Biff Rose

An odd and goofy singer/songwriter who didn't fit in any comfortable niche when he emerged in the late 1960s, New Orleans pianist Biff Rose was like a vaudeville entertainer reincarnated as a spacy hippie. It isn't quite accurate to call him a rock artist, but he fits in rock about as well as anywhere else. If he's remembered by rock audiences at all, it's because David Bowie covered a Rose song -- "Fill Your Heart" (co-written by Rose and Paul Williams), from Rose's 1968 debut album -- on his Hunky Dory. Bowie also covered another song from that album, "Buzz the Fuzz," in live performances (it can be heard on a 1970 bootleg), and Tiny Tim did "Fill Your Heart" on the B-side of "Tiptoe Through the Tulips." Musically, Rose was firmly in the pre-World War II camp, sounding like a Broadway songwriter with his jaunty piano and bouncy singalong melodies. These were delivered in a whiny voice that made it easy to envision scenes of cigar-chomping Tin Pan Alley publishers telling him, "We like your songs, kid. But stick to writing, we'll get someone else to sing them." Lyrically, he was a different story, with an arch and whimsical tone that both reflected and mocked the counterculture. When he sang about flowery love and idyllic free living, there were sarcastic and ironic undercurrents that made him hard to take seriously; at the same time, the words were too far out for him to get accepted by Broadway or the easy-listening pop market. There can be no doubt that Rose influenced Bowie's early 1970s work, particularly Hunky Dory, which owed something to Rose's early albums in both the quasi-musical piano styles and thorny-rose lyrics. Bowie, of course, was a much better singer and a much harder rocker. History gives certain molds and stances to artists that might not be 100%...