Bowie

by Marc Spitz

  “A gay novel,” he has said. “A stunning piece of writing. I found out later that it was a bible among gay America but I didn’t know it at the time. There was something in the book akin to my feelings of loneliness. I thought this is a lifestyle I really have to experience. I really opted to drown in the euphoria of this new experience, which was a real taboo with society. And I must admit I loved that aspect of it.”

  “David sensed there was something there,” says Tony Zanetta. “There was something attractive about being a sexual outlaw. And he definitely absorbed that into his Ziggy Stardust character, because Ziggy Stardust was a very sensual presentation. It was like the ultimate alien, but there was something very beautiful and desirable about Ziggy Stardust. So that all the little alienated kids all over the world, like the fat girls and the gay boys that didn’t fit in, were attracted to this kind of alien-ness. And yes, he did use it.”

  With Ziggy Stardust, Bowie was no longer a joiner, he was finally a leader, and he was just starting to get an idea of the responsibility therein. Like Bob Dylan before him and Kurt Cobain, Ice Cube and Eminem after him, David wasn’t exactly comfortable with it. While genuinely happy that his public announcement may have had a liberating effect on heretofore-closeted people, he knew that he was an artist, not a spokesman.

  “I was quite proud that I did it,” Bowie told the great music journalist Robert Palmer in 1983. “On the other hand, I didn’t want to carry a banner for any group of people and I was as worried about that as the aftermath. Being approached by organizations. I didn’t want that. I didn’t feel like part of a group. I didn’t like that aspect of it: this is going to start overshadowing my writing and everything else that I do. But there you go.”

  14.

  RELEASED BY RCA on June 6, 1972, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars is one of those rare albums that would have still made a legend out of its maker if he’d released absolutely nothing before or since. There are only a handful of such albums in rock. The Sex Pistols’ Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols. Colossal Youth by Young Marble Giants, perhaps. Grace by Jeff Buckley, certainly.

  If Bowie’s entire sixties and very early seventies output had never existed, and he was struck down by a double-decker bus in the spring of ’72, we would still be talking about Bowie, and people like me would still be writing books about him. This is the magnitude of Ziggy, the album. It opens with a drum beat and the kind of slow, spare, scene-setting that marked teenage disaster epics like “Leader of the Pack” by the Shangri-Las or “Dead Man’s Curve” by Jan and Dean. “Pushing through the market square,” Bowie sings, “So many mothers sighing …”

  The news has just broken that the Earth only has five years left. Bowie’s narrator is a kid, standing possibly on the Bromley High Street, watching the reality sink in and recording it all as he tries not to go numb. The social norm changes, and suddenly every pedestrian, fat, skinny, tall or short, is equalized, or at least equally doomed. There’s no time to erect and maintain false barriers with race, sexuality or class. Thematically, it resembles Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall” or, though it’s much darker, Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World.” By the third verse, however, Bowie addresses the listener directly, which is yet another of the album’s innovations, as this seldom happened in pop lyrics. Bowie sees us enjoying a milkshake in an ice cream parlor. We are blissfully unaware of our fate. We don’t even know we’re being sung about, according to Bowie. The burden of knowledge is all on Ziggy. It’s a lot to pack into four minutes and forty-two seconds. The track fades out with Bowie screaming out the title as Ronson, Woodmansey and Bolder join in, transforming the histrionics into a jolly pub chant. A split second allows the listener to catch his or her breath before another drum beat, this one a bit more funky, announces track two.

  “Soul Love” follows with its hand-clap rhythm and a sense of pre-apocalypse frustration. “Inspirations have I none,” Bowie sings. Circumstances demand “new words” but he can’t come up with any, hence the “la la la” melody that takes it out until the avalanche that is “Moonage Daydream”’s opening chords drops in. “Starman,” the album’s first single (and Bowie’s first hit since “Space Oddity”) follows, with Ronson’s dramatic string arrangements. Bowie, using the cool patter of a jazz nighthawk, explains, Marvel Comics–style, the creation myth of Ziggy. He would elaborate on this to William S. Burroughs during a Rolling Stone interview two years later. “Ziggy is advised in a dream by the Infinites to write the coming of a Starman, so he writes ‘Starman,’ which is the first news of hope that the people have heard. So they latch onto it immediately …” Ziggy has been talking about this amazing spaceman who will be coming down to save Earth. He arrives somewhere in Greenwich Village. Bowie describes the “Infinites” as “black hole jumpers.” There are several of them. One of them apparently resembles Marlon Brando.

