Michael Cerveris - HEDWIG at Club Make Up -- Rebel Rebel 1999

Michael Cerveris - HEDWIG at Club Make Up -- Rebel Rebel 1999

Michael Cerveris on the death of David Bowie:

"My turntable for the foreseeable future. Growing up, though I loved rock and roll, my voice never seemed to fit the songs I loved...until I discovered Bowie. He made rock music safe for baritones. If I didn't listen to him daily as a teenager, it was damned close. As a kid in Appalachia, I drew pencil drawings of him and traced photos I found in big rock picture books from my public library.

Always feeling a bit of an alien in my surroundings, Ziggy made that seem not just ok..., but right. And through his songs I encountered and embraced and identified with all kinds of strange, mysterious and beautiful versions of the Other. Queer ones, European ones, Space ones.. It wasn't just my musical world, but my Whole View of the World that was formed by looking through those mismatched eyes. When I first tried making my own marks on the world, I essentially tried to be Bowie as Crow in David Petrarca's Tooth Of Crime in Hartford and my Hedwig was nothing if not an homage to all he'd taught me in his music (for my money, Stephen Trask and John Cameron Mitchell wrote the true Bowie musical). And I accompanied myself on guitar with Young Americans as my audition song for two pivotal parts in my life--my first TV series Fame, and the Broadway production of The Who's Tommy. So I owe him a lot.

I met him once, saw him many times from arenas, to Broadway in the front row of The Elephant Man, to a 500 capacity place in the Bronx. I wouldn't sing how I do or be where I've been if he'd never existed. The influence he had in his life and art giving comfort and inspiration to generations of misfits and freaks and anyone who felt like an outsider is incalculable. Fearless and peerless. Maybe Carrie Brownstein said it best today: "It feels like we lost something elemental, as if an entire color is gone."