David Bowie (1947-2016). Photo coutesy of Saturn.Jared Chestnut - BlazeRadio DJredc@uab.edu
Considering how much the life and passing of David Bowie has become involved in not only my personal life, but my work here with KScope and BlazeRadio as well, I’m beginning to feel like a bit of a Space Oddity. Perhaps I’ll major in this extraterrestrial curriculum, study the Spiders of Mars and whatnot.
As I sit at my computer, ears still ringing just hours after an amazing evening at Saturn, I realize that seems far more interesting than the mundane day-to-day. Gotta let all the children use it, lose it, and boogie, right?
Over the course of Thursday and Friday evening, Saturn hosted a free tribute event to the great David Bowie, seeing twenty-four separate acts covering his vast, voluminous catalog, ranging from old standards like “Space Oddity”, “Heroes”, and “Ashes to Ashes”, to deeper cuts like “Black Country Rock”, and “Scary Monsters”, all the way through to his latest work of art “Blackstar” with tracks “Blackstar” and “Lazarus”. As the evening progressed, the diverse capacity crowd seemed to pick up energy, dancing and singing along to the very end. Donations were accepted for the American Cancer Society, with aim to assist in the battle against the plague which ultimately took Bowie away from the world.
David Phipps, an older gentleman who played bass at the event, was one of many who had been influenced by Bowie from a young age.
“I’ve been a Bowie freak since I was eight or nine,” Phipps said. “I saw him on TV, my mom had let me watch TV before dinner, and he was suspended over the audience in an office chair singing in a telephone, and I just became enamored.” In regards to the evening’s events, Phipps felt that, though the bands and songs were on point, it was more a matter of the crowd and how the people on stage and off resonated.
“I think what happened tonight is very special. I know there are a lot of Bowie tributes going on in other cities, but having seen a few of the bands I don’t think anybody’s going to touch this, it’s not about the bands, it’s the feedback of the audience. It’s a communion.”
Beth Ragland-Stewart, who played the drums for “Five Years”, “Space Oddity”, and “Blackstar” with the eponymous five-pointed mark painted over her right eye, seemed to echo that same sentiment. “Everybody pretty much has blown me away. It’s been a really good night. I’m so happy to have been able to be a part of it. Lauren (the group’s vocalist)and I used to be in a band together called Paper Dolls, and we always used to bond over Bowie. When I found out he died, she was the first person I called, and when I found out about the tribute night, I was like, ‘Well, Lauren, why don’t we do something?’” After getting her husband and fellow bandmates from her group One Hundreds together, everything else just seemed to click. “It takes a lot of musicians to really pull off a Bowie song.”
One thing seemed absolutely apparent by the evening’s transition into the wee hours of the morning: as talented and insular an individual as Bowie was, his work and one-in-a-million character had (and still has) a magical way of connecting friends, family, and strangers alike with a singular bond. In many ways, this was a family reunion: an excuse for a diverse group of people, those who had followed Ziggy Stardust for decades, those who had just heard of Bowie upon his passing and began to dig into his discography, and everything in between, to put on their red shoes and dance the blues.
Let’s do it again sometime.