  “It Ain’t Easy” is something of an intermission and the most straightforward number on the album. Unsurprisingly, it’s the only nonoriginal, and it returns us to pre-apocalypse London (the stage of the Marquee, to be precise), with its talk of “hoochie coochie” women and the satisfactions they bring to a young man. What else to do while waiting for the end of the world? From here, the album gets sexed up even more intensely—gay sex is first, as the slow tempo of “Five Years” returns with the torchy piano ballad “Lady Stardust.” A misfit with long black hair and a heavily made-up face, the Lady might be Ziggy before he realized that he was a prophet for the Infinites. There are people who think it’s Marc Bolan. Or Freddi Buretti. “I smiled sadly for a love I could not obey” harkens to Wilde’s lover Lord Alfred Douglas’s famous line “I am the love that dare not speak its name,” from his poem “Two Loves” (which appears in Douglas’s volume The Chameleon). The theme of transformation from Lady Stardust to Ziggy Stardust is cleverly acknowledged as well.

  “Star” picks up the tempo. It’s a song about rock ’n’ roll ambition, autobiographical, given Bowie’s pre-Defries struggles. “I could do with the money / I’m so wiped out with things as they are.” It’s a great example of those Instamatic Bowie numbers that introduce peripheral characters, friends of his that become friends of us as listeners (“All the Young Dudes” is another one of these songs). As listeners, we may feel we too know a “Bevan” who tried to change the nation, or with regard to “Dudes,” a “Lucy” who steals clothes from unlocked cars, for that matter. He clearly picked this songwriting trick up from his hero Lou Reed, who filled every post–John Cale Velvet Underground album with a cache of local characters. “Hang On to Yourself” invents the Johnny Ramone riff four full years before the punk legends’ 1976 debut. The Spiders are all together, moving like tigers on the aforementioned Vaseline. We (the blessed) can only gape as they instruct us what to do if we’re gonna “make it.”

  Speaking of riffs, the album’s title track rarely gets mentioned anymore for just how great a riff it has, one that’s instantly recognizable and primal but complex. It’s not just an up-or downstroking slash but resonates like one despite its three integrated sections. Bowie uses three different voices to sing the hell out of it. From verse one (“Ziggy played guitar”) to verse two (“Ziggy really sang”) to the chorus, he seems to the outside observer a composed narrator, a jaded hipster and finally (“So where were the Spiders?”) an enraged and regretful participant in the decadence. Straight sex next: “Suffragette City” predicts the swirling, carnal Ziggy Stardust roadshow to come, full of mellow-thighed groupies and hangers-on who can’t afford their tickets to ride. It ends with typical Bromley-bred politeness: “Wham, bam, thank you, ma’am.” Again, wouldn’t mother be proud? “Rock and Roll Suicide” closes the album. It finds Ziggy (or is it a post-Stooges Iggy or a post-Velvets Lou?) discredited and disenfranchised, wandering the streets of London as doleful brass is played and Bowie, the lone true believer, promises, “You’re not alone!” and that if he’ll only turn on with him, they will be “wonde
rful!” Bowie recorded strong non-LP material in Trident as well, including B sides “Sweet Head” and “Velvet Goldmine,” and the A side “John, I’m Only Dancing,” but it’s with the closing string arrangement of “Rock and Roll Suicide” that the 1970s officially begin, two years in.

  “He’s one of the dominant influences of the 1970s in terms of the culture, as the culture was shifting from the sixties into the seventies,” Professor Paglia tells me. “He is like the muse of the seventies.”

