![]() ![]() Bowie, on Hunky Dory, is so committed to the song’s treacly philosophy that he descends into pure tastelessness-at times gurning like a gruesome holiday camp performer. Rose delivered those lines with the trace of a smirk, while Tiny Tim, who covered the song as the b-side of “Tiptoe Through the Tulips,” sang it with glee and amazement, as though he’d finally found a lyric that topped his own extravagant persona. But you can see why “Fill Your Heart” entranced Bowie-its lyric offers comfort and peace ( “fear is in your head/only in your head, so forget your head”), promising that the pain of consciousness can be alleviated by love, by losing yourself entirely in someone else. It goes far beyond the realm of squares, really: it seems best suited to appeal to delusional old people, toddlers and good-tempered dogs. Where the other Rose song Bowie covered, “Buzz the Fuzz,” was a hippie drug joke, “Fill Your Heart” is music for squares. He recorded quite a bit throughout the '70s, totaling nearly ten albums, but wasn't heard from on record for nearly 20 years before emerging with a new album in the late '90s.Bowie seemed to adore “Fill Your Heart,” a collaboration between the hippie comedian Biff Rose and ’70s malignance Paul Williams: it was in his live sets by early 1970 and he led off the second side of Hunky Dory with it, his first cover song on record since “I Pity The Fool.” Rose achieved some renown in the late '60s via network television appearances, particularly on Johnny Carson's show, but was never more than a cult artist as far as selling records went. Rose's Side, however, it seems an inescapable conclusion that Bowie must have enjoyed the record and played it repeatedly, so much do some of its aspects (particularly the rolling piano arrangements and chipper orchestration) resemble the production employed on Hunky Dory. Listening to the 1968 Rose LP The Thorn in Mrs. Certainly, relatively few Bowie fans would enjoy Rose's albums. History gives certain molds and stances to artists that might not be 100-percent accurate, and some Bowie fans, as well as critics who have considered his early work unremittingly hip and cutting-edge, may find the notion - that an effete musical satirist such as Rose affected Bowie's work - unacceptable. Bowie, of course, was a much better singer and a much harder rocker. There can be no doubt that Rose influenced Bowie's early-'70s work, particularly Hunky Dory, which owed something to Rose's early albums in both the quasi-musical piano styles and thorny-rose lyrics. When he sang about flowery love and idyllic free living, there were sarcastic and ironic undercurrents that made him hard to take seriously at the same time, the words were too far out for him to get accepted by Broadway or the easy listening pop market. But stick to writing, we'll get someone else to sing them." Lyrically, he was a different story, with an arch and whimsical tone that both reflected and mocked the counterculture. These were delivered in a whiney voice that made it easy to envision scenes of cigar-chomping Tin Pan Alley publishers telling him, "We like your songs, kid. Musically, Rose was firmly in the pre-World War II camp, sounding like a Broadway songwriter with his jaunty piano and bouncy singalong melodies. Bowie also covered another song from that album, "Buzz the Fuzz," in live performances (it can be heard on a 1970 bootleg), and Tiny Tim did "Fill Your Heart" on the B-side of "Tiptoe Through the Tulips." If he's remembered by rock audiences at all, it's because David Bowie covered a Rose song - "Fill Your Heart" (co-written by Rose and Paul Williams), from Rose's 1968 debut album - on Hunky Dory. It isn't quite accurate to call him a rock artist, but he fits in rock about as well as anywhere else. An odd and goofy singer/songwriter who didn't fit in any comfortable niche when he emerged in the late 1960s, New Orleans pianist Biff Rose was like a vaudeville entertainer reincarnated as a spacy hippie.
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