In the summer of 1981, the most lucrative option for me to make money was to stay in my college town and work the graveyard shift at the local IBM factory.  The work wasn't strenuous, but it was maddeningly mind-numbing. Basically, my job was to place huge copper sheets on a machine that would pumice them to achieve a nice, dull finish. At the other end of the machine, my co-worker, an extremely conservative divinity student whose cherubic face belied his harsh thoughts on the welfare system, would pull them off and stack them up. That's it. That’s all we did for seven hours a day, five days a week, with an hour for lunch (or whatever term you would use for a meal at 3 AM). That work environment, combined with a work schedule of 11 PM to 7 AM, put my head in a very strange temporal and existential space.  For one thing, I never experienced days ending. They just sort of drifted along, merging into the next day. I'd go to sleep at 8 AM on Tuesday, wake up in the afternoon (still Tuesday), putter around downtown Binghamton with a scraggle of friends, and then head off to work at 10:30 (still Tuesday);  And during my shift, the next day would arrive, although I could never sense the change. The days all merged for me.

Why am I telling you all this?  Because the one thing that I considered to be my lifeline that summer—the one thing that kept me reasonably grounded during the three months of my psychic funk—was David Bowie’s album Heroes.  I had bought the album when it came out several years earlier and listened to and enjoyed it very much.  And then I bought other albums that I would also listen to and some I would enjoy and some not so much.  But one day in June, I woke up early in the afternoon (still Tuesday), and I dug Heroes out from my record pile and put it the stereo.  I lay down on the living room floor and listened to it—both sides.  Now there are a lot of great songs on Heroes: “Joe The Lion,” “Heroes,” “Sons of the Silent Age” all stand out.  All were widely played on your local college radio station.  But the songs that meant the most to me—at least during that summer—were the three least commercial tracks on the album: “Sense of Doubt,” “Moss Garden,” and “Neuköln.”  While I initially listened to the whole album, eventually I would play just those three tracks.  Those tracks became vital to me.  As I listened to them they defined exactly how I felt that summer—they were literally the sonic representation of my state of mind: the ominous piano chords of "Sense of Doubt", the cacophonous saxophone on "Neuköln", and most importantly, the sense of peace at the center of "Moss Garden.”  Listening to them was like looking at myself in the mirror—not in a superficial, narcissistic sense—more in the sense that you are really looking hard at yourself, trying to see the real you. 

I would listen to those three songs every day.  I had to.  Like I said, they were my lifeline.  And sometimes—not every time, but often enough—I cried as I listened; not because I was sad, but because it was cathartic. So, I’m grateful to David Bowie.  I’m grateful that his music could speak to me in such a personal way, but more importantly, I’m grateful that he could make me cry.