The Man Who Sold the World

by Peter Doggett

  Out of Johnny Angelo’s staged martyrdom; Marc Bolan’s transformation from hippie to teen idol; Erich von Däniken’s claim (in his book Chariots of the Gods) that the planet had been visited, and civilization set in motion, by extraterrestrials; the deaths of performers such as Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, and Janis Joplin; his own experience of fame with “Space Oddity,” and of hero-worshipping Little Richard and Elvis: out of all these images and more,* Bowie began to assemble an imaginary star whom he could impersonate and ride to his own stardom.

  Later, he would adopt a fashionable cynicism toward his creation: “Most people still want their idols and gods to be shallow, like cheap toys. Why do you think teenagers are the way they are? They run around like ants, chewing gum and fitting onto a certain style of dressing for a day; that’s as deep as they wish to go. It’s no surprise that Ziggy was a huge success.” But by early 1972, when he chanced upon the signifiers of Ziggy’s identity—the cropped red hair, the jumpsuit, the glitter and panache—he was operating with one eye on his career, the other trained affectionately on Ziggy’s disciples, who deserved a star worthy of their devotion.

  Ziggy’s hair was chopped, colored, and shaped spikily on top of his head in January 1972. For a TV appearance, he donned a codpiece, a bomber jacket, and trousers rolled up to reveal red and black plastic platform boots. At the end of that month, Bowie’s manufactured idol—dressed in a jumpsuit made from what he later called “a quite lovely piece of faux-deco material”—made his stage debut on the tiny stage of the Toby Jug public house in Tolworth for an audience who, if they were expecting anyone, might have assumed that they would see the David Bowie of Hunky Dory or even “Space Oddity,” not a space oddity of an entirely different complexion. The artiste had no doubt what would happen next: “I’m going to be huge,” he promised a few days earlier, “and it’s quite frightening in a way, because I know that when I reach my peak and it’s time for me to be brought down, it will be with a bump.”

  [59] SUFFRAGETTE CITY

  (Bowie)

  Recorded February 1972; Ziggy Stardust LP

  * * *

  The only popular song to incorporate “suffragette” into its title before Ziggy Stardust was “Sister Suffragette” from the musical Mary Poppins, and that arguably had more to do with women’s liberation than Bowie’s “Suffragette City,” despite the claims that he subsequently made on the latter’s behalf. His offering was nothing more, or less, than a collage of his rock’n’roll influences: a sexually charged catchphrase borrowed from Charles Mingus via the Small Faces,* some “White Light/White Heat” vocal interplay and sonic thrust from the Velvet Underground, a little Clockwork Orange imagery (“droogies”), a line from John Lennon’s “I Found Out,” some Bolan boogie, some Flamin’ Groovies speed, some Jerry Lee Lewis swagger, and a dose of hard rock theatrics to wrap it up. Bowie heightened the feeling of playful pastiche by switching vocal personae every few words, sometimes mock threatening, sometimes sarcastic, sometimes merely alive with the joy of fronting an electric band.

  Not that the band was that simple: there was an almost inaudible acoustic guitar, as usual, supporting Ronson’s hyperpowered electric, while what registered as a saxophone was actually created using an ARP synthesizer. Bowie dreamed up that synth riff, producer Ken Scott found an appropriate sound on the Trident Studios ARP, and Ronson pushed the keys. The backing vocals skipped from left-hand speaker (first verse) to right (second), to add another layer of contrivance. There was even a trick in the (entirely major chord) fabric of the song. While many classic rock songs, such as the Rolling Stones’ “Brown Sugar” and the Kinks’ “All Day and All of the Night,” were raised on a three-chord structure spaced two and three semitones apart (for example, E-G-A, or A-G-C), Bowie used tighter two-semitone gaps (F-G-A), leaving the ear to expect a softer Am as the root of the song, only for a decisive A major chord to appear in its stead. This simplest of maneuvers, performed quite unconsciously, gave “Suffragette City” its unrelenting power, causing every deviation from the basic riff to sound transitory and quickening the desire for the root chord to return. And it did, over and over, until the band veered out of the chorus into a teasingly held E major chord, begging for a resolution back to A. “Wham bam thank you ma’am,” Bowie cried gleefully after a fake ending, before the band went round again, and this time delivered the relief of a last climax, as Bowie shrieked: “Suffragette!”

