The Bewlay Brothers

...and here’s yet another commentary and a guess at the meaning of the song.

This lyric seems to suggest that the brothers are arrogant. There’s an allusion to Nietzsche’s ‘dwarf men’ (those incapable of seeing the larger picture), with their ‘lack of conclusions’, and to ‘flashing teeth of brass’, brass meaning ‘cheek’ or ‘nerve’.

The song really lays into one of the brothers as ‘unbelievable’. This is compounded by ‘camelian (sic), comedian, Corinthian and caricature’. A chameleon, according to the dictionary, is someone fickle, a Corinthian is someone who overindulges in luxury, and a caricature means a grotesque exaggeration. Adding ‘comedian’ to that hardly sells the potentially dead brother as something worthy, so I hope that David Bowie wasn’t describing his brother Terry like this.

There is a strong suggestion of pretence about the brothers - that they weren’t what they said they were. They are described as ‘cool traders’ and ‘fakers’, both allusions to being not true to an ideal but rather just selling something. Also, ‘the whale of a lie like they hope it was’ is a complex reference to pretence and possibly a deliberate double-negative, making out, perhaps, that the brothers hoped they were more interesting than they were.

The brothers seem to have caused harm to, or misled others, as stated by ‘we flayed our mark’. The last verse’s reference to ‘shooting up pie in the sky’ ‘in the feeble, in the bad’ and ‘in the crutch hungry dark’ is, to me, a reference to misleading both fools (?’moonboys’) (which is, to be frank, what most of us probably are by trying to interpret this song) and people who are more dangerous than fools.

The lyrics also include a number of probable drug-related references, including ‘we were so turned on’, ‘dust would flow through our veins’, ‘shooting up’ and, possibly, ‘mind warp’. Interestingly, friends of Bowie from 1971 and earlier describe David Bowie as being more of a wine drinker at the time and not much of a toker, so I suspect that the song is not about David Bowie at all.

Personally, I’d guess that the song is a not very complimentary description of Lennon and McCartney’s Beatles, who split up in 1970, one year before the song was recorded. ‘He could be dead...’ is, I think, a reference to 1969s ‘Paul is Dead’ theory. Other clues to this may be ‘we were so turned on’ (cf. ‘I’d love to turn you on’ in A Day in the Life), ‘pie in the sky’ (cf. ‘Lucy in the Sky’) and the backward guitar riff in the song’s chorus (a cliché Beatles feature).

If this is right then the songs argument is that The Beatles gave the impression that what they were saying was drug-induced profundity whereas it was actually quite shallow (‘the solid book we wrote could not be found today’) (compare ‘Song for Bob Dylan’ which is discusses something similar but in a much more complementary way to Dylan). This led to some people over-reading the lyrics. The most extreme case of over-reading The Beatles’ lyrics was the Manson Family murders, influenced by the ‘White Album’ in the summer of 1969.

Whether Bowie really thought this little of the Beatles in 1971 is anybody’s guess. The song appears to be written as a kind of joke about cryptic lyrics being over-read (quote: ‘don’t listen to the lyrics, they don’t mean anything. I’ve just written them for the American market, they like that sort of thing’). Indeed, Lennon and Bowie were good friends by the mid 1970s.

Either way, the song has now changed its meaning for most people, being about Terry Burns. David Bowie’s 2008 description of the song as a ‘palimpsest’ is, to me, an acknowledgement that the song has taken on this new meaning, the old meaning having been wiped away.