Lady Gaga is going to pay tribute to Bowie at the Grammys. Elton John has had this to say, some interesting insights and advice for the young dudes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1a5_DQ88hZE
Elton show tribute to Bowie. Part Winifred Atwell, Little Richard, Fats Domino and Mozart on that piano...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74rztpyMgwY
So much of his life was private in the past decade, but the very in depth Rolling Stone feature gave a more detailed description of his life during this time and the way he fought his illness. A few excerpts mainly from Tony Visconti who had known and worked with Bowie from the 1960s to his final days. He was reportedly going through an intense creative period despite being so ill and put up a huge battle.
Quote:
By the time he made his surprise re-emergence in 2013 with his first album in a decade, The Next Day, he had pulled off a feat that no other rock star has quite managed, regaining all of the heady mystique of his breakthrough years, and then some.
In final three years, though, were an extraordinary fertile period of creativity. In 2014, he began work on another, even better, album, Blackstar, while also helping bring to life an ambitious off-Broadway show, Lazarus, based around his old and new songs. But he had kept one more secret: Bowie maintained focus on these last creations while battling cancer.
Visconti, who knew of Bowie's illness, noticed the tone of some of the Blackstar lyrics early on. "You canny bastard," Visconti told him. "You're writing a farewell album." Bowie simply laughed. "It's so inspirational how he lived his last year," says Visconti, pointing out that Bowie wrote some of his most amusing lyrics while terribly ill. "He kept his sense of humor."
In the worst moments, Visconti would try to reassure him. "Sometimes he would phone me when he just finished treatment," he recalls. "He couldn't talk very loud. He was really pretty messed up, and I would say, 'Don't worry about it. You're going to live.'"
"One hopes," Bowie would shoot back. "Don't get too excited about that."
[Cut back to his last tour.]
"Three-quarters through the Reality tour," recalls Garson, "he said, 'You know, Mike, after this tour, I'm just going to be a father and live a normal life. And I'm going to be there for Lexi while she grows up. I missed it the first time.'"
In 2007, Bowie helped curate New York's Highline Music Festival, which announced that he would play a "large outdoor concert" as part of the event. When he quietly pulled out, rumors swirled that he was experiencing renewed health problems. But Visconti, for one, says he saw no evidence of that.
"When I met up with David in 2008 or 2009," he says, "he actually had some weight on him. He was robust. His cheeks were rosy red. He wasn't sick. He was on medicine for his heart. But it was normal, like a lot of people in their fifties or sixties are on heart medication, and live very long lives. So he was coping with it very, very well."
.........
When Bowie showed up for Blackstar recording sessions in New York last January, he had no eyebrows, and no hair on his head. He had begun to tell a handful of friends and collaborators that he had cancer and was undergoing chemotherapy.
[Further on] all the while, Bowie was undergoing chemo, and at one time, his prognosis seemed bright. "He was optimistic because he was doing the chemo and it was working," says Visconti, "and at one point in the middle of last year, he was in remission. I was thrilled. And he was a bit apprehensive. He said, "Well, don't celebrate too quickly. For now, I'm in remission, and we'll see how it goes.' And he continued the chemotherapy. So I thought he was going to make it."
But Bowie still embedded enough intimations of mortality into his lyrics - and majesty in the music - that Blackstar seemed very much like a fitting goodbye. "I think he thought if he was going to die, this would be a great way to go," says Visconti. "This would be a great statement to make."
Bowie was well aware that Lazarus, too, served that purpose... But even as he engineered twin artistic departures for David Bowie, he was doing everything he could to stick around as David Jones. "I deeply felt that he really didn't wan to die," says van Hove. "It was a fight not against death but a fight to live. And living, for him, was being a real family man. He loved to go home, to be at home with his daughter, with his wife, his family."
In November... Bowie's cancer came back, according to Visconti. This time, doctors told him it was terminal. "It had spread all over his body," says Visconti, "so there's no recovering from that."
In those final weeks, he still somehow found time and energy to record demos for five entirely new songs. A week before his death, just before Blackstar's release, he FaceTimed Visconti and told him he wanted to make one more album, a follow up to Blackstar.
"I was thrilled," Visconti says, "and I thought, and he must have thought, that he'd have a few months, at least. So the end must've been very rapid. I'm not privy to it. I don't know exactly, but he must've taken ill very quickly after that phone call." The news of his death surprised even the collaborators who knew of his illness. Others, like the actors in Lazarus, had no idea he was sick.
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So that leaves a lot of questions as to what he may have been able to do if he had not had these health issues. Once his daughter reached adulthood, perhaps he would've attempted a full public comeback. I personally think that conditions were right for it in this era.
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