David Bowie has often been viewed, and sometimes criticized,
as a musician who needs to collaborate with other more cutting edge musical
artists in order to produce his best work. In David Bowie: Starman, his thorough biography of the rock chameleon,
Paul Trynka does not try to dispute this claim. He looks at it more as one of
Bowie’s gifts. With The Man Who Sold the
World, Bowie’s first artistically if not commercially successful album,
Bowie relied heavily on gifted guitarist Mick Ronson to create the album’s hard
rock, often improvised sound. He continued to work with collaborators
throughout the seventies and into the eighties with Let’s Dance, his most commercially successful album. Trynka argues
that many of these collaborators never achieved on their own what they achieved
while working with Bowie. He also credits Bowie’s unusual and sometimes cryptic
ways in the studio, which are well documented in the book, with bringing out
the best in musicians as diverse as Luther Vandross and Robert Fripp.
David Bowie hasn’t been willing to grant many interviews in
recent decades. This lack of access to his subject is one of the biography’s weaknesses,
but Trynka compensates by interviewing countless people who crossed paths with
Bowie from his childhood to recent years. David
Bowie: Starman seems to be the definitive biography of David Bowie.
John
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