Jimmy’s guitar sound jealousies scream…
The summer 2001 edition of Total Guitar (no relation) has a Bowie front cover and a sixteen page special on “the amazing guitarists of David Bowie”, including loads of pictures and twelve pages of transcribed music, not to mention five Bowie tracks dissected on the cover-mounted CD…phew!
The piece looks at many of the bigger name guitarists that have recorded with David, from Jimmy Page to Reeves Gabrels (wot, no Mark Plati?!…shurely shome mishtake?) and a cast of loads (eleven) in-between. The songs on the CD that get the under-the-microscope treatment are: ‘China Girl’, ‘The Jean Genie’, ‘Sound And Vision’, ‘Scary Monsters’ and ‘Survive’. All five songs are tabulated within the magazine.
Even the chord of the month is called “The Nile Rodgers Chord”! Employed on ‘Let’s Dance’, the B flat minor seven sus 4 must be among everyone’s very favourite chords. Anyway, I digress, this is what TG says about David’s inspired choice of axemen:
“When it comes to choosing guitar players, David Bowie combines the management skills of Alex Ferguson with the dynamics of Spielberg.”
Oh, alright then, here’s that complete list of guitarists the magazine chose to highlight:
Jimmy Page, Marc Bolan, Mick Ronson, Earl Slick, Carlos Alomar, John Lennon, Robert Fripp, Adrian Belew, Pete Townshend, Nile Rodgers, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Peter Frampton and Reeves Gabrels.
And here’s a list of people off the top of my head (yeah, right) who have contributed guitar to David Bowie recordings since ‘Space Oddity’, that didn’t make the TG list (I apologise in advance to those I’ve surely missed):
Tim Renwick, Keith Christmas, Mick Wayne, Mark Carr Prichard, Jeff Beck, Ron Wood, Alan Parker, Brian Eno (treatments), Ricky Gardener, Tony Visconti, Chuck Hammer, Derek Bramble, Lenny Kravitz, Tom Frish, Kevin Armstrong, Mark Plati, Chris Haskett, Page Hamilton, Gerry Leonard, Moby and David Bowie.
“Never in the field of rock guitar was so much owed by so many to so few.”
Many thanx to StarWoman for the pointer (have fun in Europe Pip), and to Susans for nipping out to the newsagents in the rain! };-)