"Time - he flexes like a whore / Falls swanking to
the floor, his trick is you & me, boy..."

The story:

Was riding the #83 bus back from Hackensack NJ to
Jersey City after applying for a job selling (now
long-defunct) CUE™ magazine door-to-door, & was
reading the latest TV GUIDE™ listings w/ their
back-pages gossip about upcoming shows & the
announcement that U.S. stars' Martin Landau &
Barbara Bain, husband & wife team seen weekly on
"Mission Impossible", were in the U.K. along w/
Canadian Barry Morse who was essentially star
David Janssen's 'Herk Harvey stand-in' for 4 years
on QM's "The Fugitive", to film a new as yet
untitled sci-fi series, then flipping a few pages
backward saw that David ↯B♂wie↯ fresh off of the
"Aladdin Sane" (A lad, insane?) & the LP of cover
versions, "Pinups" was to make an appearance on
NBC-TV's "The Midnight Special" that Friday night
on November (16) '73.
(Landau, Bain & Morse show mentioned debuted
Stateside w/ much hoopla in September 1975 as
SPACE: 1999™, a Anglo-American contender to the
strictly U.S. STAR TREK™)
Was into like ALL aspects of science fiction,
comics, mags, TV & movies, & NOW music!
Well being 17 & all, ↯B♂wie↯ to me at the time
was the artiste equivalent to Lennon & McCartney,
Dylan, Jagger & Richards, etc., in songwriting
skill, but also territories covered previously by
Marc Bolan, Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, so this was a
"must-see-TV" event, before NBC used that tag-line
in the 1990s!
And to top it all off, since 1969's "Space Oddity"
↯B♂wie↯ was the preeminent "Sci-Fi
singer/songwriter", covering subject matter &
going where NO man (?) had gone before, like "STAR
TRECK (sic) in a leather jacket".
That's ↯B♂wie's↯ own words on Warwick Hotel
stationery describing "The Bewlay Bros." the last
song on "Hunky Dory", and yes the very same hotel
that The Beatles were at in their 1st U.S. visit,
a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far, away —
1964.
LOOK™, is there LIFE™ on Mars♂? NEWSWEEK™ maybe??
Well show came =ON= as scheduled, "The 1980 Floor
Show" (a pun on Orwell's bO-Ok, whose estate B♂wie
& MainMan™, his management, were in failed
negotiations over to obtain the rights to as a
stage-show) w/ The Troggs, Marianne Faithful &
mysterious leering Amanda Lear (once Brian Jones'
main-squeeze, perhaps even the source of The
Stones' song, ♪...'round & 'round & 'round she
goes, Lil' Miss Amanda Jones...♫?) o'er the stage,
the 8th number sang by DB — "TIME", on the show
had the lyric, ♫...falls swanking to the
floor...♪, which was always **sumed by me to be
the correct version, but y'know what they say
about "assuming", well at least on TV's "The Odd
Couple", as "Felix Unger" (Tony Randall) said:
"When you 'assume', you make an 'ass' out of 'u'
and of 'me'..."
Sure enough, when attending the "Diam♦nd D♦gs
T♦ur" months later in NYC's Madison Sq. Garden,
July 19th 1974, 5 YEARS after the actual Moon
landing (!) & heard him clearly enunciate
♪...falls WANKING to the floor...♫, which another
BIG B♂wie fanatic there confirmed (he was
approximately 6' 4½").
He also performed the 1966 Eddie Floyd & Steve
Cropper hit "Knock On Wood", less than a day after
CBS' "Late Show" aired the 1954 Danny Kaye
(another famous out-of-the-bottle redhead) comedy
"Knock On Wood" — check July 19th/20th 1974 NYC
Tri-State Metro Area TV GUIDE™ listings to confirm
this for yourself!)
"1954", "1964", "1966", "1973", "1980", "1990s",
"LIFE™", "LOOK™", "NEWSWEEK™",
"TIME"...it's all coming back to me now...in 2011.