  [60] STARMAN

  (Bowie)

  Recorded February 1972; Ziggy Stardust LP

  * * *

  If Bowie was indeed “the actor,” as he claimed on Hunky Dory, then this was his finest performance. It was also a triumph of the techniques he had learned in advertising, from its marketing on the BBC’s Top of the Pops, to his assumption of superstar status on the back on what was, after all, only a No. 10 success in Britain (and a No. 65 damp squib in America, where it was killed by Elton John’s “Rocket Man,” itself little more than an imitation of “Space Oddity” [1]). Even before Ziggy Stardust was released, “Starman”* was a blatant exploitation of an album, and an image, to which it was largely peripheral. Ultimately, it was simply—like “Space Oddity” before it—a space-age novelty hit, and the fact that Bowie dropped it from his live set as early as he could hinted that it was too calculated a move even for this evangelist of self-re-creation.

  But “Starman” was something else: a superbly constructed pop song. Bowie made no attempt to hide the fact that the octave jump in the chorus (“Star-man”) mirrored the rise in Judy Garland’s “Over the Rainbow” (“some-where”); he even combined the two melodies in a showcase London performance. But whereas the Garland song used its cathartic rise to introduce a refrain that was emotionally, and melodically, expansive, the leap in Bowie’s song was followed by a more uncertain melody, reflecting his character’s innate lack of confidence. All around the starman, however, his presence evoked anticipation (the link between the verse and the chorus was the guitar figure from the Supremes’ “You Keep Me Hanging On”) and then joyous relief, when he commanded the children to boogie, and Mick Ronson’s guitar led the Spiders through a relaxed swagger through territory that Marc Bolan (the prince of “cosmic jive”) would have recognized as his home turf. Which begs the question: was “Starman,” like “Lady Stardust” [33], another song written with Bolan in mind? If so, it was a tribute that worked as a palace coup. The wordless chorus that brought “Starman” to its fade was interpreted by Bolan as a steal from his 1971 hit “Hot Love.”

  The tentative opening chords—the subdominant chord followed by the major 7th of the root—were played out on a twelve-string acoustic that was echoed across the stereo channels, and answered by the occasional strum of a six-string, until the starman and the verse arrived, and the guitar was crammed back into a single speaker. Ronson only introduced his electric guitar for the heavily phased “radio signal” from space, and to prove that we really hadn’t strayed very far from Kansas after all, a warmly romantic string arrangement carried us through the chorus. Only when the band obeyed the instruction to boogie, perfectly mimicking the T. Rex style, did a rock sensibility briefly assume the spotlight. If the Starman was going to blow our minds, it would be as a pop idol, not a rock’n’roller.

  [61] ROCK ’N’ ROLL SUICIDE

  (Bowie)

  Recorded February 1972; Ziggy Stardust LP

  * * *

  Like “Starman,” which was designed as a hit single, “Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide” was meticulously designed* to perform a specific role in Bowie’s career. Placed at the end of Ziggy Stardust (and at the end of Ziggy’s final performance in 1973), it appeared to let the curtain fall on a theatrical narrative. The equation was implicit: Ziggy had allowed himself to be killed by his fans, so he was a suicide* in all but deed. But Bowie was cleverer than that. Whoever was performing this song, whether it was the creation of David Jones or David Bowie, was addressing his audience—and every alienated individual in that audience—rather than himself.
They were the victims; he reassured them “you’re not alone,” begged them to stretch out their hands, let them just touch the end of his fingertips, and then abandoned them in a state of hysteria.

