David Bowie - I Dig Everything - Non-Album Tracks (1964-1966)

I'm a really big David Bowie fan. But I like some parts of his career much more than others. My favorite era of his is from about 1967 to 1973. (Perhaps not coincidentally, that's also roughly what I think have been the peak years of popular music in general. It seems to have been a special time, even though I'm too young to have experienced it first-hand.)

Anyway, Bowie's musical career had a slow start. From 1964 to 1966, he put out a few singles as "Davie Jones" or "Davy Jones," but they went nowhere. In 1967, his musical style changed drastically, but to not much success. He wouldn't "make it" until he had a hit with "Space Oddity" in 1969.

This album covers his 1964 to 1966 years, which was mostly music in rock or R&B styles. There's a decent official compilation called "Early On" covering this exact time period. It's okay, but it suffers from having to include every A- and B-side from that time period, when some of those are just not good enough to stand up to repeat listening, unless you're the most die-hard Bowie fan.

And it misses some other good songs from the era. For instance, Bowie wrote the song "Silly Boy Blue" all the way back in 1965 and made a demo about it then. Despite the title that makes it sound like a silly novelty song, it's actually about Buddhism, which put Bowie way ahead of the cultural zeitgeist curve. For instance, that was right when George Harrison began his interest in Indian spirituality, but nobody knew of his interest yet.

I've left off a bunch of songs from "Early On' and included six songs not on that. The album is organized chronologically. Some of the songs at the end already have Bowie getting into his next musical phase, moving away from R&B and into music hall and and theatrical styles.

If I were to recommend Bowie's albums to anyone, frankly, I would put music from this early time near dead last. A lot of it is pretty ordinary. However, if you're a big Bowie fan like I am, you want to know his whole career. I think this is a much better listen than "Early On."

By the way, with this album out of the way, I look forward to getting to much better Bowie stray tracks albums. He has a lot of really good stray songs, especially from 1967 to about 1975, many of them still officially unreleased.

01 Liza Jane (David Bowie)
02 Take My Tip (David Bowie)
03 That's a Promise (David Bowie)
04 I Want My Baby Back (David Bowie)
05 You've Got a Habit of Leaving (David Bowie)
06 Baby Loves that Way (David Bowie)
07 Silly Boy Blue [Demo] (David Bowie)
08 Can't Help Thinking about Me (David Bowie)
09 And I Say to Myself (David Bowie)
10 Good Morning Girl (David Bowie)
11 I Dig Everything (David Bowie)
12 I'm Not Losing Sleep (David Bowie)
13 Rubber Band [Single Version] (David Bowie)
14 The London Boys [Single Version] (David Bowie)
15 Love You 'Till Tuesday [Acoustic Demo] (David Bowie)
16 Over the Wall We Go (David Bowie)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15904813/DavidB_1964-1966_IDigEvrything_atse.zip.html

I wanted a photo of a young Bowie for this album cover. I believe he's 13 years old! It's probably some school portrait from before his music career even began, but I figured it would be a kick for people to see him like this.

A year or more after first posting this album, I colorized the black and white photo. Note that Bowie is well known for having different colored eyes. But I looked it up, and I'm pretty sure this photo dates to shortly before the fight Bowie got in that resulted in one of the irises in his eyes turning brown.