Leopard Messiah

[jack_babalon]

I grew up with my mother frequently blasting David Bowie vinyl off a stereophonic sound system roughly the size of a home computer desk (complete with built-in AM/FM radio and a state of the art 8 track player). As a child I would often misunderstand some of the lyrics the Thin White Duke was dropping and reinterpret them as something different, something odd. Some were close, some were way off. The top three that still stick out to me are as follows:

1. "Like a Leopard Messiah...": If this line makes you imagine a leopard headed Jesus hanging off a cross, then you know exactly what six, seven year old me saw while he jumped up and down on his bed in a sugar induced hyper-trance whenever this came on. Even now I kind of want to make the Leopard Messiah a sort of super-villain should I ever find myself having to write comic books.

2. "I'm a mean, ornery man/ Who can't afford the ticket/ To Suffer-Jet City": I had no idea where this mythical Suffer Jet City was. I pictured in my head a sort of post-apocalyptic metropolis built within a graveyard for abandoned 747's and shot down fighter planes. Apparently it was populated entirely by women, because mom told me Suffer Jets fought very hard for her right to vote. Not sure why 'Ziggy' was a mean, ornery man either but it didn't matter because I was just waiting for the "Wham, bam, thank you , Ma'am" part anyway.

3. "Swimming in a barrel, singing this song, that's my kind of highball gone wrong." : Yeah, I have no idea how the hell I thought that this could be the actual opening to 'Beauty and the Beast'. However, I should state that whenever this song comes on I get a flash of Bowie in a barrel going over Niagara Falls, with a Highball martini in his hand and singing along. It's sort of like having your own private animated .gif stuck in your head. Also, don't ask how I knew what a highball was at that age.

Alright I'll stop here before I make too terrible a fool of myself. Try to keep in mind though that I was a hyperactively imaginative child who thought of David Bowie as the strange, alien man who fell to earth he sold himself as. A sort of real life comic-book character who existed in a pop-culture neutral zone between Rock Star and Star Wars. Of course I thought the same about Kiss... but that's a blog for another time.