  That proclamation of union between artist and audience was never enacted with such passion as in the life of Judy Garland. Diagnosed as bipolar, she played out an incurably dramatic ritual of courtship with her fans. Her moment of “suicide” came with her final season at the London Palladium, in January 1969, where she tested the patience of her admirers beyond sufferance by arriving onstage (if at all) hours late, to the point that they pelted her with breadsticks. She died in June 1969 of barbiturate poisoning, having virtually ceased to eat several months earlier. Elton John connected the dots from Garland to Bowie: “I’ll always remember going out for dinner with him and Angie when he was Ziggy Stardust. It was a fabulous dinner, and over dinner he admitted to me that he always wanted to be Judy Garland, and that’s the God’s honest truth.”

  Garland’s torturous example aside, the cry of “you’re not alone” in “Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide” was borrowed from Mort Shuman’s translation of the Jacques Brel song “Jef.” Brel’s solace for loneliness was sex; Bowie’s was a show of awareness that his fans were suffering all the anguish of adolescence. Instead of sending them each a copy of “Can’t Help Thinking About Me” [A14], to show that he’d been there, too, he acted the kindly uncle, or big brother perhaps, who understood their agonizing lack of self-confidence.

  As he rose to the challenge of matching their hysteria, his voice changed from the urgent intimacy of the opening lines, through the metallic screech he’d used on his 1970 album, into a throat-scarring roar, way beyond his vocal range. A song that had begun with an unadorned acoustic guitar was now a tumultuous wash of sound, with strings and brass trying to contain the frenzy, until Ronson’s guitar seized the moment of release and caringly guided the track down to a calming Db chord. It was echoed an octave lower by the string quartet—the final sound to be heard on this quintessential rock album.

  As early as the second line of the song Bowie substituted a major chord where the key strictly required a minor, as a warning of imminent danger. When the cigarette* reached the mouth, the E major introduced a haunting moment of doubt, quickly defused by the more predictable changes that made up the verse. By the end of the third verse, when things were so confused that an American car (“Chev brakes”) was joined by a British utility vehicle (“the milk float”), the prevailing key was starting to crack under the strain, and the song veered into Gb for six bars, and finally into Db for twelve bars of desperate reassurance. In the final two bars, the arrangement incorporated all three of the song’s key chords, in the order in which they had originally appeared—as elegant a landing from a space fantasy as it would be possible to conceive.

  THE MAKING OF A STAR #3: The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars LP

  On July 15, 1972, David Bowie and his band performed at Friars, a club held inside the assembly hall in the Buckinghamshire town of Aylesbury, for the third time in less than a year. On his previous visits, Bowie had been an amiable, approachable figure, happy to chat to audience members after the show as a friend rather than an icon. Now Bowie was accompanied by a busload of journalists flown in by MainMan from America; flanked by security guards; preceded onto the stage by strobe lights and Walter Carlos’s theme from the movie Clockwork Orange; and then kept safely apart from the same fans whom he’d greeted warmly a few months earlier. They wrote distressed letters to the pop press: what has happened to David Bowie?

  It was not Bowie who appeared at Friars that night, however, but Ziggy Stardust: the conceptual art project who had become a rock’n’roll star. “I’m continually aware that I’m an actor portraying stories,” Bowie admitted the following day, “and that’s the way I wish to take my performance.” Ziggy was the guise he had chosen to adopt, “for a couple of months.” In an unguarded moment, he could confess that impersonating Ziggy had imposed a bizarre sense of dissociation from his “real” self: “It’s a continual fantasy. . . . I’m very rarely David Jones any more. I think I’ve forgotten who David Jones is.”

  Seven weeks earlier, when The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars LP was released, David Jones/Bowie was not a star—not in the way that Marc Bolan was, or Alice Cooper. MainMan hyped the record as if he had already achieved that status, boasting that his previous album, Hunky Dory, was “now high in the US charts”—which was true, as long as you regarded a placing of No. 185 as “high.” Bowie and his management had effectively decided to let Hunky Dory succeed or fail by itself, and to focus their energy on the Ziggy concept. But six weeks after its release, the “Starman” single, which was intended to stir up anticipation for the album, had still not charted. The success of Ziggy, and with it Bowie’s entire credibility as a pop performer, was in the balance.