  During rehearsals of the new material that February, Bowie’s band of taciturn Northerners even began to relish this new identity as a sexed-up gang of outer-space rebels. “At first we were very reticent about the outfits and the makeup,” Woody Woodmansey said. “I think we were tricked into the makeup thing by being told the big theatrical lights we were using would wipe out the features of your face—‘You’ll look like boiled eggs!’ ‘Makeup makes you look normal!’ Mick hated the outfits; he packed his bags and left. David asked me to go after him and handle it. I spent a good hour or so on Beckenham station with him!”

  Ironically Ronson had been bleaching his own hair for some time (in a masculine way, one must suppose). “A horrible color when I first met him,” Suzi says. She professionally dyed his hair platinum blond to complement Bowie’s hot red. “He was naturally very fair as well, so it worked. They looked very attractive up there together, him and David.” Ronson was small but strapping; there was nothing remotely fey about him, and it’s as if his very presence, along with that of Woody and Trevor (who were less pretty and wore any glam accoutrement about as well as Twisted Sister would a decade later), served to remind any potential naysayers that this was a badass rock ’n’ roll band, albeit one with a lead singer who wore more makeup than most women.

  Eventually Mick embraced the whole pose. “He got to love dressing up,” Suzi says. “We’d go to a department store and he’d go right to the mascara counter.”

  “Mick was the perfect foil for the Ziggy character. He was very much a salt-of-the-earth type, the blunt northerner with a defiantly masculine personality, so that what you got was the old-fashioned yin and yang thing. As a rock duo, I thought we were every bit as good as Mick and Keith …,” Bowie would say in 1994.

  The first proper Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars tour date took place before sixty people in the back room of the Toby Jug pub in Tolworth, where John Lennon’s seafaring father, Alf, had once worked in the kitchen. By the time the tour ended, they would play before fourteen thousand at Earls Court Exhibition Centre but the Ziggy juggernaut could not have had a more humble beginning. Tolworth had been a favorite tour warm-up spot for established bands like Led Zeppelin and Jethro Tull, but nobody had ever attempted to turn the bar into some kind of theatrical production, complete with Beethoven fanfare and choreographed lighting. From there they played colleges in Brighton, Sheffield, Bristol, Portsmouth, Manchester, Oxford and Liverpool, traveling in a van and urinating in the sinks in pub kitchens. While you’d never know it to look at them, the Spiders did play some grimy spots. The audience reaction was mixed. On some nights, they would be carried out of the venue and into the street on a wave of hands, like sports heroes. On others, arms would stay folded.

  By the summer, with the first single, “Starman,” climbing the charts, the Spiders had a high-profile London gig coming at a benefit concert for the save-the-whales fund Friends of the Earth at London’s Royal Festival Hall. By then they were skintight and more than ready for the press in attendance. After a set plagued with technical problems by openers Marmalade, the lights dimmed. Bowie walked out holding his Harptone guitar. The band followed.

  “Hello, I’m David Bowie, and these are the Spiders from Mars.”

  The energy in the three-thousand-seat room was electric as the band kicked into “Hang On to Yourself,” the set opener. Most of the material drew from Hunky Dory and the new Ziggy Stardust album, with his previous hit “Space Oddity” and a cover of “The Port of Amsterdam” by Jacques Brel rounding it out. At the end of the set, Bowie announced to the crowd that a special guest from America was in attendance. Lou Reed, a little sheepish, walked onstage carrying his guitar. Reed had just landed in London to record his second solo album, which Bowie and Ronson were set to produce. As in America, most in London had no idea who he was. “I had the feeling that as much as David wanted to pay tribute to Reed, the inclusion of the American into the act was quite unnecessary,” one reviewer noted.

