Production and Release
Held to be "the first Bowie album proper", and his first deemed worthy by record companies of regular reissue, David Bowie featured a notable list of collaborators, including session players Herbie Flowers, Tim Renwick, Terry Cox, and Rick Wakeman, as well as cellist Paul Buckmaster, multi-instrumentalist and producer Tony Visconti, and bassist John Lodge (not to be confused with The Moody Blues' bassist of the same name). Before recording for the album commenced at Trident Studios, the song "Space Oddity" had been selected as the lead single based on an earlier demo. Tim Renwick, John 'Honk' Lodge, Mick Wayne and John Cambridge – all from the band 'Junior's Eyes' – featured on the album sessions and briefly served as Bowie's backing band for live appearances and on an October 1969 BBC Radio session. Tony Visconti saw it as a "novelty record" and passed the production responsibility on to Gus Dudgeon. Visconti thus produced all the songs on the album bar what would become, from its 1972 reissue onwards, the title track.
Although the opening song had given Bowie a #5 hit in the UK earlier in the year, the remainder of the material bore little resemblance to it and the album was a commercial failure on its initial release, despite some decent reviews. However the November 1972 reissue, released in the wake of Bowie's breakthrough The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars and featuring a contemporary Ziggy photo on the cover, made #17 in the UK charts and #16 in the United States.
Read more about this topic: An Occasional Dream
Famous quotes containing the words production and, production and/or release:
“The heart of man ever finds a constant succession of passions, so that the destroying and pulling down of one proves generally to be nothing else but the production and the setting up of another.”
—François, Duc De La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680)
“The growing of food and the growing of children are both vital to the family’s survival.... Who would dare make the judgment that holding your youngest baby on your lap is less important than weeding a few more yards in the maize field? Yet this is the judgment our society makes constantly. Production of autos, canned soup, advertising copy is important. Housework—cleaning, feeding, and caring—is unimportant.”
—Debbie Taylor (20th century)
“The steel decks rock with the lightning shock, and shake with the
great recoil,
And the sea grows red with the blood of the dead and reaches for his spoil—
But not till the foe has gone below or turns his prow and runs,
Shall the voice of peace bring sweet release to the men behind the
guns!”
—John Jerome Rooney (1866–1934)