I stole a whole rolled up lid of Columbian out of my brother’s bell bottoms hung up in our shared closet, after he came home from his maître d’ shift at the Hyatt House and passed out in our bedroom. Charlie and I lit out for the desert surrounding the Tri-Cities, towards the smell of the potato processing plant, which filled the air with delicious stink. We laid in the sand and smoked it all in badly rolled joints till we got higher than we’d ever been before. After we hit the Market and Charlie had his hot black coffee (which he loved on those warm Eastern, WA nights) and I picked up maybe a Werewolf by Night, Tomb of Dracula, or a copy of those weird Captain Americas starring Möbius the vampire (horror was everywhere post-Vietnam), we headed back to the trailer. I was relieved my brother was already gone, off to another shift or to see his new Born Again girlfriend (who I didn’t try to French kiss, unlike his last one, because she was an intimidating blonde angel), and I noticed he set this LP aside from our record stash, as if it no longer had a place in his life. We put it on our crappy hi-fi and laid in my bed and stared at the ceiling of the trailer, the melt of the stoning fading as “Space Oddity” absorbed the cosmos. I had never heard it this way before, and it stoned me too. “John, I’m Only Dancing” released something in me I never knew existed, and revelatory songs like “Changes.” Also, his odes to trashy drag queens and St. Genet and Burroughs rattled my psyche, until sweetly falling into the slinky vagabond world of “Young Americans.” With political ideas and thoughts I grokked from my dad’s incessant TV news turned on whenever he was home. And ascending into “Fame” and “Golden Years,” future aeons I dreamed about. Charlie was passed out and I got up and began drawing my own comics, playing the album over and over again in case Joe took it back. But it was mine, and it wasn’t just some greatest hits album, it was a full accidental novel as stylish and thought-provoking as anything I’d read like ZAP Comix or the “meta” Breakfast with Champions. I’ll still scrap with anyone to this day who doesn’t hear it as an album in itself; more than that, a full story of odyssey, discovery, depravity, demonology, and divination.
David Bowie – ‘Changesonebowie’ by Chris Estey