  The initial response to the album was lukewarm. Nick Kent in Oz magazine complained that Bowie was attempting to “hype himself as something he isn’t.” The rock paper Sounds noted that the record “could have been the work of a competent plagiarist . . . a lot of it sounds as if he didn’t work on the ideas as much as he could have done.” This was the verdict of reviewers who had raved over the dense, philosophical songs on Bowie’s earlier albums, and could not relate to the apparently simplistic rock mythology of Ziggy Stardust. By contrast, Michael Watts of Melody Maker—to whom Bowie had made his “I’m gay” boast earlier in the year—immediately understood the singer’s intentions: the album, he wrote, “suggests the ascent and decline of a big rock figure, but leaves the listener to fill in his own details, and in the process he’s also referring obliquely to his own role as a rock star and sending it up.”

  The challenge for journalists who believed passionately in the authenticity of their idols was to accept that distance, irony, and fiction could be acceptable methods of confronting the star-making machinery of rock. They had balked at Columbia Records’ publicity campaign for “The Rock Revolutionaries,” in which a multinational media corporation attempted to use the symbolism of “revolution”—the radical touchstone of the age for Western youth—as a means of selling plastic product. Now Bowie was expecting them to deal with an artist who was quite blatantly using rock iconography to sell himself, and the illusion of stardom, as commodities. (“I’m very much a conglomerate figure,” Bowie admitted in 1972. “It’s a visual exercise in being a parasite.” He could not be accused of covering his tracks.)

  Only in retrospect* would the audacity of Bowie’s maneuvers be appreciated and understood. In June 1972, several emblematic TV appearances (notably on Top of the Pops) combined with the undeniable commercial appeal of “Starman” [60] to create exactly the degree of stardom for Ziggy Stardust that Bowie had envisaged. The audience for these records had not graduated through the dense lyrical explorations of Bowie’s beliefs and fantasies that made up the David Bowie [1969 edition], The Man Who Sold the World, and Hunky Dory LPs. If they knew Bowie at all, it was as the avowed bisexual who had written “Oh! You Pretty Things” [30]. Analysis of the shifting viewpoints and incomplete narrative of the Ziggy Stardust album could come later. Before then, the British pop audience—and especially those among them who were confused about their own identities, sexual or otherwise—welcomed the arrival of a homegrown performer as daring and provocative as Alice Cooper, as tuneful as the Beatles, and more mysterious than Marc Bolan could ever hope to be.

  By the time of his Rainbow concerts in August, where he presented a theatrical concept featuring a mime troupe (the Astronettes) led by his onetime mentor Lindsay Kemp, Bowie was stardom personified, his concept brought to ecstatic, multicolored life. But the intensity of his personification was already beginning to show. When he arrived in America the following month, he told Newsweek magazine that “I’m not what I’m supposed to be. What are people buying? I adopted Ziggy onstage, and now I feel more and more like this monster and less and less lik
e David Bowie.” His star had become a straitjacket, one that he would struggle to slough off for the next year and beyond.

  [62] ALL THE YOUNG DUDES

  (Bowie)

  Recorded by Mott The Hoople, May 1972. Recorded by Bowie, December 1972; RarestOneBowie CD

  * * *

  A derivation, first of all: in classic Hollywood westerns, “dudes” had blown in from the city, and didn’t fit. Folk/blues pioneer Lead Belly sang about “The 25-Cent Dude” in the 1940s. The Hollywood Argyles, the studio collective who recorded the much-loved (by Bowie) “Alley-Oop,” had a 1965 single titled “Long Hair, Unsquare Dude Called Jack,” though it’s unlikely that Bowie would ever have heard it. More likely he found his dudes in African-American (and lesbian) slang, where a “dude” was simply a man. After Bowie gave this song to Mott The Hoople, dudes entered the rock vocabulary as a synonym for “the kids,” though it was so linked to the seventies that it has only been used ironically since then. And even in 1972, the “boogaloo” was a dance craze that was strictly passé. If the boogaloo dudes did indeed carry the news, they may have been reading yesterday’s papers, to quote another band.