And it is. I’m not sad; it’s more like the “Awwww!” you make when you’re told you have to get out of the pool and go home. What is saddening is knowing this means people I really do care about will start dying soon, too.
UPDATE — Rick McGinnis has photos he took; writes (Read the whole thing:)
I never thought he would die. It’s a ridiculous thing to say, I know, but as far as I was concerned David Bowie was always there and, based on precedent, always would be.
UPDATE: Via AllDylan.com — David Bowie, Song by Song; some pretty good writing there.
UPDATE: Rock’s Backpages is lowering the paywall this week for a 1999 career-review audio interview.
“Here’s what David Bowie was doing at your age to make you feel like a failure.”
He came close to taking his vows as a Buddhist monk, and seriously studied mime, at one point actually opening for rock band Tyrannosaurus Rex in that capacity, with a wordless one-man play about China’s invasion of Tibet. He worked as an advertising illustrator and ran a community arts center; appeared in an ice cream commercial and an independent film; and experimented with both straight and gay lifestyles. He marketed himself as an R&B saxophonist, a mod rocker, and a music-hall-inspired mainstream entertainer, first in a string of undistinguished bands and then as a solo act. He would also incarnate as a hippie folksinger and a principal in a psychedelic performance troupe (Feathers) before emerging as an innovative and controversial mass-media personality, in what must have seemed an overnight ascent to the many who hadn’t been watching closely until then.
