It turns out, in the oddest of coincidences, that John and Bowie knew each other as teenagers (when they were David Jones and Reg Dwight) and often talked about music in their youth. Having just put out a record with a completely new band that surprisingly dipped more than a toe into heavy metal, hard rock, and glam earlier in the year, Hunky Dory seems to be something of a throwback to gentler mainstream rock, with more than a few nods back to his hippie/folkie background. On the surface, the softer arrangements and highlighted piano leads might seem like a retreat from the bold (and occasionally exotic) Man Who Sold the World, but deeper listening shows evidence of lots of lessons learned from the foray into heavy guitar rock.īowie, much more the leader on this record than the previous one, was exploring ground not wholly dissimilar to what Elton John was doing at the time (Mick Ronson, in fact, played guitar on the original version of “Madman Across the Water,” later included as part of the October 1970 album Tumbleweed Connection - and while we’re at it, early Bowie bassist Herbie Flowers played bass on that album as well). For those of us who have been carefully following Bowie, this album also signals the successful completion of the Home Perm Grow-Out phase. In another turnabout in the Bowie saga that rivals the jump from derivative but talented rock-n-roller in his earliest recordings to the Anthony Newley-gone-weird MOR fodder of his first real album, Hunky Dory (his first album for RCA) arrived just eight months after The Man Who Sold the World (his last album for Mercury), and represented yet another reinvention as the young artist slowly crept closer to the winning combination.
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