  In its July 15, 1972, edition, the New Musical Express confirmed what everyone at the Royal Festival Hall knew after leaving that night. David Bowie had arrived in that rarified air that Marc Bolan and Elton John were breathing. After six years, three failed albums and nearly a dozen flop singles, he had finally hit on something that worked. “Anybody still unconvinced that David Bowie will sweep all before him in the coming months of the year should have witnessed the end of his remarkable concert last Saturday at the Festival Hall. With elegant flash, and just a little help from ‘surprise’ guest Lou Reed, he coaxed the younger section of the audience down to the foot of the stage and nearly caused one girl to fall out of her box as she enthusiastically waved a banner which simply said: ‘Ziggy.’”

  Most everyone in the crowd knew it was David Bowie up there, but they also believed that it was Ziggy Stardust, the mark, no doubt, of a successful invention. It was the effortless suspension of belief, something that, by the London debut, was gradually weeding its way into David Bowie’s brain, even though at the time he was still very much convinced that he was acting the role of Ziggy Stardust.

  “In the past he’d acknowledge me from the stage,” says Ray Stevenson, who was there to take photos of the show. “He’d wink or say, ‘This is my best side.’ At that show, I got nothing off of him. Much later I realized he was in character. He was immersed and determined. Acknowledging me would be trivial and out of context. He was just doing his job.” Three days beforehand, Bowie returned to Top of the Pops for the first time in three years to perform his new single “Starman.”

  There are no Alice Cooper snakes and no pyrotechnics other than the dazzling Ziggy assemblage itself. Bowie’s performance of “Starman” is notable in part because of the impact it had on a dozen English teenagers who would, within the decade, form legendary bands of their own (Joy Division, Echo and the Bunnymen, the Smiths, Siouxsie and the Banshees). It’s straightforward performance with few theatrics, the kind of spot that every other act, including sturdy rockers Status Quo, who also played that day, offered whenever they taped Top of the Pops. Bowie sings live (altering the line “Some cat was laying down some rock ’n’ roll” to give Marc Bolan a shout out: “Some cat was laying down some get-it-on rock ’n’ roll”), but that’s not what makes the Top of the Pops appearance more of a landmark than their performance of “Queen Bitch” on The Old Grey Whistle Test a half a year previously. It’s a triumph of timing: the right song. The right band. The right clothes, and the right hair, of course, and as I indicated above, the right audience in dire need of exactly whatever the heck this was. It wasn’t English. It wasn’t American. The newness might have come from the unplaceability of it all, but the right kid in front of the right tube knew that whatever and wherever it was, he or she was welcome there.

  “It’s the concept of hope that the song communicates,” Woodmansey said. “That ‘we are not alone’ and ‘they’ contact the kids, not the adults, and kind of say get on with it, ‘let the children boogie.’ It kind of spearheaded the whole Ziggy Stardust concept both musically and visually, on Top of the Pops. It was like reaching the summit of Everest, after seeing so many great bands doing it over the years. I recall waiting to go on, standing in a corridor, and Status Quo were opposite us. We were dressed in our clothes and they had on their trademark denim. [Vocalist/lead guitarist] Francis Rossi looked at me and said, ‘Shit, you make us feel old.’ The success of ‘Starman’ really opened it all up for us; everything changed. Mick and I would go out shopping for food, cloth
es, etc, and every shopkeeper would ask what we’d want and then they wouldn’t take money for it! We would try really hard to pay them but they wouldn’t take it no matter what we did.”

  “I think it stands as one of the pivotal moments of modern music, or, if not music, certainly a pivotal moment in show business,” says Gary Numan today. Then a fifteen-year-old, he watched it in his East London living room. “It must have taken extraordinary courage and/or a monumental amount of self-belief. To say it stood out is an epic understatement. Even as a hard-core T. Rex fan I knew it was special.”

  More fantasy bands were formed that night than possibly any other night in modern rock history, as in one three-minute TV appearance, suddenly everything that wasn’t Bowie-touched seemed too small and bland. For these kids, this was the equivalent of Bowie first playing that Little Richard 45 on his gramophone back in Bromley. If they were watching with the family (as most English kids didn’t have a TV in their own room at the time), all the better. A father dismissing Bowie as a “pouf” or a mom shouting, “Oh, turn it off,” made it that much more arresting.