“All my big mistakes are when I try to second-guess or please an audience. My work is always stronger when I get very selfish about it.” – David Bowie
Yes, David Bowie and Elvis Presley were both born on January 8th, although they were born 12 years apart. Elvis was born on January 8, 1935, while Bowie was born on January 8, 1947.
The irony of my bio-mother LOVING Elvis and being a fanatic, and the fact that I LOVE David Bowie, and fell hard for him when I was 12 years old that has lasted my entire life, does not go unnoticed by me! I find it fascinating that they were born on the same day!
According to an interview with Bowie, he was “absolutely mesmerized” when he learned that he shared a birthday with the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll. Bowie also revealed that he was a big fan of Elvis and considered him a major hero.
Bowie was a dedicated Elvis fan, reputed to have an encyclopedic knowledge of Presley’s career, and the two shared their birthday – 8 January. Bowie said that he had originally offered the song Golden Years, which appeared on the album Station to Station and reached the Top 10 in both the US and UK, to Elvis. The story goes that he asked his then wife, Angie, to deliver the request, but she was too nervous to do so.
It would have been one of the most unusual pairings in musical history – but how would it have sounded? According to a new account – from an unlikely source – Elvis Presley asked David Bowie to be his producer.
The claim comes from country star Dwight Yoakam in an interview with US newspaper the Orange County Register. In the article, published before a concert in southern California, the singer was asked about Bowie, whom he had met in 1997, and with whom he shared a love of Elvis.
Yoakam said Bowie told him that six months before Elvis’s death in August 1977, Presley had phoned asking him to produce his next record. “That was based on Elvis having heard Bowie’s Golden Years, and I thought ‘Oh my God, it’s a tragedy that he was never able to make that,’” Yoakam told the paper. “I couldn’t even imagine 1977 David Bowie producing Elvis. It would have been fantastic. It has to be one of the greatest tragedies in pop music history that it didn’t happen, one of the biggest missed opportunities.”
Since Bowie’s death last week, another link with Elvis has been uncovered. An Elvis song called Black Star – which remained unreleased for decades after being recorded in 1960 – was cited as a possible inspiration for his farewell album. The song’s lyrics say: “Every man has a black star / A black star over his shoulder / And when a man sees his black star / He knows his time, his time has come.”
Bowie produced other artists occasionally, usually those who were his heroes or friends. In the early 1970s he worked on Lou Reed’s Transformer, Mott the Hoople’s All the Young Dudes and Iggy and the Stooges’ Raw Power. While his work on the former two was acclaimed, the third was more problematic, and more than two decades after its original release, Iggy Pop went back to remix an album that had often been seen as tinny and trebly. Bowie fared better producing Iggy Pop’s solo albums The Idiot and Lust for Life.
After Bowie’s death in 2016, yet another link with Presley was found in his farewell album ‘Blackstar’. In the search for meaning of his work, it was found that the album was inspired by an Elvis Presley song of the same name. Presley recorded the country-ish song in 1960 for a film but was ditched at the last moment and waited to be released till the ’90s. The lyrics of Bowie’s song are self-explanatory: “Every man has a black star / A black star over his shoulder / And when a man sees his black star / He knows his time, his time has come.”
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