(TV) Why Bowie's Kingdom Come doesn't work

[Keith Allison <keith@thewonder.co.uk>]

http://bowiesongs.wordpress.com/tag/tom-verlaine/

Kingdom Come
August 16, 2011

Kingdom Come (Tom Verlaine, 1979).
Kingdom Come (David Bowie, early take, rough mix, 1980).
Kingdom Come (Bowie, 1980).
Kingdom Come (Verlaine, live, ca. 1984).
Kingdom Come (Verlaine, live, 2006).

The great New York band Television broke up in 1978 due to the standard 
reasons: drugs, egos, money (lack of). Tom Verlaine, the band’s singer, 
lyricist and co-lead guitarist, soon got a record deal with Television’s 
label Elektra and in the fall of 1979 released his first solo album.

Bowie was a fan, calling Verlaine one of “New York’s finest new 
writers…I wish he had a bigger audience.” Verlaine’s solo albums, which 
he released at a regular clip in the ’80s, document a career that never 
had the audience it deserved. He was a critical middleweight. In the 
Village Voice “Pazz and Jop” year-end polls of the era, Verlaine’s 
albums consistently fall in the 20 to 30 range: he was respected, not 
revered or even disliked. His albums didn’t sell well and he eventually 
moved to the UK, where a few more people bought his records.

Verlaine had started as a poet, and his best songs were full of casual 
epiphanies, words like an inspired run of notes on his guitar: Broadway 
looked so medieval. I fell sideways laughing. I remember how the 
darkness doubled, I recall lightning struck itself. I’m uncertain when 
beauty meets abuse. She put on her boxing gloves and went to sleep. The 
standout on Tom Verlaine was “Kingdom Come,” his purgatorial song, with 
the daily business of life like being on a chain gang: breaking rocks, 
cutting hay, all while watched from a tower by a man with a gun. The 
only hope of escape is death, or judgement day, whichever comes first.*

Carlos Alomar suggested Bowie cover “Kingdom Come,” which would be the 
first cover on a Bowie record since Station to Station. Bowie asked 
Verlaine to play guitar on his song but things apparently went awry, as 
little, if any, Verlaine is on the final record (Robert Fripp instead 
does the lead guitar work on Bowie’s “Kingdom Come,” mainly keeping to 
the margins). Tony Visconti recalled Verlaine showing up at the Power 
Station looking “a little down on his luck and lugubrious.” Verlaine 
said he had some ideas for overdubs but needed the right sound first, so 
he began to try out every single amp in the studio, playing the same 
phrase on over 30 of them. Visconti said he and Bowie had lunch, watched 
TV and ultimately left Verlaine in the studio, still auditioning amps. 
“I don’t think we ever used a note of his playing, even if we recorded 
him,” Visconti wrote.

Bowie’s “Kingdom Come” is an attempt to give the song grandeur, with 
layers of guitars and, first in the chorus and then in the verses, 
call-and-response backing vocals by a quartet (Bowie, Visconti, Lynn 
Maitland and Chris Porter).** Some of the changes work well enough, like 
transferring Verlaine’s drum hook to George Murray’s bass, freeing 
Dennis Davis to pound on the beat while doing fills to lighten the 
track’s monotonous tendencies. Other changes seem either sloppy (Bowie 
weirdly made “the face of doom” the “voice of doom,” while still keeping 
the next line about the voice “shining”) or perverse, like Bowie 
removing the title line hook from the chorus and not singing it until 
3:15 in, almost as the song starts to fade out.

It all seems like a great misreading of the song. Verlaine’s “when the 
kingdom comes” refrain, which Bowie discarded, is unchanging and barely 
melodic, suggesting the ceaseless labor of being. Instead Bowie’s vocal 
is an over-the-top vibrato-heavy extravagance that seems deliberately 
unhinged; it’s fascinating and kind of awful. Verlaine, even when he 
approached the cosmic, had a penitential tone in his singing, the sound 
of someone consistently being humbled and delighted by the oddness of 
life. Bowie just savages each line he sings—placing long, brutal 
stresses on the end of each phrase (“well i wa-haw-haw-alllked in the 
pouring ray-hay-hay-hayn”) building to the note-killing agonies of the 
bridge—“wall’s a miiiiile HII-yi-i-IIGH,” singing “hoping I’m gonna 
die-ay-ay-ay” like Ronnie Spector. A bewildering cover, “Kingdom Come” 
seems the primary inspiration for Bowie own, finer “Up the Hill Backwards.”

Recorded February 1980, Power Station, NYC, and April 1980, Good Earth 
Studios, London.

* Verlaine’s song reused the title of an unreleased Television song, but 
the two “Kingdom Comes” are otherwise unrelated.

** It was a random collection of amateur singers: Maitland was a mutual 
friend, while Porter was Visconti’s assistant engineer.

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