, "Buzz the Fuzz," in live performances (it can be heard on a 1970 bootleg), and Tiny Tim did "Fill Your Heart" on the B-side of "Tiptoe Through the Tulips." If he's remembered by rock audiences at all, it's because David Bowie covered a Rose song - "Fill Your Heart" (co-written by Rose and Paul Williams), from Rose's 1968 debut album - on Hunky Dory. It isn't quite accurate to call him a rock artist, but he fits in rock about as well as anywhere else. ![]() An odd and goofy singer/songwriter who didn't fit in any comfortable niche when he emerged in the late 1960s, New Orleans pianist Biff Rose was like a vaudeville entertainer reincarnated as a spacy hippie. ![]()
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