We may have said in Episode 2 that cover versions would be our next topic attacked on a Blerd Radio podcast. In between that proclamation and the night we marked to record Episode 3, a musical icon passed away. With that in mind, we (the team of Big Money, Dr. Z, Michael Parr and the returning Michael Cunningham) decided to devote a podcast to the music and the legend of David Bowie.
The task of discussing Bowie’s impact proved a bit difficult to do within the framework of a single podcast episode, but we managed to cram a lot into 90 minutes, including:
-The return of Michael Cunningham after a lengthy break, which is appropriate as he is the biggest Bowie fan on the panel (and arguably the biggest Bowie fan of anyone any of us knows.)
-How did we each discover Bowie? And where were we when we heard the news of his passing?
-Is Bowie’s decade-long run of “classic” albums the longest in music history? It certainly deserves to be mentioned alongside similar runs by artists like Stevie Wonder and Prince (and the Bowie/Prince comparison pops up numerous times over the course of the episode.)
-After three years plus of doing Blerd Radio, it finally comes out that Dr. Z was in a band? Who knew?
-Bowie acknowledging his own mortality on the Blackstar album and how that’s nearly unprecedented on an album by a major artist (David’s buddy Freddie Mercury notwithstanding).
-Bowie’s enduring legacy as one of the few artists to age in the pop culture spotlight without trading heavily on nostalgia.
-The lengthy list of collaborators that Bowie was able to gather into his fold and/or introduce to the world (like Stevie Ray Vaughan and Luther Vandross).
–Blackstar’s status as Bowie’s first #1 album.
-Required watching/listening: the Red Bull session with Bowie producer Tony Visconti and an edition of our friend Matt Wardlaw’s “Lost Together” podcast, also recorded with Visconti.
-Bowie-oke: Dr. Z and Cunningham task one another with Bowie covers for karaoke!
We also promised to include this video.
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1 comment
John says:
Feb 22, 2016
One really cool thing about Bowie for me is that Young Americans stood out to me as a kid because it was more mainstream and definitely in my young wheelhouse. To eventually make the connection between Bowie and Vandross just made perfect sense to me, but Let’s Dance was clearly my jump-off.