I met David Bowie once.
It was backstage at the Highline Ballroom in October of 2007, during the “High Line Festival,” a week-long series of events in New York City that he personally curated. At the time, he was rarely seen in public and, following his heart surgery in 2004, rumors that Bowie was gravely ill had begun to circulate around the music industry. But those whispers didn’t correlate at all with the man I saw at the Chelsea venue.
He had golden skin, near-perfect pearly white teeth, and listened with wide-eyed attentiveness as I moronically babbled my enthusiasm for the Secret Machines, a New York space-rock band he had picked to play his festival. He actually seemed like he cared about what I had to say, but then, Bowie always was an underrated actor.
Not only was it one of the greatest days of my life (any day you meet David Bowie automatically becomes so), but in the years after, I would smugly tell anyone who parroted the “Bowie is dying” spiel about the picture of health I saw that night.
But I can’t do that anymore. It turns out that he was sick after all.
As made public in the early hours of Monday, Bowie had been fighting cancer for 18 months and died surrounded by family on Jan. 10.
In the musical eulogies, tributes and appreciations likely to be written in the next few days, there will be much talk of how he made the chameleon-like transition from the psych-pop of “Space Oddity” (1969) into the alien sex fiend that was Ziggy Stardust, forged the plastic soul of “Young Americans” (1975), before revitalizing rock with his famed Berlin trilogy in the late ’70, and going on to dominate the charts with “Let’s Dance” (1983).
“He did it all” is a phrase likely to make the rounds, especially in relation to those golden years. But that’s selling him short, because he was still in the process of doing it all, right up until the very last days.
Released on Friday (his 69th birthday, no less), Bowie’s final album, “Blackstar,” was an astonishing fusion of modern jazz and darkened electro that signified yet another new sonic direction. Fans and critics rightly heralded it as his best work in years, if not decades. Additionally, Bowie recently stretched his creative streak into the off-Broadway production “Lazarus,” in which music from “Blackstar” was featured heavily. It’s now staggering to think he did all this while suffering from a terminal illness that only his nearest and dearest knew about.
Bowie may have made a broader cultural impact in the ‘70s, but he was no relic. The London-born New Yorker remained a vibrant, progressive and daring artist until the end. As such, his death doesn’t just mark the passing of a legend, it robs us of a contemporary torchbearer.