- Song 187, “Space Oddity” by David Bowie, Part One, “Commencing Countdown Engines On”

This episode is the first of a two-parter on “Space Oddity”, and the early career of David Bowie. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.
Patreon backers also have a two-hour and twenty-minute bonus episode available, on “I Started a Joke” by the Bee Gees.
Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by editing, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/
 
Resources
Because of the increasing problems with Mixcloud’s restrictions, I have decided to start sharing streaming playlists of the songs used in episodes instead of Mixcloud ones. This Tunemymusic link will let you listen to the playlist I created on your streaming platform of choice — however please note that not all the songs excerpted are currently available on all streaming platforms.
The single best source on Bowie’s early work is Rebel Rebel by Chris O’Leary. This is an adaptation of parts of O’Leary’s great blog Pushing Ahead of the Dame, but expanded and updated significantly.
Other books used for this and all other Bowie episodes include Starman by Paul Trynka, David Bowie a Life by Dylan Jones, The Complete David Bowie by Nicholas Pegg, The London Boys by Marc Burrows, and Ziggyology by Simon Goddard.
Information on Zoroastrianism came from Zoroastrianism: A Guide For The Perplexed by Jenny Rose. The version of Thus Spake Zarathustra I referenced here is the version translated and with an introduction by RJ Hollingdale.
Because Bowie’s early work was scattered among a lot of different labels, there is no comprehensive collection of his juvenalia — each label has released collections of the four or five tracks they own. However, The Shel Talmy Recordings contains a full album worth of recordings and demos.
The most comprehensive collection of Bowie’s Deram work is this sadly out-of-print double CD. This single-CD version is cheaper and contains most of the important material.
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Transcript
Before we begin, this episode contains discussion of sexually transmitted infection, mental illness, and prejudice against sex workers.
Knowledge of what’s to come in the future can have a funny effect on a project like this. Currently, we’re still in 1969, and over the next few episodes we will be looking at a lot of records that could be seen in one way or another as “the end of the sixties”. Depending on which episode you want to consider the true end, we’ll be leaving the sixties somewhere between song 189 and song 192 — by which time we’ll be well into the spring of 1970 — while the next song is in some ways wrapping up some loose ends from the fifties. Maybe those records felt like “the end of the sixties” at the time, though I doubt it, but what I do know is that here, before the end of the sixties, is where the seventies start.
(Some might argue we’ve already seen the start of the seventies with Led Zeppelin, and I wouldn’t necessarily disagree with them, but to my mind Led Zeppelin are a continuation of things that had already begun in the sixties, whereas David Bowie, when he finally became big, seemed like something totally new and different.)
Realistically, though, absolutely nobody at the time would have thought of Bowie as the future. There were all sorts of new sounds on the charts in 1969 — the swamp rock of Creedence Clearwater Revival or Tony Joe White, the psychedelic soul of the Temptations and Sly and the Family Stone, the horn-driven rock of Blood, Sweat, and Tears — which a listener might have pointed to and said “that’s what music is going to sound like in the seventies” (and to an extent they would have been right — a