When David Bowie released the album The Man Who Sold the World in 1970, it was considered a “transitional” album. Sales were initially poor, according to Ultimate Classic Rock, and the title track, which featured an ominous sound with distorted guitar and unsettling, ambiguous lyrics written by a young Bowie, went nowhere. At first.
A 1972 cover story for The History of Rock joked that The Man Who Sold the World “sold about five copies” in the UK and that “Bowie bought them.”
Bowie seemed to have mixed feelings on the music. In the same article, he was asked if there was any of his songs that he could have done better if he’d done them later, and he replied, “A lot of Man Who Sold The World, although that was one of the best albums I made. It was a whole traumatic period.”
Bowie soon became a glam rock god with the 1972 release of The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars, but it would be two decades before the song “The Man Who Sold the World” received mainstream attention in the U.S.
The revival for “The Man Who Sold the Earth” came in 1993 when Nirvana performed it in front of a live audience on MTV Unplugged. The haunting acoustic rendition of the song was one of lead singer Kurt Cobain’s last performances before his death in early 1994, becoming a posthumous gift for fans when it was included on the band’s Unplugged album. Nirvana’s “The Man Who Sold the Earth” became a commercial success due to heavy radio and MTV airplay.
Former Nirvana drummer Chad Channing told Songfacts he had introduced Cobain to the Bowie song a few years prior to Unplugged.
“We were in Boston and stopped by this record store, and I found this copy of The Man Who Sold The World. It was a cool copy – it had the poster in it and everything,” Channing recalled. “And those guys weren’t familiar with the record. And I inquired about, ‘What David Bowie do you like? Do you like David Bowie?’ And they’re like, ‘Well, the only David Bowie we’re familiar with is ‘Let’s Dance.’ I was surprised. I was like, ‘Really? Wow.’ I was like, ‘You’ve got to hear some early David Bowie, for sure.”
Channing later played the title track for Cobain, who was blown away.
Bowie was also blown away by Nirvana’s version of the song. In a video interview in the late 1990s, he said. “It’s a really sad rendition of course, because it’s so tied up with [Cobain’s] own life and death. So it takes on all these different shades for me.“
“Because I always sort of remember, fairly clearly, my state of mind when I was actually writing it,” Bowie shared. “Which I guess was as near to a mystical state as a 19-year-old could get into. And I remember it was at a time when I was sort of studying Buddhism. For my 15 minutes of Buddhism. So it’s interesting that it really had two mystical states—the time I wrote and recorded it and the time when he recorded it again.”
Decades later, both versions of “The Man Who Sold the World” remain classics from the eras in which they were recorded, two different looks at the same song that get even better with age.
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