Soligny's background information on the making of each album is quite satisfying, but for a book that purports to be a sort of musical biography of the artist, I was left wanting more when reading his track-by-track notes. The author is almost completely uncritical, and he has a tendency to latch onto just one or two facets of each of Bowie's multi-faceted songs. So his paragraph on "Hang Onto Yourself" mostly deals with that song's tempo while his extremely brief write-up on "Black Country Rock" mostly just addresses its debt to Marc Bolan. He rarely engages with Bowie's lyrics and doesn't approach Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars and Diamond Dogs as concept albums.
The remembrances that finish each chapter do not offer much extra insight into Bowie's songs, but they can illuminate his work methods when the speaker is someone like Mick Ronson, Tony Visconti, Dana Gillespie, Iggy Pop, or Dennis Mackay, who did time in the studio with him. Quotes from peers such as Roger Daltrey, John Cale, David Gilmour, Brian May, and Nick Lowe tend to be really short and fairly expendable. Quite a few of them are of the "I was never much of a fan" variety, and Soligny sometimes has an amusing tendency to go a phrase or two too far when choosing his quote chunks, as when Chris Martin's praise for Ronson ends with an awkward "He died, didn't he?" or when recording engineer Phil Brown adds that he didn't like Bowie's "Thin White Duke" phase or when Amanda Lear expresses doubts about the validity of her own opinions. There could have also been some clarification for who all these speakers are, especially when they aren't as well known as Iggy Pop or Mick Ronson. Sometimes the endnotes clear this up. Sometimes they don't.
While certain parts of Rainbowman feel a bit thin, I don't want to give the impression I didn't enjoy the book as a whole, even if I didn't learn a ton from it. Soligny's writing and structure make it very readable, and each chapter is a fun companion to the appropriate Bowie album. I noticed that the time it took to read most chapters synched up very well with the time it took to listen to the album it covered. I also liked how Soligny folded Bowie's side projects (such as The Man Who Fell to Earth and records with the Stooges and Iggy solo) and live performances into the story. And I loved the tableaux of album covers with aesthetically appropriate accoutrements that began each chapter, though I wish they were in color.
David Bowie-Rainbowman: 1967-1980 is now being published in English for the first time and is the first volume of a two-volume set. Presumably the English edition of David Bowie-Rainbowman, Vol. 2: 1981-2016 is on the horizon.
